Sometimes you just can’t wait for the weekend. On Friday afternoon, the Rockies traded longtime third baseman Ryan McMahon to the Yankees in exchange for pitching prospects Griffin Herring and Josh Grosz. MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand first reported the deal, while Jorge Castillo of ESPN was first to report Herring’s inclusion and Bob Nightengale of USA Today was first to name Grosz.

McMahon was drafted by Colorado in 2013 and has spent his entire nine-year career with the Rockies; he ranks ninth in franchise history in games played. He is in the fourth year of a six-year, $70 million extension, and the Yankees will take on the rest of his remaining contract. He is owed a tad less than $4.2 million this season, and $16 million a year in both 2026 and 2027. At the time of the trade, the Yankees have an 88.8% chance of making the playoffs, but they’re 4 1/2 games back of the Blue Jays in the AL East after dropping two of three in Toronto earlier this week. New York could use a boost, and to say that McMahon has the potential to fill a position of need would be an understatement. Read the rest of this entry »

The deafening quiet of this year’s July trade market was disturbed on Thursday night with the announcement that the Seattle Mariners were acquiring first baseman Josh Naylor from the Arizona Diamondbacks. Naylor has provided more than respectable offense for the Snakes this year, hitting .292/.360/.447 with 11 homers, good for a 123 wRC+ and 1.4 WAR. Heading to the desert in return are two minor league pitchers, lefty Brandyn Garcia and righty Ashton Izzi.

While the Diamondbacks have generally disappointed in 2025, little of the fault can be placed at Naylor’s feet. The team expected to compete in 2025, but lost Christian Walker to the Astros in free agency, so the hope was that Naylor would fill the hole for a year before hitting the open market himself. He was never going to be an elite defensive first baseman like Walker, but the expectation was that he would at least provide a similar level of offense. Naylor is likely to fall well short of his career-high 31 homers from 2024, but he’s compensated for that by adding nearly 50 points of batting average, meaning his 123 wRC+ is actually slightly higher than his 119 mark from last season.

If the season ended today, the Mariners would make the playoffs as the second AL Wild Card, and the five-game separation between them and the division-leading Astros is not an insurmountable distance. Houston’s edge in the AL West seems even smaller when you consider how much of its lineup is currently out hurt. The injured quartet of Yordan Alvarez, Isaac Paredes, Jeremy Peña, and Jake Meyers would represent a huge chunk of any team’s offensive value. First base has been a particular source of trouble for the M’s this year, with their first basemen ranking in the bottom third in baseball with a combined 0.4 WAR. The original plan had been for Luke Raley to get the lion’s share of the playing time at first, mostly against righties, with fill-ins around him to take care of the southpaws. However, injuries to Mitch Haniger and Victor Robles thinned out Seattle’s corner outfield and DH depth and pushed Raley mostly to right field. As a result, the team was forced to give a lot of playing time to Rowdy Tellez; he posted an execrable .249 on-base percentage with the Mariners before they dropped him in June.

Naylor is not a superstar, so naturally, his acquisition doesn’t dramatically change the face of the AL West race. After last night’s win over the Angels, ZiPS gave the Mariners a 76% chance to make the playoffs and a 24% probability to win the division. These numbers would be 72% and 21% without the trade.

So, what’s the cost for their new first baseman? Neither Garcia, nor Izzi was torching up the prospect lists, but then again, Naylor is a free agent after the season, making this trade is a pure short-term rental. The 25-year-old Garcia has already made a brief major league debut, and since I don’t believe the Diamondbacks are going to go full rebuild, that has a lot of allure over the compensation draft pick they would have gotten if they’d held onto Naylor and he’d signed elsewhere this offseason. Garcia is a hard-throwing lefty sinkerballer with a three-quarters delivery who predictably induces a lot of grounders. My colleague Eric Longenhagen gave him a 40+ FV when Seattle’s top prospects list was published last month.

The ZiPS projections see Garcia as a solid, though unspectacular, mid-bullpen arm with at least some upside.

As a 21-year-old in High-A ball, Ashton Izzi has more developing to do than Garcia, but even with decidedly mixed results, the righty showed enough upside for Eric to also give him a 40+ FV. According to Eric, Izzi boasts a four-seamer that sits around 94 mph with solid movement. He gets “near elite” extension with his fastball, but it doesn’t generate many whiffs. Izzi also has a usefully average two-seamer, Eric says, as well as a sweeper and a cutter; the sweeper is a big swing-and-miss pitch for him. His changeup is mediocre, and Eric is concerned that Izzi will struggle to develop a good weapon to wield against lefties. Overall, per Eric, if Izzi can clear his developmental hurdles, he can make the majors as a starter.

In all, I think getting two real prospects, one who can impact the parent club immediately, is an absolutely fair return for Naylor. The Mariners have only two playoff wins over the last two decades, and now is the time to go all-in to add to that total. Their offense is better this season than in previous years, but they still needed to fill their hole at first base, and Naylor represents a major upgrade over what they had before.

Nick Allen is definitely going to show up on my FanGraphs Walk-Off page. I’ve checked in on him a lot over the last month, but of the 1,664 stats on his player page (yes, I counted them all), I’ve really only been paying attention to one number. I just want to know how many plate appearances Allen has. The answer is 304, and that won’t do.

A month ago, I wrote about homerless qualifiers, the all-but-extinct subset of players who come to the plate often enough to qualify for the batting title – a minimum of 3.1 plate appearances per team game, or 502 over a 162-game season – without hitting even a single home run. At the time, Xavier Edwards was the only homerless qualifier left, but I didn’t believe in him – which is to say that I did believe he had the capacity to hit a home run. He did just that on July 12, blasting a 97.8-mph wall-scraper off Scott Blewett:

Read the rest of this entry »

On any given pitch, a swing-and-miss is the best possible outcome for the pitcher. The ball isn’t put in play, the count advances in favor of the pitcher, and the batter may look a little foolish in the process. It stands to reason that pitchers who possess multiple pitches that run above-average whiff rates will likely have strong strikeout rates, too. Then there’s another, much smaller group of pitchers who have multiple pitches with elite whiff rates. Those rare hurlers will surely have the best strikeout rates in baseball, right? Among all starting pitchers this season, there are just eight who possess multiple pitches that generate a whiff more than 40% of the time.

MacKenzie Gore leads the way with three of these elite bat-missing weapons, followed by a few of the game’s best strikeout artists. At the bottom, though, are two pitchers whose strikeout rates are much lower than you’d expect given their ability to generate whiffs: groundball specialist José Soriano and rookie Cade Horton. (As an aside, Horton’s changeup has the third-highest whiff rate of any pitch thrown at least 100 times this year, yet his strikeout rate is an unimpressive 17.6%.)

What happens if you lower the threshold to pitches with whiff rates north of 30%? There are 18 starters with three or more of these less-effective-but-still-impressive pitches. Spoiler: Soriano shows up again. Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Mahle was 23 years old and had 20 big league innings under his belt when our 2018 Cincinnati Reds Top Prospects list was published in January of that year. A seventh-round pick out of an Orange County high school five years earlier, Mahle was ranked fourth in the system, with Eric Longenhagen assigning him a 50 FV.

Mahle has gone on to have an injury-marred career. Most notably, he underwent Tommy John surgery in May 2023, less than a year after he’d been dealt from the Reds to the Minnesota Twins in exchange for Christian Encarnacion-Strand, Spencer Steer, and Steve Hajjar at the trade deadline.

When healthy, the 30-year-old right-hander has been a quality pitcher more often than not. In 2021, he made 33 starts for Cincinnati and went 13-6 with a 3.75 ERA and a 3.80 FIP over 180 innings. Moreover, Mahle was on track for an even better season when he went on the shelf seven weeks ago with what has since been diagnosed as a right rotator cuff strain. In 14 starts comprising 77 innings with the Texas Rangers, Mahle had a record of 6-3 to go with a 2.34 ERA and a 3.37 FIP. His status for the remainder of the current campaign is unclear.

What did Mahle’s 2018 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Before he went on the injured list, I shared some of what Eric wrote and asked Mahle to respond to it.

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“After 24 hyper-efficient starts at Double and Triple-A, Mahle finally got a four-start cup of coffee in Cincinnati at the end of the season. His ability to locate was not on display in the big leagues, but it’s what got Mahle there.”

“Not great,” Mahle said of his four starts in 2017. “I was wild. My first two or three starts, I’d thrown something like 50 pitches by time I got through two innings. So yeah, not very efficient. But I got through it. Then I got off to a decent start the next year, in 2018, but pitched kind of hurt toward the end of that season.”

“He has above-average fastball command despite a somewhat noisy delivery; it should tighten another half-grade as Mahle hits his peak.”

“Hmm… yeah, my delivery back then was super stiff,” he said. “I held my glove up high and it stayed there until I broke my hands. Looking back, my delivery was, again, super stiff. A lot has changed there.

“Honestly, I don’t remember exactly,” Mahle said when asked when he made the adjustment. “It must have been with [Reds pitching coach Derek Johnson]. We kind of took away some movement in the hands. Instead of going from up high to down low, we started going from the belt to make it a little simpler.”

“His stuff is middling, spearheaded by a slightly above-average fastball/slider combination out of which Mahle squeezes every ounce of juice due to his ability to locate.”

“I was pitching with pretty much all fastballs at that time,” the righty recalled. “My slider was super inconsistent. I didn’t have a splitter like I have now. I basically just relied on the fastball.”

“He adds and subtracts from his fastball, exhibiting velocities anywhere from 88 to 95, touching 96 regularly, and maxing out at 98.”

“Yeah, but not so much anymore,” Mahle admitted. “I kind of live low 90s now and will top around 95. But relying so much on my fastball back then, I had to try to overpower guys with it. I had to try to throw it hard.”

“While Mahle’s change doesn’t have terrific movement, his ability to manipulate pitch speed without noticeable arm deceleration helps make it a viable third offering.”

“Yep. I mean, that was me,” Mahle said. “I didn’t have much of a changeup, so I had to try to place it in the zone, or wherever I was trying to get it. Like my slider, it was just super inconsistent. The arm speed… I actually feel like I probably did have to change it, based on what I was throwing. I maybe telegraphed a lot back then. Now I can throw everything with pretty much the same arm speed.”

“His stuff isn’t overwhelming, but his command should allow him to survive as an average big league starter.”

“That’s how I’ve gotten by,” the nine-year veteran acknowledged. “My command, still now… like, my fastball isn’t an overpowering pitch velo-wise, but I locate it. I also get some good ride on it. Back then, I didn’t know that. I just knew that it did well up in the zone. But yeah, I kind of lived off the location of my pitches.

“I understand everything a lot more now,” Mahle added. “I know why it works well up in the zone, and what the separation is on each pitch, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. Compared to now, back then I was pretty much just throwing.”

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Previous “Old Scouting Reports Revisited” interviews can be found through these links: Shane Baz, Cody Bellinger, Matthew Boyd, Dylan Cease, Matt Chapman, Erick Fedde, Kyle Freeland, Max Fried, Lucas Giolito, Randal Grichuk, Ian Happ, Jeff Hoffman, Tanner Houck, Matthew Liberatore, Sean Newcomb, Bailey Ober, Matt Olson, Austin Riley, Joe Ryan, Max Scherzer, Marcus Semien.

Over the past month, every red-blooded American with a phone and a passing familiarity with baseball has posted some version of the following sentiment: This crop of trade candidates stinks. It’s true.

Somewhat conveniently for the purposes of my argument, Ben Clemens wrapped up his annual Trade Value series this morning. He has 50 players on his rankings proper, plus 65 more in the Honorable Mentions post. I’ve seen persistent, at least semi-credible trade rumors about one player on the top 50: Byron Buxton. Buxton is one of the most talented baseball players who ever lived, but his injuries and maddening inconsistency have become his reputation. This is reflected not only in his incredibly incentive-laden Twins contract, but his spot on the trade value list: no. 41.

More to the point, Buxton recently declared that he has no interest whatsoever in waiving his full no-trade clause to allow a move to a contender. His exact words: “I don’t want to play anywhere else.” It doesn’t get more unequivocal than that. Read the rest of this entry »

Last July 29, Erick Fedde was a key piece in a three-way blockbuster that ended up having a major impact on the postseason. Unfortunately, that impact wasn’t for the Cardinals, who acquired him from the White Sox; instead Tommy Edman, who was dealt from the Cardinals to the Dodgers in the same eight-player trade, won NLCS MVP honors and helped his new team to a championship. Fedde pitched reasonably well for St. Louis — who missed the 2024 playoffs — late last season, but his performance this year suddenly took a sharp turn for the worse. On Wednesday, the day after he was roughed up by the Rockies, the struggling 32-year-old righty was designated for assignment, a likely prelude to being released.

The move isn’t exactly a shock, and it comes as the Cardinals have slipped in the standings, in all likelihood ruling out an aggressive approach as the July 31 trade deadline approaches. The team has gone 5-12 in July to drop their record to 52-51, plummeting from three games out of first place in the NL Central to 9 1/2 out, and from having a one-game lead for the third Wild Card spot to being 3 1/2 back, with both the Reds (53-50) and Giants (54-49) between them and the Padres (55-47):

While losing five out of their last six to the Diamondbacks and Rockies, the Cardinals’ Playoff Odds dipped below 20% for the first time since May 8:

Read the rest of this entry »

There is a time in life when you expect the world to always be full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of space where the memories are.

– Helen Macdonald

On Tuesday night, Rich Hill made his first major league start of the season and his first ever as a Kansas City Royal. Although he took the loss, the game lived up to its billing as a feel-good story. The 45-year-old lefty went five innings against the second-best offense in baseball, allowing one earned run and two unearned. He walked two Cubs, struck out one looking, induced 11 groundballs, and left the game with a 1.80 ERA. Stylistically, it was a vintage Rich Hill performance (from a vintage Rich Hill), featuring not-so-fastballs, loopy curves, and dropdown frisbee sliders. It was also a vintage Hill performance from a sensorial perspective, in that it involved a whole lot of strange human sounds.

I mentioned Hill’s vocalizations when I wrote about the minor league deal he signed with the Royals back in May. They’re right there in my mental map of a Hill start. But memory just can’t do justice to some things. It fades. It falters. Even the events that imprint upon us most deeply tend to loosen their hold with time. It’s cruel, but it’s for the best. If our memories could transport us exactly to who we were when we felt that first rush of puppy love, heard that one perfect song, tasted that one croissant in Paris, would we even bother to seek out new experiences, or would we just live within the old ones and keep playing the hits? All of this is to say that I thought I was prepared for the Rich Hill experience. I tuned into the game Tuesday night expecting to hear the man grunt. But then I actually heard the man grunt. I was not prepared. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Abbott is establishing himself as a top-shelf starter. Now in his third big league season, the 26-year-old southpaw has a record of 8-1 to go with a 2.13 ERA and a 3.42 FIP over 97 1/3 innings. Moreover, he represented the Cincinnati Reds in last week’s All-Star Game. An honorable mention in Ben Clemens’ ongoing Trade Value series, Abbott merits attention — and he’s been receiving his fair share of it here at FanGraphs. Jake Mailhot wrote about him in mid-May, and Michael Baumann followed up by doing so in mid-June; Baumann also covered Abbott as a rookie in this piece from August 2023.

Accuse us of being AbbottGraphs if you’d like, but the University of Virginia product is getting yet another write-up courtesy of yours truly. Being a big fan of crafty lefties, I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to talk to Abbott — as well as to others about Abbott — when the Reds visited Fenway Park earlier this month.

Not surprisingly, his self-assessment pretty much matched what I’ve read and seen.

“I’m not an overpowering guy,” acknowledged Abbott, whose 92.4-mph fastball velocity ranks in the 21st percentile. “Mixing speeds and getting guys off balance has always been the name of the game with me. That and staying in the zone as much as possible. I also take pride in being available, being able to throw 100 pitches every fifth day.” Read the rest of this entry »

Every baseball season, we see something unexpected. “You can’t predict baseball,” in the words of an axiom from a decade ago. And it’s true. But because baseball occurs in such great volume, over such a long period of time, unexpected things can happen in different ways, and at different rates. Sometimes, an overachieving team picks up one extra game every two weeks, gently floating to the top of the standings with minimal fuss. We get drip-fed this surprise gradually, like an irrigation system designed not to drown your basil plants.

And sometimes you fall into a lake.

On either side of the All-Star break, the Milwaukee Brewers won 11 games in a row. Even after that streak ended with a paper-thin 1-0 loss in Seattle on Tuesday, they are the hottest team in baseball right now. They’re red hot. No, white hot. They are, to quote the poet, so hot it’s hurting everyone’s feelings. Read the rest of this entry »