Sandy Alcantara was supposed to be the last bastion of the traditional starting pitcher, the guy who pumps gas seven innings a start come hell or high water. The stoic, hirsute antidote to the effete, three-ply soft five-and-dive starter of today. In his 2022 Cy Young campaign, Alcantara threw more innings than any other National League pitcher since 2015, and he did it while throwing harder than any other starter in the league that year. Oh yeah, man, that’s the stuff.
A mildly disappointing 2023 ended in a torn UCL, which prevented Alcantara from participating in a rare Marlins postseason appearance. But he’s back now, ready to remind the world what 220 innings a year looks like.
Through six starts, the Miami ace has an ERA of 8.31. His strikeout rate is down to 15.8%, which is about two-thirds of what it was at his peak, and his walk rate is 14.2%, which is so bad you don’t need context to appreciate it.
It’s not often that I take a pause from the prospect lists to write about individual call-ups, but we have three big league debuts on the docket for today, and I wanted to update readers on those pitchers, as well one other prospect-related bycatch that’s come up during the course of me working on the Reds, Guardians, and Brewers org lists.
First, let’s talk about the starting pitchers making their big league debuts today: Chase Petty of the Reds, AJ Blubaugh of the Astros, and Noah Cameron of the Royals. All of them have updated player profiles over on The Board.
Chase Petty, RHP, Cincinnati Reds (50 FV)
Petty, who touched 102 in high school, came to the Reds from Minnesota during the spring of 2022 in a trade for Sonny Gray. After missing time with an elbow issue in 2023, he had a healthy and complete 2024 season in which he worked 137 innings spent mostly at Double-A Chattanooga, many more frames than he had thrown in any year prior. Proving he could sustain big stuff across that load of innings was instrumental to his inclusion among the 2025 Top 100 Prospects. His fastball was still sitting 94-97 mph after Petty had been promoted to Louisville at the very end of last season, and he has carried that into 2025. As of his call-up, he has 27 strikeouts, nine walks, and a 1.30 WHIP in 23 innings (five starts). Read the rest of this entry »
Carlos Correa has grounded into six double plays this season. He doesn’t lead the league; that would be Junior Caminero, who has already racked up nine, putting him on pace for an even 50 by the end of the year. If Caminero keeps that up (he won’t), he would shatter the single-season record of 36, set by Jim Rice in 1984. Still, it’s Correa whose GIDP numbers I find most intriguing.
Correa has always been prone to double plays. Since the day of his debut, 10 years ago in June, only five major leaguers have grounded into more of them. However, in 2023, Correa took things to a new level. He set a single-season Twins record by grounding into 30 double plays. He did so in just 130 games and 580 trips to the plate. His 30 GIDPs were the most by any player in a season since Casey McGehee in 2014 (31) and the most on a per-PA basis (min. 500 PA) since A.J. Pierzynski in 2004 (27 GIDPs in 510 PA). Adjusted for era, Correa’s GIDPs-per-PA rate registered as the third highest of all time:
Complete AL/NL records date back to 1939. Pitchers excluded.
Correa’s historically pitiful GIDP performance in 2023 made what he did next all the more fascinating. In 2024, he produced an equally historical turnaround season. He hit just five groundball double plays, 25 fewer than the year before. Admittedly, he played significantly fewer games, but even on a rate basis, the difference was astounding. Never in his career had he grounded into two-outers at a lower clip. (Quick aside: Writers need synonyms, and if they don’t exist, it’s our job to make them up. Get ready.) Read the rest of this entry »
Particularly in light of their failure to upgrade their roster this winter, starting pitching is the foundation of the Seattle Mariners. Last year, four of their starters took at least 30 turns, and the unit posted the majors’ lowest ERA (3.38) while ranking either first or second in the American League in FIP and WAR as well. But while this year’s Mariners are currently running first in the AL West at 17-12, their rotation has scuffled, in part because it’s far from whole. George Kirby, who led the staff in WAR last year, began the season on the injured list due to shoulder inflammation, and now Logan Gilbert, who made the All-Star team and received Cy Young votes, has joined him there due to a flexor strain.
The 27-year-old Gilbert made his sixth start of the season on Friday night at T-Mobile Park against the Marlins. While the results were impressive — he needed just 29 pitches to throw three perfect innings, striking out three — his average four-seam fastball velocity was down 1.1 mph from his season average of 95.6, and his slider and curve were a bit slower than usual as well. He did not return for the fourth inning, replaced by reliever Casey Lawrence, and the Mariners soon announced that he had departed due to forearm tightness.
“I felt it a little bit warming up,” said Gilbert. “Just never really went away. Sometimes you just get going and it feels a little better. Tonight, it just didn’t.” Read the rest of this entry »
Sean Newcomb has thus far fallen short of the high expectations he’d set coming out of college and during his first years of pro ball. Drafted 15th overall by the Los Angeles Angels in 2014 out of the University of Hartford, the 31-year-old left-hander has a record of 28-28 to go with a 4.50 ERA and a 4.38 FIP over 454 1/3 career big league innings. He’s currently trying to revive his career. Now with his fifth organization after signing with the Boston Red Sox as a minor league free agent over the winter, Newcomb made the team out of spring training — injuries to multiple Red Sox hurlers played a role in his doing so — and he’s since taken the hill six times. Over five starts and one relief appearance, the Massachusetts native has a 4.24 ERA, a 2.61 FIP, and a 27.5% strikeout rate in 23 1/3 frames. All three of his decisions have been losses.
His second major league season suggested stardom was in his future. Traded from the Angels to the Atlanta Braves as part of the Andrelton Simmons deal in November 2015, Newcomb went on to make 30 starts in 2018 and log a 3.90 ERA over 164 innings. In June of that year he was featured here at FanGraphs, with yours truly writing that the hard-throwing southpaw was “rapidly establishing himself as one of the best pitchers in the National League.” A month later, he came within one strike of notching a no-hitter. Then things started going in the wrong direction. Newcomb not only landed in the Braves bullpen in 2019, he had a stint in Triple-A. From 2020-2024, he tossed just 98 2/3 big league innings while toiling for three different teams. His ERA over that span was 6.66 ERA.
Turn the clock back to March 2015, and Newcomb was ranked no. 2 on our Angels Top Prospects list, behind only Andrew Heaney. What did Newcomb’s FanGraphs scouting report look like at the time? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what our then prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel wrote, and asked Newcomb to respond to it.
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“Newcomb was the Hunter Dozier of the 2014 draft, a player that clubs liked higher than the media consensus had them, partly because teams weren’t sure if they were the only team that had him so high, so they kept it pretty quiet.”
“I think a big part of it was my coming out of the Northeast,” Newcomb replied. “That made me a little more of an unknown, but I did kind of have an idea that I was going to be a first-rounder. I talked to all 30 clubs. I actually thought there was a chance that I was going with the fifth pick to Minnesota.”
Do you know how many leaderboards we have here at FanGraphs? I don’t. I genuinely don’t. Just in our main offense, defense, and pitching leaderboards, I counted 78. That’s before you get into team stats, league stats, splits, spring training, the postseason, combined WAR leaderboards, NPB, KBO, the minors, college, the BOARD, and on and on. We have hundreds of leaderboards because you, the citizens of planet baseball, deserve them. If you want to know who’s leading the Florida State League in groundball-to-fly ball rate, it is your right to learn that Kyle Henley of my beloved Daytona Tortugas is somehow hitting a mind-boggling seven grounders for every ball he hits in the air. I didn’t think it was possible for a baseball player’s offensive profile to suffer from acrophobia, but here we are learning new things from the leaderboards every day.
We have three plate discipline leaderboards because we pull data from Sports Info Solutions, Pitch Info, and Statcast. The strike zone is (for now) three dimensional, and so is our coverage of it. I came to really appreciate this fact on Monday, when I got curious about which hitter was doing the best job of avoiding whiffs. According to SIS, Chicago Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner is leading all of baseball with a perfect, shining 100% contact rate inside the strike zone. Let’s stop for a moment and reflect upon this achievement. We have been playing baseball for over a month now. Over more than 100 plate appearances and nearly 400 pitches, Hoerner has yet to swing at a strike and miss. He is the only player in baseball who can make such a claim, and yet that claim is disputed nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »
Tanner Scott is 15 appearances into the season, and by extension 15 appearances into his four-year, $72 million Dodgers contract, and a lot of things are working as normal. He has a 2.40 ERA, almost exactly the same as the 2.31 he posted in a breakout campaign with Miami two years ago. He has a 2.93 FIP, just one hundredth of a run up from his mark last season. He has eight saves, which is commensurate with his role: Closer on a really good team.
But he hasn’t walked anyone. In 15 innings, having faced 54 batters, he hasn’t walked anyone. This falls into the most annoying April blog category of: “Please don’t mess with my premise before this article runs,” but as of this writing, Scott has thrown more innings than any pitcher in the league with zero walks. Only three pitchers with two or fewer walks on the year have thrown more innings than Scott.
That’s because he’s pounding the zone. Scott’s first-pitch strike rate is an astounding 85.2%, the highest number in baseball. That’s helped by a 45.1% chase rate, which is the highest mark in the league among pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. But Scott is also throwing in the zone a career-high 57.1% of the time, which is in the 87th percentile for pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »
The good news for the Baltimore Orioles is they won the first game of their three-game series against the first-place New York Yankees on Monday night. The bad news is the win only improved the team’s record to 11-17, the fourth-worst mark in baseball. As it stands Tuesday morning, the Orioles sit in last place in the AL East, and with nearly a fifth of the season over, it’s getting harder to dismiss the poor start as merely a blip.
Where the Orioles have struggled is not that hard to pinpoint: nearly everywhere. The rotation has combined for a 5.62 ERA/5.14 FIP and 6.4 strikeouts per nine innings, numbers that firmly place Baltimore at the bottom of the league. The defense hasn’t been much better, and after a decent start, the offense has evaporated over the last two weeks.
The season is longer than just April, of course, and the Orioles theoretically still have plenty of time to right the ship. But do they have the deckhands? To show whether or not they do, I took the current Orioles depth chart, and estimated the projected WAR based on playing time, using both ZiPS WAR from the preseason and the updated ZiPS WAR I ran overnight. Let’s start with the offense. Read the rest of this entry »
Jorge Polanco has always been a good hitter. He has a career 111 wRC+, and since he started getting regular playing time in 2016, he’s finished with a wRC+ below 100 only three times, one of which was the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. But he’s played 20 games so far this season, and he’s never had a 20-game stretch quite like this. He’s batting .377 with a 233 wRC+. How is Polanco – while injured – running the fifth-best xwOBA in baseball and second-best overall batting line?
As I mentioned, Polanco isn’t 100%. He underwent surgery in October to repair his left patellar tendon, and soreness in that knee has already cost him a couple of games this season. Polanco has also been dealing with a minor oblique strain, which has kept him from hitting right-handed since March 31. Polanco has a career 118 wRC+ as a lefty and a 95 wRC+ as a righty. That’s a legitimate platoon split, but it’s not big enough that we should have expected him to turn into Babe Ruth once he quit batting right-handed. Moreover, you have to imagine that the injury is slowing him down at least slightly, even from the left side. Maybe I’m wrong here, but it’s just hard to believe that any baseball swing could be completely unaffected by an oblique injury.
Just to recap, Polanco has a minor injury. He’s only batting left-handed and (with the exception of one plate appearance that ended with a strikeout) only facing righties. He’s also DHing and getting days off to protect the oblique. Oh, and he’s been the best hitter in baseball (non-Aaron Judge division). So let’s figure out what’s going on. We’ll start with the basics. Here are Polanco’s numbers from each of the five most recent seasons. Read the rest of this entry »
Last year, Victor Scott II broke camp with the Cardinals behind an avalanche of buzz. He’d swiped 94 bags in the minors the previous year while playing elite defense in center field and posting a solid batting line. With the new rules providing a tailwind to speedsters, Scott seemed like the next exciting Cardinals position player. But then he hit the major leagues, or rather, didn’t hit in the major leagues. He batted .179/.219/.283 over 50 games of action and ended up down in Triple-A, a level he’d skipped during his meteoric rise, where he also struggled.
This year, Scott is back in the majors, but with considerably less hype surrounding him. However, a month into the season, he looks like a completely different hitter. He’s walking more, striking out less, and hitting for a higher average thanks to more line drives. He’s also living up to his potential on the basepaths and in the field, with a perfect 9-for-9 stolen base record and good defense. Last year’s version of Scott? Unplayable. This year? A fun upgrade on Kevin Kiermaier. Could the new version possibly be here to stay? I dug into the numbers to hazard a guess.
The main thing I’m interested in when it comes to Scott is how he gets on base. That’s what makes him intriguing – once he’s on first, he’s basically on second. Since you can’t steal first, that’s where the pinch point is. And in 2024, pitchers had a simple plan: Attack the zone and dare Scott to do anything about it. That helps explain his 3.9% walk rate – he got to a 1-0 count in about a third of his plate appearances last year. Similarly, he reached two or more balls in a count only about a third of the time.
There are major league players who succeed despite working from behind in the count so frequently, but they tend to have an elite compensatory skill. I’m talking about Luis Arraez’s contact, Jake Burger’s power, Bo Bichette’s feel to hit. Honestly, most hitters who get ahead in the count and walk so rarely just aren’t good. Pitchers don’t let them get into advantageous counts; the group is dotted with low-power defensive specialists who pitchers simply don’t respect. Read the rest of this entry »
