Dear Readers:

I write to you from a place of hiding. The Phillies’ outfield situation has taken a turn for the worse, and the team has sent out a multitude of agents in response. The Phanatic and his lieutenants — green and fuzzy, mounted on quad bikes, armed with hot dog launchers — are now scouring the countryside in search of able-bodied right-handed adults. From Lancaster to Lakewood, from New Brunswick to New Castle, they maraud over hill and dale. If you own a baseball glove and can bat, you’re liable to be pulled from your bed in the dead of night and dragooned, press-ganged, and otherwise cajoled into service as the Phillies’ right fielder. Read the rest of this entry »

Jesús Luzardo has been pitching better than you might think. The 28-year-old Philadelphia Phillies left-hander is an uninspiring 4-4 with a 4.56 ERA over 13 starts covering 73 innings, but his surface stats only tell part of the story. Luzardo has a 3.40 FIP — it was a sparkling 2.77 prior to his most recent outing — while his 26.7% hard-hit percentage ranks second lowest among qualified pitchers. Moreover, he misses his fair share of bats. His 25.6% strikeout rate ranks in the 73rd percentile, while his 30.7% whiff rate is in the 86th. Good fortune simply hasn’t been on his side. At .343, Luzardo has the highest BABIP among qualified pitchers.

The lefty’s lack of luck isn’t what I wanted to talk to him about when the Phillies visited Boston in mid-May. Rather, I was interested in how he has evolved as a pitcher since we first spoke nine years ago. At the time, Luzardo was a 19-year-old Oakland Athletics prospect who was playing for the New York-Penn League’s Vermont Lake Monsters. A lot of water having gone under the bridge, change was inevitable.

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David Laurila: We talked back in 2017 when you were getting your feet wet in short-season ball. Just how much have you changed as a pitcher since that time?

Jesús Luzardo: “I have a little bit different repertoire now. I’ve added some pitches. I’ve fine-tuned my mechanics. Along the way, I’ve just matured as a pitcher. I mean, I feel like I still have a long way to go, that I can get even better. I haven’t reached my full maturity as a pitcher. But I’m definitely a lot more polished. I know more about myself, what makes me me.” Read the rest of this entry »

On April 28, with the Phillies off to a 9-19 start — tied with the Mets for the worst in the majors — president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski fired manager Rob Thomson and named bench coach Don Mattingly as interim manager. Since then, the team has been red-hot, going 16-6 and (briefly) climbing above .500 for the first time since April 7. While they aren’t yet in a playoff position, the Phillies’ season has at least gotten a much-needed reset. Cristopher Sánchez and Kyle Schwarber appear to be on their way to especially productive campaigns, and Zack Wheeler has made a strong return from surgery to alleviate thoracic outlet syndrome.

After winning the NL East in back-to-back seasons and making the playoffs four times in a row, at the outset of 2026, the Phillies appeared to have a pretty good shot at returning to October baseball, with a 24.4% chance of winning the division and a 68.8% chance of reaching the postseason according to our Playoff Odds. That said, they did have significant concerns, particularly with regards to their starting pitching and their remade outfield. Their rotation placed third in our preseason Positional Power Rankings, which seemed overly optimistic given not only the question marks regarding Wheeler but also the departure of Ranger Suarez for Boston, the ugly 6.01 ERA Aaron Nola put up last year, and the arrival of top pitching prospect Andrew Painter despite a subpar 2025 season at Triple-A. The remade outfield, with Justin Crawford taking over in center, Brandon Marsh settling in left in place of Max Kepler, and Adolis García replacing Nick Castellanos in right, offered a chance to improve upon last year’s subpar showing, but it was hardly a guarantee, particularly given that García had been non-tendered by the Rangers.

Under Thomson, the Phillies won just two of their first nine series, taking two out of three games from the Nationals at home and the Rockies in Colorado during the season’s first two weeks but losing series to the Rangers, Diamondbacks, Cubs (twice) and Braves (twice) — with a 10-game losing streak spanning parts of their home-and-home series against the last two teams — before Dombrowski swung the axe. It was a surprising move given the Phillies’ success under Thomson, who himself took over for the fired Joe Girardi in June 2022, guided the team to its first pennant in 13 years, and won at a .580 clip while making the playoffs in every subsequent season. Read the rest of this entry »

In high school statistics, we got one rule beaten into our heads over and over again: Don’t extrapolate outside the bounds of your data. Then, when we were done learning that one, we got another rule: Outliers tend to revert towards the mean. Gee, thanks a lot, Mr. Gilliam – how am I supposed to explain Cristopher Sánchez using those two rules?

Look at this table of pitching statistics. Clearly, extrapolating past the edge of Sánchez’s performance seems fine:

We have all of these ERA estimators – FIP, xFIP, xERA, SIERA – because merely looking at someone’s ERA can be misleading. ERA is noisy. Between inherited runners, sequencing, scoring decisions, and just plain old variance, knowing a player’s ERA in one year doesn’t necessarily mean you know how well they played. The whole alphabet of advanced pitching statistics comes down to trying to solve that noise problem by focusing on indicators with greater stability.

In other words, advanced ERA estimators tend to move around less than actual ERA. It follows naturally that changes in ERA estimators are more predictive of future results than changes in ERA. When all of these markers are moving in tandem – and moving by a lot, to boot – the aggregate picture looks very different than your average pitcher with a shiny ERA early in the season. Read the rest of this entry »

AJ Blubaugh has given a boost to the Astros bullpen since debuting in late April of last season. Over 29 big-league appearances (including three as a starter), the 25-year-old right-hander has logged a 3.22 ERA over 58-and-two-thirds innings while being credited with five wins, against three losses, and three saves. Drafted in the seventh round by Houston out of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2022, he ranked third among the system’s prospects with a 45 FV when he reached The Show.

His backstory is atypical, in part because of a pitch he hasn’t thrown since his days as an Ohio prep. Moreover, the Mansfield native now has a delivery that is both conventional and consistent. That wasn’t always the case.

“When I was in high school and started to get into pitching, I threw from three different slots,” Blubaugh explained. “An over-the-top arm slot, a sidearm arm slot, and a submarine arm slot. I would differentiate that every single pitch. One pitch would be a curveball from over the top, then I’d drop to sidearm and throw a slider. Then I’d throw a fastball from submarine. I was just a funky junk-ball thrower. I threw a knuckleball a bunch, probably from the time I was 10 years old to the time I graduated. It was probably my main pitch.”

Remarkably, his butterfly wasn’t simply delivered from down under; it came from each of his arm angles. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper is Cooperstown bound, and he’ll get there having embraced a relatively straightforward approach. Aggressively selective and with a swing built to do damage, the future Hall of Famer isn’t big on hitting analytics or new-school methods. More than anything, he trusts his raw ability — which he has in great abundance — and basically goes out to bash. It’s hard to argue with his success. Now in his 15th big league season, and eighth with the Philadelphia Phillies, the two-time NL MVP has 373 home runs to go with a .280/.386/.519 slash line and a 141 wRC+ for his career. Moreover, the 33-year-old is showing no signs of slowing down. At the quarter mark of the current campaign, he has 10 round-trippers and a 146 wRC+.

Harper sat down to talk hitting at Fenway Park earlier this week.

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David Laurila: You told me that you’re more so see-ball-hit-ball than a guy who puts a lot of thought into his craft. Can you elaborate on that?

Bryce Harper: “I take my routine into the cage and kind of let that play out. There are days in the cage where you’re going to feel good, and days in the cage where you’re not necessarily going to feel good. I just need to stick with my routine every day, the same routine, understanding what works for me. That’s kind of how I’ve always been. I’ve got little drills that I like to do, which keep me through the ball and in the same path. But video-wise, pitcher tendencies — all that kind of stuff — I mostly throw out the door. I don’t do too much of that.”

Laurila: That said, have you changed at all from when you first broke into pro ball? Stance, set-up, bat path, etc.

Harper: “I’ve had to evolve. Guys are throwing harder. When I came up in 2012, one of the harder fastballs, Jonny Venters’, was like 98 [mph]. [Francisco Rodríguez] threw pretty hard. But now everybody is 95 to 100, up to 102. Each day you’re facing guys who are throwing really hard, from starters to bullpen. So, I’ve had to make sure I get to the baseball in a certain way, staying on plane. High heaters. Making sure that I’m on plane to get to baseballs thrown at a high level.”

Laurila: You need to do that without cheating on fastballs, otherwise you’re going to get beat by a secondary… Read the rest of this entry »

“Throw the bums out!” is a rich American tradition. While most used in the context of the messiness of that whole democracy thing, it’s also applicable to sports. When you’re a fan, especially a passionate one, and things are going horribly wrong for your favorite team, there’s a real sense of wanting the perpetrators of these crimes against excellence to be figuratively carted out in tumbrels and to meet their makers like Danton or Robespierre. And heads do roll in baseball when things are going badly, because someone has to take responsibility for a team’s crapitude, and it’s not going to be the team’s owner. Most often, it’s someone public-facing, as fans will not be appeased by the firing of some relatively anonymous staffer in operations. Since general managers and team presidents get first priority to hold the axe (but not always), and individual coaches don’t usually have wide-enough authority to take responsibility for the whole team, that leaves managers as the common sin eaters.

The moment of catharsis happens, and lo and behold, teams play a lot better, vindicating the demise of the ex-manager. It certainly feels that way, and it’s not the craziest idea in the world to think that there’s something to it. While you would expect teams in the midst of a spate of sucking to be underplaying their talent level rather than overplaying it, when you drive by an accident with a car that’s been unfortunately integrated into a telephone pole, it’s also quite likely that the driver had something to do with it.

Two managers have already been fired this season, after their large-payroll teams with championship aspirations got off to awful starts. Surprisingly, Alex Cora was first to go, as Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow canned not just Cora, but also anyone on the coaching staff considered to be one of Cora’s guys, on Saturday night after the team started the season 10-17. Then, on Tuesday, the Phillies fired Rob Thomson after they began the year 9-19, a woeful start that included a 10-game losing streak. Four years ago, Thomson became one of the most successful midseason replacement managers ever, as he steered a sinking Phillies ship back from a 22-29 start all the way to the World Series. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza can’t be comfortable about his job security right now, despite the team’s insistence that his job is safe. Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

The Philadelphia Phillies have released right-handed pitcher Taijuan Walker, and it’s not hard to understand why. The Phillies, two-time defending NL East champs and one of the preseason favorites for the National League pennant, are down two engines and spiraling rapidly toward an uncontrolled crash landing. They need to dump everything that’s not bolted down, and unfortunately for Walker, that’s him.

The 33-year-old right-hander took the loss in two of the Phillies’ eight consecutive defeats, and if his 9.13 ERA is due to regress with better sequencing and luck, it wasn’t going to regress by much. Walker’s xERA is 7.04 and his FIP is 7.82. In 22 2/3 innings, he has struck out 17 batters while allowing 36 hits (including eight home runs) and 11 walks.

On the heels of his final outing in Phillies colors, Jayson Stark posted a statistical coincidence that’s so damning, it almost feels unkind to notice: Opponents have hit .353/.417/.657 against Walker this season. In 1941, the year of his record 56-game hitting streak, Joe DiMaggio hit .357/.440/.643. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sure you know the joke about the two hikers, the bear, and the running shoes. A bear is chasing two men through the woods; one stops to put on his running shoes. “You fool!” his friend says. “Even in those shoes you’ll never outrun the bear!”

“I don’t need to outrun the bear,” says the man. “I just need to outrun you.”

It’s an old joke, and I tell it a lot because I find it to have the probative value of an actual Biblical parable. You don’t need to be great; just be better than the other guy. For the past week, the Phillies have been mired in a losing streak that would’ve gotten national attention had the bear not been devoting its attention to eating the Mets. But on Wednesday, the Mets finally snapped their 12-game skid and the Phillies dropped their eighth game on the bounce. Now the two rivals both sit at 8-16, the worst record in the National League. Read the rest of this entry »