Archive for Phillies

Help Us, Andrew Painter, My People Cry Out for Salvation!

Kyle Ross-Imagn Images

Andrew Painter made his major league debut on Tuesday, as the Phillies were coming off a three-game losing streak. That’s a tough assignment; I know it’s the first week of the season, but that has never stopped Phillies fans — who even in the best of times are always looking for a reason to jump off a bridge — from declaring the team irretrievably cooked.

Not so fast, my friends. Because anyone who’s willing to overreact to a one-game sample in April must be over the moon about Painter.

Painter, who turns 23 next month, was one of the top pitching prospects in the entire sport in the 2022-23 offseason. At age 19, he was promoted to Double-A, where he posted a 2.54 ERA in five starts and struck out 37, while walking just two, in 28 1/3 innings. As 2023 dawned, there was a not-unreasonable expectation that Painter would contribute down the stretch in his age-20 season, perhaps as a bullpen stopper, like a young David Price or Adam Wainwright, or perhaps in the rotation. (Remember, this was before Cristopher Sánchez turned into the world-destroying ace he’s become.)

But Painter’s elbow started barking, and an early hesitation to sending him to get Tommy John surgery led to both 2023 and 2024 being written off. With two years of rust, Painter struggled in 2025, pitching to an ERA over 5.00 across two minor league levels, and the first single-digit K/9 ratio of his professional career. The Phillies pitched well last postseason, but they still could’ve used Painter. He simply hadn’t earned the call-up that he’d seemingly had in the bag since early 2023.

He dropped his arm slot and lost a ton of life off his fastball while returning from Tommy John, but the promise remained. He was no longer the top pitching prospect in baseball, nor the top prospect in the Phillies’ system, but he rated no. 27 overall this past offseason and eighth among pitching prospects, with a 55-FV grade. This is still Philadelphia’s most anticipated rookie pitcher since at least Cole Hamels.

It speaks to the Phillies’ faith in the young right-hander that they did not go out and get anything resembling a like-for-like replacement for the departing Ranger Suarez. With Zack Wheeler on the mend from thoracic outlet syndrome, that left Painter in the big league rotation with no safety net. I genuinely do not know who starting pitcher no. 6 is for the Phillies right now, but I am confronted with the possibility that it might be Bryse Wilson if 40-man roster glut were not a consideration.

So, yeah, there’s a bit of pressure on Painter.

If he was feeling that pressure, you couldn’t tell. Painter, who stands an Ent-like 6-foot-7, strolled serenely to the mound for his first competitive big league action. And as good as the stuff and the results were — don’t worry, I’m getting there — Painter’s composure seemed to impress his teammates most.

Remember, the Phillies are, generally speaking, old as hell. They’ve been around the block. Matt Gelb of The Athletic noted before the game that Tuesday’s was the first Phillies lineup in five and a half years to feature two players aged 22 or younger. Gelb quoted Jesús Luzardo, Brandon Marsh, and J.T. Realmuto praising Painter’s composure in his gamer. Kyle Schwarber and Adolis García echoed those sentiments in their postgame remarks.

But it doesn’t matter how calm a rookie pitcher is if he’s throwing slop and getting shelled. So let’s check Painter’s stuff and results.

Yes, the Nationals’ lineup isn’t that good overall, but it features a few challenging hitters: CJ Abrams, Daylen Lile, and the genuinely capital-D Dangerous James Wood. Joey Wiemer is coming off a run of literally not making an out for 10 straight plate appearances, though it looks like the magic (or quantum ray power) has finally worn off.

The value proposition for Painter is that there’s nothing weird about him. He’s just what an ace looks like. He’s huge, he throws hard, he has a varied arsenal of six pitches… there’s just nothing to talk yourself into on the scouting report.

Painter throws two fastballs, a four-seamer and sinker, both of which sat 94-97 and topped out at 98.7 mph. He hit that figure twice in the first inning, when he was freshest and the adrenaline was surely pumping hardest, but he got back to 98.6 mph in the fourth.

Like a lot of modern starters, Painter has one look for left-handed hitters and another for righties. The platoon advantage works because breaking balls move away from same-handed batters and toward opposite-handed hitters. So pitchers like Painter, who have multiple fastballs and breaking balls, want to work side-to-side against same-handed batters and up-and-down against opposite-handed ones. That means four-seamer, sinker, slider, sweeper against righties, and four-seamer, slider, curveball, changeup against lefties in Painter’s case.

Nationals manager Blake Butera loaded up on the former. With six lefties and two switch-hitters in the lineup, Wiemer was the only right-handed batter Painter faced all evening, so we saw a lot of his four-seamer, slider, curveball, and changeup, and relatively little of his sinker and sweeper.

Painter was kind enough to get at least one strikeout on each pitch from that first group of four, so that you can see all of them in this highlight video.

Painter’s first and last strikeouts came against Wood, and both came from working fastball up, curveball down, to change Wood’s eye level and mess up his timing. He struck out in the fifth inning after taking an 80.6-mph curveball for a strike, and then chasing a 97.2-mph four-seamer up and away.

With the fastball and curveball established, Painter could tunnel his changeup into a middle ground in terms of movement and speed. The scouting report on Painter has “FASTBALL VELOCITY” and “NASTY CURVEBALL” written in all caps, but the changeup is a new weapon, perhaps the only positive development from his forgettable 2025 season in Lehigh Valley.

He was able to paint the bottom left-hand corner of the strike zone with his changeup to get Luis García Jr. looking in the third, and he did it again to Jorbit Vivas in the fourth. Both of those pitches were right on the edge of the zone, but Painter worked there so effectively that the Nats were out of challenges when Vivas tried to summon ABS to bail him out.

And when Painter did allow contact, it was pretty innocuous. He let up 12 balls in play out of 21 batters faced. Only three of those batted balls had an xBA of .100 or higher, and only one reached Baseball Savant’s hard-hit threshold of 95 mph. That was the last pitch Painter threw all night: Abrams ripped it to right for a single, and Phillies manager Rob Thomson, wanting his rookie starter to go out on a positive, pulled the plug.

The damage the Nats did against Painter, such as it was, didn’t do much to discredit the rookie’s effort. Lile seemed to have Painter’s number, reaching twice, but one of those two came on a popup that four different Phillies lost in the lights. As a general rule, when someone tags Jon Bois on social media with “watching baseball,” it doesn’t speak well of what’s depicted.

@jonbois.bsky.social watching baseball

buck_knife (@buckknife.bsky.social) 2026-04-01T02:17:28.626Z

The state of perpetual garment-rending around the Phillies might be unhelpful, as I mentioned up top, but as debuts go, at home in April against the Nats is a pretty soft assignment for a rookie. Painter aced it, so to speak, but that success only earns him a new set of questions to answer. Can he get it done against deeper lineups? Can he survive a third time through the order? Can he hold his velocity? If so, how far up the rotation can he climb — a question that could become quite relevant given the questions about Wheeler’s health and Aaron Nola’s getting abducted by aliens last year.

But that’s life in the big leagues. The hits just keep on coming. Or, in Painter’s case, maybe they won’t.


Welcome to the Big Leagues, Boys — It Can Only Get Worse From Here

Bill Streicher, Jeff Curry, David Frerker-Imagn Images, Kevin R. Wexler-NorthJersey.com-USA Today Network

On September 12, 2004, Eli Manning made his NFL debut. The Giants were down three touchdowns in the fourth quarter, and starting quarterback Kurt Warner had taken four sacks and fumbled twice; maybe let the no. 1 overall pick take a spin.

On Manning’s very first play from scrimmage, he handed the ball to Tiki Barber, who ran for a 72-yard touchdown. Now, Manning would go on to have a very, very good career: 16 years in the league, four Pro Bowls, 366 touchdown passes, two Super Bowls, and untold hundreds of millions of dollars in career earnings. But if you look at Manning’s career through a certain lens, he peaked with that first snap.

A quarterback’s job is to advance the ball down the field and score. And while Barber did most of the work, a one-play, 72-yard touchdown drive is about as good as a debut gets. Manning’s career productivity would never be better than it was after that first play. So it proved, and quickly; on the very next possession, Manning coughed up a fumble of his own on a nightmarish three-way hit. Welcome to The Show, kid. Read the rest of this entry »


Phillies Re-Extend Cristopher Sánchez

Bill Streicher-Imagn Images

Cristopher Sánchez wasn’t going anywhere for awhile. He’s now not going anywhere for even longer. With Ranger Suarez in Boston, Zack Wheeler recovering from thoracic outlet surgery, and Aaron Nola looking his age, the 29-year-old left-hander is the ace of a Phillies starting rotation that led baseball in WAR in both 2025 and 2023 and hasn’t finished below fourth this decade. On Sunday, the Philadelphia signed Sánchez to a contract extension that will keep him around through the 2032 season, with a club option for 2033, when he’ll be 36. The move also comes less than two weeks after the team inked Jesús Luzardo to his own five-year, $135 million extension. Clearly, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski would like to maintain the status quo.

Robert Murray of FanSided broke the news of the deal. Matt Gelb of The Athletic reported that the contract is worth a guaranteed $107 million, and Francys Romero of Beisbol FR reported that it included more than $13 million in incentives. The club option for 2033, if it’s picked up, would add another $32.5 million. This may well sound familiar. In June 2024, the Phillies signed Sánchez to a four-year extension that contained two more club options for 2029 and 2030. Those first four years bought out all of his arbitration years for $22.5 million. If picked up, the two club options (along with Cy Young incentives) could have increased the maximum value to $56.6 million.

We’ll get back into the mechanics of the deal and what they mean soon. We’re not going to spend more than a few paragraphs on why the Phillies decided Sánchez was worth all this. That part should be obvious. Sánchez is quite simply one of the best pitchers in the world. He finished 10th in the National League Cy Young voting in 2024 and second in 2025. He has a career ERA of 3.24 and a FIP of 3.15. By any standard, the lefty found an entirely new level in 2025, running a career-high 26% strikeout rate. His 2.55 FIP was nearly half a run better than his previous career best, and his 63 DRA- was nearly 20 points lower than his previous best. Read the rest of this entry »


Counting Pitchers on My Fingers

Jeff Curry and David Butler II-Imagn Images

Starting rotations have five slots.

Yes, every once in a while a team will pretend to have four or six slots, but that team must inevitably confront the truth: Starting rotations have five slots. It’s a matter of policy, preference, and just plain practicality, Mariners general manager Justin Hollander said last year in an interview with Lookout Landing.

“The unfortunate thing about the roster rules is you only get 26 spots, and you only get 13 pitchers. And when you add a sixth starter, you take away a reliever. When you add a sixth starter, sometimes your starters pitch every six days, sometimes they pitch every eight or nine days. Starting pitchers are fussy. They don’t like that. They like to stay on a regular schedule. They like to know when they’re pitching.”

I’ve been thinking about the fixed-nature of rotations lately after reading this discussion between Eno Saris and Jen McCaffrey in The Athletic. They compare the rotations in Detroit and Boston by assigning each pitcher a label (one, two, three, four, five), sizing them up horizontally and vertically, and confronting the trade-offs in quality and depth. This reflects how many of us compare rotations in the abstract, and I wanted to see if this could be applied more broadly. Read the rest of this entry »


Effectively Wild Episode 2451: Season Preview Series: Phillies and Angels

EWFI
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Team Italy’s triumphs (and good vibes) at the WBC, a tumultuous week for Team USA and Mark DeRosa, and where the tournament stands entering the quarterfinals, then preview the 2026 Philadelphia Phillies (39:21) with The Athletic’s Matt Gelb, and the 2026 Los Angeles Angels (1:21:00) with The Athletic’s Sam Blum, plus a postscript (2:09:08).

Audio intro: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme
Audio interstitial 1: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme
Audio interstitial 2: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Effectively Wild Theme (Pedantic)
Audio outro: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme

Link to WBC standings
Link to WBC bracket
Link to “caffeine and kisses” story
Link to Pasquantino homers
Link to “beaned up” article
Link to “beaned up” clip
Link to DeRosa clip 1
Link to DeRosa clip 2
Link to DeRosa clip 3
Link to latest DeRosa comments
Link to clip removal
Link to article on DeRosa’s mistake
Link to Ghiroli on DeRosa
Link to Rosenthal on DeRosa 1
Link to Rosenthal on DeRosa 2
Link to article on DeRosa/Harper
Link to Disgrace of Gijón
Link to roster reconfigurations
Link to Raleigh shirt
Link to Team USA chemistry article
Link to Sopranos clip
Link to team payrolls page
Link to Phillies offseason tracker
Link to Phillies depth chart
Link to Harper EBOO article
Link to Matt on Harper
Link to Matt on Harper/Dombrowski
Link to Matt on Castellanos
Link to Castellanos Insta post
Link to Matt on Kerkering
Link to Phillies himbo article 1
Link to Phillies himbo article 2
Link to Stark on Phillies continuity
Link to Matt on Strahm
Link to Girl With a Pearl Earring
Link to team SP projections
Link to team RP projections
Link to Matt’s author archive
Link to Matt’s podcast
Link to TB12 update
Link to Angels offseason tracker
Link to Angels depth chart
Link to Sam’s Angels beat farewell
Link to Sam on Netflix in Japan
Link to Sam on Rendon
Link to Angels TV network story
Link to Trout sprint speed story
Link to article on fastest human
Link to pitching development survey
Link to Sam’s author archive
Link to Paxton/pitch limits article
Link to WBC rules
Link to Ben on “Strategy”
Link to Laureano post 1
Link to Laureano post 2

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The Doomsday Scenarios

Eric Hartline and Thomas Shea-Imagn Images

I’ve now spent nearly a quarter of a century working with baseball projections, and in that time, I’ve always been struck by the certainty with which so many people view them. People are far more certain than they should be that great teams will be great, star players will be stars, and so on. However, one of the things that comes from working with projections for a big chunk of your life is that you develop a painful awareness of how much of the future cannot be known until it actually happens.

As in most seasons, we enter without a general conception of which teams will be the best. We may pretend everyone starts off with a clean slate, but absolutely nobody expects the Rockies to be better than the Dodgers. But even if that particular scenario is extremely unlikely, every one of the top teams has a scenario in which things fall apart. These clubs have a vested interest in protecting against that potential downside, as much as possible, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the doomsday scenario for some of the best teams in baseball.

To get an idea, I did a full seasonal simulation of the ZiPS projected standings, and instead of looking at the standings overall, I looked at the bottom 20% of outcomes to see what we could glean from the results. According to ZiPS, every team except the Dodgers misses the playoffs when it performs no better than its 20th-percentile win total.

Philadelphia Phillies: Rotation Depth

This almost seems counterintuitive given just how good the rotation projections are for the Phillies, but the projections are not enthusiastic about their depth here. And what makes that especially worrisome is that with so much uncertainty around the health of Zack Wheeler and the performance of Aaron Nola, Philadelphia is probably going to need that depth more than it did last year. This time around, the Phillies are missing Ranger Suarez, who signed with the Red Sox during the offseason. Andrew Painter was healthy in 2025, but one cannot ignore that he was rather middling against Triple-A hitting. The outfield looks like a problem, as well, but it generally has been, and ZiPS is a fan of Justin Crawford.

If Philadelphia adds one of the innings-eaters still available in free agency, ZiPS sees the team’s outlook improve, much more than I expected. Just having someone like Lucas Giolito, Tyler Anderson, or even Patrick Corbin around did a lot to alleviate the rotational downside. It may come down to which of these pitchers is open to a swing role or a minor league deal with an opt-out date. And yes, I do think it feels weird to suggest Corbin as an upgrade for a team in 2026.

New York Mets: Right Field

The Mets certainly don’t dominate in either the rotation or bullpen projections, but ZiPS is fairly confident that both of these units will hold up over the course of the season. Despite a solid projection for Carson Benge in right field, the range of outcomes is quite high, and in the simulations where Benge struggles, ZiPS has trouble competently filling in right field. Tyrone Taylor is an underwhelming option, and ZiPS thinks Brett Baty would have a tough time defensively in the outfield. With no particularly interesting outfielders available in free agency, the best solution might simply be making sure Jacob Reimer gets some time in the outfield. New York’s roster just isn’t really set up to get him time at third base, where he probably is most valuable. But he also represents the most tantalizing 2026 upside of any player the Mets have in the minors, so they ought to try and be open to promoting him aggressively, and getting a little weird with it, if need be.

New York Yankees: Injuries

The Yankees’ outcomes are weird, in that their bad seasons were mostly ones in which Aaron Judge, for whatever reason, ended up with fewer than 300 plate appearances, and only occasionally something else. Getting limited innings from Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodón was already baked into the cake, and ZiPS thinks there are enough fourth-starter types to patch up any rotation holes that might pop up. The problem is, just how do you replace Judge? I’m not sure there’s a scenario where the Yankees can do much to mitigate any risk there, for the simple reality that in a tightly projected division, suddenly losing six wins is likely to drop them out of the AL East divisional race. At the very least, the Yankees should hold off on shopping Spencer Jones for help elsewhere, but it wouldn’t fix a Judge loss.

Baltimore Orioles: Rotation Quality

Baltimore has potential aces in both Trevor Rogers and Kyle Bradish, but that word potential is an unpleasant adjective. Adding Pete Alonso and Taylor Ward really stabilizes the offense, which was a concern last year, but the rotation is an issue. The Orioles finished with a bottom five rotation in the ZiPS simulations more often than all other AL East teams combined. There’s nothing on the farm that helps this, and I think that with the Orioles increasingly pushing their chips in, they ought to be aggressive at taking the opportunity to loot struggling teams of their top pitching, even if the prospect hit would be tremendous. I think there are even scenarios, though not many, in which it might make sense for the O’s to trade either Adley Rutschman, assuming he has a bounce-back season, or Samuel Basallo.

Boston Red Sox: First Base

The good news is that ZiPS sees the Red Sox as the most stable of AL contenders, with the lowest percentage of sub-.500 seasons of any AL team. The rotation isn’t the best in baseball, but it may be the most bulletproof one, and that isn’t even counting on getting lots of innings from pitchers like Payton Tolle and Connelly Early, who would be Plan As in most rotations in baseball. In fact, when the Red Sox had their worst performance, it was almost entirely the offense that fell short, and not necessarily from the position you might expect.

Most people have focused on third base because of the loss of Alex Bregman, but Caleb Durbin is actually a decent option. Plus, if Durbin struggles, Marcelo Mayer could very likely provide what the former isn’t. Where there is real downside risk is at first base. I liked the Willson Contreras acquisition, too, and he’s probably going to be at least solidly average in 2026, but he’s also going to be 34 in May. It’s an age where you look at the long left tails of the outcome distribution for non-elite first basemen, and there’s always a real risk of a very sudden plummet off a cliff. Triston Casas hasn’t played in a game since last May — and won’t even play in any spring training games this year — and he has a real mixed history.

What to do? That’s a lot trickier. Boston obviously isn’t going to replace Contreras before he has that downside year. But this team should be ready for that possibility, and if the surplus of pitching turns out to be real, the Sox will have a position of depth from which to trade.

Chicago Cubs: Rotation Quality

The outlook improved with the addition of Edward Cabrera, but ZiPS still has the Cubs with the weakest rotation of the 10 teams listed here. In the ZiPS simulations, the rotation was largely the source of the Cubs’ worst seasons. There aren’t really any exciting starters left out there in free agency, but I think I’d do what I suspect the Cubs are already thinking of doing: giving Ben Brown’s upside as a starting pitcher more serious consideration. He allowed too many home runs and had a high BABIP on a really good defensive team, but it’s guys like that who tend to come out of nowhere quickly (see Corbin Burnes in 2019). Brown has swing-and-miss stuff, and I think given the potential, I’d rather see him starting at Triple-A than pitching in relief in the majors.

Houston Astros: Outfield Corners

Not counting 2020, for obvious reasons, the 686 runs the Astros scored in 2025 represented their fewest since 2014. A full, healthy season of Yordan Alvarez would be incredibly helpful, but the team’s also not likely to wring another 135 wRC+ out of Jeremy Peña. Not helping matters is that Joey Loperfido and Cam Smith project as one of the weakest corner outfield tandems in the majors in 2026. Smith surprised many, including me, in the early months last year, but an OPS that fell shy of .500 in the second half is highly concerning. There’s a chance that the Astros get little from their outfield corners, which is a problem for a team with a middling offense that just lost ace Framber Valdez in free agency. In some 30% of simulations, the Astros got a sub-90 wRC+ out of their corner outfielders, and in those runs, they had a .475 winning percentage. If there’s a team that should aggressively go after either Jarren Duran or Wilyer Abreu, it’s Houston.

Toronto Blue Jays: Rotation Depth

Even with the loss of Anthony Santander to shoulder surgery, ZiPS still sees the Blue Jays’ rotation as their biggest pain point. There are simply a lot of question marks once you get past Dylan Cease and Kevin Gausman, something I mentioned a bit in Toronto’s ZiPS rundown in January. In a lot of the sims, the team got next to nothing out of any of Cody Ponce, José Berríos, Shane Bieber, and Max Scherzer, whether because of injury, decline, or general performance issues. If Sandy Alcantara looks anywhere near his old self with the Marlins in the early months, I think the Jays ought to be one of his suitors. At the very least, Alcantara would do well with an infield that has Andrés Giménez and Ernie Clement.

Seattle Mariners: Outfield Corners

As with the Astros, ZiPS sees Seattle’s corner outfield spots as having the most downside. Unlike the Astros, ZiPS doesn’t view it as truly a doomsday scenario. After the Red Sox and Dodgers, ZiPS considers the Mariners to be the contender with the least downside. Randy Arozarena’s projection distribution is pretty interesting, with the bottom falling out of him once you get under the 15th-percentile projection or so; while his 20th-percentile OPS+ is a non-disastrous 94, it drops to 70 for the 10th-percentile level. As for Victor Robles, he’s been all over the place in his career, and the Plan Bs in the organization are unimpressive. I think Seattle’s strong enough that it doesn’t necessarily have the same need to be aggressive as Houston does, but this is still a potential point of weakness that could pose an issue.

Los Angeles Dodgers: Black Swans

It’s really hard to kill the Dodgers. I argued after the 2024-2025 offseason, a very busy one, that the Dodgers weren’t really improving their average outcome so much as drastically raising their floor. I stand by it; they’ve added Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz while losing nobody who was crucial to the 2025 team. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be projected to win 105 games or anything, but it does mean that in most of their worst projected outcomes, they’re still a playoff contender. Their 10th-percentile projection, for example, is 86 wins. Their 2% chance of finishing below .500 is the smallest percentage I’ve ever projected, a record that now goes back more than 20 years. Doomsday for the Dodgers may require an actual doomsday scenario like societal collapse, nuclear war, or a vacuum metastability event. Since I do not know how to prevent any of those, there’s nothing more I can add.


Philly-ing Up: Luzardo Inks a Five-Year Extension

Bill Streicher-Imagn Images

With Ranger Suarez now a Red Sock, Zack Wheeler rehabbing from thoracic outlet surgery, and Aaron Nola trying to rebound from a career-worst season, the Phillies rotation has its share of uncertainty as the 2026 regular season approaches. On Monday, the team did its best to bolster that unit for the longer term, agreeing to a five-year, $135 million extension with lefty Jesús Luzardo.

The 28-year-old Luzardo is coming off an impressive first season with the Phillies, who acquired him (along with catching prospect Paul McIntosh) from the Marlins in December 2024 in exchange for two prospects, shortstop Starlyn Caba and outfielder Emaarion Boyd. After making just 12 starts for Miami in 2024 due to elbow tightness and a stress reaction in his lower back, Luzardo made a full complement of 32 starts last year while setting career highs with 183.2 innings and 5.3 WAR, both second on the team behind Cristopher Sánchez. Both his 2.90 FIP and 3.33 xERA — each of which ranked fourth in the National League — make better cases for the quality of his pitching than his 3.92 ERA; in fact, the gap between his ERA and FIP was the third-highest among all qualifiers:

Largest Gap Between ERA and FIP
Pitcher Team IP ERA FIP E-F
Sandy Alcantara MIA 174.2 5.36 4.28 1.08
Brandon Pfaadt ARI 176.2 5.25 4.22 1.03
Jesús Luzardo PHI 183.2 3.92 2.90 1.02
Dylan Cease SDP 168.0 4.55 3.56 1.00
Sonny Gray STL 180.2 4.28 3.39 0.89
Kyle Freeland COL 162.2 4.98 4.18 0.80
David Peterson NYM 168.2 4.22 3.48 0.73
Mitchell Parker WSN 164.2 5.68 4.99 0.70
Andre Pallante STL 162.2 5.31 4.68 0.63
Logan Webb SFG 207.0 3.22 2.60 0.61
Minimum 162 innings pitched.

Strangely enough, all 10 of those pitchers hail from the NL; José Soriano, who had the largest gap in the American League at 0.53 runs (4.26 ERA, 3.73 FIP), ranked 11th among qualifiers, just below the cutoff in the table above. Read the rest of this entry »


When Chases and Whiffs Don’t Lead to Outs

John Froschauer-Imagn Images

A pitcher goes to the mound hoping to record outs without allowing runs. Unfortunately, a lot goes on between the ball leaving the pitcher’s hand and the scoreboard changing. You can’t just toe the rubber, chuck the ball, and say, “God’s will be done,” as you stare glassy-eyed into the distance like Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg.

I mean, you could, but you wouldn’t like the results.

A modern pitcher goes to the mound with a plan to influence events much further up the causal chain. Every pitcher is special in his own way, but every plan boils down to this: By changing speed, movement, or location, trick the hitter into swinging somewhere other than where the ball will be. Read the rest of this entry »


Let’s Sign Some Contracts! 2026 Edition

Dan Hamilton, Stephen Brashear-Imagn Images

If there’s something even more satisfying than spending your hard-earned money, it’s spending someone else’s money that you didn’t earn. When we’re talking baseball, unless you’re an extremely high-net-worth individual who can casually spend hundreds of millions of dollars — if this describes you, call me and we can totally hang out or something — you only have the option to spend other people’s cash. I mean, I haven’t technically asked American Express to up my credit limit to $300 million, but I’m guessing the answer would be no. Every year around this time, I make a whole piece out of it, naming seven players I think teams should attempt to sign to long-term contracts now, rather than waiting until later. There are some additional complications, of course, with a lockout likely coming after this season, but teams and players could be willing to act with more urgency to sign contracts now before all the uncertainty ahead of them.

I’ve (hopefully) chosen seven players whose possible extensions would benefit both the player and the team, as all good contracts ought to do. I’ve included the up-to-date ZiPS projections for each player, as well as the contract that ZiPS thinks each player should get, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I think the player will end up with that figure or even sign an extension. Read the rest of this entry »


Doubling Down: Jurickson Profar Draws a Second PED Suspension, and Johan Rojas (Likely) a First

Tim Heitman and Kyle Ross-Imagn Images

In 2024, 11 years after he was the consensus no. 1 prospect in the game, Jurickson Profar finally broke out, setting career highs in home runs (24), wRC+ (139) and WAR (4.3), making his first All-Star team, and helping the Padres to an NL Wild Card berth. He cashed in that winter; after never making more than $7.75 million in a season, Profar signed a three-year, $42 million deal with the Braves. Four games into his tenure with his new team, however, he drew an 80-game suspension for violating the Joint Drug Agreement. While he was productive upon returning and figured prominently in the plans of a team expected to contend for the NL East title this season, on Tuesday, the 33-year-old outfielder drew a second PED suspension, this one for the entire 2026 season.

Profar wasn’t the only player reported to be facing a PED suspension on Tuesday, or even the only NL East outfielder who had run afoul of the game’s drug policy. According to multiple sources, the Phillies’ Johan Rojas has an 80-game suspension looming for a first-time offense. While MLB officially announced Profar’s suspension in a press release sent at 6:47 p.m. ET on Tuesday — over six hours after ESPN’s Jeff Passan first broke the news — Rojas’ is not yet official.

Both players are reportedly appealing their suspensions. An hour after Passan’s tweet, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that the Major League Baseball Players Association is filing a grievance on Profar’s behalf. It’s not clear yet on what grounds the union is challenging the suspension, but such a case would be heard by MLB’s independent arbitrator, Martin F. Scheinman. Later that afternoon, The Athletic’s Charlotte Varnes and Matt Gelb reported that Rojas is appealing his suspension, as well. He is starting in center field and batting seventh in Philadelphia’s exhibition game on Wednesday against Team Canada. Read the rest of this entry »