Last week, I began a series of pieces about team win-loss totals as estimated by BaseRuns, first by taking a broad look at the methodology and its limitations, then by zooming in on the offenses that deviate most notably from their BaseRuns assessment in the run scoring department. Let’s wrap up with a look at the defenses that sit furthest from their runs allowed approximation.

In the offense edition, I used a game show format to evaluate whether the perspective offered by BaseRuns has a point, or if there’s something its methodology is overlooking. We’ll keep that framework going for the defenses as well. Here’s a reminder of how it works:

To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, Ranger Suárez aced his toughest test of the season. Taking on a red-hot Astros team (they’ve posted a 135 wRC+ over the last 14 days) that demolishes lefties (they’re first in wRC+ vs. left-handed pitchers), Suárez hardly broke a sweat. He tossed 7.1 scoreless innings, allowing just three hits, before Cooper Hummel parked his 99th pitch of the game into the right field seats.

The start may have ended on a sour note, but Tuesday’s performance was the cherry on top of an unbelievably sweet run for the 29-year-old southpaw. In his last nine starts, Suárez has allowed eight earned runs. That’s good for a 1.17 ERA over nearly a third of an entire season.

But for some reason, I’m never quite ready to believe. Maybe it’s because his primary fastball sits below 91 mph, or the absence of gaudy strikeout rates, or the lack of a single pitch that grades out as even average by Stuff+ or PitchingBot. Mostly, I think it’s because I perceive Suárez as a fundamentally streaky pitcher. He’s certainly on a run at the moment, and he’s gone on these runs before. During his breakout 2021 campaign, he compiled a 1.24 ERA in his final eight starts of the season. And there were the first three months of 2024: a 1.85 ERA over a 99 inning span. Read the rest of this entry »

When I wrote a few weeks ago about how Kyle Schwarber deserves to be the first player in baseball history to get not his own bobblehead doll, but rather his own bobble helmet doll, I neglected to mention one thing. Schwarber has been brilliant this season. He’s off to the best start of his entire career. Schwarber is currently running a 164 wRC+, which makes him the eighth-best qualified hitter in baseball. His 19 home runs and 16% walk rate both rank in the top five. That excellent spring is all the more impressive considering that Schwarber is, relatively speaking, something of a slow starter. He owns a career 110 wRC+ in March and April, followed by a 115 mark in May, then a 145 mark in June. This season, he just started out hot and got even hotter. Here’s a table that shows his wOBA in March and April through his entire career:

Schwarber has had plenty of hot streaks like this one before, but never to lead off a season. Moreover, the way he’s doing it is different. With Joey Gallo attempting to reinvent himself as a pitcher, Schwarber stands alone as the game’s foremost practitioner of the Three True Outcomes, but he’s doing his best to abandon one of those outcomes. He’s currently running a 24.4% strikeout rate, which would represent the lowest rate of his career and a drop of more than four percentage points compared to last season. In addition to lowering his strikeout rate, Schwarber is doing more damage than ever when he puts the ball in play. His .499 wOBAcon and .531 xwOBAcon are the best marks of his entire career. Read the rest of this entry »

Assistant, Player Development

Department: Player Development
Reports to: Assistant Director, Player Development & Coordinator, Player Development
Status: Full-Time Salary Non-Exempt

Position Overview:
The Philadelphia Phillies are seeking passionate and knowledgeable applicants who will work closely with the Assistant Director, PD and the Coordinator, PD as well as various stakeholders in the Player Development department. The position will be based out of Clearwater, FL. A strong candidate will provide a diverse perspective and administrative support to our PD group. This position will offer opportunities to contribute throughout the many facets of the PD department.

Responsibilities:

• Prepare tools, reports and other resources to distribute information throughout PD
• Knowledge of and competency with minor league transaction and contract processes using MLB’s online portal
• Coordinate internal and MLB projects including but not limited to updating newly implemented MiLB Hub as well as overseeing various staff requests, surveys, lists and reporting
• Assist in Minor League roster management, player moves logistics and communication throughout the PD system
• Manage onboarding and offboarding procedures for PD players and staff
• Manage communication, data and personnel platforms throughout PD for players and staff
• Oversee distribution of minor league and winter ball game reports to organizational personnel
• Serve as point person between player development front office and PHI major league social media team to promote our minor league system

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university
• Strong foundational baseball knowledge
• Proficiency in Google Sheets and other Google Editors Suite tools
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Rigorous attention to detail
• Proven ability to learn quickly and work as part of a team

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with minor league transactions and rules
• Previous experience working in a professional baseball environment
• Familiarity with SQL and/or experience with other programming languages (e.g. R, Python)
• Ability to communicate in Spanish

Interested applicants should submit both their resume and answers to the following questions (Please limit each response to 300 words):

• Identify one pitcher and one position player in the Phillies system not ranked in the team’s MLB.com Top 30 Prospects List that you feel would be the next up to be added and why?
• Describe a baseball-related problem or question that you’d be keen to solve. What interests you about this particular problem or question? How would you approach this?

We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, gender identity, marital or veteran status, or any other protected class.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Philadelphia Phillies.

Aaron Nola is having a truly awful season: Through nine starts, he’s 1-7 with a 6.16 ERA, which is bad for any pitcher. For the putative no. 2 starter on a big-market team whose fans are getting pretty tetchy about not having won a World Series in a while, it’s disastrous. Especially when said pitcher is in year two of a seven-year, $172 million contract. In fact, you’d have to say Nola has been surpassed in the pecking order by Cristopher Sánchez at the very least, and possibly by newcomer Jesús Luzardo.

Everyone’s got their theories as to what’s gone wrong. Davy Andrews tried to figure out Nola’s deal last month. Timothy Jackson of Baseball Prospectus speculated earlier this week that there’s something off with his fastball, and that lefty-heavy opposing lineups might be to blame. The Phillies, for their part, just put Nola on the (non-COVID) IL for the first time in almost eight years. The stated reason is an ankle injury Nola says is messing up his mechanics, but a player in a slump this bad can almost always use some time off to clear his head as well. Read the rest of this entry »

When I go jogging, I wrap a rubber band around my keys so they don’t jingle in my pocket. I put my phone in a different pocket, an extra one I sewed into the front of my shorts so it’s close enough that it won’t tug on the headphone cord. I tuck the ends of my shoelaces in above the tongue so they don’t flop all over the place. I go to all this trouble for two reasons. First, I’m a sensitive soul. Second, I don’t really love running. I love the feeling of having run, but every step is a fight against the voice in my head telling me that I should just stop because running is for suckers. After a mile or so, any one of those slight annoyances – jangling keys, slight tugging on my earbuds, shoelaces flapping against my shoes – will start to bother me so much that I’ll give in to that very obvious truth.

I’m sharing this preamble with you because although I normally write about small, obscure subjects, what I’m writing about today is so small and so obscure that I feel like I owe you an explanation as to why I noticed it at all. As I hope I’ve made clear, I noticed it because I’m weird. Read the rest of this entry »

It isn’t supposed to be this easy. When the Phillies traded for Jesús Luzardo over the winter, they did so with the understanding that he wouldn’t be an ace right from the jump. He was coming off a rough and injured 2024, he’d only hit 20 starts in a season once in his career, and every warning light you could possibly imagine was flashing – worst stuff model grades of his career, lowest strikeout rate, lowest whiff rate, highest hard-hit rate.

Those warning signs explain why the Phillies were able to acquire Luzardo for relative peanuts. It also explains why our projection systems were unenthused by him heading into this year, projecting a 4.19 ERA, a distant fifth among Philadelphia’s starters. No one doubts Luzardo’s potential, but after six seasons and 500 innings (itself not a great sign) of roughly league-average work, well, at some point you are what you are.

Right, yeah, Luzardo’s been the best pitcher on the Phillies this year and one of the best pitchers in baseball. I’m not as surprised as I thought I’d be. But given that we’re a quarter of the way through the season and his ERA and FIP are both below 2.00, I think it’s time to take a closer look at what he’s doing differently.
Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Ross had a bummer of a 2024 season – a lower back injury ended his season after only 74 innings. He had a bummer of a start to 2025, too. Opponents were hitting him hard and he couldn’t miss a bat to save his life. But Tuesday night against the Mets, manager Rob Thomson said, Hey Joe, I trust you.

Ross was in the game unexpectedly early after Cristopher Sánchez departed with forearm soreness after only two innings. Ross came in to start the third inning, with the Phillies trailing 2-1. He came out of spring training in a short-relief role, but more recently he’d been used as a long reliever, and this particular situation called for multiple innings. So Ross came in and looked great, the best he has all year. After Pete Alonso greeted him with a single, Ross retired the next six Mets in order, two on strikeouts.

Two innings matched Ross’s longest outing of the year, and his pitch count was already up to a season-high 32. How long would you stick with a reliever who began the day with a 7.45 ERA, a 5.30 FIP, and an 11.1% strikeout rate in a one-run game? At some point, Thomson would have to take him out, and the bottom of the fifth inning seemed like the perfect time. The top of the Mets order was due up, which meant Francisco Lindor. And Francisco Lindor owns Joe Ross.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over his first five starts, Aaron Nola is 0-5 with a 6.43 ERA. On Monday night against the Mets, Nola nearly put up his best performance of the season, allowing two earned runs over six innings before things went off the rails. In the seventh inning, the two runners that he bequeathed to the bullpen scored, leaving him with a final line of 6 1/3 innings and four earned runs. Still, it was an improvement.

No one has more losses or fewer wins than Nola this season. Only three qualified pitchers have a higher ERA. How much should we be panicking right now? I will tell you up front that I don’t know the answer. There’s plenty going on, and I don’t know how to make all the pieces fit neatly, so I’m just going to lay out what I’ve learned. Let’s start with a whole bunch of advanced ERA estimators. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, I sat down to watch the Red Sox-Rays game, hoping to find the answer to a question that’s been bugging me for weeks: Who does Shane Baz look like?

I didn’t come close to an answer, because while watching Baz pitch, I was struck by the sparseness of the young right-hander’s uniform. Only three letters in his name; two digits in his uniform number, but represented by skinny numerals. It stood out on the Rays’ classy blue-on-white uniforms. (Some say it’s boring and/or derivative, but I disagree — it’s a color scheme that’ll never steer you wrong in baseball.)

Then I lost the plot a little. The Rays don’t have a jersey sponsor, and their sleeve patch doesn’t contain any script. Their team name is only four letters long. How close does Baz come to having the fewest characters on his uniform of any major league player? Read the rest of this entry »