Jazz Chisholm and Jean Segura caught my attention while they were playing catch prior to a recent Miami Marlins road game at Fenway Park. Unlike their teammates, the duo was trading tosses underhand, windmilling their throws like fastpitch softball pitchers. Moreover, they looked good doing it. Their motions were smooth and easy, their deliveries firm and accurate. Having never seen professional baseball players do this, I was very much intrigued.

Standing nearby was Jennifer Brann. Now an analyst with the Marlins, Brann had excelled on the mound at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland prior to being hired by Miami two years ago. I asked her if she had seen them do so previously.

“I’ve seen Segura mess around a little bit, but I’d never seen Jazz pitch underhand like that,” Brann told me. “It was cool to watch. They knew what they were doing, especially Segura; he threw a rise ball and a changeup. But Jazz looked pretty good, too.”

The following day, I made it a point to approach both players in the clubhouse to find out if they had any softball experience. It turns out that they did.

“My grandma was a professional [fastpitch] softball player,” said Chisholm, who grew up in Nassau. “She played for the Bahamas National Team. That’s what really got me into baseball — I learned a lot of my baseball skills from softball — and she played until she was 60, too. She was just superhuman.”

Chisholm played fastpitch growing up, in part because the sport is played in Bahamian high schools, while baseball is not. (He did play Little League baseball.). Having attended a K-12, he began competing against upperclassmen as a sixth grader, both as a shortstop and a pitcher. Chisholm subsequently moved to the United States at age 12, thus ending his competitive softball days, Read the rest of this entry »

It’s tough not to pick on the Cardinals these days. Last season, they won 93 games and took the NL Central title with a team that combined strong offense, exceptional defense — long a St. Louis tradition — and good pitching; it was their 15th straight season above .500 and fourth in a row reaching the postseason. This year, however, they’ve spent time as the NL’s worst team, and while they’re now merely the third-worst, at 33-46 they’re going nowhere and impressing nobody.

A big and perhaps undersold part of the Cardinals’ problem is the collapse of their vaunted defense, which has often featured five players — first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, third baseman Nolan Arenado, outfielder Tyler O’Neill, and multiposition regulars Brendan Donovan and Tommy Edman — who won Gold Gloves in either 2021 or ’22. Manager Oli Marmol has been tasked with shoehorning hot-hitting youngsters Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker into the lineup at comparatively unfamiliar positions, as both are blocked by Arenado at third base, their primary position in the minors, and between injuries and offensive issues, lately Edman has been patrolling center field instead of the middle infield. Backing a pitching staff that doesn’t miss enough bats — their 21.1% strikeout rate is the majors’ fifth-worst — it’s all collapsed into an unhappy mess.

Given that context it’s less than surprising that the Cardinals show up as one of the majors’ worst defensive teams using the methodology I rolled out on Thursday to illustrate the best. For that exercise, I sought to find a consensus from among several major defensive metrics, namely Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, and Statcast’s Runs Prevented (which I’m calling Runs Above Average because their site and ours use the abbreviation RAA) as well as our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as on our stat pages), and Statcast’s catching metrics for framing, blocking, and throwing (which I’ve combine into the abbreviation CRAA). Each of those has different methodologies, and they produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom that owe something to what they don’t measure as well as how much regression is built into their systems. Pitchers don’t have UZRs or RAAs, for example, and the catching numbers are set off in their own categories rather than included in UZR and RAA. I’ve accounted for the varying spreads, which range from 86 runs in DRS (from 42 to -44) to 25.6 runs in FRM (from 13.8 to -11.8), by using standard deviation scores (z-scores), which measure how many standard deviations each team is from the league average in each category. Read the rest of this entry »

When I last checked in on Nick Castellanos, he was not in a good place. Though he was playing in a World Series with the Phillies, the team with which he signed a five-year, $100 million contract after the lockout ended in March, his season had been a disappointment, and aside from the occasional big hit here and highlight-reel catch there — the latter class of which had seemed particularly unlikely given his defensive metrics — his postseason had been bleak as well, right down to his making the final out in Games 5 and 6 of the World Series as the Phillies fell to the Astros. Fortunately, after turning the page on 2022, Castellanos has reemerged as one of the Phillies’ most productive hitters.

When the Phillies signed Castellanos, he was coming off the best season of his career, having made his first All-Star team while setting across-the-board career highs with a .309/.362/.576 line, 34 homers, a 139 wRC+, and 3.6 WAR. He had opted out following the second year of a four-year, $64 million deal with the Reds, but despite notable interest from multiple teams including the Padres and Marlins, he didn’t secure a deal before the lockout began in early December. Once he did finally agree to terms with the Phillies, eight days after the lockout ended, he felt as though he had to rush into the season, adjusting to a new team, new city, new fanbase, and new media… and with a new child on the way. Soon, Bryce Harper’s elbow injury forced Castellanos to play right field on a regular basis instead of DHing a significant amount of the time as initially planned.

Things did not go well. Castellanos matched his career-worst 94 wRC+ via a .263/.305/.389 line, set career lows with a 5.2% walk rate and 6.6% barrel rate, and homered just 13 times. He was dreadful afield (-10 RAA, -8 DRS, -7.3 UZR) as well, and while his -0.8 WAR didn’t make him the majors’ least valuable position player, none of the 31 others with WARs that low or lower — including future Hall of Famers Miguel Cabrera and Joey Votto — had just set sail on a $100 million contract. Adding further insult, in the postseason, Castellanos hit .185/.232/.246 in 69 plate appearances. Not even a few memorable diving catches could offset that. Read the rest of this entry »

I was contemplating Kyle Schwarber recently, as one does, and was amused by the notion that a player could post a batting average in the .170s and still be a valuable hitter overall. We’ve known that batting average isn’t everything since… well, I was going to say the nascent moments of the sabermetric revolution in the late 20th century, but it’s been way longer than that.

There’s a thread in popular history that casts the latter-day Brooklyn Dodgers as a team of romantic literary figures. Between the righteousness of Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese, the tragic brevity of the careers of Pete Reiser and later Roy Campanella, and the juxtaposition with the shiny, all-conquering Yankees, there’s a sense that the Dodgers succeeded through some combination of moral rectitude and poetic necessity.

In truth, they won because they drew an absolute crapload of walks. In 1947, Reese and Eddie Stanky both drew over 100 walks, and the Dodgers drew 30% more walks than the NL average. The 2002 A’s beat the AL average by 16%, so the team that made walking cool looks like a bunch of hackers next to the 1947 Dodgers.

If Branch Rickey knew the limitations of batting average, what took the rest of us so long? Read the rest of this entry »

It may not have ended the slump he’s fallen into since mid-April, but Trea Turner picked a very good time to snap out of a 2-for-20 skid that began last weekend. On Wednesday afternoon against the Diamondbacks, the Phillies were trailing, 5–3, and down to their final out, in danger not only of being swept in the three-game series but also of losing for the eighth time in 10 games. Then José Ruiz hung a curveball that Turner didn’t miss, pounding it for a game-tying two-run homer. The Phillies won in 10 innings, but whether this the start of a turnaround for Turner — who, like Manny Machado, is off to a rough start on his new $300 million contract — remains to be seen.

The homer was Turner’s fifth of the year and his first since May 6. Even with it and Thursday’s subsequent 0-for-5 against the Braves, his offensive numbers look a whole lot more like what the Phillies got from their shortstops (Didi Gregorius, Bryson Stott, Johan Camargo, and Edmundo Sosa) last year than what Turner did with the Dodgers:

Turner has been frank about his struggles. After Monday’s loss to the Diamondbacks, he told reporters, “I’m honest with myself, I’ve sucked.” While that may be overstating the case a bit, he hasn’t offered anything close to his superstar-level play of the past two seasons, and only through respectable (if small sample) defensive metrics at shortstop (1.6 UZR, 1 OAA, -2 DRS) is he above replacement level. Using our UZR/OAA inputs, his 0.6 WAR prorates to 2.0 over a full season — more or less average — but using DRS, his 0.3 bWAR prorates to just 1.0 WAR, or decidedly below average. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper is back. One hundred and sixty days ago — less than six months! — he had Tommy John surgery, repairing a torn elbow ligament he suffered last April. NBC Sports Philadelphia, who you’d think would have a good read on the situation, published an optimistic headline with an aggressive timetable: Harper could be swinging by mid-May and playing in major league games by the All Star break. It’s May 3 today.

Suffice to say that 160 days isn’t a lot of time. I have perishable goods in my fridge that might have been there when Harper went under the knife. As Jay Cuda noted, the White Sox hadn’t won two straight games all season (until last night) since Harper got a shiny (well, probably not literally) new ligament to replace his old one. That’s not how these timetables work.

Tommy John surgery makes players disappear for a while. They come back to a team that looks similar but not identical to the one they left behind. That’s technically true of the Phillies — Trea Turner is reprising his old role as Harper’s sidekick, Taijuan Walker is new in town, and the bullpen has turned over — but it still feels more or less like the team Harper left. A Philadelphia sports fan who was busy on Opening Day could tune into a Phillies game after the 76ers’ season is over and get confused. “Hey, wasn’t Harper getting TJ? What’s he doing in the lineup?” Read the rest of this entry »

If Matt Strahm wasn’t on your radar before this season, I can’t blame you. The left-hander put up increasingly worse results during his four years with the Padres, culminating in a 2021 season lost to injury. He bounced back the following year as a solid middle reliever for the Red Sox, but even so, he was hardly a free agent to watch this winter. He only made headlines because the two-year, $15 million deal he signed with the Phillies was more lucrative than anyone expected for him; an unnamed executive claimed that the contract “destroyed the market” for left-handed relievers.

A few years back, though, Strahm was a top-100 prospect and the most promising name in the Royals’ system. He earned his first feature here at FanGraphs in August 2016 in a piece that called him “a new relief weapon.” He was marvelous that season, posting a 1.23 ERA and 2.06 FIP across 22 innings for the reigning world champs. A year later, he earned another look from the FanGraphs staff, this time as the headlining return in the Trevor Cahill trade between the Royals and Padres. The summer after that, Strahm was once again the star of a FanGraphs story, this one about his work as an opener. Travis Sawchik looked at Strahm’s success and wondered if “Hader Lite” was an appropriate nickname. That’s high praise, indeed.

All this to say, Strahm isn’t just some guy, no matter how much his new nickname (Pastrami, i.e. “Pa-strahm-i”) makes him sound like the manager of an old-time Brooklyn deli or a kid from The Little Rascals. At the same time, he hasn’t been particularly relevant for several years, and as he entered his age-31 season, you might have thought the former top prospect was done making headlines.

Six games into his Phillies career, Strahm demands attention. He ranks 10th among National League pitchers (min. 20 IP) with a 2.31 ERA and among the top 10 in all the major ERA estimators: FIP, xFIP, xERA, and SIERA. The only other NL pitchers who can say the same are Spencer Strider, Zac Gallen, and Max Fried — arguably the early-season frontrunners for the National League Cy Young. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryson Stott began this season with a 17-game hit streak, marking a new Phillies franchise record to start a season. Eleven of those games were multi-hit efforts, culminating in 29 hits across his first 81 plate appearances. He’s added a handful of hits since his streak ended on April 18 and his overall line now stands at .339/.368/.459, good for a 126 wRC+. His early season success has been one of the few bright spots for the Phillies as they deal with a a variety of woes.

While Stott’s hot start is being at least partially driven by some fortunate results when he has put the ball in play — his BABIP currently stands at .417 — his success is also the culmination of a number of adjustments he’s made since making the Opening Day roster as a rookie last year. His initial exposure to the big leagues didn’t go very well. He collected just four hits across 31 plate appearances and was demoted to Triple-A on April 20 after playing in just nine games in the majors. Upon getting recalled on May 8, he continued to struggle until making an adjustment to his swing. Read the rest of this entry »

I might as well throw out all the usual caveats up front. It’s April. Sample sizes are still miniscule. The ball might be different. The rules are definitely different. I could go on. All of that is true, but it doesn’t change this essential fact: José Alvarado is on an otherworldly tear right now, putting up best-reliever-in-baseball numbers for a Phillies team that desperately needs the help.

Let’s start with the numbers, because they’re overwhelming. Alvarado has faced 29 batters so far this year. He’s struck out 18 of them. That’s a 62.1% strikeout rate, or as I like to call it, a made up strikeout rate. You can’t conceive of a 62.1% strikeout rate. It’s nonsense math. Nearly two-thirds of the batters who have come to the plate against Alvarado this year have walked back to the dugout with nothing to show for it but a sad face.

As you can no doubt imagine, you need to miss a lot of bats to put up strikeout numbers like that. Alvarado has posted a 20.8% swinging strike rate so far this season, seventh-best among relievers even in the small sample of April, when outliers rule. That’s a career high for him, obviously, but not by as much as you’d think: He posted a delectable 16.7% mark for all of 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

It came as a big blow to the Phillies when Rhys Hoskins, a career 125 wRC+ hitter and the de facto team captain, went down with a season-ending injury. But if there were a silver lining to the circumstances, it was that Darick Hall would get the opportunity to prove himself with a more regular role in the starting lineup. Even Hoskins agreed; the day after he tore his ACL, he told Hall he was genuinely happy for him. The 27-year-old non-prospect forced his way to the majors last summer after hitting 20 home runs in 72 games at Triple-A, then crushed another nine at the big league level, finishing with a .522 slugging percentage and 120 wRC+. This year, he had a shot to show he could keep slugging over a full season. If he could, the Phillies would be much better equipped to handle the loss of Hoskins.

Unfortunately, Hall’s big chance was short-lived. On Wednesday afternoon, the winds began to change and the clouds turned dark. The silver lining became harder to see amid the storm. While trying to stretch a single into a double, Hall landed awkwardly at second base, jamming his right thumb into the side of the bag. He stayed in the game for another inning but eventually came out when he realized something was amiss. A righty-throwing first baseman doesn’t use his right thumb in the field all that often, but five out of five doctors recommend hitting the showers when you tear a ligament.

Indeed, a torn ligament was the official diagnosis, and it will require surgery to fix. The Phillies have yet to offer an official timeline for Hall’s return, but it could be several months before he steps back on the field. Mike Trout needed surgery to repair a torn ligament in his thumb in 2017 and missed about six weeks. Kevin Kiermaier had a similar procedure the following year and missed nine. Travis d’Arnaud lost more than three months after such a surgery in 2021. Clearly, recovery time depends on the individual player and the extent of the injury; we should hear more about Hall in the coming weeks. Read the rest of this entry »