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.
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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.
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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 »

I made a baseball card. Don’t worry about my grade-school-level graphic design skills. It’s not like I’m trying to sell this template to Topps. I just figured that if I was going to use the “guess the mystery player” lead-in, I might as well try to make it a little more visually appealing. So, I made a baseball card. And I’d like you to try to guess the player to whom it belongs:

It’s not Dansby Swanson. It’s not Marcus Semien in an even-numbered year. But those are probably the two best guesses you could make without additional context (such as the headline, but humor me here), which is precisely why I wanted to play this game – and write this article. Here’s how 2024 Swanson and 2024 Semien stack up to my mystery player. Keep in mind, the time frame for the mystery player’s stats is another part of the mystery:

Swanson is a two-time All-Star and a two-time Gold Glove winner. He made $26 million last season. Semien is a three-time All-Star, a two-time Silver Slugger, and a Gold Glove winner. He also made $26 million last season. This mystery player must be pretty good, huh? Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, most teams hold some sort of team bonding, social event during spring training. The specifics of the event vary from team to team, but frequently they include renting out a movie theater and showing some cloying, inspirational movie like The Blind Side, Cool Runnings, Rudy, or better yet, a documentary like Free Solo. Regardless of the team’s outlook on the year, the goal is to get the players amped up for the season and ready to compete on the field, even if the competition in question is for fourth place in the division.

But what if instead of taking the clichéd route, teams actually tried to select a movie that fits their current vibe, one that’s thematically on brand with the state of their franchise? They won’t do this because spring training is a time for hope merchants to peddle their wares, even if they’re selling snake oil to sub-.500 teams. But spring training is over now, the regular season has begun, and it’s time to get real. So here are my movie selections for each National League team, sorted by release date from oldest to newest.

If you’re interested in which movies I selected for the American League teams, you can find those picks here. Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t expect to be writing about Taijuan Walker this close to Opening Day. I doubt that either he or the Phillies would have expected him to be in the rotation to start the season. Last year, Walker pitched his way out of the best rotation in the National League; three Phillies starters received Cy Young votes, and a fourth, Ranger Suárez, made the All-Star team. Just before Christmas, Philadelphia made an opportunistic trade for Jesús Luzardo and plans to promote Andrew Painter (the team’s top pitching prospect since, I dunno, Gavin Floyd?) around midseason.

Even with two years and $36 million left on his contract, the phrase “surplus to requirements” was invented for people in Walker’s position.

But when the end of March actually arrived, Suárez’s back was giving him problems. He’ll start the season on the IL, and back into the rotation goes Walker. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackson Jobe supplied a quality quote when asked about last weekend’s three-straight-heaters punchout of Toronto’s Vladimir Guerrero Jr..””I’m done with trying to dot a gnat’s ass,” he told a small group of reporters. “It’s, ‘Here’s my stuff. If you hit it, good. Odds are, probably not.”

Jobe is a student of the art and science of his craft, so I proceeded to ask him where he feels he is in terms development. Has the 22-year-old Detroit Tigers right-hander essentially settled into his mound identity, or is there still work left to be done in the pitch lab?

“I’d like to think I got it pretty much all fine-tuned,” replied Jobe, who is No. 9 on our Top 100. “Now it’s just learning the best way to use it, the best way to sequence it. I put my stuff up against anyone in the league on paper, to be completely honest. It’s just a matter of learning how to harness it.”

Asked about any recent changes to his pitch metrics, the rookie of the year candidate cited his slider. Read the rest of this entry »