I think everyone has moments where they wonder just what the hell they’ve done with their lives. I’ve been blessed with the divine spark of human consciousness, and a body to tote those thoughts around in, and what have I accomplished? I had one of those moments recently while I was holding a friend’s baby, trying to make her laugh. What a delightful and important but most of all profound thing, to create a whole other person and cultivate her — from scratch — into a happy adult.

Or the next best thing, creating art. I’ll speak to what I know: music. I’m left in awe of songs that, through dynamic contrast and precision of rhythm and density of countermelody, seem to be carrying that divine spark themselves — the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony, or Typhoon’s “Prosthetic Love.” So much care and emotion went into such composition that it’s hard not to be bowled over by the emotional transference of the artistic process even as you’re astounded by how precisely the pieces have been crafted and how seamlessly they fit together.

Again: What am I doing with my life to show that I value this gift? How am I using this spark to shape the world into a better place? How am I passing this light on to others? This thought burst out and grabbed me recently when I was poking around our site’s pitcher defense leaderboards and noticed something interesting about Josh Fleming. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. By now, you surely know the drill. I credit basketball genius Zach Lowe for creating the format I’m using, make a few jokes about how much baseball I get to watch to write this column, and then give you a preview of what you can read about below. This week’s no exception! I get to watch a ton of baseball, and this week I watched a lot of birds and a lot of bunts. I also watched a lot of the Pirates, just like I do every week. Let’s get right into it.

1. Reversals of Reversals of Fortune

For most of the 21st century, no one would bat an eye if you told them the Cardinals swept the Orioles. The Cards have been good pretty much forever, and the O’s went through a long dry period. But starting last year, things have changed. The Orioles last got swept in early 2022, and they’ve been one of the best teams in baseball since then. The Cardinals fell on tough times after 2022’s Molina/Pujols swan song season. Coming into their series this week, the O’s had the second-best record in the AL, while the Cardinals languished near the bottom of the NL at 20-26.
Read the rest of this entry »

Over the course of his storied career, Andrew McCutchen has stood there and watched ball four go by 1,075 times. I watched something like 750 of those pitches on Thursday, and then I cut them down into supercuts. I hope to God I never to see another ball four. I was watching for something specific. I noticed the other day that McCutchen flips his bat a lot, which caught me off guard. If you’re a Pirates fan, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about, but I suspect people outside Pittsburgh might be startled by it, too. After all, McCutchen is a veteran who tends toward a more traditional playing style. That’s not to say that he plays without any flair or that he doesn’t have a sense of humor (he definitely does), just that he’s on the staid side of things. In fact, in October of 2017, McCutchen tweeted his disapproval of the trend.

The issue is not that McCutchen has necessarily changed his mind. He doesn’t really flip his bat when he hits a home run. He’ll do it on rare occasions, but most of the time, he handles his homers with a quiet cool. He finishes his home run swing one-handed, with the bat held low, and he simply drops the bat head toward the ground and lets go of the handle in a smooth continuation of that move. It’s a classic look, and though it’s hard to imagine that McCutchen doesn’t know he looks cool while he’s doing it, it doesn’t come off as an affectation.

Instead of home runs, McCutchen flips his bat when he earns a walk. I’m not the only person to notice this. A Ke’Bryan Hayes fan account started a Twitter thread of McCutchen’s bat flips back in May of 2023, adding a video each time he did it for the next two weeks. In July, the Pirates posted a compilation video on TikTok with the caption, “Either pitch to Cutch or risk getting bat-flipped on.” If you think about it, for someone who really loves bat flipping, the walk is the perfect time. First of all, just about everyone walks more often than they homer, which means more chances to party. Second, while a walk is good for the batter and bad for the pitcher, it’s not a big enough deal that the pitcher will feel like you’re rubbing their nose in it. Third, nothing is expected of the batter after a walk. There’s no risk of flipping your bat dramatically and then realizing that you should have been running around the bases because the ball isn’t carrying like you thought it would. Read the rest of this entry »

Less than a year after being drafted first overall, Paul Skenes made his first major league start for the Pirates. On Saturday, nearly 35,000 fans packed the stands at PNC Park in Pittsburgh for the occasion, hoping to get the first glimpse of a new era for the long-struggling home team. It was impossible not to draw comparisons to Stephen Strasburg’s debut in 2010, a masterpiece in which he struck out 14 batters, coincidentally against the Pirates. Perhaps no pitching prospect in history has come with the same hype that Strasburg did as he ascended through the minors, but the buzz surrounding Skenes comes close. Let’s see how he began his big league career.

Even those who haven’t read the full scouting report on Skenes know that he throws incredibly hard, and he needed just one pitch to associate himself with triple-digit Trackman readings. While he’s averaged 99 mph during his (mostly abbreviated) minor league starts over the past month, Skenes opened up the game with 101 mph heat and sat at 100 throughout the start. He threw mostly fastballs to leadoff hitter Mike Tauchman, save for a slider that missed outside. After reaching full count, Skenes collected his first strikeout in style.

Prior to Saturday, no starting pitcher in 2024 had thrown a pitch at 101 or higher. Skenes did so six times before his debut was over. While velocity might be the best known part of his game, Skenes has developed a deep arsenal of pitches, the newest of which he put to work against the next batter, Seiya Suzuki.

This splitter-sinker hybrid, or “splinker,” is a pitch with few comparisons; only Jhoan Duran and José Soriano throw any offering remotely similar. It feels impossible to throw in the mid-90s while simultaneously killing enough spin to give the pitch a negative induced vertical break, but Skenes rips these off with ease. He tends to use this pitch as more of a sinker than an offspeed offering (after all, it averages 95 mph), deploying it mostly against right-handed hitters while saving his lesser-used, upper-80s changeup for lefties. Suzuki could only watch the splinker go by. He couldn’t do much more with the next two pitches he saw, either. Let’s play them back to back.

First, Skenes claimed strike two with the harder version of his slider. After seeing something that broke a foot toward him, Suzuki flinched a bit at a that pitch, which ended up solidly in the zone. Well ahead in the count now, Skenes went in for the kill. This sweeping slider was his most-used pitch against righties in his start, featuring 15 inches of gloveside break. Moreover, because Skenes releases the ball so far on the third base side of the mound, it approaches the plate at a more extreme angle and makes it even more difficult to hit. All Suzuki could do was flail at it for strike three.

Skenes finished his first three innings of work without allowing any runs, though he issued two walks and hit a batter. At times, he struggled to find his release, finishing late with the fastball and ending up with a clump of misses below the zone to the gloveside. He also threw a sizable number down the heart of the plate, and Cubs hitters squared up a trio of them. With his slider, he would sometimes release early and cause the pitch to back up over the plate, but the few that he landed on the outside corner, mainly of the sweeper variation, were among his best pitches of the day.

While Skenes certainly has room to grow with his fastball and slider command, he threw his splinker with remarkable accuracy and consistency throughout his start. With the exception of the pitch that hit Nico Hoerner, Skenes’ splinkers lived at the bottom of the zone or right below it; that’s especially impressive considering he’s been throwing that pitch for only a couple months. Spotting it on the edges of the zone makes it so challenging for hitters to decide whether to swing, let alone make contact if they do. The pitch led Skenes’ arsenal with a 55% chase rate, 53% CSW, and seven swinging strikes, including these two to Ian Happ to start the fourth inning.

After dispatching Happ with a fastball, Hoerner stepped up for his second plate appearance. He quickly exacted his revenge for the second-inning plunk, pulling a first-pitch slider left over the middle for a home run that barely cleared the left field fence. Many gyro sliders feature late downward break, but unlike those thrown by the likes of Jeff Hoffman and Dylan Cease, Skenes’ has a few inches of rise compared to a ball thrown without spin. Without the downward bite, batters have an easier time barreling it up when he doesn’t locate it well. That’s what happened with the slider to Hoerner, who easily kept his swing on its plane and hooked the pitch out of the yard because it didn’t dive low and away from him. In his report, Eric Longenhagen explained that Skenes’ low arm slot is a likely cause of this pitch shape, as Skenes tends to get around the side of the ball instead of imparting motion on the vertical axis.

Skenes recovered nicely from the blemish on his line, fanning two more Cubs to put his total at seven through four innings. He had thrown 74 pitches, one shy of his season high in Triple-A. Had his day ended here, I think most would have been satisfied with what they saw – a dominant yet imperfect performance that gave a rosy glimpse into the future. But his start wasn’t over yet.

Much of what I’ve written about here explains why things happened. Skenes overwhelmed hitters with his fastball because he threw it so hard. He had success with his splinker because he located it so well. He gave up a homer with his slider because he hung it up in the zone. But I have no rational explanation for what happened next. Skenes, on a short leash, was pulled quickly after ground balls from Tauchman and Suzuki found just the right holes to end up as hits. Kyle Nicolas entered the game in relief, quickly striking out the next two batters before hitting the third. With two outs and the bases loaded, he proceeded to throw 12 consecutive balls, allowing a trio of runs to score, two of which were charged to Skenes. But even as Nicolas was removed from the game, the inning was far from over. Josh Fleming and Colin Holderman combined to walk in three more runs before the inning’s merciful conclusion, which took nearly three hours thanks to a rain delay.

Skenes, in a rather unfortunate feat, tripled his ERA while sitting on the bench. But he certainly gave a lot to be excited about while on the mound. Despite having just 34 minor league innings under his belt, he is certainly a different pitcher than he was this time last year at LSU. Most notably, he has expanded and diversified his arsenal considerably, and while some wondered whether he would have a viable third pitch in the majors, he showed off a six-pitch arsenal in his first career game.

We still talk about Strasburg’s debut 14 years after it happened, not only because of the incredible results but because of what he meant for the future of the Nationals franchise. Soon after, Strasburg was joined by other homegrown talents like Bryce Harper and Anthony Rendon, and much later, Juan Soto. Washington won a World Series after a decade of contention, and Strasburg was the series MVP. What Skenes brings to Pittsburgh is no different, with his call-up carrying the optimism that he would be one of a new wave of young talents who’d come to reverse the fortunes of a team and city. Skenes didn’t have the legendary debut performance that Strasburg did, but he certainly pitched well enough to keep that hope alive.

The best pitching prospect in baseball, 21-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates righty Paul Skenes, is slated to be called up tomorrow to make his major league debut against the Cubs. The 6-foot-6 leviathan has a 0.99 ERA in seven Triple-A starts this year and has struck out 42.9% of the hitters he’s faced across 27 1/3 innings. He’s a ready-made front-of-the-rotation starter, a Herculean physical presence with even bigger stuff, and perhaps the most important part of an increasingly promising situation in Pittsburgh, a city with three baseball playoff appearances over the last 30 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

After an interminable wait for Pittsburgh fans (read: under 10 months), the Pirates on Wednesday finally announced they were calling up top pitching prospect Paul Skenes to make his major league debut on Saturday at PNC Park against the Cubs.

The 2023 first overall draft pick rocketed to the majors after just 12 minor league starts and a mere 34 innings. After the organization limited him to only five starts and 6 2/3 innings across three minor league levels last year, Skenes began this season at Triple-A Indianapolis and absolutely dominated hitters. Over seven starts (27 1/3 innings), the 6’6” righty posted a 0.99 ERA and struck out 42.9% of the batters he faced while walking just 7.6% of them.

In many ways, how Skenes pitches on Saturday is the least of the Pirates’ concerns when it comes to their prized prospect. The real puzzle will be managing his workload. Skenes has never thrown more than 75 pitches in a professional game, and his final Triple-A start was his first on just four days of rest, having been eased into a traditional rotation schedule after pitching just once a week at Louisiana State.

Skenes’ situation somewhat parallels that of Pittsburgh’s other stud rookie starter Jared Jones, who’s pitched on regular rest just once this year — a start wherein he was limited to 59 pitches (50 strikes!) in five scoreless innings. We should expect the Pirates to be just as or even more cautious with Skenes when it comes to load management.

The arrival of Skenes also means that Pittsburgh will need veterans Mitch Keller and Martín Pérez to handle more innings when they start to ease the burden on the bullpen, which will almost definitely be covering at least three innings when Skenes pitches. Determining how to piece everything together will be another logistical challenge for the Pirates.

All that said, let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. After all, those are problems for the Pirates to figure out, not us. Instead, our job is simple: sit back and enjoy the debut.

Chris Sale Looks Vintage Against His Old Team

Braves lefty Chris Sale got to catch up with his old Red Sox teammates on Wednesday, though it wasn’t exactly a pleasant day for Boston. Sale turned in his best start yet since he was traded to Atlanta over the winter, with six scoreless innings and 10 strikeouts.

The seven-time All-Star topped out at 97.2 mph and averaged 94.8 mph on his fastball, up 0.6 mph from his average in his other six starts. His slider was particularly filthy, with the Red Sox offering at 18 of them with 13 whiffs.

Perhaps it’s still too soon to declare Sale all the way, but he is pitching better than he has in years. Over his last four starts, he is 4-0 with a 1.80 ERA and 32 strikeouts across 25 innings; twice in that span he’s completed seven innings. Overall on the season, Sale is 5-1 (42 2/3 innings) with a 2.95 ERA, a 2.64 FIP, a 30.6% strikeout rate, a 4.7% walk rate, and 1.2 WAR. Yeah, that’ll play.

The Yankees’ Big Boys Are Finally Bopping

Although they lost to the Astros on Thursday, 4-3, to snap a five-game winning streak, the Yankees still got an absolutely massive home run from Aaron Judge, emblematic of why they’ve been playing so well over the past week: their offense has finally come alive.

The most encouraging part of Wednesday’s win — the last of the streak — was that Judge, Juan Soto, and Giancarlo Stanton all homered in the same game for the first time since New York traded for Soto in the offseason. Soto has been better than ever this year, but Judge and Stanton struggled for the first month of the season. Over the last week, though, the two sluggers have started mashing again. Judge hit .500/.591/1.096 (346 wRC+, and no, there are no typos there!) during the five-game winning streak, clubbing two homers and four doubles. Meanwhile, Stanton clobbered two massive home runs in the series against Houston. The first one, off Justin Verlander on Tuesday, was clocked at 118.8 mph off the bat; the next night he one-upped himself, with a 119.9 mph missile — the hardest hit ball in the majors this season.

The one core Yankees hitter who still hasn’t turned things around is Gleyber Torres. He hit .176/.300/.176 with a 54 wRC+ during the streak, before going 1-for-3 with a walk in Thursday’s game. On the season, his final one before free agency, Torres is batting .215/.301/.264 with just one home run, after he hit 25 homers last season, and his 71 wRC+ is a far cry from last year’s mark of 123.

Craig Kimbrel’s Honeymoon Period Is Over

Nobody can really replace Félix Bautista, but Craig Kimbrel was doing his darnedest when Ben Clemens checked in on him on April 16. I won’t call this a Clemens Curse (patent pending) because Kimbrel had three more scoreless appearances after the article was published, but he’s come crashing down since then.

Perhaps owing in part to a back injury that forced him to leave the game on April 28 and then sit out until May 3, Kimbrel has been scored upon in five of his last six appearances. In that time, he’s walked eight of the 23 batters he’s faced, and he’s also given up two homers. When I’ve watched him, he’s falling into the mechanical failure that’s ailed him every year since 2019: He’s yanking his fastball off to the side instead of getting under it and letting it ride at the top of the zone, which he did so successfully in his first 10 outings of the season.

Baltimore needs Kimbrel to figure it out, and figure it out quickly. For whatever reason, he is not someone who’s had much success doing anything but closing, so rearranging the bullpen could make the volatile righty functionally useless. As the O’s eye their second straight division title, they’ll be monitoring the bullpen closely and surely won’t be afraid to upgrade it come July.

Roughly a month’s worth of the 2024 season is now in the books. The American League East looks great. The Brewers and Guardians are standing up for the Central divisions. The White Sox can only beat the Rays, and the Astros somehow can’t beat anyone. Enough time has passed that I feel confident saying all of those things. On the other hand, it still feels too early to be certain about which players are over- or under-performing. But that doesn’t mean our opinions can’t change a bit. There’s enough data to make some educated guesses, so let’s put on our speculation caps. Here are four players — two hitters and two pitchers — who have risen in my estimation over the last few weeks. Tomorrow, I’ll follow up with four players who have gone the other way.

Elly De La Cruz, SS, Cincinnati Reds
I already thought De La Cruz had the potential to be one of the best players in baseball before the season started. Quite reasonably, though, I was worried about the downsides. A guy who struck out 33.7% of the time last year is always risky, and that’s particularly true given how he did it. He swung more often than league average at balls and less often than average at strikes; he also made less contact than average. You can have one of those three things be true, or maybe even two of three if you make up for it elsewhere, but three of three? Yikes. Read the rest of this entry »

When I interviewed Marco Gonzales in spring training 2018, the now 32-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates southpaw was with the Seattle Mariners and about to establish himself as a solid big league starter. We discussed his return to health — he’d undergone Tommy John surgery two years prior — as well as his repertoire. We also touched on his approach on the mound, a subject we’d earlier addressed in a 2014 conversation when he was a St. Louis Cardinals pitching prospect. At the time, Gonzales was your prototypical crafty lefty, and he’s remained just that throughout his career.

The former Mariners’ player rep for the MLBPA has a lot of opinions on the game he’s played professionally since 2013, when the Cardinals drafted him 19th overall out of Gonzaga University. Not surprisingly, the increase in arm injuries is of particular interest, as is the pitch clock.

Gonzales, who has since landed on the 15-day injured list with a left forearm muscle strain, sat down to discuss those topics at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park earlier this month.

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David Laurila: We talked back in 2018 when you were with the Mariners. Are you the same pitcher now that you were then?

Marco Gonzales: “No. You’re never the same pitcher you were, even if you think you are. You might have a similar identity — you always have an identity as a player — but you change physically, emotionally, mentally. Your maturity on the mound changes. Your thought process changes, and in turn, that changes what you can do on the mound.

“The pitches I throw haven’t added or subtracted, but how I think about them, how they move, and how I’ve used them has changed a lot. Year to year, week to week, there are changes. That’s part of baseball. For whatever reason, sometimes a pitch doesn’t come out the same way it usually does and you have to use it differently, or maybe manipulate it more.” Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Jones had made just one big-league appearance when my colleague Ben Clemens wrote on April 2 that we should all get irresponsibly excited about the rookie right-hander. Little has happened to change that opinion. When Jones takes the mound this afternoon for the sixth time in a Pittsburgh Pirates uniform, he will do so with a 2.79 ERA, a 3.19 FIP, and 34.8% strikeout rate. Moreover, his fastball has averaged 97.3 mph, occasionally reaching triple digits.

Following his second start, I caught up to the flame-throwing 22-year-old at PNC Park to get a first-hand account of his arsenal and development path. Among the things I learned is that he was especially raw when the Pirates drafted him 44th-overall in 2020 out of La Mirada (CA) High School.

“I didn’t know how to pitch when I signed,” Jones told me. “I just threw fastballs, and throwing hard in high school is a lot different than throwing hard in pro ball. Guys in pro ball can hit the hard fastball, especially if you don’t have anything else.”

Jones did have secondary pitches prior to getting drafted, originally a curveball “that wasn’t very good,” and then a slider that went from “just okay” as a young prep to “pretty good” by the time he’d graduated. Even so, he was admittedly more thrower than pitcher — someone whose elite arm strength allowed him to “just throw fastballs by guys.”

Velocity came naturally to the now-6-foot-1, 180-pound righty. It also came early. “I was in my sophomore year of high school when I hit 97 [mph] for the first time,” explained Jones. “I’ve been a hard thrower for a long time.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things, my weekly column that highlights strange and often delightful happenings from the last week of baseball. My own baseball watching was a bit stilted this week, for the best possible reason. I went to three Giants games, an exciting event made possible by cheap ticket deals, a friend’s birthday, and some last minute cancellations of non-baseball weekend plans. Two of those games were pretty awful; Blake Snell got shelled Friday night, and then Blake Snell’s replacements got shelled Wednesday afternoon.

The good news is, there’s still *so much* good baseball going on all the time that I had plenty in the tank to write about. You don’t have to look too far to find things to like about baseball these days. We’ve got new holidays, old AL Central rivals, stadium gimmicks, and pure unadulterated velocity. As always, this column is inspired by Zach Lowe’s basketball column, Ten Things (Zach inspired Will Leitch to start his own Five Things column over at MLB.com, in fact). Read the rest of this entry »