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Just two weeks after Jac Caglianone fell to them in the draft, the Kansas City Royals have acquired another beefy two-way college player: Michael Lorenzen. After spending the first seven seasons of his major league career with the Cincinnati Reds, the former Cal State Fullerton star is now on his fifth team in the past 24 months. And for the second time in as many seasons, he’s parlayed a strong first half into a midseason trade to a contender. In return, the Rangers receive Walter Pennington, a 26-year-old lefty reliever who made his MLB debut earlier this month.

The Rangers signed Lorenzen at the very end of spring training to a one-year, $4.5 million contract, intending to use him to plug one of the various holes in the rotation left by injuries to Tyler Mahle, Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, but you get the idea. Lorenzen wanted to start, and the defending World Series champions had a need.

And for a while, it looked like the steal of the offseason. In contrast to other late signees like Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery, Lorenzen didn’t seem adversely affected by his short ramp-up. He debuted on April 15 and threw 79 pitches over five scoreless innings. Lorenzen followed that up by finishing six innings over his next eight starts, all while holding opponents to a .204/.296/.343 batting line. At the end of that run, Lorenzen’s season ERA was below 3.00.

Though if you want a microcosm for how the Rangers’ season has gone, Texas rewarded Lorenzen’s outstanding first two months with insultingly meager run support: enough to go just 3-6 in those nine starts.

Which is how we got to a point where the Rangers are selling to Kansas City. It’s pretty common historically for these two teams to exchange players; in fact, it was just a year ago tomorrow that Texas acquired Aroldis Chapman from the Royals for a package including pitching prospect Cole Ragans. It worked out for both sides: The Rangers won a championship, and Kansas City was able to magically turn Ragans into a no. 1 starter overnight.

It’s less common for Texas to be in a position to sell to Kansas City. The Royals are currently in possession of the last AL Wild Card spot, and according to our Playoff Odds, they’re a little less than even money to hang onto it. The Rangers, at 51-55, aren’t out of hope yet, but they’re taking on water. Well, they’ve already taken on water and the ship could capsize any day now. The Royals haven’t been good while the Rangers were bad since 2014, which was a one-off anomaly in a highly competitive decade for Texas. Before that, you have to go back to the 1980s.

With all that said, why are the Rangers trading off one of their early-season successes for a 26-year-old rookie who was undrafted out of (checks notes) the Colorado School of Mines?

Well, as good as the first two months of the season were to Lorenzen, the last two months were less so. Since June 7, his ERA is 4.79 and his FIP is 6.19, and he’s allowed 10 home runs in just 47 innings. Over the past 30 days, his ERA is 6.20. His past two appearances were the apotheosis of a pitcher on his way out: On Saturday, Lorenzen threw 40 pitches and allowed four runs but failed to get out of the first inning. A day later, the Rangers brought him back for a four-inning relief appearance totaling 55 more pitches.

Some regression was always going to happen. Lorenzen has never been a big strikeout guy, and this season he’s increased his walk rate by more than half. Out of 80 pitchers with at least 100 innings this season, Lorenzen is dead last in K-BB%. All of this while allowing a higher-than-average HR/9 rate.

Some internet weirdos think that the metrics we put out here at FanGraphs have their own thoughts and emotions, so as to be vindictive against certain players or teams. Of course that’s not the case — something like WAR or FIP is just an equation. It does not love or hate. But if FIP did have a mind of its own, self-awareness, or even a soul, it would look at Lorenzen’s numbers from this season, hold its nose and go, “Oooooh, stinky!”

So the other shoe — in Lorenzen’s case, that shoe is an extremely cool custom Vans cleat — was always going to drop. And it’s happening just as the Rangers’ need for Lorenzen is disappearing. Scherzer is back already, and deGrom, Mahle, and Cody Bradford are close behind. Lorenzen was going to be out of the rotation pretty soon no matter what, so now he has a chance to make another team’s rotation.

Lorenzen’s contract calls for $2.5 million in workload bonuses, and I was curious how many of those markers he’s hit. He gets $200,000 reaching 60 innings pitched, and another $200,000 for every 10 innings from 60 to 100. Throwing 40-plus pitches on consecutive days might be the kind of thing you’d expect from, well, Cal State Fullerton a generation ago, but that last outing also got Lorenzen over 100 innings before the trade. So that’s $1 million in the bag so far, with the following bonuses still on the board: $300,000 for 120 innings, $350,000 for 140 innings, $400,000 for 160 innings, and $450,000 for 180 innings.

Unless Lorenzen gets hurt, 120 innings feels like a lock. But there are only 10 or 11 trips through the rotation left in the regular season; unless Lorenzen does a 2008 CC Sabathia impression, 180 innings isn’t going to happen, and even 160 innings feels unlikely.

For the second time in as many years, the team Lorenzen is joining at the deadline counts its rotation as its greatest strength, and there’s not an obvious place for the 32-year-old to slot in. Ragans and Seth Lugo are All-Stars, Brady Singer and Michael Wacha have been excellent so far this year, and even no. 5 starter Alec Marsh has had better results and peripherals than Lorenzen.

I would imagine that Lorenzen is going to serve as a middle reliever and swingman. The Royals not only need to make the playoffs, they need to make sure not to wear out their rotation along the way. This is not a rotation that’s used to making 30 starts in the regular season, then five more in October.

Wacha and Lugo have both pitched in the postseason, but collectively, this rotation’s last MLB playoff start came in 2015, when Wacha was 23 years old and two seasons removed from winning NLCS MVP. Lugo is going to pass his major league career high in innings the next time he takes the mound. Ragans has already thrown more innings this year than he has in any professional season. It doesn’t sound like the worst idea in the world to toss in a guy who can piggyback or serve as a no. 6 starter.

So what of Pennington? The other half of this trade has two-thirds of an inning of career big league experience and a sinker that sits in the low 90s — for a reliever, even a lefty, that’s fringy. But Pennington also has above-average feel for a breaking ball, which has allowed him to put up eye-popping numbers in the high minors: a 32.9% strikeout rate with a .179 opponent batting average and a 2.26 ERA in 59 2/3 Triple-A appearances.

A finesse-and-soft-stuff lefty is obviously going to fare well against Triple-A opposition and have questions over whether he can sneak that breaker past big leaguers with any consistency. For that reason, he came in at no. 36 on Travis Ice’s Royals prospect list a few weeks ago. It’s a token return for a pitcher who was as hot as Lorenzen was two months ago, but a non-trivial return for someone who was trending toward getting DFA’d. Even if the Rangers right the ship and make a surprising run for the playoffs, I’d argue that a dedicated lefty reliever, even a low-leverage one, is more valuable to the Rangers right now than Lorenzen. Particularly as any such run would require Mahle and deGrom returning to the rotation and pitching well.

I usually don’t care even a little about team control for relief pitchers in a trade — especially if that reliever isn’t, like, Devin Williams or Mason Miller. But it’s also worth mentioning that Kirby Yates and José Leclerc are going to be free agents next year, and David Robertson could join them on the open market if his $7 million mutual option doesn’t get exercised. (Mutual options tend to have a narrow window for both sides to agree.) Also, next year Yates is going to be 38 and Robertson will be 40. So if nothing else, Pennington gives the Rangers useful depth.

The Rangers get a prospect, the Royals get some depth, and Lorenzen improves his chance of playing into October. It might not be the blockbuster everyone was waiting for, but trades like this keep the wheels moving.

I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it.
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At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contenders. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the third full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.0 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, four are in the middle ground between 0.0 and 1.0, eight are between 1.0 and 2.0, and three are above 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .245/.321/.421 for a 109 wRC+; that last figure is up three points from last year, and seven points from the last time I did this list, via a slash line that’s virtually identical (the majors’ slugging percentage as a whole has dropped 17 points from last season).

This year, we’re seeing a greater number of teams invest more playing time in a single DH. Whereas each of the past two seasons saw three players reach the 500 plate appearance threshold as DHs, this year we’re on pace for five; similarly, 11 player are on pace to reach 400 PA as DHs, compared to eight last year. That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances.

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Today the Killers list turns the corner — or rather turns to the teams receiving less-than-acceptable production in the outfield corners. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I’ve batched the two corners together into one supersized roundup because three of the seven teams below the WAR cutoff for left field also make the list for right field, and because there’s plenty of crossover in play with regards to personnel. The capsules are listed in order of their left field rankings first, while noting those three crossover teams with an asterisk. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the July 30 deadline, but these are teams to keep an eye on. All statistics are through July 14.

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Today, we have a two-fer of Killers lists covering a couple of key defensive positions, specifically the hot corner and behind the plate. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. That may suggest that some of these teams will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because their performance at that spot thus far is worth a look.

Cubs

Following the free agent departure of Willson Contreras, last year the catching corps of Yan Gomes, Tucker Barnhart, and rookie Miguel Amaya ranked 21st in WAR. Heading into this season, it made at least some sense on paper to have the 25-year-old Amaya — a former Top 100 prospect who lost significant development time to the pandemic and November 2021 Tommy John surgery — get more playing time while moving the 37-year-old Gomes, whose framing metrics had declined, into a backup role. Unfortunately, both have been terrible. Amaya has hit just .201/.266/.288 (59 wRC+) with average-ish defense (good blocking, poor throwing) en route to -0.1 WAR. Gomes was even worse both at the plate (.154/.179/.242, 15 wRC+) and behind it (-5 DRS, -4 FRV, -3.9 FRM) before getting released on June 21, replaced by Tomás Nido, who had just been released by the Mets. Nido has hit .202/.229/.331 (57 wRC+) overall but is just 4-for-41 as a Cub. Defensively, he’s got a mixed bag of metrics, though he’s been a whisker above average framing-wise. Read the rest of this entry »

FanGraphs was at the Futures Game in Arlington on Saturday. In total, 16 pitchers appeared in the seven-inning game. The following are some quick notes on every pitcher who toed the rubber during All-Star weekend’s premier prospect event. Obviously one game isn’t enough on its own to move the needle significantly for any of these guys — they all have a large body of work that can better inform our evaluations — but it’s useful to see whose stuff ticks up when they’re in an environment like the Futures Game and get to let it eat in a shorter burst than they’re accustomed to. Read the rest of this entry »

The Texas Rangers came into the season with every intention of competing for another World Series championship. While the team had a fairly low-key winter, the ZiPS projection system thought it would be legitimately competitive in the AL West, though not necessarily one of baseball’s top teams. Instead, with less than half the season’s slate of games remaining, Texas sits uncomfortably below .500 with the playoff math looking increasingly daunting.

When the season began, my understanding was the Rangers expected to struggle at times during the first half, especially in the rotation, and they were OK with that as long as they didn’t fall too far behind the other AL West contenders, the Houston Astros and Seattle Mariners. The organization was comfortable letting Jordan Montgomery walk in free agency because it felt the team had enough punch in the lineup to remain in the division race long enough for at least some of its injured pitchers to get healthy and reinforce the roster, which would be as good as acquiring a starter in a deadline trade.

For about a month, this scenario seemed to be playing out. The Astros limped miserably out of the gate, and the Mariners didn’t do much better. The Rangers spent most of April leading the AL West, but they didn’t build enough of a cushion. That came back to bite them when Seattle caught fire and Houston turned its season around. Simultaneously, Texas went in the other direction. Since May 1, the Rangers offense has put up a 92 wRC+, and that’s with the benefit of Corey Seager mashing after his early slump (.286/.367/.563 in that span) and Wyatt Langford hitting way better since coming off the IL in late May (.285/.339/.464). With the 17th-ranked ERA and 24th-ranked FIP since the start of May, the pitching staff hasn’t exactly made up for the offensive shortfall.

As of Thursday morning, ZiPS has the Rangers with a 10% chance to make the playoffs, far short of their projected 56% odds coming into the season. The projections still see the AL West as a race, but mostly between the Astros and Mariners, with Texas assuming the role of the third-place underdog.

Of course, 10% isn’t zero, but the Rangers certainly have their work cut out for them. ZiPS currently assumes that, on average, the Rangers will be a .500 team the rest of the season. Let’s make a different assumption, that ZiPS is very wrong, and on average, they will be a .530 team from here on out. That still only boosts their playoff probability to 17.8%. Simply playing better is no longer enough, and there is unlikely to be any kind of reasonable deadline addition that would help them flip the script.

At the same time, Texas is still positioned well for a run in 2025, so there’s no need to blow the whole team up. Looking at just the main contributors under team control, ZiPS generally sees brighter days ahead next season.

ZiPS projects this group of players to win six or seven more games in 2025 than they’re projected to this season. (The win total for 2024 is a combination of the team’s season-to-date and rest-of season projections.) That’s an impressive number in most circumstances, but even more so for a rather old team; the offense is slightly older than league average and the pitching staff is the oldest in the majors. This group already has a good case for contention in 2025.

So if this year’s a longshot and 2025 looks better, what’s the winning argument for not retooling with a focus toward improving the roster for next season? That’s not rhetorical; I don’t have a good one (and feel free to make one in the comments that my cold-stricken brain couldn’t conjure). Again, the Rangers won the World Series last fall, and having that ring already earned ought to give the team some room to maneuver without angering the fanbase. Now, the Rangers won’t be able to snag prospects on the level of Jackson Holliday or James Wood for the players they’d be willing to trade, but in swaps for their players on expiring contracts — Max Scherzer, Nathan Eovaldi, David Robertson, Andrew Heaney, José Leclerc, Kirby Yates, and Michael Lorenzen — I would think they could at least get some talent that could help them in the future, even if you assume Scherzer sticks to his stated preference that he won’t waive his no-trade clause.

Dropping out of a race when you’re the defending champ is a tough thing to do psychologically. But the Rangers are in a bad place right now, and by throwing in the towel, they could improve their chances to contend for another title in 2025.

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the defending World Series champion Texas Rangers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

The Guardians rate as one of baseball’s bigger surprises. After finishing 76-86 last year — their worst record since 2012 — they’ve rebounded to go 57-33 thus far, and entered Wednesday with the AL’s best record. Their offense is much more potent than it was last year, and despite losing ace Shane Bieber for the season due to Tommy John surgery, they rank second in the league in run prevention at 3.87 runs per game.

While Cleveland’s staff owns the AL’s second-highest strikeout rate (24.2%), a good amount of credit for the team’s run prevention belongs to its defense. By my evaluation of a handful of the major defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages) — the Guardians rate as the majors’ second-best defensive team thus far this season. The Yankees, who spent much of the first half atop the AL East before a 5-16 slide knocked them into second place, are the only team ahead of them.

On an individual level, even a full season of data isn’t enough to get the clearest picture of a player’s defense, and it’s not at all surprising that a 600-inning sample produces divergent values across the major metrics. After all, they’re based on differing methodologies that produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom, spreads 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 FRVs, catchers don’t have UZRs, and DRS tends to produce the most extreme ratings. Still, within this aggregation I do think we get enough signal at this point in the season to make it worth checking in; I don’t proclaim this to be a bulletproof methodology so much as a good point of entry into a broad topic. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend of mine is a huge Cleveland Guardians fan, and the other night we were discussing the awards chances for some of their top players. He pitched Emmanuel Clase as a Cy Young candidate — which, side note: Have you seen his ERA and Cleveland’s record when leading after eight innings this year? — but I was more interested in where José Ramírez and Steven Kwan might finish in the MVP race. I pulled up our leaderboards to see where they stood and was greeted with a surprise that had nothing to do with the Guards:

Huh? Josh Smith? The same Josh Smith who batted below the Mendoza Line in each of his first two major league seasons? The one who didn’t get a single postseason plate appearance last year? The one who barely made the Opening Day roster this season? Somehow, yes.

Through the first half of the 2024 campaign, that Josh Smith has been the most productive hitter in a loaded Texas Rangers lineup. Of course, that doesn’t quite capture how great the 26-year-old has been this season — after all, that loaded lineup is hurt and underperforming — but you could shave 25 points off his wRC+ and he’d still be their best hitter. Fortunately, the Yankees included Smith in their 2021 trade for Joey Gallo, so no shaving is required.

More to the point, Smith isn’t just excellent relative to the Rangers’ band of bangless bangers. Rather, his status as a great hitter this season is indisputable. Here’s where Smith ranks among qualified American League batters:

So what’s behind Smith’s surge? The most obvious thing to point to is his stance. According to Shawn McFarland of the Dallas Morning News, Smith changed his setup and load over the offseason while working out at Texas’ Globe Life Field with Seth Conner, the team’s assistant hitting coach. Smith stands more narrow now than he did last year, and he has gone to a “stacked” load — meaning he keeps his head stacked over the center of his body through his swing to the point of contact. The purpose of these adjustments was to cut down on strikeouts and fly balls, hit more line drives, and get back to the contact-oriented approach that made him a Top 100 prospect a few years ago.

“I decided to change it because I was hitting like a buck fifty,” Smith told McFarland in April. “That was kind of annoying, so I decided to make some changes.”

His actual batting average last year (.185) wasn’t quite that bad, but regardless, if you want to hike up your average, striking out less and hitting more line drives is a good place to start.

Midway through this season, Smith’s changes have worked as intended. His strikeout rate has dropped from 23.7% last year to 19.2% this year, and his 34.9% fly ball rate is down from last year’s 40.4%. Meanwhile, he’s increased his line drive rate by 10.4 percentage points (25.3%, up from 14.9%). That’s the biggest jump among the 188 players who recorded at least 200 plate appearances in both 2023 and ’24:

Smith has said that in his first two seasons, he got caught up in the push for power. He was chasing fly balls because he thought that was the way to stick in the big leagues. In some ways, he achieved what he was going for last year: He dramatically increased his barrel rate (10.5%, up from 2.4% in 2022) and his average exit velocity (88.5 mph, up from 87.0). And last year was an improvement at the plate from his woeful rookie campaign, but that’s like saying the 1963 Mets were better than the ’62 Mets — they were better, but only because they couldn’t get any worse:

During the offseason, in the afterglow of winning the World Series, Smith concluded that he wasn’t going to cut it as a slugger. At 5-foot-10 and 172 pounds, he couldn’t generate enough power to make his 2023 approach worthwhile. So he started working out with Conner and the early returns were promising, as Smith had a good spring training (154 wRC+ in 49 plate appearances). He made the Opening Day roster mainly because of his positional versatility, but he was a backup and playing time wasn’t guaranteed.

That is, until third baseman Josh Jung broke his wrist in the fourth game of the season, requiring surgery. Smith replaced him as the strong side of a platoon but quickly hit his way into the everyday lineup. Beginning with his first start on April 2 through the end of that month, Smith hit .321/.415/.506 across 94 plate appearances, good for a 163 wRC+. He hasn’t looked back since, climbing up the batting order and settling into the no. 3 hole. Even with Jung nearing his return to the lineup, manager Bruce Bochy has said Smith has earned a starting role, though where he plays in the field will depend on the day.

Narrowing his stance and stacking his load have helped Smith get into a better position to hit, but being in a good position to hit and actually doing it are two different things. That brings us to the driving force behind Smith’s success: He’s making much better swing decisions.

Inspired by teammate Corey Seager, Smith has started hunting pitches over the heart of the plate. Sounds obvious, right? Swing at the most hittable pitches. Duh! But that’s easier said than done when you’re in the box and trying to gear up for 100-mph heaters while also worrying about nasty breaking pitches. In Seager, Smith saw the benefits of a selectively aggressive approach and realized he’d been overthinking things in the box.

Now he’s stripped hitting down to its most basic elements to such a degree that I’m cringing while typing this because it sounds like I went to the Crash Davis School of Baseball Clichés: Swing at good pitches, don’t try to do too much, hit line drives. But this really is what Smith is doing. Check this out:

Smith has been especially great at hunting first pitches in the Heart Zone:

This season, nestled in the lineup between Seager and Adolis García most games, Smith is seeing first pitches in the Heart Zone at a much higher rate, and when he does, he’s hacking at and ripping them.

There are some questions about the sustainability of Smith’s breakout. He is greatly outperforming his expected stats (.244 xBA, .350 xSLG, .314 xwOBA), and it seems unlikely that pitchers will keep grooving him this many pitches. But, even if a regression is coming, it’s hard to image that Smith will be as bad as he was in his first two seasons. With his new setup and approach, his foundation as a line drive hitter should help him limit his slumps and produce as a solid lineup contributor, if not the surprising offensive force he’s been this season.