When Randy Arozarena burst onto the national stage, he did so as the best hitter in baseball. For one postseason, he channeled peak Joe DiMaggio, hitting a ludicrous .377/.442/.831 in the 2020 playoffs. He was no slouch in the playoffs last year either, posting a .333/.474/.600 line, albeit in just four games. If you follow baseball in October, you probably think of Arozarena as a bruising power hitter. During the regular season, though, he’s something else entirely.

That’s not to say he’s a bad hitter. In fact, he’s put together an excellent 2022 line by cutting down on strikeouts. He’s been solid at the plate for three straight years now. He boasts a 133 wRC+ since the start of the 2020 season, a top 25 mark among all hitters over that timeframe, sandwiched between some guys you probably think are comfortably better than him: Corey Seager and Will Smith.

That’s great, and fine, but that’s not what I want to talk about. Arozarena is good in a conventional way in the batter’s box. He’s wild, and perhaps kind of bad, on the basepaths. It’s an absolute blast. Observe.

In the first game of yesterday’s doubleheader against the Blue Jays, Arozarena was busy early. In the first inning, he grounded into a force out, but beat out the double play relay throw to keep the inning alive and score a run. Arozarena is obviously fast; when you watch him you can’t help thinking of a defensive back in the open field. He’s compact and explosive; when he hustles down the line, you can almost hear the footsteps coming.

In the third inning, Arozarena delivered another RBI groundout, ho hum. That’s when things got interesting. With two outs and Manuel Margot at the plate, Arozarena got the itch to run. He gets that itch a lot; he’s attempted 39 steals this year and succeeded on 29 of them. I wouldn’t call his base-stealing instincts great, but I would call them voracious. In fact, he’d already scratched that itch in this very game, stealing second in the first inning without a throw.

But if one steal is good, two is better. Arozarena doesn’t so much steal on the pitcher as on the general disbelief that he can be stopped. A man on first and two outs? It’s a classic base-stealing opportunity, a situation where you only need to be successful 70% of the time to break even. Say no more – it was go time for Arozarena. Even a hidden ball trick attempt couldn’t stop him:

On 1-0, Arozarena took off and stole second easily:

Or did he? Home plate umpire Ramon De Jesus didn’t think so:

Margot inadvertently made contact with Danny Jansen on his backswing, as you can clearly see from a reverse angle:

Easy call, if you’re a veritable encyclopedia of baseball rules like De Jesus. If a batter inadvertently makes contact with a catcher on his backswing, the stolen base attempt simply doesn’t count; the runner has to go back to first, but the result of the pitch counts. You don’t see that one every day, but it seems like a pretty fair rule.

Not that there was any suspense about whether Arozarena was running, but now it was doubly obvious. Mitch White threw over to first before his next pitch, and Arozarena giggled a bit at Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who actually threw the ball back to White this time:

After bluffing a steal on 1-1 (he stopped after a bad jump), Arozarena was yet again on the move, and yet again easily safe:

But, uh, you’re not gonna believe it:

Yep, another clear case of inadvertent interference on Margot’s backswing. I don’t know if I’ve seen two of those calls all year, let alone two in the same at-bat. What could Arozarena do but sulk back to first?

Honestly, I’d GIF the entire at-bat if I could. The Jays and Rays should keep cameras on Arozarena and Guerrero at first base; every time the broadcast panned there, they were bantering back and forth, presumably about how ridiculous the situation was. Arozarena is a ton of fun to watch, particularly on the basepaths, and he was in fine form yesterday. But that wasn’t even the best part of this particular time on base.

When Margot put a ball in play, it stopped being a stolen base opportunity, and instead became an opportunity to get a head of steam and make something happen on the basepaths. Arozarena loves to do nothing else more – and that’s much to his detriment. He’s made 12 outs on the basepaths this year, the third-highest mark in the majors (Jose Altuve has 15, Yandy Díaz 14). Despite his blinding speed, he’s among the worst in the game by UBR, our measure of how many runs a player has added or lost based on their non-stealing baserunning. That’s basically tied with Alejandro Kirk, who isn’t exactly known for being fleet footed. The Rays are on course for a historical tally of outs made on the basepaths, thanks in no small part to Arozarena and Díaz.

And those outs add up. Making an out on the bases every once in a while is unavoidable, but Arozarena racks them up in bunches. He’s a gambler with unshakeable faith in his speed, but major league outfielders are pretty dang good. Still, you don’t steal home in a playoff game if you’re not pushing the envelope. Rays fans surely fret about the extra outs, but there’s no denying the adrenaline rush he produces every time he tries.

Margot gave him another chance to shine, shooting a hard-hit ball off of Matt Chapman and into left field. Since Arozarena was running on the pitch, there was no doubt he’d reach third base. But he went one further:

Wait, uh, what? I’ve seen a lot of baseball in my day, but I can’t think of any runners scoring from first on a single since Enos Slaughter’s famous mad dash (and that was ruled a double). This wasn’t even a particularly deep hit; Teoscar Hernández was in shallow left field when he fielded the ball.

My favorite part of this play is that Arozarena wasn’t even running hard the whole time:

That’s not to say he was loafing; he played it by the book until he reached third. There’s no reason to sharply round second on a grounder there, so he was pulling in safely. When the ball kicked into the outfield, he took third base, again without needing to kick it into high gear.

That’s a by-the-numbers play by a fast baserunner. Then, Arozarena channeled vroom vroom guy. Look at where he was when Hernández fielded the ball:

I don’t even know what to think about this. This isn’t just that Arozarena knows he’s fast. He could be peak Cool Papa Bell and not cover that much ground before a throw made it home. He wasn’t even running at full speed there; he was throttling down to stop at third.

That deceleration didn’t last long. When Hernández didn’t immediately throw to a relay man but instead started jogging in, Arozarena mashed the turbo button. He went from a slow jog to a sprint, catching Hernández off guard.

It still shouldn’t have mattered. Hernández was in shallow left field, with the ball in his hands, when Arozarena touched third base. This isn’t about testing a fielder’s arm; I don’t think there’s any outfielder in the major leagues who couldn’t make that throw if they knew they were going home with the ball, particularly now that Khris Davis plays for the Wild Health Genomes of the Atlantic League.

This was outright picking on the frailties of the human brain. Major league players are great athletes, masters of their craft, but thousands upon thousands of hours spent playing baseball builds pattern recognition, pattern recognition that Arozarena weaponized on this play (which I’ll just note wasn’t scored an error). When Hernández fielded that ball, he knew the play was over. One look at the runners – Arozarena decelerating into third, Margot cooling his heels at first – told him all he needed to know. This play was over; no need to come up throwing and risk an error.

You can see it in the way he fields the ball. No one in the stadium was expecting that play to require a full-effort throw, Hernández included:

I love it. I love everything about it. I wish every baserunner behaved more like this. I don’t mean getting thrown out on the basepaths, though to be honest I’m in for the occasional light-hearted TOOTBLAN. I’m talking about the combination of speed, belief, and guile that led to Arozarena creating a run out of thin air. That wasn’t a run-scoring opportunity. Usain Bolt wouldn’t have scored there. Plenty of runners wouldn’t have scored from second there.

In fact, I love this play so much that I’m going to break down Arozarena’s mad dash into three parts. First, the attempted steal and realization that the ball is in play:

That’s pretty standard. I think he had the base stolen pretty easily, and when he saw a grounder to third base, he correctly throttled down at second. When the ball kicked away from Chapman, the next read was automatic, something that every fast player in the majors does instinctively:

Again, easy. After an initial acceleration, he realized there wouldn’t be a competitive play at third base and did what every runner does in his situation: ease off. With the advantage of starting in motion, any baserunner in the majors would likely reach third there. But what happened next was pure genius, and it’s more fun in an isolation view of Arozarena. Even as he was decelerating into third, he made up his mind that he was going to pick on Hernández:

He had eyes on Hernández fielding the ball. When he turned his head away, he had made up his mind: he was going to hope Hernández made a bad throw from a tough position, coasting towards second and throwing halfway across his body. I’m honestly not even sure it was much of a gamble; Arozarena had time to peek back and see the throw, and was still close enough to third that he could have made it back safely if the throw was on line.

That’s something you don’t see every day, because if you saw it every day it wouldn’t work. You can’t subvert expectations for fun and profit if you’re always doing it; those expectations would change. This was a sublime moment, but it was just a moment: Arozarena also makes plenty of overly-aggressive attempts at extra bases that end in disaster.

On this day, though, he was perfect, and his speed and derring-do accounted for two RBIs and a run in a 4-2 Tampa Bay victory. But all that running takes a toll. After two successful stolen bases that got called back, two pickoff throws, a bluffed steal, a foul ball on a steal attempt, and that trip around the bases, Arozarena was gassed:

Who could blame him? That’s a lot of running, and a lot of thinking on his feet while doing it.

Baserunning doesn’t always work out this well for Randy Arozarena. It almost never works out this well, in fact. Even counting this play, he’s been an atrocious baserunner this year. But I don’t really care because that was a blast. I audibly gasped when I saw this play developing in real time. He couldn’t score from there, could he? How could he even think about trying to score from there? Then, of course, he went and did it. More audible gasps in baseball. More audacious baserunning decisions. More Randy Arozarena, please.

You could be forgiven for having given up on the Rays. Four weeks ago, they lost to the Orioles at Tropicana Field, knocking their record to 58–53 and sending them down to fourth place in the AL East, half a game behind the O’s, two games behind the Blue Jays, and 12 games behind the Yankees. Injuries had gutted their lineup. Yet since that point, they’ve been as hot as any team in baseball, even the Braves. What’s more, Wander Franco is slated to return from a two-month absence on Friday, just in time for the surging squad to face the Yankees — now leading the division by just 4.5 games — in the Bronx.

The 21-year-old Franco topped our Top 100 Prospects lists in both 2020 and ‘21 before putting together a stellar rookie season last year but has played just 58 games this season, hitting a modest .260/.308/.396 for a 104 wRC+. He landed on the injured list on May 31 due to a right quad strain and missed most of June, then played just 13 games before returning to the IL on July 10 due to a fractured hamate in his right hand, which required surgery.

Franco began a rehab stint with Triple-A Durham on August 16 but made just two plate appearances before discomfort in his right wrist forced him from the game; later that week, the Rays pulled him from the assignment due to lingering soreness. He finally returned to action on September 4 and went 6-for-11 with a double over a three-game span. Tampa planned for him to stay with Durham through Saturday, but his 3-for-5 performance while playing nine innings at shortstop on Wednesday led the team to accelerate his timetable.

While Franco’s slash stats don’t measure up to last year’s numbers, his Statcast data in several key categories is practically the same:

Franco’s average exit velo and hard-hit and barrel rates are almost identical from year to year, but this year he’s hitting more grounders and fewer fly balls (note the lower average launch angle and the increase in his groundball/fly ball ratio from 1.32 to 1.66). What’s more, he’s hit just .188 and slugged .229 on grounders this year, compared to .252 and .306 last year. Where hitting the ball in the air helped him to outperform his expected stats last time, that hasn’t been the case this year, though he’s still produced a wRC+ nine points above that of the major league mark for shortstops (95). It’s also 39 points above that of fill-in Taylor Walls, who has “hit” an anemic .176/.267/.282 (65 wRC+) in 408 PA accompanied by a wide divergence in his defensive metrics at shortstop (-0.3 UZR, -4 RAA, and 12 DRS). By our measure, he’s been 0.4 wins below replacement, but via Baseball Reference, he’s been worth 2.3 WAR. Go figure.

While the truth of Walls’ value probably lies somewhere in between, the larger truth is that the Rays are a better team with Franco, and they’re getting him back at a critical time. The team entered Friday having gone 19–5 (.792) since August 12, tied with the Braves for the majors’ best record, and with the best Pythagorean record (.793) in that span as well. In that time, they’ve overtaken the Orioles (which took just a day) and the Blue Jays, cut the slumping Yankees’ AL East advantage to 4.5 games, and taken over the top spot in the AL Wild Card race. Here’s a snapshot of their odds change:

The Rays began that 19–5 run by taking the next two games form the Orioles and then two of three from the Yankees, though they have benefited by playing a fairly soft schedule thereafter: four games apiece against the Royals and Angels, six against the Red Sox, two against the Marlins, and three more against the second-half edition of the Yankees, who have gone just 19–27 as everybody not named Aaron Judge has either stopped hitting, gotten hurt, or both. Read the rest of this entry »

The top prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers system lost one of his baseball “brothers” a month ago. Not literally — Alex De Jesus is alive and well — but rather by dint of a trade-deadline deal. A 20-year-old infielder who’d been playing with the High-A Great Lakes Loons, De Jesus went to the Toronto Blue Jays organization, along with Mitch White, in exchange for Moises Brito and Nick Frasso.

Shortly after the trade, I asked Diego Cartaya what it’s like to have a teammate who is also a close friend leave the organization.

“It’s not easy, but I’m kind of happy for him,” replied Cartaya, who along with being L.A.’s top prospect is No. 31 in our MLB prospect rankings. “He’s going to get a better opportunity with Toronto, so we’re pretty excited for him. But it’s hard. As teammates, we spend more time together than we do with our families. He’s just like my brother.”

Cartaya’s real family is in Venezuela, and it was his father who initially taught him how to hit. The tutoring he’s received since entering pro ball at age 16 has resulted in occasional tweaks, both to his stance and his swing. Cartaya told me that he used to be “more of a big launch-angle guy,” but now has a flatter swing. Upon hearing that, I noted that the home run I’d seen him hit the previous night was more of a line drive than a moonshot. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday’s interview with Michael Harris II focused on his career path, the 21-year-old Atlanta Braves rookie having excelled as a multiple-sport athlete while growing up in Stockbridge, Georgia. Moreover, he’d been a two-way player whom many scouts preferred as a pitcher. While baseball and outfielder-only are proving to be prudent choices, he had options along the way.

Jordan Romano’s path shares some similarities with Harris’s. Not only was the Toronto Blue Jays closer a multi-sport athlete in his formative years, he originally excelled as a position player. That he became a pitcher was circumstantial. Choosing baseball was a matter of passion.

“Being Canadian, I played a lot of hockey in high school,”said Romano, who grew up a Toronto Maple Leafs fan in Markham, Ontario. “I also played a little basketball and was pretty decent at volleyball. But with baseball, you kind of had to drag me off the field, even in practice. My parents wanted me to play a bunch of different sports, and while I really enjoyed hockey — I still do — I didn’t have the passion for it that I did for baseball.”

Romano never considered himself NHL material, but he does feel he had the potential to play collegiately, or in juniors, had he stuck with it. The decision to forgo that possibility came at age 17, and while it shaped his future, it didn’t end his time on the ice. Romano kept lacing up the skates for another year. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday afternoon, Drew Rasmussen had everything working. For eight innings, his fastball/cutter combination kept Orioles batters off balance, with intermittent sliders only deepening their confusion. The first 24 Orioles to come to the plate walked away empty-handed. It took Rasmussen just 79 pitches to navigate those eight innings. He was on course for both a perfect game and a Maddux, and the Orioles looked unlikely to stop him.

They managed to break through. Jorge Mateo led off the ninth inning by lacing a double down the third base line. He advanced on a groundout, then scored on a wild pitch. Rasmussen didn’t even manage a complete game; after Brett Phillips reached on a dropped third strike, Kevin Cash went to the bullpen for the last two outs of the game. It wasn’t the crowning achievement for Rasmussen that it might have been, but this season has been a success nonetheless, and a near-perfecto presents a great excuse to examine what’s gone right.

I last checked in on Rasmussen after his first start this season, when he adopted a new sweeping slider and threw it a ton. In 2021, he’d been a fastball-first pitcher with a slider that changed shape as he worked on it throughout the year. In 2022, he came out featuring the slider, with a new cutter to boot. Would 2022 be the year of the sweeper for Rasmussen?

As it turns out, not so much. His first few starts represented a local high in slider usage, and he’s been leaning on the pitch less and less since. He’s filled in that gap by going back to his high-octane fastball and by trusting that new cutter:

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the day after the trade deadline, which always means one thing: baseball writers begrudgingly cleaning up their gross, sparkling-water-can-filled workspaces. Oh, wait, actually it means two things: that, and a flood of “who won the trading deadline” articles.

This year, I’m going to do something slightly different. I won’t claim that I’ve re-invented the wheel, but I’ve always thought that those winner/loser columns are too deterministic and don’t leave enough room for nuance. I thought about listing each team that made a trade as a winner, with a “maybe” appended to indicate that we don’t know what will happen in the future; if you really want to know who won and who lost, check back in October… or maybe in October of 2025. I thought about making each team a “loser (maybe)” for the same reason. In the end, I settled on some broad archetypes. I’ll throw a subjective grade on how much I like the move, and also endeavor to explain the risks around each team’s deadline. You can find all of our deadline coverage here. Let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Rays traded C/INF Ford Proctor to the Giants for Triple-A reliever Jeremy Walker. The Rays appear to have been trying to clear 40-man space. The Rays have several players on the 60-day IL who don’t currently occupy a 40-man spot but will need to once they return, including Wander Franco, Manuel Margot, and Harold Ramírez, all of whom are likely to come off of the IL between now and the end of the season. Tampa could also potentially add more big leaguers before the deadline who would require 40-man space. The move was an opportunistic pounce by the Giants, who get a player I happen to like quite a bit.

Proctor was occupying a 40-man spot while hitting .213/.329/.306 at Triple-A Durham, and his strikeout rate has climbed significantly for the second straight year. He was a contact-oriented infielder at Rice and in the lower minors who the Rays moved behind the plate during the early stages of the pandemic. While he’s made huge strides on defense, he still has moments of ineptitude, whiffing on the occasional easy-to-receive pitch, or letting a blockable ball in the dirt get past him. For a convert who has just shy of two years experience wearing the tools of ignorance, Proctor looks pretty good even though he’s 25. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the trade deadline. It’s the best time of the year for baseball chaos, rumor-mongering reporting, and of course, the main event: a million trades featuring relievers you’ve heard of but don’t know a ton about. The difference between a blown lead in the seventh inning of a playoff game and an uneventful 4-2 win might be one of these unheralded arms. Heck, they could be a better option but still give up a three-run shot in a crushing loss. Or they could be a worse option! There are no guarantees in baseball. Still, here are some relievers who contending teams think enough of to trade for and plug into their bullpens.

Yankees Acquire Scott Effross
Scott Effross wasn’t supposed to amount to anything in the big leagues. A 15th-round pick in the 2015 draft, he kicked around the Cubs system for years, frequently old for his level and rarely posting knockout numbers. Then in 2019, on the suggestion of pitching coach Ron Villone, he started throwing sidearm. Three years later, he’s carving through hitters in the majors.

“Carving” might undersell it. Since his 2021 debut, Effross has been one of the best relievers in the game. In 57.1 innings, he’s compiled a 2.98 ERA and 2.45 FIP. He’s striking out 29% of opposing batters and hardly walking anyone. With his new low arm slot, he’s adopted what I like to think of as the sidearmer’s basic arsenal: a sinker, a slider, and a break-glass-in-case-of-lefty changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros shook up their first base situation on Monday, acquiring 1B/DH Trey Mancini from the Orioles as part of a three-way trade that also included the Rays. Mancini, the longest-tenured player on Baltimore’s roster, was having a solid, if not spectacular, season, hitting .268/.347/.404 with 10 homers and 1.2 WAR in 92 games, with most of his playing time this season split between first base and designated hitter and an occasional appearance in a corner outfield role. He’ll be a free agent at the end of the season, though there is a $10 million mutual option. To land Mancini, the Astros sent outfielder Jose Siri to the Rays and pitcher Chayce McDermott to the O’s, with Tampa shipping pitcher Seth Johnson to Baltimore and Jayden Murray to Houston.

To look at this trade more easily, let’s separate it into three different transactions.

The Baltimore Orioles acquire pitchers Seth Johnson and Chayce McDermott for 1B/DH Trey Mancini

From a PR standpoint, there will likely be some sharp elbows thrown at the Orioles locally. Baltimore is having its first even marginally playoff-relevant season in a long while, and Mancini has been with the team through the entire process. As its veteran rebuild survivor, he played a similar role that Freddie Freeman did for the Braves while they went through their own painful renovations. His battle with colon cancer, diagnosed on his 28th birthday, and subsequent grand return after surgery and six months of chemotherapy only served to make him more beloved in town.

Basically, the on-field case for keeping Mancini and letting him walk at the end of the season involved a very “now” outlook for the team. It does make the Orioles a bit weaker over the next two months, but it’s only a major loss if you look at the consequences in a very binary fashion, in that Baltimore is in the wild card race with Mancini and out of it without him. Once you move past that, the calculus for whether a trade like this is a good idea comes out very differently. Read the rest of this entry »

With their outfield (and whole roster, really) hit hard by injuries, the Rays acquired 34-year-old left fielder David Peralta from the Diamondbacks for 19-year-old catching prospect Christian Cerda on Sunday. The Freight Train is hitting .248/.315/.457, good for a 109 wRC+, which is in line with his career norm (111 wRC+), even though the shape of his production has totally changed.

Before we get into how that came to be, though, let’s take a moment to appreciate Peralta’s remarkable path here. Originally a left-handed pitcher in the Cardinals organization, he was released amid shoulder issues and played outfield in Independent ball for a couple of years before signing with the Diamondbacks in 2013. It’s borderline offensive to cram that stretch of Peralta’s career into one sentence. Indy ball isn’t exactly glamorous, and Peralta was broke and worked at McDonalds while waiting for the Diamondbacks, who he knew wanted to sign him, to free up the minor league roster space to do so. After he finally signed, it took only about a year for him to reach the big leagues, and Peralta has had one hell of a now nine-year MLB career, during which he’s been one of the better left field defenders in baseball (and has one Gold Glove), won a Silver Slugger during his peak year in 2018 (.293/.352/.516 with 30 bombs), led the league in triples twice, and endured wrist and shoulder surgeries while becoming a cult hero in Arizona. From a baseball role standpoint, the Rays are getting a platoon stick (.268/.325/.496 versus righties this year) and plus defender in a corner spot, but Peralta also brings the parts of himself that helped him grind through injury and Indy ball. Read the rest of this entry »