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.

The Kansas City Royals’ strong start has been one of the most surprising stories of the season thus far. With a comeback win over the Mariners last night, the Royals raised their record to 26-18 and pulled into second place in the AL Central, just a game and a half behind the Guardians for the division lead. Bobby Witt Jr. is playing like a legitimate MVP candidate, Salvador Perez is walking more and striking out less than ever (at age 34!), and Seth Lugo is pitching like he wants a Cy Young award in his trophy case.

But take a look at Kansas City’s lineup and offensive statistics and it doesn’t exactly look like one of the best teams in the American League. Entering Tuesday, the Royals had a 94 wRC+ (22nd in the majors) and a .307 wOBA (16th); they also ranked 14th in average (.242), 20th in on-base percentage (.304), 14th in slugging (.390), and tied for 18th in home runs (40). That’s a middling offense at best and a bottom-third group at worst.

The easy explanation for Kansas City’s success this year is its pitching staff, which entering Tuesday ranked ninth in baseball with a 3.49 ERA and a 3.73 FIP. More specifically, the rotation has been one of the best in the majors. Royals starters have combined for a 3.26 ERA (5th), a 3.44 FIP (4th), and 4.6 WAR (2nd), again as of the start of play Tuesday.

But a great rotation alone doesn’t make a good team. If the season ended yesterday, the Royals would be in the playoffs right now because they are producing at the plate in the moments that matter.

That 94 wRC+ overall? Forget it. Their wRC+ was 132 with runners in scoring position, 131 with runners on, and 137 in their few dozen bases plate appearances with the bases loaded. They weren’t as excellent in high-leverage spots (101 wRC+), but that’s still notably better than their wRC+ in all other situations (94).

So, is this a skill? Eh, probably not, but if you’d like to re-litigate Esky Magic from 2014 and 2015 in the comments, have at it. More likely, it’s some combination of luck and random variation in a quarter-season sample. Players don’t suddenly become better or worse depending on the situation, they just perform better or worse. The statistics I shared above are merely what has happened; they’re not predictive of what the rest of the season will hold. Jeff Sullivan put it best back in 2018 when looking at “clutch” through a win probability lens: The most important thing about clutch is that you shouldn’t count on it continuing.

Now, this isn’t to say that the Royals are frauds, because the flip side of the above statement also holds true. Just because you shouldn’t count on clutch continuing doesn’t mean that it won’t. Also, Kansas City isn’t winning only because of its situational hitting. They’ve got Witt and Salvy and all that starting pitching! The Royals may not be this good, but they certainly aren’t bad. And when it’s all over, they might just be good enough. They’re a weird team in a weird division, and maybe they can ride that weirdness all the way into the postseason.

Quick Hits

• Bob Nightengale put it best: “Break up the Colorado Rockies!” Wednesday’s win over the Padres gave the Rockies their sixth straight win, and if five meant we should break them up, what are we supposed to do now? And they haven’t beaten bad teams either! The streak started with a win against the Giants, followed by a three-game sweep of the Rangers and a back-to-back victories against the Padres at Petco Park.

This strikes me as positive regression more than anything else (like the White Sox being above .500 since Tommy Pham joined the team), but Colorado’s sweep of the Rangers was quite the spoiler. Scoring just six runs across those three games, the vaunted Texas lineup was shut down by starting pitching luminaries Ryan Feltner, Austin Gomber, and Ty Blach. Even Dakota Hudson got in on the fun on Monday against the Padres. After going 0-6 in his first seven starts, he earned his first win of the season.

• You’re not a baseball writer if you don’t write a story that needs to be updated after it is published. So I would, of course, like to note that after I filed Monday’s column about how infrequently the Braves use their bench, Austin Riley left Sunday night’s game with an inflamed oblique. Riley isn’t expected to go on the IL, but he was kept out of Atlanta’s lineup on both Monday and Tuesday, allowing Zack Short to beef up those ghost bench statistics.

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe for coming up with the idea for the column, because it’s a great excuse to watch a ton of baseball and write about plays that make me smile. This week had a little bit of everything: close and fun games, lopsided and fun games, idiosyncratic batter behavior, and even an all-time major league record (nope, not a good one). Let’s get started. One quick note: Five Things is taking a week off next week for workload management. No word on whether I’ll be assigned to FanGraphs Triple-A to keep my typing arm fresh, but the column will return a week from Friday.

1. High-Stakes Games in April
Two division leaders faced off in Seattle on Monday night. The juggernaut Braves need no introduction; they have the best record in baseball and won 104 games last year. The Mariners have ridden a dominant rotation to the top of the AL West despite a sputtering offense. The first game of the series pitted Bryce Miller against Max Fried, and while neither was projected as their team’s ace coming into the season, they both looked the part in this game.

Miller started things off with his customary dominant fastball. He got Ronald Acuña Jr. looking and Ozzie Albies swinging in the first inning, and kept going from there. When Miller’s fastball is cooking, it’s hard to imagine making contact against him, never mind getting a hit:

Fried got off to a slow start this year after missing half of last season with injury, but he’d just thrown a three-hitter against the Marlins, and he picked up right where he left off. He baffled the Mariners with an array of fastballs, sliders, and delightful slow curves:

These two battled long into the night, exchanging scoreless innings and confident struts. One thing they didn’t exchange was baserunners; through six innings, they combined for three walks and no hits allowed. They traded strikeouts – 10 for Miller, seven for Fried – and made every 2-1 count feel like a rally.

The Braves lineup is too good to hold down forever. Acuña recorded the first hit of the game with a smashed groundball single in the seventh. Then he stole second. Then he stole third. Then Albies cracked a ground-rule double to bring him home. Miller recovered to escape the inning with no further damage, but Fried and the relievers that followed him could work with that. They made it through eight innings without any damage, setting up a dramatic clash between Atlanta closer A.J. Minter, trying to protect that one-run lead, and the two goats of the Seattle offense so far, Jorge Polanco and Mitch Garver. Polanco led off the bottom of the ninth with a single through the six hole before Garver clobbered a walk-off blast:

More games like this in April, please. More games like it in May and June. I like whimsical baseball just as much as the next person – probably more, in fact. But when games are this well played and this tight, it’s like a little piece of the playoffs escaped October and landed in my living room. My heart couldn’t handle every game being like this, but getting one every once in a while is a delight.

2. Wyatt Langford in Space
Wyatt Langford’s debut has been uneven, to be kind. He’s hitting .239/.311/.312, not exactly the offensive juggernaut Rangers fans expected after he tore up the minors last year. He has top-of-the-scale power; he hit six homers in spring training this year, and 10 in fewer than 200 minor league plate appearances last season. So far, that power hasn’t shown up. He only has a single home run in the majors this year. But oh boy, was that home run fun:

It feels weird for a power hitting DH to have an inside-the-park home run and no regular ones, but Langford is a strange DH. The fact that he isn’t a plus corner outfielder is surprising, because he can absolutely fly. Statcast clocks his average sprint speed so far this year at 29.6 ft/sec, one of the fastest marks in the sport. That somehow hasn’t translated to defense yet, but on offense? The man can move.

For a lot of players, this would be a triple. I clocked him at just under 15 seconds around the bases, and that could have been even faster if he didn’t think he hit a homer at first:

Now, did the Reds defense help out? Sure. Jake Fraley didn’t play the carom well at all; if he’d simply been less aggressive chasing the ball into that corner, this would have been a double or triple at most. But that one mistake is all it took (and for the Sam Miller enthusiasts out there, note Elly De La Cruz taking the cutoff throw from right field). But even accounting for the defensive miscue, Langford’s speed is what made this play happen.

Langford doesn’t seem like a track star to me, though I’m not sure how much of that is because I keep seeing “DH” next to his name. (He was playing left field in this game, for what it’s worth.) But watching him round the bases, you can’t miss it:

I particularly liked this close-up angle the Rangers posted:

Maybe it’s the red gloves. Maybe it’s the stride length. There’s just something simultaneously soothing and surprising about seeing him round the bases. He’s a large man with flailing arms, but there’s a grace to it too; his torso and head barely bounce around even as he accelerates to full speed. It’s a joy to watch, is my point. And Adolis García loved it just as much as I did:

3. Walk Offs
It all started with a mistake. In the bottom of the first inning last Thursday, Yoshinobu Yamamoto missed just low to Joey Meneses in a full count. Umpire Brian Walsh didn’t see it that way:

You can see Meneses at the edge of the frame looking back in shock. That was a ball! But the game moved on. The next three-ball pitch Yamamoto threw was a walk to Joey Gallo. The next one after that? Another one to Gallo with a different result:

I do think that one was a strike, but Gallo clearly didn’t. And now the battle lines were set: The Nationals were walking to first on every three-ball pitch they saw. Jacob Young got the memo:

And then on 3-2, he got the memo again:

Jesse Winker looked to me like he was ready to trot off – but Yamamoto’s 3-2 curveball caught so much of the plate that he instead pivoted around and marched back to the dugout:

Yamamoto was commanding the edges of the plate masterfully, and getting some help there to boot. But I loved Washington’s strategy. Just trot down to first base if it’s close. Maybe you’ll influence the umpire. Yamamoto threw eight pitches in three-ball counts in the game. The Nats swung at one and ran down toward first on five. That’s aspirational living right there. Maybe Mike Rizzo should put up a sign that says “no one cares how fast you run down to first base on strike three.” Or maybe he shouldn’t – I had a lot of fun watching them do it.

4. Revenge
You can only pull off this play when a catcher is hitting:

Don’t get me wrong, José Ramírez is a great defender. That was a heck of a play, a difficult barehanded scoop and an impressive off-platform throw. Not many third basemen can combine those two so smoothly. But if pretty much anyone else on the Braves were running, that would have been a single. Travis d’Arnaud is a 35-year-old catcher, and he moves like one, with 18th percentile sprint speed and 10th percentile home-to-first splits.

A series of unlikely events needs to happen for that to be such an unlucky out. Replace Ramírez with a slightly worse defender and it’s a hit. Replace d’Arnaud with a slightly faster runner and it’s a hit. Take a mile per hour off of the contact, or move it just a bit more away from Ramírez’s path, and it’s a hit. Part of being a good defender is making a lot of these edge-case plays, but I’m sure d’Arnaud was unhappy about losing a hit that way.

It’s OK, though, because he got his revenge two nights later. With two out and no one on in the top of the 10th, Ramírez singled off of A.J. Minter. He got a huge jump on the second pitch of the next at-bat and stole second standing up. Or at least, he thought he did:

Blink and you’ll miss it. Orlando Arcia’s swipe tag was way late, and it didn’t even make contact. A reverse angle is even more confusing. I have no idea why Ramírez didn’t slide, but he looks pretty clearly safe on this one:

Surely replay would fix this, right? Wrong:

What a remarkably perfect throw. Without meaning to, d’Arnaud hit Ramírez’s back pocket batting gloves from 130 feet away. Ramírez was out the moment Arcia caught the ball. The after-the-fact swipe was just instinctual, because Arcia has caught thousands of throws like that in his life but probably never received one that precise. I’ve heard of letting the ball do the work on a tag, but this takes that to a new level.

If Ramírez had been faster, there would be no play. If he’d been slower, he probably would have slid – honestly, he should have anyway. If the throw had been three inches off in either direction, the tag wouldn’t have been there. Ramírez stole one from d’Arnaud thanks to a series of just-so events. It’s only fair that d’Arnaud did the same to him.

5. Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory
With their loss to the Astros on Sunday, the Rockies fell to 7-21 in their first 28 games, which is bad enough. Even worse, they trailed at some point in each of those games. That tied a “record” set by the 1910 St. Louis Browns for most consecutive games trailing to start a season. Any time you’re tying a record set by the Browns, something has gone wrong.

Luckily for them, the next game, on Tuesday, offered a quick reprieve. They ambushed the Marlins with five runs in the top of the first, and Ryan Feltner was absolutely dealing. He faced the minimum number of batters through six innings, with the two singles he allowed quickly erased by a double play and a caught stealing, respectively. He needed only 79 pitches to get through eight scoreless innings. Bud Black sent him back out for the ninth to try for his first career complete game, a shutout to boot.

Things started to go wrong right away. Vidal Bruján snuck a single through the infield, Feltner hit Christian Bethancourt to add another baserunner, and then Luis Arraez doubled Bruján home to open the scoring ledger for Miami. Feltner’s first complete game would have to wait, because the Rockies needed this win. Closer Justin Lawrence came in to slam the door. But uh… he walked Bryan De La Cruz, and then Dane Myers (in the game because Jazz Chisholm Jr. got ejected for arguing balls and strikes) singled home two runs, and then Josh Bell singled to load the bases, and then Lawrence hit Jesús Sánchez to make it 5-4, and then… well, you get the idea. By the time Jalen Beeks came in to replace Lawrence, the game was tied and there was still only one out. But Beeks wriggled out of the jam without conceding anything further. The Rockies still had a chance to bury this accursed streak – they hadn’t trailed at any point in this game.

They scored a run in the top of the 10th when Ryan McMahon stroked a two-out double. But it wasn’t to be. De La Cruz doubled in the bottom of the inning to even the score. Then Myers – c’mon, the guy who wasn’t even supposed to be in the game! – won it for Miami with a seeing-eye single. Or maybe De La Cruz won it by remembering to touch home. Or maybe catcher Elias Díaz lost it with a bobble:

Oh boy, that one’s gonna sting. The Rockies can’t get out of their own way. They’ve trailed in the two games they’ve played since this collapse, too, extending the record to an outrageous 31 straight games trailing to start the season. Include the end of last year, and it’s 37 straight games trailing. I’m sorry for the Rockies fans enduring this, and for Patrick Dubuque for choosing to live the Rockies fan life for a year in this year of all years. At this point, there’s not much you can do other than stare, like rubbernecking but for sports.

In the ninth inning of Monday night’s game against the Phillies, Rockies catcher Elias Díaz doubled off Jeff Hoffman with two outs, nobody on, and the game tied 1-1. That put Rockies manager Bud Black in a bit of a pickle. With a runner on second, a single would score the go-ahead run, and Colorado’s best hitter — Nolan Jones — was at the plate. If a single were ever going to come, it would come now.

Rather, a single would score a normal runner from second. Unfortunately, Díaz is slow. He’s in the first percentile for sprint speed. He’s so slow, when he puts a pork shoulder in the crockpot it’s done cooking by the time he comes back from the pantry with the barbecue sauce.

If Black wanted to get that run in from second with a single, he had one of two options. First, call a cab. Second, call for a pinch-runner. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. 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 »

Welcome to the triumphant return of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, the longest-named column in baseball. Rogers Hornsby famously stared out his window all winter waiting for baseball to return. I can’t claim to have done the same, but I’m still overjoyed it’s back, and what better way to celebrate than by talking about some weird and delightful things that caught my eye while I soaked in baseball’s opening week? As always, this column is inspired by Zach Lowe’s basketball column of a similar name, which I read religiously.

1. Non-Elite Defenders Making Elite Defensive Plays
Great defenders make great plays. I’m sure you can picture Nolan Arenado making a do-or-die barehanded throw or Kevin Kiermaier tracking down a line drive at a full sprint. That’s why those guys are such storied defenders; they make the exceptional seem expected. There are plenty of other players in baseball, though, and many of them make the exceptional seem, well, exceptional. When someone you wouldn’t expect turns in a web gem, it feels all the better, and this week had a ton of them.

There’s the Juan Soto throw, of course:

That was brilliant, and it came at the perfect time. Plenty has already been written about it, but that doesn’t make it less impressive. Soto is at best an average outfielder and likely worse than that, and his arm is one of the weaker parts of his game. But he’s capable of brilliance out there from time to time, particularly when accuracy matters, and this one delivered.

But there were so many more! How about Brett Baty doing his best Arenado (or Ke’Bryan Hayes, shout out to the real best third base defender) impression on a tough grounder:

That’s phenomenal work. The combination of a weakly hit ball and fast runner meant that Baty had to make every instant count. Any wasted movement on a gather or pivot would’ve made Matt Vierling safe. This wasn’t your normal plant your feet and make a strong throw kind of out; Baty was either going to fire off balance or eat the ball. Check out his footwork, courtesy of the always-excellent SNY camera crew:

That throw came against his momentum and with his left leg completely airborne. As an added bonus, fellow lightly regarded defender Pete Alonso received the throw perfectly. Baty was a top prospect because of his hitting. If he keeps making plays like this, we might have to tear up that old scouting report.

Speaking of prospects who aren’t known for their fielding, Jordan Walker was one of the worst outfield defenders in baseball last year – understandable for a 21-year-old learning a new position in the major leagues. He’s fast and has a powerful throwing arm, so the building blocks are there, but the numbers don’t lie: He was out of his element in the outfield.

Maybe this year is different, though:

Simply put, that’s a great play. Jackson Merrill’s liner was headed toward the gap, which meant that Walker had to come in almost perpendicular to the ball to make a play. A bad step early in the route likely would’ve left him high and dry. But he got it right and turned a double into an out.

These guys won’t always make the right plays. In fact, they often won’t. That only makes it more fun when they nail it. Even bad major league defenders are capable of brilliance. Stars – they’re absolutely nothing like us!

2. Location, Location, Location
Pop ups are death for hitters. Infield pop ups are particularly so. Every other type of hit has some chance of finding a hole, but the combination of short distance and long hangtime mean that if you hit the ball straight up and it doesn’t go far, you’re going to be out. Batters hit .006/.006/.006 on infield fly balls from 2021 through 2023 – 12,583 pop ups led to 74 hits. You generally need some wild wind, a collision, or perhaps an overzealous pitcher trying to field for himself to have any shot at a hit. Mostly, though, it just turns into an out.

So far, 2024 has had other ideas. In the first five days of games, two infield pop ups turned into singles. One even turned into a double. It’s silly season for bad contact, in other words. It all started with Eddie Rosario:

That’s one of the hardest-hit infield pop ups of the year, one of only two hit at 95 mph or harder. That meant that the Reds had all day to camp under it, but unfortunately for them, it was a windy day in Cincinnati on Saturday. Gameday reported 17 mph winds from right to left, and you can see Santiago Espinal and Christian Encarnacion-Strand struggle to track the ball. If your infield pop up is going to drop, that’s a common way for it to happen.

Another unlikely but possible option is to hit the ball extremely softly, as Matt Carpenter demonstrated on April Fool’s Day:

That was a pop up, but it didn’t go very far up. With the infield playing at medium depth and Graham Pauley guarding third base after an earlier bunt single (yeah, Carpenter had quite a day), there was just no time to get to it. Maybe Matt Waldron could have made a play, but pitchers generally stay out of the way on balls like those for good reason. Even then, it would have required going over the mound and making a running basket catch. Sometimes, your pop ups just land in the exact right spot.

But wait, there’s one more. This one was a real doozy by René Pinto, also on April 1:

This one is the last pop up hit archetype: a Trop ball. There’s no wind in Tampa Bay’s domed stadium, but there is a blindingly white roof. White, conveniently enough, is the color of a baseball. So when you really sky one, as the Rays catcher did here, things can get dicey.

How easy of a play was this? In some ways, it was phenomenally easy. After all, five different fielders had time to converge on the ball, and Corey Seager easily could have made it there if he weren’t covering third. That ball hung in the air for more than six seconds, plenty of time for everyone to judge it. It didn’t carry very far, and there was no pitcher’s mound to stumble on.

Leaguewide, hits like this are the least likely of any pop up to land. Even at the Trop, batters are hitting only .011/.011/.011 on them in the Statcast era. But in other ways, it’s not a probability but a binary. This was Jonah Heim’s ball, but he just plain couldn’t see it:

From there, it was academic. And the Rangers’ diligence in heading for the ball meant that no one was covering second, so Pinto got to jog an extra 90 feet with no one stopping him. That might be the slowest home to first time on an in-play double that I’ve ever seen. That screenshot up above was only a few seconds before the ball landed, and Pinto was still near home plate.

In the long run, these things will even out. Most infield fly balls get caught. But sometimes things get really weird – and weirdness can be sublime. Naturally, Yandy Díaz smoked the next pitch for a 331-foot frozen rope – and made the last out of the game. What a sport.

3. Oneil Cruz Is Chaotic, and Good
I watched Saturday’s Pirates-Marlins tilt closely to write about Jared Jones, but my eyes kept straying. Catch a Pittsburgh game, and I’m pretty sure you’ll feel the same way. Oneil Cruz isn’t always the best player on the field. Sometimes, in fact, he’s a hindrance for Pittsburgh’s chances. But one thing you can never say is that he’s boring.

When Cruz is on the basepaths, his speed means trouble. For who? It’s not always clear, because he’s aggressive to a fault. When he’s on third base and the ball is hit on the ground, you better believe he’s going home:

I think that was a good decision, but it’s close. A perfect throw from Josh Bell probably gets him there; Bell had already thrown out Michael A. Taylor at the plate on a similar play earlier in the game, for example. But the throw wasn’t quite perfect, and Christian Bethancourt couldn’t corral it anyway. Cruz would have been safe even if Bethancourt caught it cleanly, but the ball rolled to the backstop to bring in another run.

In the long run, pressure like that tends to pay off, at least in my opinion. Taylor would have been out at first if Cruz didn’t go for it, and the difference between second and third with two outs (Cruz stays) and first and third with two outs (Cruz tries for home and makes an out) isn’t particularly huge. Sure, it’s a chaotic play, but it’s a positive for the Pirates.

Cruz’s defense is a work in progress, but no one can doubt his tools. Sometimes he’ll make a mess of a play that should be easy:

I’m not in love with his decision to stay back on that ball, but Jesús Sánchez is slow enough that it all should have worked out anyway. But staying back meant Cruz had to crow hop and fire a laser to first. He has a huge arm, but it’s not the most accurate, as you can see here. A different setup would have made that play far easier.

On the other hand, sometimes he’ll make a mess out of a play, only to recover because of that cannon arm. This is definitely not how Tom Emanski would teach it:

Cruz handcuffed himself on the initial attempt; instead of being able to make a clean backhanded pick, he got stuck with the ball coming straight at him and flubbed the scoop. For most players, that would be the end of the play, even with a catcher running. But Cruz has a get out of jail free card: He can pick the ball up barehanded and then unleash havoc. The NL Central has a ton of big shortstop arms: Masyn Winn set the tracked record for an infield assist at the Futures Game last summer, and Elly De La Cruz is no slouch. But Cruz might have them both beat when he can set his feet and get into one. Even flat-footed, that throw got on Connor Joe in a hurry.

This game had a ton of Cruz action; not every Pirates game is like that. I watched Monday’s Pirates-Nats tilt hoping for an encore, but Cruz held onto a ball rather than attempt to turn an outrageous double play and was restrained on the basepaths. At the plate, he’s striking out so much that hard contact is barely keeping him on the right side of a 100 wRC+. His trajectory in the majors is still extremely uncertain. Still, I’m going to keep tuning in and hoping for some excitement. You never know what will happen next when Cruz is on the field.

4. The White Sox Get Feisty
It’s going to be a rough season on the south side. The White Sox are a bad team, they don’t have any obvious reinforcements in sight, and they got swept in the season-opening series against the Tigers. The Braves were due up next – after treating the White Sox like a de facto farm system over the winter – and Atlanta romped to a 9-0 rain-shortened victory Monday.

Tuesday promised more of the same. The temperature at game time was a miserable 44 degrees. Remarkably, 12,300 courageous fans showed up, but not all of them were there for the home team. After all, rooting for a club that seems likely to get battered by the best team in baseball on a frigid Tuesday night doesn’t sound particularly appealing, so a meaningful percentage of the audience was audibly cheering for Atlanta. Things were looking grim, in other words.

Something funny happened, though. The White Sox and their fans made a game out of it. Garrett Crochet spun an absolute gem in his second start of the season: seven innings, eight strikeouts, one walk, and one lone run on a Marcell Ozuna homer. When pinch hitter Paul DeJong smacked a solo shot of his own, it gave Chicago a 2-1 lead with only two frames left to play.

That set the stage for an explosive finish. Almost immediately, Atlanta threatened again. Jarred Kelenic worked a one-out walk in the top of the eighth, bringing Ronald Acuña Jr. to the plate. “MVP! MVP!” The Atlanta fans in attendance made their presence known as Acuña worked a walk to put the tying run in scoring position.

But Chicago’s fans, few though they might be, weren’t going quietly. They drowned out the MVP chant in a series of boos, then started a “Let’s go White Sox” cheer as a counter. After a sleepy start, the game suddenly had some juice.

Michael Kopech came in to relieve John Brebbia after that walk, and he promptly walked Ozzie Albies to load the bases. But Yoán Moncada turned a slick double play to keep the Pale Hose out in front. The dugout loved it:

The Sox tacked on an insurance run in the bottom of the eighth, and it turned out they needed it. Kopech had a tough time closing things out. Ozuna smashed his second solo shot to cut the lead to 3-2 before Kopech walked Michael Harris II after an extended plate appearance in which Harris fouled off a string of high fastballs and spit on a low slider. Orlando Arcia wouldn’t go down quietly, either. Kopech again missed with the one slider he threw, and Arcia eventually slapped a cutter through the infield to put the tying run in scoring position for the second inning in a row.

Was this fated to be a crushing loss? Kopech couldn’t find the zone against Travis d’Arnaud, falling behind 3-1 with four straight elevated fastballs. The slider was totally gone; perhaps the adrenaline that came with the potential for his first big league save was too much. The crowd and players were rowdy now, treating this early April game like one with huge implications. Boos rained down after not particularly close pitches got called balls. Braves fans tried to start their own cheers but got repeatedly drowned out by the Sox faithful.

With Acuña on deck, walking d’Arnaud was unacceptable. Kopech tickled the strike zone on 3-1, which brought it all down to a full count pitch. He hit his spot perfectly, and d’Arnaud could only pop it up:

The crowd roared. The lights dimmed as fireworks went off. Kopech looked relieved more than excited as the team celebrated around him. For a day, at least, Chicago’s best was enough to hold off the best team in baseball.

This isn’t how the year will go for the White Sox. They’re headed straight into a rebuild with an unpopular ownership and front office group. I’m not sure that the fans will be able to muster up the same excitement for a July tilt against the Pirates. For a day, though, the atmosphere felt electric and the underdogs came up big. What a magical sport that lets us find moments of excitement even in seasons of despair.

5. Nolan Jones Tries To Do Too Much
Nolan Jones is one of my favorite young players to watch. He’s what you’d get if you took a garden variety power hitting outfielder and stapled a bazooka to his right arm. His outfield defense is below average if you ignore his throws, but you can’t ignore throws. Statcast has him in the 100th percentile for arm strength and runs saved with his arm; in other words, he’s a highlight reel waiting to happen when he picks the ball up. He had 19 outfield assists last year in less than 800 innings, leading baseball while playing 500 fewer innings than second place Lane Thomas.

This year, things haven’t gone quite so well. Jones already has more errors than he did in all of last season. One sequence against the Cubs summed up what I think is going wrong. Everyone knows Jones has a cannon, and so when Christopher Morel singled to left, Ian Happ wasn’t thinking about trying to score from second base:

That’s just smart baserunning. There’s no point in testing the best arm in the game when he’s running toward the ball from a shallow starting position. Only, did you see what happened out in left? Let’s zoom in:

Jones planned to come up firing. He absolutely didn’t need to; as we saw, Happ had already slammed on the brakes. But if you have the best arm in the game, every play probably feels like a chance to throw someone out, the old “every problem looks like a nail to a hammer” issue. He tried to make an infield-style scoop on the run and paid for it. That’s a particularly big error given the game state and location on the field; there’s no one backing Jones up there, and with only one out, it’s not *that* valuable to keep the runner at third anyway.

The ball rolled all the way to the wall, which was bad enough. Happ and trail runner Seiya Suzuki both scored easily. But Jones compounded the error. Let’s see what happened next from Morel’s perspective:

Like Happ, Morel slammed on the brakes as he got to third. After all, Jones has a huge arm and there’s still only one out, so trying to squeeze in the last 90 feet doesn’t make that much sense. Even with his eyes on the play the whole time, he decelerated to a stop. But Jones overcooked his relay throw:

I’m not quite clear about what happened there. That was a situation for a lollipop; the play was over, and all he had to do was return the ball to the infield. Maybe he got a bad grip on the ball, maybe he slipped as he was throwing it, but he just spiked it into the ground and Ryan McMahon couldn’t handle the wild carom.

This feels to me like a clear case of Jones trying to do too much. He appears to be pressing, trying to throw the world out after last year’s phenomenal performance. But part of having a huge arm is knowing when you don’t need to use it. That experience comes with time, and I’m confident that he’ll figure it out, but his aggression has hurt the Rockies so far. Oh, and those other errors? Sometimes you just miss one:

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley remind people to vote in their preseason predictions game, discuss the completion of the season preview series, and then (10:15) analyze Shohei Ohtani’s remarks from Monday and preview the rest of the 2024 Los Angeles Dodgers season with The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, followed (1:15:31) by a 2024 Colorado Rockies preview with The Denver Gazette’s Luke Zahlmann, plus a postscript on the Diamondbacks signing Jordan Montgomery (1:55:50) and a recap of preview guests’ goals for each team this year (2:01:25).

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Up until now, the Rockies had made very little noise this offseason. After agreeing to extensions with Germán Márquez and Charlie Blackmon just before the 2023 season wrapped up, Colorado spent a mere $3.5 million on major league free agent deals in the six months since, the fewest of any team in the majors. Yet, at the tail end of a long, quiet winter, the Rockies finally made headlines, when on Sunday they signed 22-year-old Ezequiel Tovar to a long-term contract extension. The deal, which begins right away, will pay Tovar $63.5 million over the next seven years. After that, the Rockies have a $20.5 million team option for 2031, the shortstop’s age-29 season.

Across three offseasons at the helm for Colorado, general manager Bill Schmidt has largely avoided multi-year free agent deals, with one notable exception: Kris Bryant and the seven-year, $182 million pact he signed before the 2022 season. Over the past two winters, the Rockies are one of only three teams not to have signed a single multi-year free agent deal; the other two clubs, the Pirates and Orioles, have outspent Colorado by totals of $37.71 million and $10.13 million, respectively. However, free agency isn’t the only way for teams to keep players around for longer periods of time. Under Schmidt, the Rockies have signed eight players to multi-year extensions; only the Braves have extended more players on multi-year deals in that span. Atlanta has gotten far more extension attention, but this is how Colorado operates, too.

Even so, the Tovar deal represents a different approach for the Rockies because it is the first time that Schmidt has extended a player with fewer than four years of service. It’s also the longest extension the Rockies have awarded since February 2019, when they signed Nolan Arenado to an eight-year, $260 million deal that began in 2020. Moreover, while we have started to see more and more pre-arb players signing long-term extensions around the majors, many of those players either are stars or have star potential. Perhaps the only good comp for Tovar’s extension is the eight-year, $50 million deal Keibert Ruiz signed with the Nationals after putting up a 91 wRC+ and 1.8 WAR in 2022, his first full season. Then again, even Ruiz arguably had a higher ceiling at the time. Tovar might be in a class of his own when it comes to low-ceiling, high-floor youngsters signing lucrative long-term deals.

Entering the 2023 season, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin ranked Tovar no. 41 on our Top 100 Prospects list, describing him as “a fantastic defensive shortstop” with “poor plate discipline” that “somewhat undermines his excellent bat-to-ball skill.” One year later, Tovar is no longer a prospect, but that remains the prevailing report. He finished his debut season with the lowest walk rate and the second-highest O-Swing% among qualified NL batters. He also finished with 16 OAA and 13 DRS; the only shortstop to outpace him in both metrics was Dansby Swanson. Despite his 70 wRC+, worst among qualified NL hitters, Tovar finished his rookie season with 1.6 WAR. That’s hardly star-level performance, but a 1.6-WAR player is still a big league regular.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: Tovar’s offensive numbers last season were pitiful. One of the only areas in which he was above average was batting average, and Coors Field likely inflated that number. His plate discipline was dreadful, as expected, but so were his contact skills, which came as something of a surprise. Tovar ranked 66th out of 72 qualified NL hitters in contact rate, and he wasn’t just whiffing on pitches outside the zone. While his O-Contact% was poor, his Z-Contact% also came in below league average.

On the bright side, when he did manage to put the ball in play, Tovar showed flashes of his promising hit tool. His .378 xwOBAcon was a few ticks above league average, thanks to his line drive tendencies. He ranked in the 71st percentile in Baseball Savant’s Sweet-Spot% and finished seventh among qualified NL players in line drive rate. If he can make more contact, especially on pitches in the strike zone, his offensive numbers will improve even if he never adds a lick of discipline to his game. If he can improve his plate discipline, then all the better. For what it’s worth, he significantly improved his walk rate during his final season in the minor leagues, prompting his Double-A manager, Chris Denorfia, to rave about Tovar’s growth. “He’s made this developmental jump,” Denorfia told David Laurila in 2022. “Something clicked to where he’s recognizing situations where pitchers are going to try to get him to chase.” Plate discipline is a different animal in the majors than in the minors, but still, it’s worth acknowledging that this is a skill he has successfully improved in the past.

Tovar also showed off 69th-percentile sprint speed in 2023. He won’t ever be a weapon on the basepaths, but with speed like that, he should be a better base runner than his numbers last year would suggest; he went 11-for-16 on stolen base attempts and was worth -0.6 BsR. Long story short, this is a player with much more offensive potential than we saw last season, and he has a strong enough glove to allow him to nurse his growing pains at the highest level while still contributing positive value to his club.

Courtesy of Dan Szymborski, here is what the ZiPS projections envision for Tovar over the next eight years:

With projections like that, ZiPS would give Tovar $92 million over seven years. That’s more than he’ll make even if the Rockies pick up his team option for an eighth year.

With all that in mind, it’s easy to see why the Rockies offered Tovar a long-term extension. We’ve already seen his floor, and it’s rather sturdy — he can be a valuable player even if he’s the worst hitter in the league. The Rockies could do a heck of a lot worse than pay $9 million per year for seven seasons of a 1.5-win shortstop. What’s more, it won’t take much for this deal to pay dividends in Colorado. If Tovar’s hit tool progresses against big league pitching, he would blossom into an above-average shortstop throughout his twenties.

As for Tovar, his youth has gifted him the rare opportunity to cash in now without giving up the chance to sign another long-term deal. His $63.5 million guarantee is more than the vast majority of players will earn in their careers, yet he can still reach free agency before his 30th birthday. If Colorado picks up its club option, Tovar will have to wait another year to test the open market. Yet, if the Rockies are comfortable paying $20.5 million for his services (even the Rockies, and even in 2031 dollars), that suggests Tovar will be playing well enough to cash in on the free agent market at 30 years old. The two or three free agent years he is losing aren’t nothing, especially for a glove-first player. Still, Tovar had to sacrifice something for lifelong financial security, and it’s not difficult to understand why he made that choice.

Ultimately, this is a rock solid move for both sides. The Rockies are betting they secured three additional years with an excellent shortstop at price tag well below market value. If that doesn’t work out, they’re only slightly overpaying one of the better defensive players in baseball. Meanwhile, Tovar gets to work out his kinks at the MLB level without ever having to worry about money, and if everything goes according to plan, he can still sign a lucrative free agent deal in the 2030s. Now, both sides can get to work on what they need to do next: Tovar will try to improve his plate discipline, while the Rockies will look to acquire, develop, and yes, extend the stars who can help them escape the NL West basement.

I’ve had depth on my mind a lot recently. That’s because a lot of us here at FanGraphs have, and it’s turned into some pretty cool work that I previewed last week. That’s probably the last you’ll hear about that little project for a bit while we keep refining it and trying to figure out how to use the general concept in different ways. But there was one takeaway in the comments section that I found pretty amazing and I’m going to riff on it today because hey, it’s still early March and baseball news is in short supply.

Remove the top 10 players from 28 teams in baseball – all but the Rockies and Nationals – and look at every team’s winning percentage against neutral opposition. The Rockies are projected 29th out of 30 teams, ahead of only the White-Sox-Minus-10s. The Nationals, meanwhile, are 27th, ahead of just the Angels-Minus-10s and then those Rockies and the Pale-Hose-Minus-10s.

That just sounds wrong. Remove the Mets’ best 10 players, to pick a so-so divisional rival for one of our benighted franchises, and their best remaining player would be either Brett Baty or Luis Severino, both projected for 1.6 WAR. Again, that’s their best player in this hypothetical world. And we have them down as a .425 team. We think the Nats are at .408 at full strength! It’s truly hard to wrap your head around how that could be possible. Read the rest of this entry »

The Colorado Rockies are a bit of a laughingstock at the moment. I say this intending no undue disrespect; from a player evaluation and roster-building standpoint, they’re one of the handful of organizations in baseball that doesn’t meet the bare standard of competence. They’ve missed the playoffs five years running and lost 197 games over the past two seasons.

Unfortunately, this fallow period is the historical norm in Colorado. The Rockies strung together a pair of surprising playoff appearances in 2017 and 2018; apart from those two campaigns, which netted a total of one playoff win, the Rockies haven’t finished over .500 since 2010. In 31 seasons, they’ve never won the NL West.

And there isn’t really an end in sight. No Orioles-style bumper crop of prospects that can turn 100 losses to 100 wins in 18 months. Our playoff odds didn’t give the Rockies the dreaded goose egg, but it came down to the wire. The Rockies are projected to go 63-99, with a 0.1% chance of making the postseason. Both numbers are the worst in baseball. The projected 31-game gap to first place isn’t the largest in the league, if only because the Nationals are just as bad and the computers see the Braves as better than the Dodgers. (So do I, Ohtani and all, for what it’s worth.) Read the rest of this entry »

By most any measure, Rockies outfielder Nolan Jones had an excellent rookie season in 2023. He finished fourth in National League Rookie of the Year voting behind unanimous winner Corbin Carroll, Kodai Senga, and James Outman. He posted a .297/.389/.542 batting line in 106 games, becoming the first Rockie rookie to go 20-20 in franchise history. His .395 wOBA ranked 10th among the 212 players with at least 400 plate appearances. He was an above-average fielder, spending most of his time in the outfield corners, with his fairly poor range more than made up for by his elite arm (OAA, DRS, and UZR all agree that he was a plus defender). He led Colorado with 3.0 BsR, and finished as one of 12 players in the majors with as many as 3.0 runs above average in each of batting, base running, and fielding value:

Read the rest of this entry »