Though many predicted heading into the 2025 season that the Orioles’ weak starting rotation and general inactivity over the offseason would come back to haunt them, even Baltimore’s biggest skeptics weren’t prognosticating that the team would sit well under .500 and 7.5 games out of playoff position at the end of July. Such as it is, the Orioles spent this year’s trade deadline turning over roughly a third of their roster. Over the last week or so, the O’s have traded relievers Gregory Soto, Seranthony Domínguez, and Andrew Kittredge, along with infielders Ryan O’Hearn and Ramón Urías. Then on Thursday afternoon, Anthony DiComo reported that Cedric Mullins was on his way to the Mets; a few hours later, Jeff Passan broke the news that Charlie Morton would be joining the Tigers. The only healthy pending free agent who wasn’t traded out of Baltimore is Tomoyuki Sugano, and with Zach Eflin hitting the IL mere hours before the deadline, Sugano is now a load-bearing member of the rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a big deadline for relief pitchers, even for teams that aren’t operating in the Mason Miller or Jhoan Duran tier. The Orioles bullpen continues to get picked over like a charcuterie board: Andrew Kittredge is Chicago-bound, with the Cubs sending Wilfri De La Cruz the other way.

The Tigers beefed up their bullpen by picking up Paul Sewald from the Guardians in exchange for a player to be named later or cash. A few hours later, Detroit sent minor league pitchers Josh Randall and R.J. Sales to Washington for Kyle Finnegan and added Codi Heuer from Texas for minor league depth. Finally, the Dodgers are bringing Brock Stewart back from Minnesota, with James Outman going in the other direction.

Let’s take those in order. Read the rest of this entry »

Not every deadline trade is a dramatic one, but that’s OK — teams need to make low-key moves, too. Do you think James Bond saved the world every day? No! Some days, he had to do paperwork. Some days, he had to go to the dentist, or take the car to the gas station to vacuum up the leftover Cool Ranch Doritos crumbs on the floor after they spilled out on his drive from Baltim… I mean Bristol. So let’s catch up on some of Wednesday’s smaller moves.

The Seattle Mariners acquired left-handed reliever Caleb Ferguson from the Pittsburgh Pirates for right-handed starter Jeter Martinez

The Mariners have been operating with a shortage of southpaws this season, with Gabe Speier mostly being the only lefty on the active roster. Speier’s been good, holding lefties to a .609 OPS this season, but he can’t pitch in every playoff game, and Andrés Muñoz, who handles lefties quite well, generally doesn’t make his entrance before the ninth inning, so a depth-targeted upgrade to give the team another option down the stretch and during October makes a lot of sense. Caleb Ferguson has shed some strikeouts this year as he’s more heavily integrated his sinker into his repertoire, but he’s compensated for that loss by shedding a walk per nine from last season and becoming one of the hardest pitchers in baseball to make good contact against. Of all the pitchers with at least 30 innings this season, only Adrian Morejon has allowed a lower hard-hit percentage. Ferguson gives the Mariners a second lefty in the ‘pen they can count on, something they couldn’t really say about Joe Jacques or Tayler Saucedo. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tigers didn’t wait long. On Monday, the team announced that starter Reese Olson would miss the rest of the season (and possibly the postseason) with a right shoulder strain, and that same day, Detroit filled Olson’s rotation spot by swinging a trade within the division for Minnesota right-hander Chris Paddack. The full deal brought Paddack and reliever Randy Dobnak to the Tigers in exchange for 19-year-old catching prospect Enrique Jimenez. The trade represented an attempt to stabilize an increasingly banged-up Detroit rotation for an increasingly important stretch run. For the Twins, the move kicked off what has the potential to be a significant sell-off.

We’ll start with the Twins side. “It’s just crazy how fast it can turn around,” Paddack told Dan Hayes of The Athletic, who initially reported news of the deal along with Ken Rosenthal. “World just got twisted upside down, to say the least. It stinks. This business is out of our control sometimes. I was really pulling for us, as a Twin. I was hoping we would make some moves and go get that Wild Card spot. I’m excited for this new opportunity with a new team.” It’s not immediately clear who will take Paddack’s spot in the Minnesota rotation. The Twins have a bullpen game planned for today. Paddack will start tomorrow, and he’s lined up to face his old squad when the Tigers and Twins face off a week from today. The Twins broadcast made a point of circling the date on the calendar during last night’s game. Read the rest of this entry »

In the final days before the All-Star break, the Mariners threw 60 pitches to Gleyber Torres. I swear he didn’t make a single incorrect swing decision.

Fastball jammed inside on a 2-2 count? He’ll spoil it.

Slider dropped in the chase zone, low and away? Easy take.

Fastball pinned to the top edge in a full count? That’s a walk.

What’s a pitcher to do? Torres went 5-for-10 in the series with two doubles and two walks. It wasn’t the flashiest series, and it’s not really the flashiest batting line. He’s hitting .282/.390/.421 this year, which scans to me more as “very good” than “great.” But if there were an award for “most annoying at-bat,” I’d submit a nomination for Torres. Read the rest of this entry »

On last Monday’s episode of the Rates and Barrels podcast, Derek VanRiper raised a curious contradiction. “[Riley Greene is] first percentile in squared-up percentage, but 97th percentile in barrel rate, which — I’m sure there’s an explanation, I don’t know what it is just yet.” In response, Eno Sarris asked, “How can he barrel it without squaring it up?” It was a great question. In colloquial use, a squared-up ball is synonymous with a barreled ball. So what’s going on here, exactly?

The first thing to know: A squared-up ball is not necessarily a well-hit ball, as Davy Andrews highlighted when these stats were first made public last June. To understand why, one must first become acquainted with the Statcast definition of squared up. The MLB glossary entry for squared-up rate defines it thusly: “A swing’s squared-up rate tells us how much of the highest possible exit velocity available (based on the physics related to the swing speed and pitch speed) a batter was able to obtain – it is, at its simplest, how much exit velocity did you get as a share of how much exit velocity was possible based on your swing speed and the speed of the pitch.” If a hitter generates 80% of their possible exit velocity on a given swing and the ball is put in play, the batted ball is considered squared up.

We might quibble over the simplicity of that definition. In any case, as Davy showed, squared-up balls can be hit at super low speeds — if all it means is that a hitter channelled 80% of the potential exit velocity, then 80% of a half-swing is not very much exit velocity.

It’s also possible to do damage without making frequent flush contact; Greene shows us how. As Ben Clemens wrote just a couple of weeks ago, Greene is posting yet another excellent offensive campaign despite one of the higher strikeout rates among qualified hitters. He’s doing it unconventionally, swinging a ton in early counts to maximize damage. He’s also unconventional in another sense: He barrels the ball a ton while hardly ever squaring it up.

Part of the explanation for how this works is tied to the nature of swinging hard. When the bat speed statistics first dropped, it immediately became clear that there is a strong negative relationship between bat speed and the ability to square the ball up, at least by the Statcast definition. Click over to the bat tracking leaderboard, and the first thing you’ll see is this image, which shows the negative correlation between these two variables:

That’s no surprise. By the Statcast definition of a squared-up ball, slow swingers will always come out on top, because swinging slower allows for greater barrel accuracy. But it’s not all bad news for hard swingers. They also tend to produce the most valuable type of batted ball: a barrel.

Naturally, bat speed is correlated — positively — with barrel rate. A barrel, by the Statcast definition, is any type of batted ball where the expected batting average is at least .500 and the expected slugging percentage is at least 1.500. Barrels tend to be clustered in a pretty narrow exit velocity/launch angle range, somewhere north of 100 mph in terms of exit velocity and between 15 and 40 degrees or so of launch angle:

As the scatterplot below shows, the relationship between bat speed and barrel rate is extremely tight:

Greene’s average bat speed — 75.2 mph — is in the 91st percentile, so on some level, a high barrel rate and a low squared-up rate is to be expected. Even so, the spread between these two metrics is striking. His barrel rate is higher than his squared-up rate! Only one other hitter has a lower squared-up-minus-barrel rate — Aaron Judge. And that gives a hint into how, exactly, Greene is pulling this off.

Judge racks up an obscene number of barrels. Already, he’s mashed 60 this year, good for a 25.9% barrel rate. Like Greene, his squared-up rate is low — not as low, but comfortably a standard deviation below the mean. But also like Greene, Judge is amazing at converting his squared-up balls into barrels.

Nobody comes particularly close to Judge in this metric. Nearly 40% of his squared-up balls are converted into barrels, by far the highest rate in the league. (The league average is 13.6%.) As you might have guessed, Greene also excels here, ranking fifth among all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances:

So that’s the first part of this equation. Greene might not square the ball up that often, but when he does, it’s frequently crushed. The other part of the equation? Greene hits a ton of foul balls.

Greene’s 315 foul balls rank fifth among all hitters. When Greene makes contact with the ball, it goes foul 56% of the time. That mark ranks 11th out of all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances; besides Cal Raleigh, nobody else in Greene’s squared-up-to-barrel cohort fouls off nearly as many balls:

All of those foul balls — in addition to his seventh percentile whiff rate — contribute to the squared-up percentage denominator, sinking Greene’s squared-up rate to the very bottom of qualified hitters. Importantly, foul balls are not part of the barrel rate denominator. The barrel rate that shows up on the Savant player page popsicles is a measure of barrels per batted ball event. A bunch of foul balls do nothing to affect a hitter’s barrel rate, but they’ll go a long way toward tanking a squared-up rate.

It isn’t necessarily intuitive to think that a hitter could be so good at barreling the ball and so bad at squaring it up. But breaking it down in this fashion, I think it starts to clarify this ostensible conundrum. Barrels are hard to come by. Even Judge, the barrel GOAT, hits one just over a quarter of the time he puts a ball in play. To be a barrel king like Judge or Greene, you don’t need to crush that many baseballs, at least on an absolute basis. But you better make sure that when the ball is in play, it gets smushed.

More than anything, I think these two data points paint a compelling picture of the modern hitter. Greene, perhaps more than any other hitter, goes for broke, almost like the anti-Luis Arraez. His swing tilt is the steepest in the sport. He mishits a bunch of pitches. He whiffs a ton. But when he connects, he does damage. And even though those damage events are relatively infrequent, they’re valuable enough to make him one of the better hitters in baseball.

Coming into 2025, you might not have expected Alejandro Kirk and Ernie Clement to play central roles on a playoff contender. Neither player was an above-average hitter last season; in fact, each hit for a 93 wRC+ while playing regularly for a team that won just 74 games. Yet the pair rank first and second in position player WAR on the Blue Jays, thanks not only to improved offense but exceptional glovework, with Kirk battling the Giants’ Patrick Bailey for the top spot in two catching metrics, and Clement ranking among the best third basemen while also posting strong metrics in limited duty at the three other infield positions. The pair have not only helped the Blue Jays to a 47-38 record and the top AL Wild Card position, but also the top ranking in my annual midseason defensive breakdown.

Kirk and Clement aren’t Toronto’s only defensive stalwarts. Second baseman Andrés Giménez and center fielder Myles Straw, a pair of light-hitting glove whizzes acquired from the Guardians in separate trades this past winter, have been strong at their respective positions, with the latter helping to cover for the absences of Daulton Varsho. A Gold Glove winner last year, Varsho missed the first month of this season recovering from right rotator cuff surgery, and returned to the injured list on June 1 due to a strained left hamstring. Even in limited duty, Straw, Varsho, and Giménez — who missed about four weeks due to a quad strain, with Clement filling in at second for most of that time — have all rated as three to five runs above average according to Statcast’s Fielding Runs Value (FRV), and five to eight above average according to Defensive Runs Saved (DRS). Clement has totaled 12 DRS and 10 FRV at the four infield spots; in 359.2 innings at third, he’s second in the majors in both DRS (7) and FRV (5).

This is the third year in a row I’ve taken a midseason dip into the alphabet soup of defensive metrics, including Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our own catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages). One longtime standby, Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), has been retired, which required me to adjust my methodology. Read the rest of this entry »

Cam Schlittler has emerged as the top pitching prospect in the New York Yankees organization. His ability to overpower hitters is a big reason why. In four starts since being promoted to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre on June 3, the 6-foot-6, 225-pound right-hander has logged a 1.69 ERA and a 40.2% strikeout rate over 21-and-a-third innings. Counting his 53 frames at Double-A Somerset, Schlittler has a 2.18 ERA and a 33.0% strikeout rate on the season.

The 2022 seventh-rounder out of Northeastern University is averaging 96.5 mph with his heater, but more than velocity plays into the offering’s effectiveness. As Eric Longenhagen wrote back in January, Schlittler’s “size and arm angle create downhill plane on his mid-90s fastball akin to a runaway truck ramp, while the backspinning nature of the pitch also creates riding life.”

I asked the 24-year-old Walpole, Massachusetts native about the characteristics our lead prospect analyst described in his report.

“Arm slot-wise it’s nothing crazy,” Schlittler said in our spring training conversation. “I’m more of a high-three-quarters kind of guy, but what I didn’t realize until looking at video a couple months ago is that I have really quick arm speed. My mechanics are kind of slow, and then my arm path is really fast, so the ball kind of shoots out a little bit. With my height, release point— I get good extension — and how fast my arm is moving, the ball gets on guys quicker than they might expect.” Read the rest of this entry »

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

When Riley Greene debuted in 2022, he had a tiny bit of a strikeout problem. His overall line – .253/.321/.362 in cavernous Comerica Park – was roughly league average, but it would have been better than that if he had struck out less than 28.7% of the time. Over the subsequent two years, he reined that issue in some: 27.4% in 2023 and 26.7% in 2024. He also got better at the plate while doing so. And this year, he’s off to a scorching start, .291/.345/.530 with a career-best 145 wRC+. So he conquered the strikeout demons, right? Wrong. He’s striking out a ghastly 30.7% of the time. This requires further explanation.

One of the classic paradoxes driving the way baseball looks today is that strikeouts don’t appear to be as bad for hitters as one might think. There’s essentially no correlation between batter strikeout rate and overall batter production. You could crunch the numbers to verify that – or you could just consider Luis Arraez and Aaron Judge. But while we pretty much all know this by now – the Judges and Harpers and Ohtanis of the world crack a few eggs while they’re depositing omelets over the outfield fences – it doesn’t feel as true at the extreme high end of the spectrum. After all, Joey Gallo’s outlandish 38% strikeout rate obviously held him back. But Gallo is the easiest example, and discussing his strikeout woes doesn’t quite prove a whole lot. So let’s look at the 10 hitters striking out most this year:

Aside from Greene, that’s not an impressive group. Stowers is the best of the bunch, but even including him, the aggregate statistics are quite poor. This isn’t some list of overmatched hitters doing absolutely nothing right, ether; there’s fearsome power here pretty much across the board. They’re just striking out so much that the overall package doesn’t work. So why does Greene look so different from the rest?

It starts, as MLB.com’s Jared Greenspan pointed out, with aggression. Greene spent his first years in the majors as a patient hitter, chasing less often than average and taking a few pitches in the zone as the price of his patience. My favorite proxy for hitter aggression is how often they swing at first pitches in the strike zone. The league as a whole swings at about 45% of such pitches. Greene was right around there in his first three years in the big leagues: 42.4%, 45.2%, 46.1%, respectively. Then he decided to stop letting those cookies go by. This year, he’s swinging at 56% of first-pitch strikes.

The reason for this is simple: These are good pitches to hit. From 2022 through 2024, Greene put up great numbers when he made contact with a first-pitch strike. He batted .425 and slugged .770 on them, with underlying contact metrics to match. He’s doing even more damage this year, .448 with a .966 slug. More importantly, though, he’s damaging these pitches more frequently because he’s swinging at them more often. These tend to be the best pitches to hit all plate appearance; why not take a big hack at them?

There’s a cost to doing this. Greene is also swinging more often at bad first pitches; his 0-0 chase rate is up to 18.5% from roughly 12% in his career before the season began. That sounds bad, but consider that he’s upped his in-zone swing rate by 10 percentage points. Because of this aggression, he is no longer taking as many hittable pitches for strikes. Take a look at how often he’s gotten ahead, fallen behind, and put the ball in play over time:

As you can see, this has been a great trade-off. He’s putting the ball in play more frequently than ever and falling behind less often as a result. Aggression pays, particularly early in the count and particularly for hitters as powerful as Greene.

That smidgen of extra production against hittable pitches in early counts helps explain some of Greene’s boosted production on batted balls this year – his .525 wOBACON and .504 xwOBACON are both career highs (here’s why I like these BACON stats). Want to mash the ball? Aim at easier pitches.

That said, Greene’s aggressive approach to pitches in the zone has come with some swing-and-miss downside. Break the plate down into more than just “in or out” and you can see the trade-off more clearly:

Naturally, Greene is swinging more at everything in his attempt to drive more hittable pitches. That makes sense; he didn’t simply wave a magic wand and start swinging at the good ones more without adjusting his approach to all pitches. He’s not hacking blindly at everything off the plate, or even close to that, but it makes plenty of sense that he’s taking a few more ill-advised swings along with all the extra good ones.

Normally, you’d expect this to be a self-correcting loop. Greene gets more aggressive, so pitchers leave the strike zone more often, which tilts Greene back toward selectivity as he gets ahead in the count more often and can choose pitches to hunt. Early in the count, pitchers are treating him about the same as always – he’s powerful, and so they try to nibble around the corners of the zone, accepting extra balls in exchange for avoiding meatballs. But with two strikes, particularly if you exclude 3-2 counts, they’re not giving him so much as the time of day. He sees strikes on a mere 35.3% of 0-2, 1-2, and 2-2 counts, one of the lowest marks in baseball.

That feels like a wise adjustment by opposing pitchers. This guy is powerful and wants to swing, so why bail him out by giving him something to hit? So he faces a steady diet of breaking balls in the dirt, high fastballs, sinkers off the plate in, basically everything you can think of. There’s an adjustment to be made here, starting aggressive and dialing it back with two strikes instead of maintaining that aggression all the way through. In 2024, he chased 30.3% of the time in those counts. This year, he’s up to 39.1%. That’s from “much less than average” to “more than average” if you’re keeping score at home.

The end result of this newfound aggression and pitchers’ avoidance of the zone is that Greene is striking out on 22.8% of the two-strike pitches he sees, the highest mark of his career. He’s also getting to two-strike counts more frequently thanks to his early-count swings. He’s fouling more pitches off than ever before, as well. That comes with the swing-hard-early territory; Greene will happily take some foul balls in exchange for all the damage he’s doing when he keeps the ball fair.

As far as I can tell, Greene is like no one else in the high-strikeout cohort. He’s not up there because he’s a helpless hacker who can’t make contact. He has a good sense of the strike zone, one he’s displayed in multiple seasons. His swing is geared for power, so he’ll always swing over his fair share of balls, but plenty of hitters with power swings still have good two-strike approaches. Greene just hasn’t put together his new early-count plan – attack pitches in the zone and accept a few extra chases to do it – with a two-strike approach. He’s chasing too often, and as best as I can tell, it’s because he’s swinging more frequently than ever before early in the count. It’s tough to switch mental gears, particularly while you’re learning a new approach, and I think Greene has fallen into that trap so far.

All this is to say Greene is hardly doomed to strike out 30% of the time for the rest of the year. In fact, I think his early-count aggression will end up lowering his strikeout rate, not raising it. He’s giving pitchers fewer easy options by hunting drivable pitches early. And in previous seasons, he’s already demonstrated the ability to tighten up and manage the zone late in the count. He’s still just 24 years old and only in his sixth year of professional baseball (excluding the canceled 2020 minor league season). Unlike most of the players who strike out as often as he does, he seems to have no fatal flaw that will keep him in that group. It’s just a matter of making all the parts of his ever-improving game work together, and I definitely wouldn’t bet against him fixing it sooner or later.

It’s a credit to his incredible talent that his horrid strikeout rate hasn’t really mattered so far. I love his new approach this year overall. When you have this level of power, letting early-count strikes go by is a cardinal sin. I think he’ll figure out how to modulate that as necessary – when he gets behind and pitchers start fishing for strikeouts, basically. But if you’re looking for a testament to Greene’s talent, I can’t think of any better one than his performance this year. He’s striking out a truly unconscionable amount while he tries to change the way he works at the plate, and yet it doesn’t matter. He’s just that powerful, and even though he’s aggressive, he’s not flailing pointlessly at pitches out of the zone and blunting his results on contact. The strikeouts will almost certainly come down. The new, early-count damage? That’s here to stay.