Matt Blewett, Chet Strange, Bruce Kluckhohn-Imagn Images
I was starting to get worried that Griffin Jax was going to be left behind in the Twins’ wholesale liquidation of their bullpen. Fear not; the hardest thrower in the Air Force Reserve is headed out after all. The Rays currently sit two games under .500 and 3 1/2 games out of a Wild Card spot, with a 9.9% chance of making the playoffs. That long-shot contender status did not dampen their enthusiasm for Jax in the slightest. Tampa Bay sent the talented but inconsistent starter Taj Bradley to Minnesota in exchange for Jax, who is under team control through 2027.
D. Ross Cameron, Kamil Krzaczynski, Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images
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 »
In the offense edition, I used a game show format to evaluate whether the perspective offered by BaseRuns has a point, or if there’s something its methodology is overlooking. We’ll keep that framework going for the defenses as well. Here’s a reminder of how it works:
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.
When I volunteered to write about the Aaron Civale-for-Andrew Vaughn swap, I thought I was going to be covering the most interesting trade of the month. At the very least, I thought I’d be putting out the most interesting trade write-up of the day. It’s not that Civale and Vaughn are huge household names, but you don’t often see notable major leaguers traded for one another in June. Trade season isn’t supposed to have started yet! I looked back through the FanGraphs archives to find pieces with the “trade” tag that dealt with June transactions. I found six others:
Then, of course, there’s one you’re reading right now. Of those seven June trades we’ve covered, four took place before the last week of the month: the two from 2019 and the two from the past 72 hours.
Do I feel slighted that mine is no longer the biggest trade story of the month, the week, or even the day? That through no fault of my own and no fault of my editors’, my story has been relegated to a secondary position? No, not really. But if I did, I’d be able to relate quite well to Civale. Last week, the Brewers informed the right-hander he’d be moving to the bullpen. Civale was understandably upset. He’s in his free agent walk year, and moving to a long relief role could diminish his earning potential in the offseason. What’s more, aside from one postseason appearance last fall, he has never worked out of the bullpen in his professional career. Above all else, he remains a perfectly capable back-end starting pitcher. He didn’t cost himself a rotation spot with his poor performance; the Brewers simply had five superior options. Read the rest of this entry »
Just over a year ago, the Brewers made the best kind of baseball history: weird baseball history. On May 31, 2024, they hosted the White Sox in Milwaukee, shellacking them 12-5. That part wasn’t weird. It’s hard to imagine anything less weird than the 2024 White Sox losing a baseball game (unless it’s the 2025 Rockies losing a baseball game). The weird part was how the Brewers beat the White Sox. They put up 23 hits, and 16 of those hits came on groundballs. That’s the most groundball base hits ever recorded since the pitch tracking era began in 2008. Would you like to see them all? Of course you would.
That’s what a record looks like. Groundball after groundball finding the various nooks and crannies that made the 2024 White Sox defense so similar to an English muffin. We’ve been waiting until this game’s anniversary to write about it. According to Baseball Savant, since 2008, only one other team has surpassed 12 groundball base hits in a single game. The White Sox tallied 15 against the Tigers on September 14, 2017. And that’s it. That’s the only team that came within three groundball hits of Milwaukee. First, let’s talk about how the Brewers pulled off this feat of worm-burning ingenuity.
As with any record, a fair bit of luck was involved. Balls took crazy hops off the mound and the first base bag. The Brewers hit a perfectly placed chopper and sent a ball hugging the third base line on a check swing. They wouldn’t have broken the record if any one of those balls had bounced another way. But as the saying goes, luck is the residue of design, and there was plenty of design involved here too. Read the rest of this entry »
A papal conclave is the ultimate news story. It’s an event shrouded in ceremony and secrecy, which takes place incredibly rarely; only three times in the past 40 years, in fact. Even in this era when seeing everything has made the mysterious mundane, the world is left waiting in total ignorance for news of white smoke. Billions of observers, Catholic or not, look on in rapt fascination. And when the conclave produced the first American-born pope, Leo XIV, things only got more fascinating.
I come from a Catholic extended family, but for the most part, I was a devoted low-church protestant in my youth and am largely irreligious now. Nevertheless, I’ve always held the Vatican in a certain esteem. Its grandeur, its rituals, its dense and ancient jargon — all of that looks mystical and romantic from a distance. Is it the sole conduit to Almighty God? Perhaps not, from where I sit. But it’s a fascinating institution nonetheless.
That cloud of fairy tale wonder evaporated in an instant on Thursday, when the cardinal electors chose Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago to inherit St. Peter’s throne. Read the rest of this entry »
Lucas Giolito is looking to return to form following elbow surgery that cost him all of last year. Now 30 years old and in his first season on mound with the Boston Red Sox, Giolito has made a pair of starts — one solid, another squalid — in which he has surrendered 15 hits and nine runs over 9 2/3 innings. At his best, he’s been a top-of-the-rotation pitcher. From 2019-2021, the 6-foot-6 right-hander fashioned a 3.47 ERA and a 3.54 FIP while making a team-high 72 starts for the Chicago White Sox.
Turn the clock back 10 years, and Giolito sat atop our 2015 Washington Nationals Top Prospects list. Our then-lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel was understandably bullish about Giolito, writing that the 2012 first-round draft pick had true no. 1 upside.
What did Giolito’s FanGraphs scouting report look like at the time? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Giolito to respond to it.
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“Giolito was nationally known by scouts all the way back to when he hit 95 mph at age 15.”
“I always threw hard,” Giolito said. “I was one of the hardest throwers in Little League and everything like that. I started long tossing a lot around the time I got to high school, and just kept building and building. I think I hit 90 when I was 14, and then 95 maybe closer to my 16th birthday. So yeah, it kept going up until I blew my elbow out.
“Probably,” Giolito responded when asked if the velocity was too much, too early. “There wasn’t too much understanding on the medical side, like strengthening, stability — all the stuff that we’re doing now to maintain the little muscles, the big muscles, to support your body when it’s outputting that much force. I was also very skinny. My shoulder blades winged out. I didn’t have much muscular development at that age, but I was moving very fast. It eventually caught up to me.”
“[He] was in the running to go 1-1 as one of the top prep pitchers of all time, until he was shut down with a sprained UCL in his elbow. This led to an expected Tommy John surgery one outing after he signed for an $800,000 overslot bonus as the 16th overall pick.”
“I remember having an outing where I think the Astros’ GM came to see me pitch in person,” Giolito said. “I pitched really well that day. I was on top of the world. It was like, ‘Oh my God, I might be the first-overall pick if I just continue what I’m doing for the rest of the season.’ It was the next outing, or maybe two outings later, where I hurt my elbow. I had to shut down. We didn’t want to do the full TJ yet, because we thought that would hurt me in the draft. Plus, if I was going to get TJ, I wanted to be in a professional organization where you get access to the best care. I tried to rehab it.
“Going into the draft, I had no idea,” added Giolito, a product of Harvard-Westlake High School. “I thought I’d be picked somewhere in the first three rounds, that a team would take a flier on me. I didn’t know I’d be in the first round. That was kind of the beginning of the pre-draft-deal era, but I literally was watching the draft on the TV when they said my name. That was when I found out I was drafted in the first round.
“The Nationals picked me. I was a prep arm with a blown-out elbow, which is a big, big risk. I have Stephen Strasburg to thank, because he was a big prospect who came up, blew his elbow out, got Tommy John, and had a relatively successful recovery from that. The Nationals kind of saw me in that same vein. It was, ‘OK, we’ll get this guy. He’ll have TJ, but we feel confident with this.’”
“The stuff was all the way back this year as he dominated Low-A at age 19/20 in his first full year coming off of surgery. The Nationals were understandably conservative with pitch and innings counts.”
“My first full season back they had my innings count at 100,” Giolito recalled. “I got to 100 innings and they shut me down, and that sucked, because our team was so good. Our starting rotation consisted of me, Reynaldo López, Nick Pivetta. Austin Voth was in the rotation, but he got sent up to High-A at some point that year. We had a really nasty one-two-three with me, Reynaldo, and Nick, but then I got shut down with a few weeks left in the season and had to be a cheerleader. We ended up losing in the playoffs.”
“His knockout curveball, which gets 65 or 70 grades from scouts, is his signature offspeed pitch.”
“Not any more,” replied the righty. “I still have it, but I don’t throw it as often. I always say that Tommy John gave me my changeup. When I was recovering I messed around with changeup grips a lot and found one that was comfortable. I threw it a lot in that same season you mentioned, that Low-A season. I threw a ton of changeups, because the curveball made my elbow hurt that first season back.
“My curveball was good in the minor leagues — I still used it — but we mixed that changeup in a lot. Over time, especially when I developed the slider, the changeup really became the big pitch for me.”
“He has true no. 1 starter upside.”
“Yeah, I mean, I had that with the White Sox for a couple of years,” Giolito said. “I still have confidence that I have true no. 1 starter upside. I just have to come back from this thing and develop some good consistency.”
Yesterday, James Fegan wrote a great story at Sox Machine about how Chase Meidroth became one of the most patient players in baseball. The White Sox want Meidroth to be more aggressive, but after a recent call-up, he’s running a minuscule 17.3% chase rate. He ran that exact same chase rate last season in Triple-A, and it ranked fifth lowest among the 381 players who saw at least 500 pitches outside the zone. Here at FanGraphs, Michael Baumann also covered Meidroth’s overabundance of patience a couple weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, Baumann’s article featured something Fegan’s didn’t: a paragraph about nominative determinism. The defining characteristic of Meidroth’s profile is that he’s a Chase who doesn’t chase. But Meidroth isn’t the only Chase in baseball. Maybe he’s an outlier. Maybe the other players named Chase rack up chases, if only out of a sincere desire to obey the fifth commandment.
Chase Utley was the first major league Chase. He debuted in 2003, conveniently just a year after Sports Info Solutions started tracking pitches. That means that we can track the chase rate of every Chase who’s ever played. I went through his year-by-year chase rates in order to calculate a league-adjusted figure, which we’ll call Chase Rate Plus for the remainder of this article. Utley’s Chase Rate Plus was 88, 12% below the league average, and it helped him run a walk rate that was 6% above the league average. In other words, the first Chase in history didn’t chase much either. What about the rest of the bunch? Read the rest of this entry »
Ty France went into last season trying to be something he’s not, and the results reflected that. Over 535 plate appearances split between the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, he slashed .234/.305/.365 with 13 home runs and a 93 wRC+. Statistically speaking, it was the worst year of his career.
Now with the Minnesota Twins after inking a modest $1M free-agent deal in mid-February, France went into yesterday with numbers more in line with what he did from 2019-2023. A month-plus into the campaign, the 30-year-old first baseman has a 118 wRC+ and a .271/.341/.407 slash line.
How has he rediscovered the better version of himself?
“My swing is simple and compact right now,” France told me prior to an 0-for-4 Friday night that included his being robbed on a diving catch and lining an at-em ball at an infielder. “Instead of trying to do too much, I’m just trying to get in my best position and take a good swing.
“Guys are getting paid for homers and doing damage, so a lot of my training last offseason was geared toward trying to hit the ball in the air and drive the ball,” France added. “I kind of lost touch with what I was best at, which is using the right side of the field just collecting hits. This past offseason was about getting back to the basics and rediscovering who I am as a hitter.” Read the rest of this entry »
Brooks Baldwin doesn’t profile as a future star, but that doesn’t mean he won’t have a long and productive major league career. Versatility is a big reason why.
A poor man’s Ben Zobrist, the 24-year-old switch-hitter has played every defensive position besides first base, catcher, and pitcher since debuting with the Chicago White Sox last summer. It may be only a matter of time before those three are added to his résumé. Counting his days as a North Carolina prep and a UNC-Wilmington Seahawk, there isn’t anywhere he hasn’t played.
The versatility dates back to his formative years.
“I’ve been playing all over the field since I was 10 years old,” explained Baldwin, who was announced as a third baseman when the White Sox selected him in the 12th round of the 2022 draft. “It’s something my dad instilled in me, not restricting myself to one position. He played pro ball a little bit [in the Cleveland Guardians system], and before that in college at Clemson. He did the same thing.”
Chuck Baldwin’s son has seen time at first base in the minors, and the other two missing positions at the major league level are ones he’s well acquainted with. The chip off the old block caught “pretty often” in his freshman and sophomore years of high school, and pitched all four years. Primarily a starter, he had a fastball in the upper-80s as a senior.
Baldwin has been switch-hitting since he was eight or nine years old. His father’s high school coach, Linwood Hedgepeth, made the suggestion. After watching the naturally-left-handed hitter in the batting cage, the member of the North Carolina Baseball Hall of Fame told the elder Baldwin,’This kid can switch it.’” Read the rest of this entry »
