The Portland Sea Dogs roster includes three Top 100 prospects, but neither Roman Anthony (15), Marcelo Mayer (42), nor Kyle Teel (83) has been the Double-A affiliate’s best player so far this season. That distinction belongs to a 23-year-old, shortstop-turned-left-fielder whom the Boston Red Sox drafted 69th overall in 2019 out of the Carlos Beltran Baseball Academy. Along with playing stellar defense at a new position, Matthew Lugo is slashing .306/.404/.653 with 10 home runs and an Eastern League-best 191 wRC+.

Markedly-improved plate discipline has played a big role in his breakout. Last year, Lugo logged a 5.9% walk rate and a 27.6% strikeout rate. This year those numbers are 13.4% and 22.5%.

The key to his newfound ability to dominate the strike zone?

“Timing,” explained Lugo, who takes his cuts from the right side. “Last year, I had a lot of movement with my hands, which made me inconsistent being on time with the pitcher. My hands were very low, and then when I got to the launch position they were very high; there was a lot of distance for my hands to go through. This year, I’m closer to my launch position before I swing. I also had a [bat] wiggle and this year I just get to my spot with no wiggle. I’m getting into my spot early and have more time to see the pitch, so I’m making better swing decisions.”

The decision to move Lugo off of his natural position and into an outfield corner wasn’t based on defensive shortcomings, but rather on the arrival of Mayer. The high-ceiling shortstop was promoted to Portland last year on Memorial Day weekend, and given his first-round pedigree, he wasn’t going to be the one moving. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Weems was in his 10th professional season when he was featured here at FanGraphs for the first, and heretofore only, time in July 2020. His story was one of resilience, but also of change. Then 27 years old, Weems was a converted catcher soon to make his big-league debut as a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics. Drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 2011 out of Columbus (GA) High School in 2011, he moved to the mound five years later after dwelling in Mendoza-line territory while wearing the tools of ignorance.

Weems is now in his third season with the Washington Nationals, and by and large he’s forged a decent career as a reliever. The 6-foot-4 right-hander has made 118 appearances at baseball’s highest level, and his numbers include 140 strikeouts in 130 innings. The first of his Ks came against Trevor Story, the first batter he faced while toeing a big-league rubber.

I recently asked the personable hurler if he ever thinks about that initial punch out.

“Absolutely,” replied Weems, who has a 3.94 ERA over 16 innings in the current campaign. “You have to kind of stay where your feet are in this game — what you did in the past is in your past — but at the same time, if you’d have told me early on in my [professional] career that I’d be a pitcher in the big leagues, I would have laughed. Looking back, what I’ve done is pretty cool.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. After taking a week off to recharge and travel, I was itching to watch some baseball this week, and the sport delivered. After spending last week in New York, I had the city on my mind, and the Mets delivered with some exciting series against the Braves and Phillies. There was good rivalry action out west, too, with the Dodgers and Giants squaring off. And of course, there’s that classic rivalry, Tommy Pham against the concept of ever taking a single play off. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe for the inspiration for this series. Let’s get right into it.

1. Max Effort Every Time

Tommy Pham is my favorite baseball player. To be clear, I don’t think he’s the best baseball player. I’m not sure that I, personally, would want him as a teammate, even. He’s too intense for my laid back view of the world. But his maniacal drive is absolutely delightful to watch, and it’s particularly delightful now that he’s on a team that is absolutely not competing for a playoff spot this year.
Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

When I think about openers, I think about Ryne Stanek. His statistics as a Ray in 2018 and 2019 were comical: Before he was traded to the Marlins in 2019, he made 100 appearances over those two seasons; 59 of them were “starts.” In those opening appearances, he never threw more than 37 pitches, recorded more than six outs, or faced more than nine hitters. But since leaving the Rays, despite appearing in 234 games, he’s pitched for more teams (three) than he’s made starts (zero). In fact, he’s averaging less than one inning per appearance.

I searched my brain to figure out who is today’s version of Stanek circa 2018-19, only to realize that there isn’t one. I turned to Stathead and confirmed my inkling: The opener has gone by the wayside in 2024.

In my query, I set a couple of filters as guardrails. First, I limited my search to pitchers who were on, at most, three days of rest. That way, I could eliminate the true starters who got hurt or blitzed out of games from this sample. I also capped the number of batters faced at nine. Facing the leadoff man twice goes against the spirit of the opener, where the aim is to prevent batters from seeing any one pitcher too many times.

It doesn’t take a math degree to know that nine is far fewer than 154. But it’s not quite that simple. Remember, we’re only a quarter of the way through the season, and there will almost certainly be more openers used the rest of the way. That said, baseball is on pace to use 33 openers in 2024, which would be the fewest since the opener was first utilized in 2018 — yes, that includes the shortened 2020 campaign. It’s worth noting that only 12 openers were used at this point in 2023, so we could see opener usage ramp up as this season progresses, too. Even so, it’s clear that something has changed.

I don’t really have a take on whether or not the opener is a good strategy in today’s game. I also don’t think there’s an obvious explanation for why the fall of the opener is happening. Some of it may just be circumstance. Gabe Kapler’s Giants frequently used openers, and he’s no longer managing. The 2018-19 Rays had Blake Snell and Charlie Morton, but they also had plenty of pitchers who were best deployed in short outings. This season, the Rays feature a deeper group of pitchers who are capable of carrying a starter’s workload. Five years ago, Tampa Bay turned to openers out of necessity; now, that’s no longer necessary.

What To Look Forward to This Weekend

• The Mariners have played great baseball of late, winning eight of their last nine series, bringing their record to 24-20, and entering play Friday in first place in the AL West. But they’ve got a big test coming up, with three games in Baltimore followed by three games in the Bronx, two exciting series that will give the Mariners ample opportunity to show the league they’re for real. George Kirby and Corbin Burnes face off in a marquee pitching matchup on Sunday.

• The Rockies are looking to extend their winning streak that currently sits at seven games, beginning tonight in San Francisco. Colorado started out its streak last week with a win against the Giants, scoring seven runs off Keaton Winn, who is set to start for the Giants on Sunday. Whether or not the Rockies will be riding a nine-game streak at that point will depend on San Francisco starters Kyle Harrison and Jordan Hicks, as well as a piecemeal Giants lineup that’s without Patrick Bailey, Michael Conforto, Jung Hoo Lee, and Jorge Soler.

• Although they’re still the league’s worst team, the White Sox have played less embarrassingly of late, going 8-4 over their last 12 games. This weekend, though, they head to the Bronx to face the first-place Yankees. Led by a ridiculously hot Aaron Judge, New York has won four straight games and 10 of its last 12. During the Yankees’ three-game sweep of the Twins in Minnesota, Judge went 7-for-11 (.636) with five doubles and two home runs. On the season, he’s slashing .262/.393/.555 with 11 homers and a 169 wRC+, which is remarkable considering how much he struggled in April.

Lastly, a quick programming note. Beginning next week, we’ll be shifting Top of the Order to a twice-weekly schedule, running on Tuesday and Friday mornings. See you then!

Tuesday, April 2 was a good day for the Chicago White Sox. A solid seven-inning start from Garrett Crochet gave the team a lead into the late innings and the bullpen managed to preserve the win. This win, the first of the season, moved to Sox to a 1-4 record, a .200 winning percentage. That’s not an impressive start to the season by any means, but that 1-4 record represents the high-water mark of the month-old 2024 season for the Pale Hose. At no point in the last three weeks have the White Sox had a seasonal winning percentage better than .200, and the four-game losing streak to begin the year is their shortest losing streak so far. Whenever a team that’s projected to be terrible starts the season even worse than expected, we instinctually invoke the 1962 Mets, who set the record for the most losses in a season, at 120. We’re at that point with these White Sox.

What’s striking about Chicago’s start is that in some ways, it’s not even particularly unlucky. Yes, Yoán Moncada and Luis Robert Jr. are out for significant stretches of time, but the projected WAR for their missed playing time so far is a bit under one win. The team’s had only two other IL stints since the start of the season and both injured players, reliever John Brebbia and slugger Eloy Jiménez, returned quickly. Other than Moncada and Robert, the Sox are fielding largely the lineup, rotation, and bullpen that they intended to when the season began. They’re only about a single win worse than their Pythagorean record, and in their three wins, they outscored their opponents by a total of four runs, meaning they were just a few bad breaks from being in the 1988 Orioles territory of dreadful starts.

Chicago’s pitching, at least, hasn’t been completely hopeless. Don’t get me wrong, the White Sox staff ranks at or near the bottom of the league in ERA, FIP, and the various spins on these numbers, but the bullpen has been sort of average, and there have been at least flashes of competence from some of the starters. Crochet’s ERA is ugly, but his peripheral stats are much better and the reasons he’s struggled (homer rate, BABIP) are two of the most volatile stats in existence. Erick Fedde has looked a lot better than he did before his stint in Korea and was terrific on Tuesday, striking out 11 Twins in a 6-5 walk-off loss for the Sox. No, it’s not the pitching that’s the primary offender right now; it’s the offense.

The White Sox have been cosplaying as a Deadball era team, hitting .189/.263/.292 and scoring barely over two runs per game. To put that into context, they have a 62 wRC+ as a team, a mark that has never been maintained for a full season by any big league club; the worst hitting team over a full season was the 1920 Philadelphia A’s, with a 68 wRC+. Even if we look at just the first 24 games of a season, the White Sox lineup is among the most inept since 1901.

Teams were shut out an average of 10.3 times last year; these White Sox have been shut out eight times, meaning they’ve already been shut out half as many times as the offense that led the majors in shutouts last season, the Oakland A’s. Chicago is more than a third of the way toward matching the 2019 Marlins and 2022 Tigers for the highest single-season total of shutouts in the wild-card era, with 22. Let’s catch up quickly on the current AL Central projections in ZiPS.

The White Sox are hopelessly out of the race in a division where “showing up for the season” is basically all it takes to contend. Their current 80th percentile projection to finish the season is about 10 wins worse than the 20th percentile projection for any other team. That 20th percentile projection of 47.2 wins would amount to 115 losses, tantalizingly close to 120. Let’s get the exact distribution of the South Siders’ results.

ZiPS currently gives the White Sox an 8.1% chance of winning 42 or fewer games. When I projected the A’s last year, they came out with only a 5.2% shot at finishing that poorly. Congratulations?

The 2024 White Sox are fairly likely to set franchise records for futility. The current projections give them a 43% chance to have the worst winning percentage in franchise history, a mark currently held by the 1932 club, at .325.

It’s also hard to see where the White Sox would get surges of improvement outside of a regression toward the mean. At the earliest, Moncada is still a few months away from returning. ZiPS is already assuming that Robert’s IL stint will be much shorter and he’ll come back and play as he was expected to coming into the season. There are no hotshot prospects expected to make an impact this year, and the big league roster looks an awful lot like a Triple-A team at the moment, full of fringy veterans.

And don’t forget: The White Sox could get even worse than this come trade season. Moncada’s likely going to return too late to be tradeable at the deadline, but everyone else should be available. I’m including Robert; next season is his last under his base contract before the team option years, and I can’t envision this franchise turning things around before he hits free agency. If 2023 wasn’t sufficient notice that the team’s competitive window has been slammed shut and locked, it’s clear now that the whole thing has been bricked over.

It’s tragic – in a baseball sense – that the fans endured a seven-year rebuild only to have the win-now phase amount to only two seasons, one of them severely shortened by the pandemic. And unlike teams that can claim to have suffered an extraordinary series of unfortunate events, this tale is largely one the White Sox wrote for themselves. Coming off a 93-win season in 2021 in which they lapped the division, finishing in first by 13 games, the White Sox suddenly stopped acting like contenders. Rather than addressing their weaknesses, they simply added a couple of relievers (Kendall Graveman and Joe Kelly) and called it an offseason. Despite getting no offensive contributions from second base, the outfielder corners, and designated hitter in 2021, the team’s big position player move was bringing back Leury García on a three-year contract.

Demosthenes, an Athenian politician of the fourth century BC, once wrote that “the easiest thing of all is to deceive one’s self; for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true.” This comes from one his speeches (the Olynthiacs) in which he urged military support of Olynthus, attacked by Philip II of Macedon in 349 BC. And it’s a fitting quote for the White Sox, a team that has largely been run with decisions based on things they want to be true, rather than things that are actually so.

The White Sox wanted to address the second base hole, a problem for years, by just going with whatever utility guys they had on hand. They wanted Andrew Vaughn to hit in the majors in 2021, despite his struggles at High-A ball in 2019 and the cancellation of the minor leagues in 2020. They wanted Tony La Russa to manage the team to glory, and Jiménez to turn into prime José Bautista, and Moncada to stay healthy. The wish list goes on and on.

The end result is that the Sox squandered a position in which they had many advantages. They were a team at the top of the division with a payroll that was tens of millions of dollars from the luxury tax threshold. They had much of their young core a long way from free agency and the financial potential of playing in one of the country’s largest media markets. They played in the weakest division in baseball. Now they’re the worst team in that division.

The White Sox are too far gone, with problems that run too deep to be papered over by a few personnel changes and a handful of hires to their notoriously tiny analytics department. At this point, it feels like the only way for the franchise to turn things around is to clean house. That includes Jerry Reinsdorf, the team’s owner, who by all indications is a large part of the current dysfunction, but who by all indications has no intention of selling the team. So, can the White Sox lose 120 games? Sure. But maybe the better question is this: What would it matter if they did?

On the heels of a 101-loss season and a trade of Dylan Cease, it was quite apparent that the White Sox would be bad this year. So far, however, they’ve been even worse than that, losing 10 of their first 12 games to become the first AL team whose Playoff Odds have reached zero. Adding to that insult, they’ve already lost Eloy Jiménez, Luis Robert Jr., and Yoán Moncada — the three players who projected to be their most valuable — to injuries, sadly an all-too-common occurrence when it comes to each of them. It’s going to be a long season on the South Side.

The most severe of the injuries is that of Moncada, and woof, it not only looked bad but it may mark the end of his run with the White Sox, one that has certainly contained its share of highs and lows. While running out a grounder in the second inning of Tuesday’s game against the Guardians, he suddenly started limping about halfway down the line, then stumbled and crumpled to the ground before reaching first base, writhing in agony before being tended to by head athletic trainer James Kruk. “When I was running down the line, it felt like something broke. Honestly, that was the worst pain I’ve felt in my career,” Moncada told reporters via an interpreter on Wednesday.

Moncada was diagnosed with a strained left adductor, one of the muscles of the inner thigh, and yes, this will be a recurring theme. You don’t have to believe in jinxes to cringe at the fact that in the pregame media session before Moncada’s injury, manager Pedro Grifol told reporters that the 28-year-old third baseman had been dealing with a nagging hip/adductor injury for three or four days, adding, “He’s doing a really good job maintaining it.” Thus a minor injury has become a major one; the team announced that Moncada’s estimated recovery time is three to six months. In a best-case scenario, that would place his return around the start of the second half, while in a worst-case one, he might not make it back onto the field again this season.

Moncada is already coming off a pair of injury-wracked seasons that took a significant toll on his performance. After hitting for a 120 wRC+ with 3.7 WAR in 144 games in 2021, he slipped to a 76 wRC+ and 0.8 WAR in 104 games in ’22, missing five weeks due to an oblique strain and then 10 days for strains in each hamstring. He rebounded slightly in 2023, hitting .260/.305/.425 (98 wRC+) with 1.1 WAR, but still played just 92 games, missing over 10 weeks due to a pair of IL stints for lower back inflammation. He was off to a good start this season, hitting .282/.364/.410 (127 wRC+) while showing improved plate discipline through his first 44 plate appearances.

He is now in the final guaranteed season of the five-year, $70 million extension he signed in March 2020, making $24 million this year with a $25 million club option and $5 million buyout for 2025. Given the trends of his performance and Chicago’s payroll — which declined from $193 million in 2022 to $177 million to ’23 to $148 million this season as both the old and new regimes have stripped the roster for parts — it’s unlikely the team would have picked up his option. More likely, general manager Chris Getz would have looked to trade him this summer in an effort to fortify a farm system that got a shot in the arm last year, rising from 27th in projected future value in the spring to 12th later in the season.

Grifol said the team will rotate among a trio of players to fill in for Moncada, with 29-year-old lefty Nicky Lopez, 26-year-old lefty Braden Shewmake, and 24-year-old righty Lenyn Sosa all in the mix. None of them has hit a lick at the major league level, with Lopez — who has started eight games at second base and one at shortstop so far this year — the best of the bunch with a career 72 wRC+ across more than 1,900 PA; Sosa owns a 43 wRC+ through 224 PA, while Shewmake has a 50 wRC+, but only 25 PA so far. Each of them is a huge step down from Moncada, to say the least.

Robert isn’t expected to be out as long as Moncada, but his absence is depriving the White Sox of their lone All-Star from last year and their most dynamic player. The 26-year-old center fielder left Chicago’s April 5 game after injuring himself running out a double, and was diagnosed with a Grade-2 flexor strain in his right hip, the same one in which he suffered a Grade-3 strain in 2021. He missed about three and a half months that time, but this time around he’s only anticipated to be out six to eight weeks, with “only” doing a lot of work here.

The shame of it is that Roberts is coming off the closest thing he’s had to a full season in a while. His 145 games played last year was the highest total of his four major league seasons, topping his 98 games from 2022, when he made trips to the IL for COVID-19, blurred vision, and a wrist sprain; the only other time he played at least 100 games in a season was 2019, when he tallied 122 while rocketing through three levels of the minors. Even as the team collapsed around him last season, he put together an outstanding campaign, hitting 38 homers and stealing 20 bases while hitting .264/.315/.542 (128 wRC+) with 4.9 WAR. His slugging percentage and home runs both placed third in the American League, his wRC+ and WAR, eighth.

Robert was hitting just .214/.241/.500 at the time of his injury, with a two-homer, three-hit, four-RBI game against the Tigers on March 30 accounting for the bulk of his contributions. Thus far in Robert’s absence, Grifol has shifted his right field platoon over to center. That pairing — 26-year-old lefty Dominic Fletcher and 35-year-old righty Kevin Pillar — along with various other players in smaller roles placed the White Sox 28th in the right field version of our preseason positional power rankings. Meanwhile, Robert drove their no. 5 ranking among center fielders, but with his playing time reduced, he and his replacements have dropped to 12th in our Depth Charts. Somebody ought to put up a warning sign: “Beware of Falling Projections.”

As for Jiménez, he didn’t even make it to April, or to a spot in the outfield, before getting hurt. In the season’s third game, on March 31, the 27-year-old slugger strained an adductor in his left leg while running out an infield grounder and left the game. This marks his fourth straight season with a trip to the IL; in 2021 he missed four months due to a torn pectoral tendon, in ’22 he lost two and a half months to a torn tendon in his right knee, and in ’23 he was shelved 10 days for a left hamstring strain, and then three weeks for an appendectomy. Jiménez still managed to play 120 games last year, his highest total since his 2019 rookie season, but through his first five years, he played in only about 62% of Chicago’s games.

In the wake of last year’s early-season injuries, the White Sox used Jiménez in right field in just 14 games and DHed him 105 times. Keeping him off the grass is probably preferable given not only his fragile state but his defensive metrics (-22 RAA, -18 DRS, -9.8 UZR in 2066.2 career innings). That said, a DH-only role places a lot more pressure on him to hit in order to be valuable, and last year’s .272/.317/.441 (104 wRC+) translated to just 0.5 WAR, which doesn’t cut it. The good news is that Jiménez is on the mend, and could possibly return this weekend. In his absence, Gavin Sheets has gotten hot, batting .333/.455/.704 through 33 PA but [checks notes] none of our projections suggest he can maintain that.

In our preseason projections, Robert (4.0 WAR), Moncada (2.4), and Jiménez (1.9) occupied the team’s top three spots, with Andrew Vaughn (1.6) and Andrew Benintendi (1.5) the only other position players above 1.0. In other words, without this trio the Sox don’t have a single player who projects to be average or better in the lineup. These outages and this miserable start — which includes the lowest-scoring offense in the majors, at 2.42 runs per game — have dropped their already-abysmal win projection from 66.3 as of Opening Day to 60.8. With the possible exception of the days that Garrett Crochet starts — he’s got a 2.00 ERA and 2.50 FIP through three turns — this is going to be an unwatchable team at least until Robert gets back.

I don’t really have strong opinions about the AL Central this year, either aesthetically or competitively. I picked the Tigers to win the division because I like their young pitchers, I had to pick someone, and I didn’t want to just choose the same 12 teams that made the playoffs last year. But if the Twins or Guardians, or even the Royals finished first, I wouldn’t be unduly surprised.

Mostly, I want to go the entire season without having to watch Byron Buxton leave the field on a gurney, for much the same reason I’d like to visit the Grand Canyon before I die. I’ve never actually seen it, but I’ve heard it’s wonderful. Apart from that, I’ve got an open mind.

Even so, the first two weeks of the season have brought some remarkable results. Stephen Vogt now has a better winning percentage than any manager in MLB history (minimum 10 games), as the Guardians jumped out to an 8-3 start. The Tigers and Royals are right behind, and Kansas City has had one of the best rotations in the league so far.

These three teams have one thing in common, other than their division: They’ve all played the White Sox. 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 banter about the Giants signing Blake Snell, whether Snell is now underrated, San Francisco’s offseason, Scott Boras’s offseason, leaguewide spending, an MLBPA power struggle, and (39:03) a 150-year-old message about baseball players in spring, then preview the 2024 Atlanta Braves (45:42) with 92.9 The Game’s Grant McAuley, and the 2024 Chicago White Sox (1:24:54) with Sox Machine’s James Fegan.

Audio intro: Ted O., “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: The Gagnés, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to positional power rankings
Link to Baumann on Snell
Link to MLBTR on Snell
Link to Anderson on Snell
Link to Nightengale on Snell
Link to Feinsand on Snell
Link to Snell sim game
Link to Farhan tweet
Link to Giants PR problems
Link to Grant on Brooks-Moon
Link to MLBTR on Felipe
Link to Rosenthal on Boras
Link to Dan S. thread
Link to Drellich on MLBPA
Link to MLBTR on MLBPA
Link to Giamatti essay
Link to Harwell recording
Link to 1874 column 1
Link to 1874 column 2
Link to reading soundtrack
Link to November trade
Link to Braves offseason tracker
Link to Braves depth chart
Link to Strider curve article
Link to AA extension article
Link to Ryan Nelson tweet
Link to SP projections
Link to RP projections
Link to From the Diamond site
Link to From the Diamond podcast
Link to White Sox offseason tracker
Link to White Sox depth chart
Link to Crochet precursors
Link to Ben on ex-player GMs
Link to November Getz quote
Link to February Getz quote
Link to Battlestar quote
Link to Sox ballpark coverage
Link to team defense projections
Link to James’s Sox Machine archive
Link to Sox Machine Patreon
Link to Sox Machine podcast
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Twitter Account
 EW Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

With the start of the season just two weeks away, it’s time for one of my most beloved/hated/dreaded annual traditions: making my picks for breakouts and busts. For those of you who haven’t read one of these pieces in the past, these are my picks for the players who are the most likely to change the general consensus about them over the course of the 2024 season. And since we’re talking about generally low-probability outcomes — this isn’t a list of players with better or worse projections than last year — there’s no exercise with more potential to make me look super smart… or dumb. For every J.P. Crawford or Steven Kwan triumph, there’s an instance of Andrew Vaughn-induced shame.

As usual, let’s start with a quick table of the triumphs and humiliations of last year’s picks:

It was about an average year. Vaughn and Christian Walker were the biggest misses, and Jordan Walker’s lousy defense kept him from being a win. Now on to this year’s picks.

The Breakouts

Spencer Torkelson, Detroit Tigers
Spencer Torkelson’s .233/.313/.446 line certainly didn’t knock any socks off, but he was a (relative) beast over the last two months of the season, hitting .244/.329/.526 with 16 homers. Now, I always warn folks to not read too much into monthly splits because there’s a tendency to think that splits coinciding with a good explanation are enough to overcome the small sample size issues, and because the endpoints are selective. The two-month split, however, isn’t why Torkelson’s here. Rather, there was a lot of evidence to suggest that he was underperforming his peripherals for most of the season up until that point. From the beginning of the season through August 8, Torkelson was the biggest zStats underachiever with significant playing time. Using only Statcast data with no information as to actual results, ZiPS thought that in that span Tork should have been an .868 OPS hitter; his actual OPS was .688. His OPS after that day? .921! Remember, Torkelson was a top-five prospect in baseball entering his rookie season in 2022, so even though his first year was a disaster, he’s not some 31-year-old beer leaguer coming out of nowhere.

Patrick Bailey’s Bat, San Francisco Giants
I can’t really call it a full breakout since Patrick Bailey already had an overall breakout season, thanks to defense that crushed even the loftiest of expectations. What puts him here is that people may be sleeping on his bat. No, I don’t think there’s any chance he starts hitting like Buster Posey, but Bailey’s otherworldly defense and lackluster bat (wRC+ of 78) appears to have pigeonholed him as a typical no-hit, all-glove backstop. I think that would be a mistake. Catchers have really weird developmental curves and I can’t stress enough how difficult it is for a catcher to nearly skip the high minors; he only played 28 games above A-ball before debuting in San Francisco. He hit .251/.351/.424 in the minors – again, not star quality but far from a total zero – and even without full developmental time offensively, he wasn’t completely destroyed by MLB pitching. In fact, he showed surprisingly solid plate discipline and power for a prospect with so little experience with the bat. Both ZiPS and our Depth Charts project Bailey to have an 82 wRC+, but I would not be shocked if he finished the season with a mark between 95 and 100, which, if his defense holds up, would make him an elite catcher overall.

Wyatt Langford, Texas Rangers
I don’t have a formal rule about it, but when ZiPS projects a player with little or no MLB experience to lead in a significant stat, I should take it very seriously since ZiPS doesn’t often go nuts about minor leaguers. The last player I can think of is Luis Arraez, who had a 21% chance of hitting .300 for his rookie season, according to ZiPS, which also projected him to have the highest batting average in baseball by 2020. ZiPS thinks Wyatt Langford is going to lead the majors in doubles and be one of the best offensive rookies in recent years. He was one of the few college hitters that ZiPS saw as nearly ready for the majors in 2023, and it liked him more than similarly advanced hitters Nolan Schanuel and Dylan Crews. Since ZiPS is my sidekick – or maybe it’s the other way around – I gotta have its back!

Anthony Volpe, New York Yankees
Anthony Volpe had a solid rookie season, but given his elite prospect status, it was a mild disappointment that he was only league average. Because of this, I think people are now underselling his offensive upside. He hit for a lot of power for a 22-year-old shortstop (21 home runs, .174 ISO). He also stole 24 bases on 29 tries, including successfully swiping each of his first 15 attempts, and was worth 3.5 base running runs. Two of his biggest problems were that he didn’t get on base enough (.283 OBP, 8.7 BB%) and struck out too much (27.8 K%), but these weren’t issues for him in the minors, and some of his fundamentals here are promising — he actually gets off to fewer 0-1 counts than most players with his strikeout rate. All of this suggests that he should figure things out with more major league experience. ZiPS also thinks he should have had a .312 BABIP given his Statcast data, instead of his actual mark of .259, which indicates that some of his woes were likely do to bad luck.

Keibert Ruiz, Washington Nationals
As with Volpe, I think Keibert Ruiz’s low BABIP, especially his .223 BABIP in the first half, made his season look a lot weaker than it was. ZiPS saw a .270 BABIP as a more reasonable number for him as a hitter in the first half, and that number continued to rise in the second half; he had a .285 zBABIP by the end of the season. Giving Ruiz back some of the batting average makes his actual .226/.279/.360 first-half line look a lot less abysmal and his .300/.342/.467 one in the second half look less like a fluke. In fact, except for a bit more power, most of the difference between his first half and second half was BABIP, so the halves weren’t quite as different as they appeared. Overall, his zStats line of .274/.330/.445 reflects a much more advanced hitter than we saw overall in 2023.

As I reminded people with Bailey, catchers tend to have a weird developmental pattern, and Ruiz has been no exception. Ruiz was a top prospect for a long time before hitting the Double-A wall, and his standing fell quite a bit in the eyes of prospect watchers. But he re-established himself as a top prospect to a degree that he was a huge part of Washington’s return when it traded Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Dodgers in 2021. I think people forget how young he still is at 25, and being older is not as big of a deal for a catching prospect than for someone at any other position.

Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati Reds
Elly De La Cruz is a common breakout pick for obvious reasons, but I’m including him here specifically because his plate discipline wasn’t as bad as it looks from the raw stats. ZiPS actually thought, from his plate discipline data, that his strikeout rate should have been more like 27% instead of nearly 34%, enough to knock off 27 strikeouts. And given that he should be a high BABIP player, because he was the fastest man in baseball last year, putting more balls in play would benefit him more than it would most players. Overall, his zStats line last year was .273/.323/.449, compared to his actual line of .235/.300/.410, meaning the holes in his game aren’t quite as deep as his reputation would suggest.

And if you don’t buy that, he did show better plate discipline as the season progressed. I’ll again warn of the dangers of storylines that coincide with splits, but things like offensive swing percentage stabilize very quickly, mitigating some of the sample size issues. I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at the graph below and conclude that De La Cruz got caught up in the hype of his initial success and became too aggressive. As a result, he started struggling before coming to realize that he had gotten away from the approach that made him such a dynamic player in the first place.

Dominic Canzone, Seattle Mariners
One should be suspicious of Pacific Coast League stats, but Dominic Canzone’s .354/.431/.634 line last year was good even by PCL standards, enough for a 151 wRC+ in the league. However, that success didn’t follow him to the majors. He probably doesn’t have a lot of upside, but the rate of his improvement over the last couple of years suggests that there’s a chance he could have a nice little Geronimo Berroa-esque run.

Tucupita Marcano, San Diego Padres
This one is kind of a stretch because I don’t see an obvious path for Tucupita Marcano to get much playing time. He hasn’t hit at all in the majors yet, but he’s also had a weird minor league career; he’s still just coming off his age-23 season and has made some progress at translating his minor league plate discipline to the majors. ZiPS isn’t in on him, but Steamer is, and if he can managed his 94 wRC+ Steamer projection, along with a decent glove (though more at second base than short) and his speed, he’ll at least be interesting. Gotta have one out there pick, no?

The Busts

Cody Bellinger, Chicago Cubs
I don’t think Cody Bellinger will fall anywhere near the depths of his brutal 2021 season, but there are reasons to be suspicious of last year’s resurgence. He changed some of his mechanics and altered his approach, especially in two-strike counts, to make more contact, and those adjustments should be sustainable. It’s the power numbers that are a bit preposterous, to the degree I can’t think of any comparable player who managed to maintain this amount of power with mediocre-at-best exit velocity numbers. Statcast’s expected slugging percentage knocks 88 points off his actual one, and the ZiPS version (zSLG) is 20 points meaner than that.

J.T. Realmuto, Philadelphia Phillies
This one hurts, especially for a player ZiPS was so excited about in 2015-2016 before his breakout. But the decline in J.T. Realmuto’s offensive numbers in 2023 is supported by the drop in his peripheral numbers; he was just a bit worse at everything last year. He’s also a catcher entering his mid 30s. This is a gut thing more than a projection thing, but I suspect any kind of a leg injury would be a bigger deal for a surprisingly quick player like Realmuto, whose offensive stats already reflect his speed, than for your typical catcher.

Isaac Paredes, Tampa Bay Rays
Isaac Paredes is a good hitter, but is he really a 140 wRC+ guy? In both Statcast and ZiPS, Paredes had an even larger disparity between his actual power numbers and his peripherals than Bellinger. That said, there’s some good news, because unlike Bellinger, Paredes has done this before. There were 20 hitters in 2022 that hit at least five more homers than zHR expected, and 18 of them went on to hit fewer home runs in 2023. Paredes was one of the two who hit more (the other was Pete Alonso). Because Paredes has such a low hard-hit percentage, I’m not completely on board yet.

Lane Thomas, Washington Nationals
One thing about Cinderella stories is that people tend to overrate them after the ball. Most of these stories don’t involve permanent stardom; Joey Meneses and Frank Schwindel are two example of people getting too excited about an older breakout guy. Unlike Schwindel, Lane Thomas is probably still a league-average player, on the level of his 2021 and 2022 seasons, but I’d be shocked to see him hit 30 homers again. He’s probably a stopgap center fielder/fourth outfielder type, and I’m seeing him surprisingly high in some fantasy rankings.

Dominic Fletcher, Chicago White Sox
I was pretty shocked to see the White Sox trade Cristian Mena for Dominic Fletcher, even with the assumption that ZiPS is being too exuberant about Mena in ranking him at the back of the top 50 prospects. If you evaluate him the way our prospect team does, a fourth outfielder for a 45 FV prospect is quite a rich gain. And it’s looking like the Sox will give Fletcher a pretty good chance at getting the majority of the playing time in right field. It’s not as bad as the team’s irrational excitement about Oscar Colás last year, but there’s just not a lot of support for Fletcher’s maintaining his .301/.350/.441 line from his brief stint in the majors. That’s ridiculously higher than his zStats slash line of .249/.290/.376, which works out to a difference of 125 OPS points.