Today we turn our attention to some chilly performances at the hot corner. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of a contender (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of roughly 10%) and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far (which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. That may suggest that some of these teams will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because their performance at that spot thus far is worth a look.

Cubs

The Cubs began the season with 2023 first-round pick Matt Shaw — no. 13 on our preseason Top 100 Prospects list as a 55-FV prospect — as their starter at third base, but he struggled out of the gate, hitting just .172/.294/.241 (62 wRC+) from Opening Day through April 14 before being optioned to Triple-A Iowa. Jon Berti did the bulk of the work in his absence, with Gage Workman, Vidal Bruján, Nicky Lopez and even Justin Turner spotting there as well before Shaw was recalled on May 19. The 23-year-old rookie got hot upon returning, but struggled in June before starting July in a 1-for-27 funk; he is now batting just .198/.276/.280 (61 wRC+) with two homers, 11 steals, and 0.0 WAR. While he’s underperformed relative to his expected stats (including a .350 xSLG), his 83.3-mph average exit velocity places him in the first percentile, and his 26.8% hard-hit rate in the fifth. Notably, he rode the pine in the days leading up to the All-Star break, making one start and two late-inning appearances over the Cubs’ last five games. Manager Craig Counsell called Shaw’s absence from the lineup “just a little breather here.” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Today that title is a bit of a misnomer; I got back from vacation Monday night, so I saw very little baseball before Tuesday. That said, I didn’t need to see very much to have a great time. This week has been awesome. Home runs both mammoth and inside-the-park, great baserunning by slow guys, bad baserunning by slow guys, reflex plays and dekes; the list goes on and on. We might need the All-Star break just to catch our collective breath before a bustling trade deadline and sprint to the finish. For now, though, let’s just marvel at the week – after my customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, of course.

1. Unconventional Double Plays
Cody Bellinger has been great addition to the Yankees after they acquired him for peanuts over the winter. He is flashing the offensive prowess that has come and gone over the years, and with Trent Grisham manning center, he is playing the corner outfield more than he has in the past. His glove isn’t as good as it was at his peak, but putting a center fielder in left is still a plus for your team defense, as the Mets learned on Sunday. This Juan Soto line drive would have been a hit against almost anyone else:

Statcast gave it a 25% catch probability, and I think it was probably even harder than that. Catch probability measures how far Bellinger had to run and how much time he had to do it, but that ball was absolutely scalded and had so much topspin that it was hooking down hard in the brief time it was in the air. He caught it by the very end of the webbing; “baseball is a game of inches” is usually about the bat hitting the ball or a bang-bang play, but in this case, one inch separated a catch from extra bases:

Oh yeah, then this happened:

That throw is as good of a play as the catch! At full extension, stretched out awkwardly to secure the ball, Bellinger still managed to find first base on the run and unleash an absolute seed that hit Paul Goldschmidt right in the glove on the fly. Making that catch was hard enough. Making it without falling was even harder. Making it without falling and then throwing a frozen rope on target? Almost unthinkable.

Even after that catch, even with that throw, you might wonder why Francisco Lindor got doubled off. Partially, he couldn’t believe anyone could catch that line drive. Partially, too, he got deked. Goldschmidt no-sold the play, barely moving his glove until he absolutely had to. This isn’t the body language of a guy desperate to turn a double play:

That’s not the perfect angle, but you get the idea. The rhythm of this play, to Lindor, didn’t feel like the kind where he’d need to sprint and dive back to first. When someone makes a play that good, you turn around and go back, but what are they going to do, unleash an off-balance missile while the first baseman you’re staring at barely moves? Apparently, yes!

2. Irrational Exuberance
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is not a good baserunner. That’s not an opinion. He’s been below average in each year of his major league career. He has 24 career steals and has been caught stealing 12 times. He’s slow, and he hits into a lot of double plays. But despite all that, Vlad likes to run. Give him the chance, and he’ll take off. Take Wednesday, for example. Guerrero took advantage of an errant pickoff throw to scamper to second:

You’ve seen that play a million times. Everyone was pretty relaxed about it; in the game audio, you can actually hear Jays first base coach Mark Budzinski calmly telling Vlad “go ahead, go ahead.” But the play wasn’t over:

Yeah, don’t do that. I’ve already mentioned that Guerrero isn’t fleet of foot, but it also took him forever to get moving; acceleration isn’t a strength either. Watch his feet – his first step was actually backwards, out into right field. Adrian Houser was on the wrong side of the mound, but Vlad just didn’t have enough straight line speed to make it matter. To make matters even worse, that was the third out of the inning, at third base, with Addison Barger — one of the teams’ hottest hitters — at the plate. Against the White Sox! Don’t do this.

Don’t do this either:

Now, to be fair, this is a tougher play than before. The underlying cause, though, is similar: a belief that baserunning is easier than it actually is. Elite runners might be safe there. That said, elite runners are a lot faster, and better at sliding, and they’d probably take two steps to their left to better block the throwing lane. That should be an extremely difficult throw for a right-handed first baseman, instead of the easy pitch-and-catch that it was. And once you’re dead to rights, well, hitting the brakes and retreating is a better option than starting your slide so early. You probably won’t survive the rundown, but you might stay in it long enough to give the runner on third time to score before you’re tagged for the final out of the inning.

To Guerrero’s credit, he did try a nifty maneuver at second that nearly rescued the whole thing:

Again, though, leave the high-difficulty baserunning stunts for the high-talent baserunners. Both of these decisions would be excellent if, say, Trea Turner had made them. Knowing what you can accomplish is a key part of accruing value on the bases. Watching what happens when that crucial step doesn’t occur sure is fun for a neutral observer, though.

3. One-up-manship
Kyle Schwarber had himself a game on Tuesday night. He went 2-for-4 with a double and a home run, and that homer was outrageous. Not only did he hit it into McCovey Cove, but he did so more or less flat-footed:

He even showed off another facet of his game an inning earlier, swiping second base off a distracted Robbie Ray:

That brought Schwarber to nine steals on the year, with only one caught stealing. He’s one of the slowest runners in baseball, but he understands the proper application of that speed, generally stealing bases off pitchers who forget about him. He’s not a particularly good baserunner overall, but he’s been picking smart spots to go this year.

One batter later, though, Schwarber tried to double up on his baserunning feat by swiping third. Enter Patrick Bailey:

Schwarber had a great read on Ray; he got an excellent jump in a great spot to steal, with the batter screening the catcher at the plate. Bailey just did everything he had to do that much better:

Watch his footwork there. He cleared batter Alec Bohm and got his lead foot planted at the back of the batter’s box while he was catching the ball. The catch and transfer were both perfect, letting him throw in rhythm. The throw? A laser beam to Matt Chapman’s glove for a tag that got Schwarber by an inch or two. I don’t think Schwarber could have done anything better; he just got beat by perhaps the best defensive catcher in the game.

Bailey is having a miserable season at the plate, but he even outdid Schwarber there, too. The Schwarbomb in the seventh put the Phillies up 3-1, and the score stayed there until Bailey batted with one out in the ninth. Then, well:

It’s hard to imagine a more exciting walk-off than that, and it made for the perfect kicker to this game. Sure, Schwarber had a stolen base and two-run homer, but Bailey had a caught stealing and a walk-off, three-run, inside-the-park homer. Real “anything you can do I can do better” vibes.

4. Two-Way Excellence
Oh, you like inside-the-park home runs? Northern California has your back:

That’s Lawrence Butler leading off the home half of the first for the A’s with an only-in-Sacramento play. It involved the ball kicking off of a chain link fence section of the wall and eluding the entire Braves outfield. That let Butler score even with one of the most nonchalant starts to an inside-the-parker you’ll ever see:

That’s the stride of someone who thought he hit the ball out of the park, but the crazy carom and Butler’s speed made it all work in the end. That’s been a hallmark of his game this year, in fact. He’s not the best defender in the world, but he’s got enough range and instincts to make up for a scattershot arm. He has plenty of swing-and-miss in his game, but he has enough plate discipline to keep his strikeouts from capsizing his offensive contributions. He’s a savvy baserunner capable of hitting top speed faster than you’d think. And he has enough power to make up for any small flaws elsewhere:

Inside the park? Outside the park? Butler has the speed/power combination to accomplish both. He looks like a nice building block of the next good A’s team – not this year’s team, of course, but maybe next year’s. After 1,000 major league plate appearances, it seems pretty clear that he’s a solid all-around player but not quite a star. That’s just fine for both the contract and the prospect pedigree, though – and as a huge bonus, he’s tremendously fun to watch. More home runs like these, please.

5. Raw Power
More home runs like these, too. Jac Caglianone was playing college baseball last year. The sixth pick in the 2024 draft, he looked more like a developmental stash than a plug-and-play star. He played both ways in college, though he was clearly a lot better offensively, and the Royals drafted him with that in mind. But he was raw, with iffy command of the strike zone and a swing-first mentality that led to ugly swings over sliders.

A whirlwind tour of the minors – 158 wRC+ in Double-A, 164 in Triple-A – convinced Kansas City to call him up at the beginning of June. Through just over a month of play, the results have been disappointing; Caglianone is hitting .151/.205/.286, for a 31 wRC+. But the results are lying. He’s been much better than I thought he’d be, to be quite honest. He’s running a 22% strikeout rate, far lower than I would have expected given that he’s chasing 41% of the pitches he sees outside the strike zone, one of the worst marks in the big leagues. The stats might be rough, but the process isn’t; by xwOBA, he’s been about an average hitter, rather than 70% below average, thanks to his prodigious exit velocities.

In other words, over the long run. Caglianone is going to hit for a lot of power. He’s already hitting the ball very hard, in fact, he just hasn’t quite harnessed that into doubles and dingers. But oh my god, have you seen what it looks like when he gets hot? Tuesday night, he did this:

If you want to know how scalded that ball was, watch the outfielders. Those are courtesy jogs, not “maybe I can get this one” sprints. That was 114 mph off the bat, the kind of home run that only the Judges and Stantons of the world can consistently pull off. When you hit the ball that low (19 degrees), it’s hard to leave the stadium. Caglianone is part of that group of elite power hitters already.

One hard-hit ball often begets another. His results so far have been poor, but he’s clearly close to unlocking something. If you leave a pitch over the middle of the plate against Caglianone, it’s going to travel a long way. Look at this nonsense from the next day:

That’s not a reasonable place to hit a home run. It went 466 feet, some real Bo Jackson stuff. I had the volume cranked up on this game, and the crack of the bat was so thunderous that the entire crowd went “ooooh” in unison. He might not have hit that ball quite as hard as the previous one, but he got it at the perfect angle and still tattooed it. His power binges are park-proof; Kaufmann Stadium is the stingiest stadium in baseball for left-handed power hitters, but if you hit the ball as hard as Caglianone does, it doesn’t matter where the fence is.

I didn’t think Caglianone was going to hit the majors this quickly. I’m still kind of surprised at how well he’s adapted to big league pitching; he’s getting attacked relentlessly on the inside part of the plate and chasing 40% of the time, and yet still running reasonable strikeout rates. But I’m not at all surprised at how fun he is to watch – and I can’t wait for more rainmaking home runs, and more mob movie celebrations in the dugout:

There’s never a good time to lose a starting pitcher, but doing so when you’ve lost six of your last seven games and have relinquished first place in your division is an especially unwelcome happenstance. This is what the New York Yankees are currently experiencing, as Clarke Schmidt, who was placed on the injured list due to forearm tightness after an early exit from his Thursday start, will likely undergo Tommy John surgery. With a 3.32 ERA, 3.90 FIP, and 1.2 WAR in 14 starts, Schmidt appeared to be headed towards his best season in the majors, but short of a miracle, he’ll now be out until well into the 2026 season at least. Coming just as the offense appeared to be recovering from its June swoon, the Yankees’ trade deadline to-do list may have just gotten a bit longer.

Six weeks ago, the Yankees were in a strong, though not insurmountable, position at the top of the AL East. No fan should start making travel plans based on a seven-game divisional lead in late May, but it’s about as strong a position as a team can hope to have in a good division. In his May 28 start, Schmidt threw six shutout innings en route to a 1-0 victory over the Angels, giving the Yankees that a seven-game lead (their seasonal high-water mark) and a 35-20 overall record. Since then, the Yankees have gone 14-21, losing 11 games in the standings relative to the current first-place team, the Blue Jays.

The disappearance of the offense was a big part of the Yankees’ slump, at least until the last week or so. On the whole, the offense dropped to a .718 OPS in June after posting an .812 OPS through the end of May, a mark that was second only to the Dodgers. Half of the team’s plate appearances in June were made by players with a wRC+ under 90 for the month, including key early-season performers Paul Goldschmidt and Ben Rice, as well as a returning Giancarlo Stanton. The pitching remained solid despite the team’s 13-14 month, with the rotation combining for a 3.19 ERA and a slightly less exciting 3.79 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

You’re probably familiar with the saying, “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.” Maybe because your Aunt Debbie shared a post from her favorite social media influencer. Maybe because you passed the time during a layover at the airport perusing the self-help books in the Hudson News near your gate. Like most self-help tropes, whether or not it hits for you depends a little on your life circumstances and a little on how you choose to apply it. When it comes to sports fandom, emotional hedging can be a useful tool to avoid disappointment, or maybe you prefer projecting confidence to manifest a desired outcome. And if you’re a Phillies fan, you’ve perfected the art of oscillating wildly between the two over the course of a single game. You even have a handy meme with a meter that only ever points to one extreme or the other:

(Please excuse the mismatched needle sizes and logo alignment. These images are precious internet relics that have been downloaded, clumsily edited, re-uploaded, compressed, and decompressed hundreds, if not thousands, of times. The pixelation is earned like callouses on the hands of a skilled laborer.)

But the formula seems to assume that expectations are set and controlled by the person in search of a happy existence. The entire notion is upended when mathematical models based on historical outcomes become the source for baseline expectations. In this scenario, if your team is outperforming expectations, then you can enjoy the banked wins, but you do so in fear of the rainier days that surely lie somewhere in the team’s future forecast. Whereas if your team is underperforming expectations, things might feel dire, but there’s reason to believe sunnier days lie ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Warren’s best pitch is a sweeper. That’s the case for a lot of pitchers in baseball today, of course, but his rendition is almost the platonic ideal of the pitch: low-80s velocity, very little vertical movement in either direction, and a huge, comic-book-exaggerated horizontal hook. The ball briefly looks possessed on its flight home:

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you: That’s a really sweep-y sweeper. No one in baseball gets more horizontal movement on his sweeper than Warren, in fact. From his slingy, low-three-quarters arm slot, he generates the sweep the pitch is so known for, working it across the plate to righties or darting it in to steal a front-door strike against lefties. It’s Warren’s signature pitch, the secondary offering he uses most frequently, and he has it on a string. He throws it more frequently when behind in the count than ahead, believe it or not, and floods the zone with unerring precision.

The natural pairing for that sweeping slider? Warren’s excellent sinker, which dives and tails arm side, falling four more inches and tailing two more inches than your average 93-mph sinker. That movement confuses opposing hitters to no end. He’s induced called strikes on around a third of the two-strike sinkers he’s thrown all year, the best mark in the majors. You can see why:

That, in a nutshell, is the promise of Will Warren. Major league pitchers are increasingly adopting a sinker/sweeper approach when they face same-handed opposition, and Warren is one of the best there is at sinking and sweeping. That was the promise that made him a Top 100 prospect – two elite pitches, the ability to mix in a four-seamer, changeup, and curveball to keep batters off of those two premium offerings, and enough command to sew it all together. It’s working. Though he’s suffered from poor sequencing luck (65.2% left-on-base rate, one of the lowest in the majors among starters), his 2.88 FIP, 3.37 SIERA, and 3.58 xERA all point to his effectiveness so far.
Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Englert throws an array of pitches. The 25-year-old right-hander’s repertoire comprises a four-seam fastball, a sinker, a changeup, a cutter/slider, a sweeper, a “big curveball,” and a “shorter version of the curveball.” He considers his changeup — utilized at a 31.6% clip over his 13 relief appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays — to be his best pitch. More on that in a moment.

Englert, whom the Rays acquired from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for Drew Sommers back in February, will also break out the occasional… lets’s call it a baby curveball.

“I threw a few that were around 60 mph when I was in Durham,” explained Englert, whose campaign includes nine outings and a 1.84 ERA for Tampa’s Triple-A affiliate. “One of them was to the best man in my wedding. It was the first time I’d faced him in a real at-bat, and I just wanted to make him laugh.”

The prelude to Englert’s throwing a baby curveball to his close friend came a handful of weeks earlier. Back and forth between the Bulls and the bigs this season, he was at the time throwing in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium.

”I was totally messing around and wanted to see what kind of reaction I could get from Snydes (Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder),” recalled Englert, whose major-league ledger this year includes a 4.84 ERA and a much-better 2.93 FIP. “I lobbed it in there, kind of like the [Zack] Greinke-style curveball, and landed it. I thought he would laugh it off, but instead Snydes goes, ‘Huh. You could maybe use that early in counts to some lefties.’ That was him having an openness to, ‘Hey, make the ball move different ways, do different things, use them all.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I won’t try to slow-play it; there was nothing I didn’t like this week. Baseball is freaking great right now. There are huge blockbuster trades that ignite passionate fanbases, for better or worse. The playoff chase is starting to heat up as we approach the All Star break. Crowds are picking up now that school is out. The weather is beautiful in seemingly every stadium. We’ve entered San Francisco Summer, which means it’s a lovely 57 and foggy most days here, ideal baseball weather for me (and you, too, if you live here long enough to acclimate). So I have no bones to pick this week, nothing that irked or piqued me. It’s just pure appreciation for this beautiful game – and, as always, for Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose column idea I adapted from basketball to baseball.

1. The Streaking… Rockies?!
The hottest team in baseball right now? That’d be the Red Sox or Dodgers, probably – maybe the Rays or Astros depending on what time horizon you’re looking at. But if you adjust for difficulty level, it has to be the Rockies, who were one James Wood superhuman effort (two two-run homers in a 4-3 victory) away from a four-game sweep of the Nationals. Add that to their Sunday victory over the Braves, and they’re 4-1 in their last five. That could have been a five-game winning streak!

Sure, baseball is a game of randomness. Every team gets hot for little micro-patches of the season. But, well, this feels like the biggest test of the “anyone can do anything for 10 games” theory in quite some time. These Rockies are terrible. Their everyday lineup features six players with a combined -1.4 WAR this year. Those the starters – the bench is worse than that. Their rotation has an aggregate 6.23 ERA. They’ve been outscored by 196 runs this year; the next-closest team is the Athletics at -128. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Fried is one of the best pitchers in baseball. Now in his ninth big league season, and his first with the New York Yankees after eight with the Atlanta Braves, the 31-year-old southpaw is 9-2 with a 1.89 ERA over 95 innings. His career marks are impressive as well. Since debuting in August 2017, Fried has a 2.96 ERA and 3.25 FIP to go with a sparkling 82-38 record. His .683 winning percentage ranks behind only Clayton Kershaw (.695) among active pitchers with at least 100 decisions.

When our 2015 Atlanta Braves Top Prospect list was published in January of that year, Fried was coming off a 2014 season that saw him miss the first three months with forearm soreness and throw just 10 2/3 innings in the low minors before undergoing Tommy John surgery in July. Acquired by Atlanta from the San Diego Padres shortly before our list went up, the seventh overall pick in the 2012 draft was ranked third in the Braves system by Kiley McDaniel, then our lead prospect analyst.

What did Fried’s 2015 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Fried to respond to it.

———

“The 6-foot-4, 185 pound lefty was half of what may have been the best one-two punch in high school baseball history, with Nationals top prospect RHP Lucas Giolito at Harvard Westlake High School in 2012.”

“It was definitely a good little thing,” replied Fried. “It didn’t mention that Jack Flaherty was in there, too. He was probably a better performer in high school than both of us. His stats blew mine and Lucas’ out of the water.”

“Scouts were concerned going into the 2012 draft spring about the unusually high volume of pitches with limited down time on the high school’s pitching program.” Read the rest of this entry »