LOS ANGELES — Yoshinobu Yamamoto was in a bit of a pickle. In the first inning of his first-ever World Series start on Saturday night, the adrenaline was (understandably) pumping; the normally controlled right-hander sprayed fastballs around the zone to hand Gleyber Torres, the Yankees leadoff hitter, a base on balls. Following a Juan Soto groundout pushed Torres to second, Yamamoto fell behind Aaron Judge 2-1 after missing with a couple of fastballs.

He’d shown Judge the slow curveball on 1-0, so he probably didn’t want to show it again. But he also did not want to fall behind 3-1 to this generation’s Barry Bonds with a runner on second and Giancarlo Stanton looming on deck. It was time to break out the secret weapon.

In a sense, Yamamoto hardly needed his slider to dominate the Yankees in Game 2 of the World Series, which the Dodgers won, 4-2, to take 2-0 series lead. He threw only six sliders on Saturday night, throwing them less frequently than his fastball, curveball, and splitter. (Baseball Savant says Yamamoto threw eight sliders, but I proclaim that two of them were misclassified cutters.)

But the total number of sliders thrown belies their importance. Every single slider was thrown in a huge spot, like in this 2-1 count to Judge early in the contest. Each time the game could have easily slipped away with one missed location, one poor pitch selection, Yamamoto opted for the slider, shielding it from his opponents until it was absolutely necessary. Read the rest of this entry »

Ice Cube opened Game 2 of the World Series in Los Angeles by manifesting a “Good Day” for the Dodgers. Yoshinobu Yamamoto and the Dodgers bullpen put the Yankees offense in a freezer, while the Los Angeles bats got to Carlos Rodón. But in the seventh inning the sun set on the good day when Shohei Ohtani injured his shoulder on a stolen base attempt. After the game, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said Ohtani suffered a subluxation of the shoulder and that further testing would be required, but his strength and range of motion were good. With the severity of the injury still unclear, a 4-2 win and 2-0 series lead for now is clouded by uncertainty.

Prior to the vibe shift, the game began with Yamamoto on the mound for his fourth start of the postseason. His performance in his prior starts was shaky – allowing five runs in three innings in his first meeting with the Padres, zero runs in five innings in a second face off with San Diego, and two runs in 4 1/3 innings against the Mets. The Dodgers have been managing Yamamoto’s workload since his return from a right rotator cuff strain on September 10, and he hadn’t pitched more than five innings in a start since June 7, when he silenced the Yankees in the Bronx for seven scoreless innings. In Game 2, Yamamoto’s second start against the Yankees, he was nearly as effective as he was in that first outing: He one-hit New York over 6 1/3 innings, allowing just one earned run on a Juan Soto home run. Soto, who scored both Yankees runs in Game 2, was their only player whose bat avoided the deep freeze.

For Yamamoto to reach the level of effectiveness he showcased on Saturday night, he relies on a variety of offspeed pitches to keep hitters from sitting on his four-seamer, which is his worst pitch by Stuff+ with a grade of 84. He kept the Yankees off balance by disregarding standard sequencing practices. Instead he deployed his curveball, splitter, slider, and cutter to trap the Yankees offense in a web of sequencing chaos. Read the rest of this entry »

What a game. This series has been so hyped that a scoreless tie through four innings felt like a letdown. But then the party got started. In the end, we got everything we wanted: stars, steals, defensive gems and gaffes, and even a walk-off home run to evoke Kirk Gibson. But my beat is writing about managerial decisions, so let’s get a quick 1,100 or so words in on that before it’s time for Game 2. Specifically, I’m interested in the bottom half of the 10th inning in Game 1 of the World Series, and the decisions that led to Freddie Freeman’s colossal walk-off grand slam and lifted the Dodgers to a 6-3 win over the Yankees.

Using Nestor

Hated it. The pitch for why it’s a bad decision is pretty easy, right? Nestor Cortes hadn’t pitched in a month, a trusted lefty reliever was also warm, and the scariest possible guy was due up. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where this was the lowest-risk move. There’s not much I can say about the pitch-level data, because he threw only two pitches, but there are myriad reasons to opt for a reliever over a starter in that situation.

A lot of Cortes’s brilliance is in his variety. He throws a ton of different pitches. He has a funky windup – several funky windups, in fact. He changes speeds and locations. That’s how a guy who sits 91-92 mph with his fastball keeps succeeding in the big leagues. But many of those advantages are blunted when you don’t have feel for the game.
Read the rest of this entry »

LOS ANGELES — The injured star meandered to the plate. Bases loaded, two outs, bottom of the 10th inning, down a run in the first game of the World Series. It all happened so fast. A first-pitch fastball fired inside, elevated, square in the lefty happy zone. A short, powerful swing beat it to the spot. A towering line drive sliced through the chilly Southern California air, the crowd silent in awe and disbelief for a beat. Then pandemonium, earth-shaking stomps, elated feral screams pierced the air.

In an instant classic, Freddie Freeman, playing through an injured ankle, channeled the iconic Kirk Gibson home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, pounding a first-pitch heater into the right field bleachers for a walk-off grand slam to hand the Dodgers a 6-3 win over the Yankees in Game 1 of the World Series at Dodger Stadium.

“Those are the kind of things, when you’re 5 years old with your two older brothers and you’re playing wiffle ball in the backyard, those are the scenarios you dream about, two outs, bases loaded in a World Series game,” Freeman said. “For it to actually happen and get a home run and walk it off to give us a 1-0 lead, that’s as good as it gets right there.”

The 10th inning was a saga unto itself, a seesaw affair in which New York’s win probability swung from 90% to 0% in the span of a few minutes. It looked like the story of the game would be Los Angeles closer Blake Treinen and his inability or refusal to prevent stolen bases; Jazz Chisholm Jr. singled, stole second and third, and scored on a groundball to short to hand the Yankees a 3-2 lead.

After exhausting all of their preferred arms in the first nine innings, the Yankees were left to rely on Jake Cousins to try and close it out. Cousins retired the first hitter he saw before walking Gavin Lux and giving up a single to Tommy Edman.

That forced Yankees manager Aaron Boone’s hand. He didn’t want Cousins, a right-hander, to take on Shohei Ohtani, so he sought out the platoon advantage by bringing in Nestor Cortes, who was making his first appearance in over a month after dealing with a balky elbow. One pitch later, and Boone was looking like a genius — Ohtani put an awkward swing on a middle-middle heater, and left fielder Alex Verdugo sacrificed his body to corral the foul pop, lunging over the barrier along the line and front-flipping after securing the catch. Because Verdugo left the field of play after making the grab, both runners advanced; with two outs, and still seeking the platoon advantage, Boone intentionally walked Mookie Betts to bring up Freeman.

Cortes was not so lucky on his second pitch. He fired a fastball with 21 inches of induced vertical break; it was well-placed horizontally, hitting the inside corner, but not so much vertically. It hung up right where Freeman could mash it. Because the pitch was located inside, it allowed for a perfectly pulled fly ball, rocked at 109-mph and at a 30-degree launch angle. It was a true no-doubt dinger. Freeman triumphantly lifted his bat milliseconds after contact, aware he’d just delivered a legendary moment.

“It’s arguably one of the – might be the greatest baseball moment I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve witnessed some great ones,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said.

Until then, it looked like Giancarlo Stanton had been the one to deliver the legendary moment. In the top of the sixth inning, the titanic slugger walloped a Jack Flaherty curveball 116.7-mph to the pull side for a go-ahead two-run dinger, handing the Yankees a 2-1 lead with their top bullpen guys lined up to shut the door. But the Dodgers knotted it up in the bottom of the eighth, linking an Ohtani double with a Betts sac fly to level the score at two.

Things got weird in the top of the ninth, when Gleyber Torres rocked a Michael Kopech fastball deep into left field. A Dodgers fan, unbelievably, reached over the left field wall, snagging the liner before it could complete its journey. The umpires ruled it a fan-interference double, and Torres was stranded at second, setting up the extra inning dramatics that followed.

Before that wild finish, the game was largely defined by the two starting pitchers: Flaherty and Gerrit Cole. They both turned in excellent performances, slicing through hitters and keeping their teams within striking distance.

Flaherty’s NLCS flipped between brilliant and shambolic, leading to questions about how he might equip himself in this series opener. In Game 1 against the Mets, Flaherty threw seven brilliant shutout innings, lending an exhausted Dodgers bullpen some much-needed rest. But in Game 5, Flaherty did not have his best stuff. The Mets lit him up for eight runs over just three innings as the Dodgers effectively punted the game.

As MLB.com’s Mike Petriello tweeted before the game, Flaherty’s performance likely would hinge on his fastball velocity. When Flaherty sits above 93 mph, the expected damage is low and the pitch gets a ton of whiffs. But when it averages 91.4 mph, as it did in his start in Game 5 of the NLCS, it is liable to get hit around.

Petriello proved prophetic: Flaherty’s fastball averaged 93.6 mph, topping out at 96, and the fastball did damage, notching 10 called strikes and a 38% CSW (called-strike-and-whiff percentage). But the knuckle-curve was the real weapon — the Yankees swung at it 17 times and came up empty on 12 of them. Unfortunately for Flaherty, one of those swings was that Stanton two-run homer. He finished with 5 1/3 innings pitched, six strikeouts, one walk, and two earned runs.

Cole might have been even better. Across six-plus innings, the Yankees ace allowed one run on four hits and no walks, and for the fourth time this postseason, he struck out exactly four batters. He flipped his tactics midway through the start, deploying a fastball-heavy approach the first time through the order and emphasizing his softer stuff on successive encounters with the Dodgers lineup. Through two innings, Cole had thrown 70% fastballs.

Navigating through the lineup for a second time, Cole switched up his approach. He went cutter/changeup/cutter to start off his second Ohtani at-bat; Ohtani secured the early edge, bringing the count to 2-1. Cole got back into the count with a cheeky sinker; even though it was located middle-middle, Ohtani could only manage a foul ball, perhaps fooled by the unexpected movement. Cole, sticking with his newfound soft stuff approach, buried a curve on 2-2 to punch out Ohtani.

To Freeman in the bottom of the fourth, Cole continued the assault; he got ahead with two consecutive cutters, breaking Freeman’s bat on a foul ball on the second of the offerings. Ahead once again, Cole jammed Freeman with a 98-mph four-seamer up and in; Freeman shattered his bat again, shoving the pitch to the pull side for a 47-mph exit velocity groundout.

The Dodgers scored the game’s first run off Cole in the bottom of the fifth. With one out, Enrique Hernández drove a heater down the right field line; Juan Soto overran the ball, allowing Hernández to reach third with a triple. It was the Dodgers’ second hit of the game and their second triple, after Freeman — of all people — tripled down the third base line with two outs in the first inning despite his barking ankle. On a 1-1 count, Will Smith lifted a low-and-outside cutter to Soto into relatively shallow right field. Soto caught it a bit awkwardly but produced a strong and accurate throw home; Hernández slid in head first, just ahead of the tag.

As the top of the sixth began, Roberts faced his first difficult decision of the game — let the locked-in Flaherty take on Soto and Judge for a third time, or opt for one of the flamethrowers in the bullpen. Going against the conventional wisdom, Roberts stuck with his horse — and it backfired. Boone made the same decision, and the outcome went his way. The third-time-through-the-order debates would be settled another day.

With Cole finally out in the bottom of the seventh, the Dodgers immediately threatened to tie the game. Clay Holmes started Max Muncy out with a sinker at his boots for ball one; the next pitch, a slider, was too far up, giving Muncy the 2-0 edge. On the third pitch, Holmes overcooked a backfoot sweeper, nipping Muncy’s toe and giving the Dodgers runners on first and second with no outs. Enrique Hernández laid down a bunt, giving up an out to move the runners into scoring position.

Even with a slight Yankees lead, FanGraphs live win probabilities gave the Dodgers a 54.3% chance of winning after Hernández’s bunt. That probability sunk to 37.3% after Smith popped up the first pitch he saw. That was the end of the line for Holmes; Tommy Kahnle, he of 47 consecutive changeups, came in to handle Lux. In the highest leverage at-bat of the first nine innings, Lux rolled over on a — surprise! — changeup, stranding the runners at second and third.

Kahnle stayed in to face Edman to lead off the eighth. He threw four changeups to Edman, who rolled over to short. Ohtani smashed Kahnle’s 56th consecutive changeup 113.9 mph, roping it off the center field wall for a double. Ohtani’s speed forced a hurried throw from Soto; it came up about three feet short, and Torres tried to pick it, but it deflected off his glove. He was unable to locate it right away, and by the time he did, Ohtani had scooted to third with just one out. Boone pushed the closer button, bringing in Luke Weaver to take on Betts and Freeman.

Weaver snuck ahead of Betts, working a 1-2 count, but Betts smoked a changeup to center. For a second, it looked like Judge wouldn’t be able to get to it, but he scampered back just in time, preventing the extra-base hit but catching it with no chance to stop Ohtani from scoring from third on the sac fly. After eight full innings, the game was knotted at two.

In the ninth, things got weird. Torres crushed a 99-mph up-and-in fastball to the very top of the wall for that fan-interference double. Then, Roberts intentionally walked Soto and pulled Kopech; Trienen came in to take on Judge with runners on first and second and two outs.

Treinen unleashed some typical wizardry, whipping two sweepers in the zone to gain the 0-2 edge; Judge ultimately skied a fastball about 200 feet in the air to end the threat.

Weaver took the middle of the Dodgers order in the bottom of the ninth. Teoscar Hernández lined out to Soto in right, and Muncy popped out to short for the second out. Then, Enrique Hernández shattered his bat on a duck snort liner; it looked like it might drop, but Verdugo made a nice sliding catch to retire him and end the inning. This game was going extras.

Trienen picked up right where he left off to start the 10th, dispatching Stanton on some filth. But he left a sinker over the plate to Chisholm, and the third baseman pounced, smacking it past Lux for his second single of the game; he nabbed second a 2-0 pitch to Anthony Rizzo. Pitching coach Mark Prior strolled deliberately to the mound.

After Chisholm took third with no throw, Volpe on a 1-1 count squared around to bunt — but missed. On 1-2, he hit a ground ball up the middle. Edman fielded, and looked like he might have a shot to turn two, but the ball got stuck in the webbing of his glove. Edman got Rizzo at second but Volpe beat the relay to first, staying out of the double play and allowing Chisholm to score the go-ahead run.

With New York’s main leverage arms expended, Boone went to his own sweeper wizard, Cousins, to try and close out the first game of the World Series. He started strong, inducing a Smith fly ball for the first out. But he fell behind Lux, ultimately walking him on a high fastball. Cousins did not mess around against the NLCS MVP Edman, but he couldn’t put the shortstop away, either. Edman laid off an 0-2 slider, then pushed a groundball single up the middle on the 1-2 pitch. Lux likely would have advanced to third, but he hesitated and then tripped rounding second base; he had to scurry back to the bag. The Yankees had two lefties, Cortes and Tim Hill, warming in the bullpen; after Edman reached, Boone went to Cortes, who had last pitched over a month ago.

The rest, we can be sure, will go down in history.

Beneath this cynical, empirically motivated exterior, I’m actually a big softie. As such, I love it when an old guy turns back the clock and rediscovers the magic one last time. Almost a decade ago, Giancarlo Stanton was the proto-Aaron Judge: A player who was bigger and stronger than any outfielder we’d ever seen, and capable of hitting the ball much harder than anyone else in the league.

Stanton came of age just as Statcast made exit velocity public knowledge, though his 2017 season — the peak of his stardom — was impressive enough by the metrics Henry Chadwick scrawled on a cave wall 15,000 years ago. Those numbers: 59 home runs, 123 runs scored, 132 RBI, a .631 slugging percentage. Small wonder Stanton was named the MVP of the National League that year. Read the rest of this entry »

Rihanna said it best. Or maybe it was Russell Crowe. This is the main event. The top seed in the American League meets the top seed in the National League. The presumptive AL MVP is leading his team against the presumptive NL winner. Those guys, coincidentally, are the two biggest free agents in history – Shohei Ohtani broke the bank this past offseason, only a year after Aaron Judge signed a historic deal of his own. Juan Soto might eclipse them both this winter. And while those three are the biggest stars in the game right now, they have three previous MVP winners – Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Giancarlo Stanton – as sidekicks. Oh yeah, and the two highest-paid pitchers in history are the aces of their respective teams. Heck, I’ve allowed this paragraph to run to a ridiculous length, and I’m only now mentioning 2024 Home Run Derby winner Teoscar Hernández.

By any objective measure, this World Series matchup is absolutely loaded with star power. But the current players are only half the story. This is the 12th Yankees-Dodgers matchup in World Series history – the Dodgers have played in 22 of these things, and they’ve faced one team more than half the time. This isn’t quite Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Fall Classic anymore, where the two preeminent teams are a subway ride apart, but the next best thing is a rivalry between the two biggest cities in the country.

Want an example of how good the players in this series are? Here are the top five hitters in baseball by wRC+ this year:

Jay Jaffe dove into how rare it is to see the best player in each league in the World Series – turns out, it’s quite rare! Fifty-homer sluggers have also never faced each other in the Series before now, and that leaves out the fact that Ohtani stole 50 bags too. Soto is an absurdly over-qualified second banana. Betts isn’t on this list, and he was in the MVP running before missing time with injury. The star power on display is simply staggering, as Davy Andrews noted Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me be very clear: This doesn’t matter. What I’m about to show you is small sample size theater. It’s not statistically significant. It has no bearing on what’s actually going to happen in the World Series. We are here for a fun fact rather than a learning opportunity. Are we all in agreement? Okay, then let me show you something wild. Here are Aaron Judge’s career numbers against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So, uh, yeah. A .389 batting average is good. A slugging percentage in the thousands is good. A wRC+ over 300 is also good. Just in case you were wondering how good those numbers are, here’s a table that shows the best career numbers against the Dodgers, minimum 40 plate appearances, courtesy of our splits leaderboard. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to throwing shade in the playoffs in recent years, nothing has caught as much – not even your least favorite broadcaster – than the concept of home field advantage. The reason for the negative feelings isn’t surprising. Other than a possible first-round bye, home field advantage is the main reward for playoff teams that win more regular-season games than other playoff teams.

It’s true that home teams have struggled in recent postseasons, but they actually haven’t been too bad this year. The 19-18 record of home teams isn’t the most scintillating of tallies, but their .513 winning percentage across 37 games is not exactly a stunning departure from the .522 winning percentage for home teams during the 2024 regular season. The most games a team can possibly play in a single postseason is 22, and nine points of winning percentage works out to only 0.2 wins per 22 games.

Naturally, the data are noisy given the relatively small number of postseason games, even under the current format, but the recent issues with home field advantage seem to mostly be a 2023 thing, when home teams went 15-26, comfortably their worst year. Smoothing out the data a bit doesn’t really do much, either.

You can always find an oddity if you shave data paper-thin like prosciutto, but with data as volatile as this, you’ll mostly end up with bleeps and bloops that don’t really mean anything. Like, sure, teams are 29-31 since 1995 at home in Game 7s and Game 5s, but that’s primarily the odd blip of NLDS home teams going 4-12 in their rubber matches.

Returning to 2023 one more time, I went back and looked at the projections, both from ZiPS and regular-season record or Pythagorean record. Using each team’s actual 2023 record, the average home team in the playoffs had a .562 regular-season winning percentage; it was .551 for the road teams. It’s a .564/.553 split using the Pythagorean records. But I still have all the projected matchups and rosters at the start of the playoffs saved, so I re-projected the results of every actual game that was played. ZiPS thought on a game-by-game basis, with home field advantage completely removed from the equation, the road teams were actually slightly stronger, projecting the average home team at .545 and the average road team at .556. Facing off against each other, ZiPS expected home teams to have a .489 record in the 31 actual playoff games, with an 8% chance of going 15-26 or worse.

Looking at the Wild Card era as a whole, home teams have gone .540 over 1,045 playoffs games. In the regular season over the same era, home teams have a .537 winning percentage. In other words, the playoffs just aren’t that different from the regular season. (ZiPS assumes a .535 playoff winning percentage for the home team in a game of exactly equal teams.) So why does it feel so bad? I suspect one reason can be found in the charts above. Home teams had a pretty good run in the mid-2010s, on the heels of the expansion from eight to 10 playoff teams, peaking at a .581 winning percentage from 2013 to 2017. In that context, it conveys the feeling that home field advantage is working as intended, and the five-year runs stayed slightly above the historical trend until the 2023 home field crash.

Since that crash feels especially bad, it’s natural that people search for deeper meaning in data that don’t really have a lot to give. One common cry was blaming the long layoffs from the bye round. This argument doesn’t hold up, as Ben Clemens pointed out last postseason.

It also doesn’t have much to do with modern baseball or modern players, either. Home field advantage has been relatively stable in the regular season throughout baseball history.

There’s been some long-term decline, but nothing earth-shattering.

The larger problem is simply that fundamentally, home field advantage just isn’t a big deal in baseball. It’s not as big a deal in other sports as some think, but unlike in the other major sports, the difference in baseball between a great team, a good team, a lousy team, and the Chicago White Sox is not that large. Other sports don’t need home field advantage to be as much of a differentiator, especially in the playoffs. A few years back, Michael Lopez, Greg Matthews, and Ben Baumer crunched some numbers and estimated that to match the better-team-advances rate of the NBA playoffs, MLB teams would need to play best-of-75 playoff series. I certainly love me some baseball, but I can’t imagine I’d still watch World Series Game 63 with the same intensity as I do every Fall Classic game now. Besides, the MLBPA wouldn’t be on board, and the calendar would make that a practical impossibility anyway.

Even giving the team with more wins home field advantage in every single game doesn’t drastically weight the dice. Assuming a .535 home winning percentage and evenly matched teams, the home team would require a best-of-13 series to become a 60/40 favorite; to increase its odds to 2-to-1, we’d have to make it a best-of-39 series. Just to experiment, I simulated series with the normal postseason distribution of home field advantage (one extra game) between two teams, the one in which the home team is .020 wins better than its opponent (just over three wins in a season). I then ran the numbers for how often the better team would be expected to win, based on series length.

So what does this all mean? In all likelihood, home field advantage in the playoffs hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. And isn’t really all that big of a deal in the first place. Without altering the very nature of the postseason significantly — aggressive changes such as requiring the lower-seeded team sweep in the Wild Card series to advance — baseball has a very limited ability to reward individual playoff teams based on their regular-season results. Home field advantage isn’t broken; it’s working in the extremely limited way that one should expect. If the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series this year, it probably won’t be because they were rewarded one more possible home game.

You are allowed to be sad. You do not have to be psyched about watching two gigantic legacy franchises smash everything in their paths and then start smashing each other in the Godzilla vs. King Kong World Series. You can be bummed that both of the obvious favorites made the World Series even though you also would have been bummed if some undeserving Wild Card team had sneaked in. Anyone who expects you to be rational in your rooting interests is being completely unreasonable. This a matchup designed specifically for fans of hegemony. You do not have to be good. You are allowed to cheer for Team Asteroid.

That said, there’s still a lot to be excited about in this matchup. The World Series offers itself to your imagination. I doubt that there’s one person reading this who doesn’t enjoy watching Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, or Freddie Freeman play baseball, who doesn’t thrill at the thought of seeing them on the biggest stage the game has to offer. It’s just inconceivable that a baseball fan could be so hopelessly lost.

Judge hit 58 home runs this season. He led baseball with a 218 wRC+. That’s the seventh-best qualified offensive season since 1900. The only players who have topped it: Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. Judge is blasting his way onto Mount Rushmore in front of our eyes. Ohtani’s 181 wRC+ ranked second. While rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he put up the first 50-50 season in history. When you combine his offense and baserunning, Ohtani was worth 80.7 runs this season, the 35th-highest total ever. Over 11 postseason games, he has a .434 on-base percentage with 10 RBI and 12 runs scored, and somehow his offensive line is worse than it was during the regular season. Soto was right behind Ohtani at 180. In seven big-league seasons, he’s never once been as low as 40% better than average at the plate, and he is still getting better. Read the rest of this entry »

Travis Ice and I have begun early work on the Los Angeles Angels and Sacramento Athletics prospect lists, and because both franchises’ prospects are on the Mesa Solar Sox roster, I spent most of last week seeing whatever game they were playing.

At this point in the Fall League, the leaders in games played have laced up their spikes only eight or nine times. Anything you’ve read about this year’s AFL so far has encompassed just two weeks of part-time play for any given player. Remember this is a hitter-friendly league for a number of both developmental and environmental reasons, and that triple slash lines in this league are not a reliable proxy for talent.

Tre’ Morgan, 1B, Tampa Bay Rays

Offensive standards at first base are quite high, and even though the collective performance of this year’s group was down relative to recent norms (by kind of a lot), it’s still a position from which we expect good players and prospects to provide impact power. Morgan has been a relevant prospect since high school, but a relative lack of power has tended to cap his projection into more of a part-time first base/outfield role.

During the 2024 regular season it looked like Morgan was more often taking max-effort swings and selling out for power. He reached Double-A and slugged .483 across three levels, but his middling raw strength and opposite-field tendency as a hitter (plus elevated chase rates relative to his career norms) suggested this was maybe not the best approach for him. In the Fall League, Morgan has been more balanced, really taking enormous hacks only in favorable counts. He’s still stinging the ball in a way that indicates he’ll be a doubles machine, and he seems less vulnerable to fastballs up and away than he did during the summer. We don’t have a way of truly knowing how Morgan will handle elevated big league fastballs until he faces them, but a more balanced, contact-oriented style of hitting is going to give him a much better chance of covering the top of the zone and being a more complete hitter. (An aside: Watch A’s prospect Denzel Clarke go first-to-third at the video’s 1:55 mark.)

I think the absolute ceiling for his production looks something like Brandon Belt’s or Daniel Murphy’s pre-Juiced Ball era statline. More likely Morgan’s output will look something like Ji Man Choi’s or LaMonte Wade Jr.’s. Morgan is not a guy who is going to hit 20 homers per year, but a heady, well-rounded offensive skillset coupled with his excellent, profile-seasoning first base defense make him better than the 40 FV grade player I evaluated him as during the year. He is making a case to be elevated into the back of this offseason’s Top 100 list.

Caleb Durbin, UTIL, New York Yankees

I gave Durbin short shrift last year even after his .353/.456/.588 line in the 2023 Fall League. He had a good 2024 at Triple-A Scranton, including a strong second half after he returned from a fractured wrist. Durbin is short — really short, he’s 5-foot-6 — but he’s not small; he’s built like a little tank. His compact, stocky build helps keep his swing short and consistently on time to pull the baseball. His quality of contact in 2024 was commensurate with a guy who slugs under .400 at the big league level, but he was dealing with an injury that typically impacts contact quality for a while after recovery.

Perhaps most importantly, Durbin looks fine at both second and third base and has also been playing all over the outfield. Defensive versatility might be his key to being rostered consistently. Durbin ran a jailbreak 4.10 for me last week, but his home-to-first times have been close to 4.4 seconds on normal swings. That’s not blazing and slower than what’s typical of a decent center fielder, but any kind of outfield viability would help the former Division-III standout become an improbable big leaguer. Durbin has played sparingly in center field during his career, and it’s going to be very difficult to evaluate him there this Fall League unless he starts getting reps there every day, which I think is unlikely. It’s more of a thing to watch develop into next spring.

Kemp Alderman, OF, Miami Marlins

Alderman, a 2023 second round pick out of Ole Miss who had some of the best exit velocities in that draft class, is currently leading the AFL with six home runs. He hit one on Friday at a whopping 119.5 mph. It went out on a line, ricocheting off the side of the batter’s eye, which you can see in this frame:

Friday, Marlins outfielder Kemp Alderman hit a homer that left Salt River Fields in a real hurry, at 119.5 mph. pic.twitter.com/HBvj2F0oud

— FanGraphs Prospects (@FG_Prospects) October 22, 2024

Like Durbin, Alderman missed time in 2024 with a broken hand. It’s good to see Alderman hitting with elite peak power coming off of this particular injury, but I’d advise everyone to pump the breaks on his overall prospectdom at this time. He loads his hands so deep, high, and late that I worry he’ll struggle against better velocity as he climbs the minors. Though Alderman’s regular-season strikeout rates don’t raise alarm, I don’t think 30-ish games at each A-ball level is a meaningful sample, especially for a draft pick out of an SEC school. It’s fine to be hopeful that I’m wrong or that Alderman will make necessary adjustments once better stuff starts beating him, and he clearly has the power to clear the offensive bar at a corner outfield spot. But even though he’s raking out here, he does not have an opinion-altering look. I know Marlins fans have gone through this a lot lately, where they have a minor leaguer with elite power but an insufficient hit tool to profile (Peyton Burdick, Griffin Conine, Jerar Encarnacion), and I worry Alderman is another of this ilk.

Devin Kirby, RHP, Minnesota Twins

Alert Ben Lindbergh, we have a knuckler. The 25-year-old Kirby was an undrafted free agent out of UConn in 2023 and spent most of 2024 in Fort Myers either on the Complex or FSL roster. His knuckleball needs to be more consistent for him to be considered a prospect at all, but for now it’s a lot of fun to watch a guy whose primary pitch is his knuckler.

The Arizona Fall League has a knuckleballer this year, Twins righty Devin Kirby. pic.twitter.com/Z6c7ik6vH4

— FanGraphs Prospects (@FG_Prospects) October 18, 2024

Board Additions

Ryan Birchard, RHP, Milwaukee Brewers
Henry Bolte, OF, Oakland Athletics

These players have had their scouting reports added to the Fall League tab on The Board. Head over there to check out their tool grades and scouting reports.