OK, I give. I did not expect the Detroit Tigers to have the best record in baseball a week into June. Or at any point in the season, to be honest. We all knew that this was a playoff team with some developing young talent still in the pipeline; a return to the postseason and a run at the AL Central title seemed like reasonable goals. But the Tigers have not only done what was expected (Tarik Skubal’s continued excellence) and hoped for (former no. 1 picks Spencer Torkelson and Casey Mize leveling up), they’ve gotten breaks they could not even have dreamed of (Zach McKinstry’s .360 OBP).

But one obvious place the Tigers were set to improve was behind the plate. Jake Rogers is a terrific defender, and not as bad a hitter as I thought before I looked up his numbers. Which is to say I thought his numbers were horrendous; they were merely bad. Rogers was one of just 12 players to hit under .200 in 300 or more PA last year; out of 286 players who hit that playing time threshold, he was in the bottom 20 in wRC+.

Great defense behind the plate covers for a lot of offensive sins, but speaking generally, playoff teams don’t like to have a guy in the lineup every day who makes outs 75% of the time. Surely, there’s a way to achieve equivalent defense without giving up quite so much offense?

Good news; Dillon Dingler is here, and he can do better than that. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2024, Tarik Skubal won the American League Cy Young. It was unanimous, and deservedly so. However many superlatives you can think of for his production, he probably deserved them. He shouldered a heavy workload, combined devastating movement and velocity with great command, and led the Tigers to the playoffs in the bargain. It’s the kind of year that stands as the best season of many players’ careers.

That might sound like I’m calling Skubal a one hit wonder, but I’m absolutely not. We projected him to be the best pitcher in baseball before the season started. We also projected him to strike out fewer batters, walk more, allow more home runs, and post a higher ERA and FIP than he did in 2024. You can be great and still worse than Skubal was in 2024. In fact, almost all great pitchers are worse than he was last year. It’s hard to be that good!

You’ll note that I didn’t say it’s impossible to be that good. That’s because, uh, have you seen Tarik Skubal pitch this year? His statistics sound almost made up. He’s the class of baseball, very clearly the best pitcher in the game this year. Of course, if you’ve kept up with our leaderboards and watched highlights, I’m not telling you anything new. But on the occasion of the best game of Skubal’s career, I thought it would be fun to dig into his marvelous season and just admire it for a bit. Tarik Skubal is everything, everywhere, all at once. His 2025 is the best in every way it’s possible to be the best. We don’t always have to wonder whether something is sustainable. Sometimes we can just appreciate it. Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Schwellenbach had just two big-league games under his belt when he was featured here at FanGraphs early last June. The most recent of them had come a few days earlier at Fenway Park, where he’d allowed six runs and failed to get out of the fifth inning. Two starts into his career, the Atlanta Braves right-hander was 0-2 with an 8.38 ERA.

Those initial speed bumps quickly became a thing of the past. Schwellenbach allowed three runs over his next two outings, and by season’s end he had made 21 appearances and logged a 3.35 ERA and a 3.29 FIP. Counting this years’s 10 starts, the 24-year-old Saginaw, Michigan native has a 3.41 ERA and a 3.41 FIP over 185 innings. Moreover, he has a 23.5% strikeout rate and just a 4.7% walk rate. Relentlessly attacking the zone with a six-pitch mix, Schwellenbach has firmly established himself as a cog in Atlanta’s rotation.

On the eve of his returning to the mound in Boston last Sunday, I asked the 2021 second-round pick out of the University of Nebraska what has changed in the 11-plus months since we first spoke.

“Honestly, when we talked last year I was just throwing the ball to the catcher,” claimed Schwellenbach, who was a shortstop in his first two collegiate seasons and then a shortstop/closer as a junior. “It was really only my second year as just a pitcher, so I was very young-minded with how I pitched. Now that I’ve got 30 or so starts, I have an idea of what I’m trying to do out there. Being around guys like Max Fried, Charlie Morton, and Chris Sale last year was obviously big, too. I learned a lot from them, as well as from [pitching coach] Rick Kranitz.”

Morton, who is now with the Baltimore Orioles, helped him improve the quality of his curveball. Their mid-season conversation was the genesis of a more efficient grip. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I’ll keep the introduction short today, because I’m getting ready to travel to St. Louis for a game with my dad and uncle. There’s a Masyn Winn bobblehead ticketed for my memorabilia shelf – and a pile of enjoyable plays to recap before I can go get it. So, of course, thank you to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose NBA columns of likes and dislikes inspired this one, and let’s get started.

1. The Weekend of Wilmer
I have a soft spot for Wilmer Flores through a sheer fluke of geography. I lived in New York during his Mets tenure, and I moved to San Francisco around the same time he did. His walk-up music has been the same for the last decade: the Friends theme song. It’s a fan favorite and even comes with a good story. He’s the quintessential role player, a guy that most teams would love to have but no team needs to have. He’s been pitching in across the diamond, albeit in decreasingly difficult defensive roles, that whole time. With the exception of a down 2024, he’s been consistently valuable, but he’s never been a star – the closest thing I know to a Wilmer Flores highlight is his charming sadness when he thought he was getting traded.

For just one weekend, though, that all changed. Flores has been improbably dueling with Aaron Judge for the major league RBI lead throughout the first eight weeks of the season. RBI might not be a great predictive stat, and it might not be a great stat overall, but it definitely matters to players. Fancier versions of measuring contextual offense – WPA, RE24, and so on – all think that Flores has been a top 10 run producer this year, too. He’d fallen behind Judge by just a hair in those races – and probably has no chance at keeping up all season. I mean, have you seen Aaron Judge? But none of that mattered when the Giants played the A’s last weekend.
Read the rest of this entry »

Through his first three seasons in Detroit, Javier Báez was largely a disappointment, with a combination of flashy defense and free swinging that yielded such diminishing returns that he sank below replacement level while battling injuries last year. He missed the late-season run that helped the Tigers capture a Wild Card spot, and as spring training opened, a full-time place in their lineup wasn’t guaranteed. Amid a rash of injuries to other Tigers, he’s not only split his time between center field — a position he hadn’t played in a regular season game before — third base, and shortstop, he’s been a productive hitter thanks to better health and some adjustments to his swing.

Even while going hitless on Friday and Sunday against the Rangers, the 32-year-old Báez is hitting .300/.336/.455 with three homers and a 127 wRC+. The peripherals underlying that are admittedly shaky, and he’s walking just 3.4% of the time, but thanks to positive defensive contributions at comparatively unfamiliar positions, he’s fourth among the team’s position players with 1.1 WAR — and he’s done it for a team that has the AL’s best record (26-15, .634) and largest division lead (2 1/2 games). For the first time in awhile, watching him is a whole lot of fun.

The Tigers signed Báez to a six-year, $140 million deal in November 2021, after he’d split his season between the Cubs and the Mets (who dealt away Pete Crow-Armstrong in the package to acquire him) — a strong one in which he posted a 117 wRC+ and 4.1 WAR. He was serviceable at best during his first season in Detroit (.238/.278/.393, 89 wRC+, 2.0 WAR) but sank to .222/.267/.325 (63 wRC+) with 0.8 WAR in 2023, then hit just .184/.221/.294 (43 wRC+) in 80 games last year. He missed nearly a month in June and July due to lumbar inflammation; the problem flared up again in August, accompanied by right hip inflammation. Under the belief that the Tigers were going nowhere at 62-66, he played his last game of the season on August 22 before undergoing surgery. Without their highest-paid player — a coincidence that was tough to miss given his underperformance — the Tigers went a major league-best 24-10 and snatched the third AL Wild Card spot, their first playoff berth in a decade. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Bacsik is best known for having surrendered Barry Bonds’s 756th home run. The August 7, 2007 bomb at San Francisco’s AT&T Park gave Bonds the most in MLB history, one more than Henry Aaron. Unlike the legendary bashers, Bacsik is but a mere mortal. A left-handed pitcher for four teams over parts of five seasons, the now-Texas Rangers broadcast analyst appeared in 51 big-league games and logged a record of 10-13 with a 5.46 ERA in 216 innings.

Despite his relative anonymity, the gopher wasn’t the only noteworthy happening in Bacsik’s career. Moreover, those didn’t all take place with him on the mound.

“In my first 14 at-bats, I didn’t get a hit, didn’t strike out, and didn’t walk,” explained Bacsik, who finished 5-for-50 at the dish. “Apparently that’s a record for not having one of those outcomes to begin a career. I didn’t know this until last year when we were in Detroit and they brought it up on the broadcast.”

In Bacsik’s next three plate appearances, he doubled, singled, and struck out — all in the same game. Two years later, in his 44th time standing in a batter’s box, he drew his only career walk.

The first home run that Bacsik allowed — there were 41 in all — was to Kevin Millar. It isn’t his most-memorable outside of the Bonds blast. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Seelinger has taken an atypical path to the doorstep of the big leagues. Drafted in the 28th round by the Pittsburgh Pirates out of Division-III Farmingdale State College in 2017, the 30-year-old right-hander subsequently played in the Tampa Bay Rays, San Francisco Giants, and Philadelphia Phillies organizations before getting released and hooking on with the Atlantic League’s Long Island Ducks before the 2024 season. His fortunes turned last summer. The Detroit Tigers signed Seelinger in late June, and since returning to affiliated ball he has logged a 1.26 ERA and a 38.4% strikeout rate over 29 relief appearances between Double-A Erie and Triple-A Toledo. So far this season, the Westbury, New York native has a 4-0 record to go with a 0.57 ERA and a 30.9% strikeout rate over nine appearances, the last five of them with the Mud Hens.

His signature pitch is every bit as notable as his late-bloomer success. Seelinger’s repertoire includes a four-seam fastball and a cutter/slider, but it is his unique offering with an unorthodox grip that most stands out. Seelinger shared the story behind it when Toledo visited Triple-A Worcester last week.

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David Laurila: You throw a unique pitch. What exactly is it?

Matt Seelinger: “So, it was coined on Long Island, where I’m from. It’s called a knuckle drop. Basically, what I do is take a four-seam fastball grip and flip it so that the horseshoe is on the inside. I take my two fingers — my pointer finger and my middle finger — and bend them. I take the top lace, and put them on the bottom of it. I put my ring finger and pinky on the seams. The thumb, I try to get underneath as much as possible, although thumb placement isn’t as big of deal as long as it’s not too high up on the ball. From there, I throw it just like a fastball, only I’m pushing it out.”

Laurila: The bent fingers are straightening as you’re releasing the ball… Read the rest of this entry »

Ty France went into last season trying to be something he’s not, and the results reflected that. Over 535 plate appearances split between the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, he slashed .234/.305/.365 with 13 home runs and a 93 wRC+. Statistically speaking, it was the worst year of his career.

Now with the Minnesota Twins after inking a modest $1M free-agent deal in mid-February, France went into yesterday with numbers more in line with what he did from 2019-2023. A month-plus into the campaign, the 30-year-old first baseman has a 118 wRC+ and a .271/.341/.407 slash line.

How has he rediscovered the better version of himself?

“My swing is simple and compact right now,” France told me prior to an 0-for-4 Friday night that included his being robbed on a diving catch and lining an at-em ball at an infielder. “Instead of trying to do too much, I’m just trying to get in my best position and take a good swing.

“Guys are getting paid for homers and doing damage, so a lot of my training last offseason was geared toward trying to hit the ball in the air and drive the ball,” France added. “I kind of lost touch with what I was best at, which is using the right side of the field just collecting hits. This past offseason was about getting back to the basics and rediscovering who I am as a hitter.” Read the rest of this entry »

While the Twins continue to stumble, the Tigers are in first place in the AL Central, having recently won nine out of 11 games. Spencer Torkelson played a big part in that surge, homering four times over that span and five times so far this season, putting him halfway to last year’s total before tax day rolled around. As he’s done on and off throughout his brief career, the top pick of the 2020 draft is raking, but given his ups and downs since reaching the majors in ’22, it will take more than a few strong weeks to convince anyone he’s truly turned a corner. Still, the adjustments he’s made suggest this is more than just a random hot streak.

Through 156 games, the 25-year-old Torkelson is hitting an impressive .288/.380/.627. His slugging percentage ranks sixth in the American League, while his 184 wRC+ ranks eighth; he was second behind only Aaron Judge in both categories until Monday’s 0-for-4 against the Brewers. Admittedly, he hasn’t exactly been beating up on Cy Young Award hopefuls, as his homers have come at the expense of the Dodgers’ Alex Vesia, the White Sox’s Davis Martin, the Yankees’ Carlos Carrasco, and the Twins’ Kody Funderburk and Simeon Woods Richardson. But Tork and his teammates are part of the reason that list looks inauspicious, as the Tigers — who are 10-6 thus far, their best start since 2015 — have beaten up opposing pitchers, scoring 5.0 runs per game (tied for second in the AL) with a 116 wRC+ (third). Read the rest of this entry »

Hitting a baseball is an unthinkable accomplishment of timing. In order to strike a ball traveling from the pitcher’s hand to the plate in less than half a second with a slab of wood, a hitter must execute an elaborate sequence of movements on time. When do you lift your front foot? When do you load your hands? When do you fire your hips? It’s a sophisticated choreography; a beat late at any point can doom the swing.

Picture Fernando Tatis Jr. When Tatis is at the plate, he shifts around like a predator stalking its prey, eyes peeled for the exact moment when the pitcher lifts his front foot so that he, too, can get his toe down at the right time, and then his hands up, and then finally the barrel through the zone:

If hitting is such a delicate sequence, conditional on the pitcher’s own timing, it follows that pitchers who mess with that timing can improve their performance; by extension, pitchers who groove their deliveries will underperform their stuff. In an interview with David Laurila in 2017, Jason Hammel described changing his delivery for these precise reasons. Read the rest of this entry »