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 »

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

When Riley Greene debuted in 2022, he had a tiny bit of a strikeout problem. His overall line – .253/.321/.362 in cavernous Comerica Park – was roughly league average, but it would have been better than that if he had struck out less than 28.7% of the time. Over the subsequent two years, he reined that issue in some: 27.4% in 2023 and 26.7% in 2024. He also got better at the plate while doing so. And this year, he’s off to a scorching start, .291/.345/.530 with a career-best 145 wRC+. So he conquered the strikeout demons, right? Wrong. He’s striking out a ghastly 30.7% of the time. This requires further explanation.

One of the classic paradoxes driving the way baseball looks today is that strikeouts don’t appear to be as bad for hitters as one might think. There’s essentially no correlation between batter strikeout rate and overall batter production. You could crunch the numbers to verify that – or you could just consider Luis Arraez and Aaron Judge. But while we pretty much all know this by now – the Judges and Harpers and Ohtanis of the world crack a few eggs while they’re depositing omelets over the outfield fences – it doesn’t feel as true at the extreme high end of the spectrum. After all, Joey Gallo’s outlandish 38% strikeout rate obviously held him back. But Gallo is the easiest example, and discussing his strikeout woes doesn’t quite prove a whole lot. So let’s look at the 10 hitters striking out most this year:

Aside from Greene, that’s not an impressive group. Stowers is the best of the bunch, but even including him, the aggregate statistics are quite poor. This isn’t some list of overmatched hitters doing absolutely nothing right, ether; there’s fearsome power here pretty much across the board. They’re just striking out so much that the overall package doesn’t work. So why does Greene look so different from the rest?

It starts, as MLB.com’s Jared Greenspan pointed out, with aggression. Greene spent his first years in the majors as a patient hitter, chasing less often than average and taking a few pitches in the zone as the price of his patience. My favorite proxy for hitter aggression is how often they swing at first pitches in the strike zone. The league as a whole swings at about 45% of such pitches. Greene was right around there in his first three years in the big leagues: 42.4%, 45.2%, 46.1%, respectively. Then he decided to stop letting those cookies go by. This year, he’s swinging at 56% of first-pitch strikes.

The reason for this is simple: These are good pitches to hit. From 2022 through 2024, Greene put up great numbers when he made contact with a first-pitch strike. He batted .425 and slugged .770 on them, with underlying contact metrics to match. He’s doing even more damage this year, .448 with a .966 slug. More importantly, though, he’s damaging these pitches more frequently because he’s swinging at them more often. These tend to be the best pitches to hit all plate appearance; why not take a big hack at them?

There’s a cost to doing this. Greene is also swinging more often at bad first pitches; his 0-0 chase rate is up to 18.5% from roughly 12% in his career before the season began. That sounds bad, but consider that he’s upped his in-zone swing rate by 10 percentage points. Because of this aggression, he is no longer taking as many hittable pitches for strikes. Take a look at how often he’s gotten ahead, fallen behind, and put the ball in play over time:

As you can see, this has been a great trade-off. He’s putting the ball in play more frequently than ever and falling behind less often as a result. Aggression pays, particularly early in the count and particularly for hitters as powerful as Greene.

That smidgen of extra production against hittable pitches in early counts helps explain some of Greene’s boosted production on batted balls this year – his .525 wOBACON and .504 xwOBACON are both career highs (here’s why I like these BACON stats). Want to mash the ball? Aim at easier pitches.

That said, Greene’s aggressive approach to pitches in the zone has come with some swing-and-miss downside. Break the plate down into more than just “in or out” and you can see the trade-off more clearly:

Naturally, Greene is swinging more at everything in his attempt to drive more hittable pitches. That makes sense; he didn’t simply wave a magic wand and start swinging at the good ones more without adjusting his approach to all pitches. He’s not hacking blindly at everything off the plate, or even close to that, but it makes plenty of sense that he’s taking a few more ill-advised swings along with all the extra good ones.

Normally, you’d expect this to be a self-correcting loop. Greene gets more aggressive, so pitchers leave the strike zone more often, which tilts Greene back toward selectivity as he gets ahead in the count more often and can choose pitches to hunt. Early in the count, pitchers are treating him about the same as always – he’s powerful, and so they try to nibble around the corners of the zone, accepting extra balls in exchange for avoiding meatballs. But with two strikes, particularly if you exclude 3-2 counts, they’re not giving him so much as the time of day. He sees strikes on a mere 35.3% of 0-2, 1-2, and 2-2 counts, one of the lowest marks in baseball.

That feels like a wise adjustment by opposing pitchers. This guy is powerful and wants to swing, so why bail him out by giving him something to hit? So he faces a steady diet of breaking balls in the dirt, high fastballs, sinkers off the plate in, basically everything you can think of. There’s an adjustment to be made here, starting aggressive and dialing it back with two strikes instead of maintaining that aggression all the way through. In 2024, he chased 30.3% of the time in those counts. This year, he’s up to 39.1%. That’s from “much less than average” to “more than average” if you’re keeping score at home.

The end result of this newfound aggression and pitchers’ avoidance of the zone is that Greene is striking out on 22.8% of the two-strike pitches he sees, the highest mark of his career. He’s also getting to two-strike counts more frequently thanks to his early-count swings. He’s fouling more pitches off than ever before, as well. That comes with the swing-hard-early territory; Greene will happily take some foul balls in exchange for all the damage he’s doing when he keeps the ball fair.

As far as I can tell, Greene is like no one else in the high-strikeout cohort. He’s not up there because he’s a helpless hacker who can’t make contact. He has a good sense of the strike zone, one he’s displayed in multiple seasons. His swing is geared for power, so he’ll always swing over his fair share of balls, but plenty of hitters with power swings still have good two-strike approaches. Greene just hasn’t put together his new early-count plan – attack pitches in the zone and accept a few extra chases to do it – with a two-strike approach. He’s chasing too often, and as best as I can tell, it’s because he’s swinging more frequently than ever before early in the count. It’s tough to switch mental gears, particularly while you’re learning a new approach, and I think Greene has fallen into that trap so far.

All this is to say Greene is hardly doomed to strike out 30% of the time for the rest of the year. In fact, I think his early-count aggression will end up lowering his strikeout rate, not raising it. He’s giving pitchers fewer easy options by hunting drivable pitches early. And in previous seasons, he’s already demonstrated the ability to tighten up and manage the zone late in the count. He’s still just 24 years old and only in his sixth year of professional baseball (excluding the canceled 2020 minor league season). Unlike most of the players who strike out as often as he does, he seems to have no fatal flaw that will keep him in that group. It’s just a matter of making all the parts of his ever-improving game work together, and I definitely wouldn’t bet against him fixing it sooner or later.

It’s a credit to his incredible talent that his horrid strikeout rate hasn’t really mattered so far. I love his new approach this year overall. When you have this level of power, letting early-count strikes go by is a cardinal sin. I think he’ll figure out how to modulate that as necessary – when he gets behind and pitchers start fishing for strikeouts, basically. But if you’re looking for a testament to Greene’s talent, I can’t think of any better one than his performance this year. He’s striking out a truly unconscionable amount while he tries to change the way he works at the plate, and yet it doesn’t matter. He’s just that powerful, and even though he’s aggressive, he’s not flailing pointlessly at pitches out of the zone and blunting his results on contact. The strikeouts will almost certainly come down. The new, early-count damage? That’s here to stay.

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.

———

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 »