Aaron Judge is the best hitter on the planet. Over the last three seasons combined, he has a 202 wRC+. We’re witnessing one of the best stretches by any hitter in baseball history, full stop. The fact that a player as great as Judge can struggle as much as he did this postseason (113 wRC+ in 64 plate appearances) is telling of how slumps can happen to anybody at any time, regardless of talent. You could chalk it up to randomness, and you’d probably be right, but randomness doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for it.

For example, hitters can find their mechanics out of whack, sometimes with no explanation. When that happens, they look to address the inefficiency and get themselves back on track. Sometimes it’s bad luck, but oftentimes it’s mechanics. Those blips can explain why hitters go through ups and downs. And depending on who you are and what your hitting style is, the fluctuations can be wide.

During the World Series, when Aaron Boone was asked if he thought Judge was pressing at the plate, he made a comment that stuck with me. Boone said, “… it can always be a little bit of a mechanical thing.” It’s not exactly clear if he meant that for Judge specifically or for all hitters, but regardless, I think it illuminates the mindset of players when they work through slumps. Depending on the shape or severity, it usually pushes hitters to get in the cage to figure out what tweak will unlock the best version of themselves. With Judge in particular, any mechanical issues can completely disrupt his bat path. Let me clarify that a bit further. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Tommy John spent 26 seasons pitching in the majors from 1963–74 and then 1976–89, more than any player besides Nolan Ryan, but his level of fame stems as much from the year that cleaves that span as it does from his work on the mound. As the recipient of the most famous sports medicine procedure of all time, the elbow ligament replacement surgery performed by Dr. Frank Jobe in late 1974 that now bears his name, John endured an arduous year-long rehab process before returning to pitch as well as ever, a recovery that gave hope to generations of injured pitchers whose careers might otherwise have ended. Tommy John surgery has somewhat obscured the pitcher’s on-field accomplishments, however.

A sinkerballer who relied upon his command and control to limit hard contact, John didn’t overpower hitters; after his surgery, when the usage of radar guns became more widespread, his sinker — which he threw 85-90% of the time — was generally clocked in the 85-87 mph range. He paired the sinker with a curveball, or rather several curves, as he could adjust the break based upon the speed at which he threw the pitch. He was the epitome of the “crafty lefty,” so good at his vocation that he arrived on the major league scene at age 20 and made his final appearance three days after his 46th birthday. He made four All-Star teams and was a key starter on five clubs that reached the postseason and three that won pennants, though he wound up on the losing end of the World Series each time.

Thomas Edward John Jr. was born on May 22, 1943 in Terre Haute, Indiana. He cut his teeth playing sandlot ball and more organized games at Spencer F. Ball Park, a three-block square with about 10 baseball diamonds used for everything from pickup games to those of two rival high schools, Garfield and Gerstmeyer, the latter of which he attended.

At Gerstmeyer, John excelled in basketball as well as baseball, so much so that the rangy, 6-foot-3 teenager was recruited by legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, and had over 50 basketball scholarship offers but just one for baseball (few colleges gave those out in those days). When Rupp paid a visit to their household, the senior John told the coach that his son was probably going to bypass college to pursue professional baseball. As the pitcher recalled in 2015:

Rupp said, “Well, we have a pretty good baseball team down in Kentucky, and your son might even be able to make our team.” My dad never liked Rupp, but that really made him mad. He told Coach Rupp, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” Rupp was furious. His assistant came in and tried to smooth things over, but it didn’t matter.

On the mound, John lacked a top-notch fastball but had a major league-caliber curveball that he learned from former Phillies minor leaguer Arley Andrews, a friend of his father. He pitched to a 28-2 record in high school, and while the Cleveland Indians scout who signed him, John Schulte, expressed concern about his inability to overpower hitters, he signed him nonetheless two weeks after John graduated from Gerstmeyer in 1961 — four years before the introduction of the amateur draft. Read the rest of this entry »

“Juan Soto hates swinging.” That’s a takeaway you’re sure to hear if you follow baseball this winter. His free agency is the biggest story of the next few months, and his offensive approach drives fans to distraction. Walks aren’t all that fun, and Soto feasts on them. How could you not bring it up when your team is pursuing him for a record-breaking deal?

From a certain standpoint, it’s true that Soto hates swinging. Of the 101 batters who saw at least 1,500 pitches with zero or one strikes this past season, Soto ranked 99th in swing rate on those pitches. When he isn’t defending the plate with two strikes, he spends a ton of time with the bat on his shoulder.

That’s not a specific enough way of looking at it, though. For an example, let’s chop the strike zone up into pieces. Soto saw 675 pitches that weren’t in the strike zone or even near it – what Baseball Savant defines as the chase and waste zones. He swung at 6.5% of those, 42nd out of the 44 batters who saw 500 or more such pitches. He was almost never fooled into swinging at awful pitches, in other words.

Next consider the edges of the zone – pitches that are either barely strikes or barely balls. There aren’t a lot of good options on these pitches. Hitters don’t generally crush the ball when it’s located on the corners, unless they’re sitting on either a pitch or a location. Sure, if you’re looking high and away, you might tag it, but more likely you’ll swing and miss or make weak contact. Soto swung at 31.3% of these pitches, the second-lowest rate in baseball.

Those pitches in the chase and waste zones? You shouldn’t swing at them. There, Soto’s patience is an obvious asset. The ones on the borderline? It’s less obvious. There are great hitters who take an expansive approach to borderline pitches, like Bobby Witt Jr. and Yordan Alvarez. There are awful hitters who do it too, as you’d expect. Swinging too much at offerings we call “pitcher’s pitches” is pretty clearly not going to pan out every time.

Likewise, discretion is no guarantee of valor. There are great hitters who, like Soto, mostly let these pitches go. Aaron Judge and Kyle Schwarber fit the bill. It’s not just high-walk-rate sluggers, either; Matt Chapman, Adley Rutschman, Nolan Arenado, and even Randy Arozarena behave this way. On the other hand, plenty of bad hitters take borderline pitches and are still bad.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m using a new format for our postseason managerial report cards this year. In the past, I went through every game from every manager, whether they played 22 games en route to winning the World Series or got swept out of the Wild Card round. To be honest, I hated writing those brief blurbs. No one is all that interested in the manager who ran out the same lineup twice, or saw his starters get trounced and used his best relievers anyway because the series is so short. This year, I’m sticking to the highlights, and grading only the managers who survived until at least their League Championship series. I already covered Stephen Vogt and Carlos Mendoza. Today, I’m looking at Aaron Boone.

My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in behind closed doors for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but Luke Weaver and Brent Honeywell were also important contributors this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Juan Soto is important because he’s great, not because he won the 2019 World Series. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the start of 2013, the Dodgers have been the best team in baseball. Over that 12-season span, they’ve won the National League West 11 times, made it to the NLCS seven times, and made it to the World Series four times. Their 1,215 regular season wins are 95 more than the team in second place, and their 64 postseason wins are also the most in the game. Despite all that, until late Wednesday night, they’d only managed one championship. What deserves to go down as one of the most impressive dynasties in the history of the game has been consistently denied that sort of recognition because of the delightful, infuriating unpredictability of playoff baseball. During an absolutely wild World Series Game 5, that unpredictability finally worked in the Dodgers’ favor.

This paragraph is just a list of things that happened during Game 5, so hold on tight. There was a brief no-hit bid from one starter and a disastrous, abortive start from the other. There were monster home runs, broken bat singles, seeing-eye grounders, great defensive plays, calamitous errors, inexcusable mental mistakes, a five-run inning, a five-run comeback, unearned runs, nearly catastrophic baserunning decisions, a catcher’s interference, a disengagement penalty, a surprisingly high number of sacrifice flies, a starter coming in to get the save on one-day’s rest, and, I’m absolutely certain, a bunch of other stuff that I’m too fried to remember. The only thing that didn’t happen, thankfully, was two ding dongs grabbing Mookie Betts. In the end, the Dodgers were the team left standing, securing a 7-6 victory over the Yankees at Yankee Stadium for their eighth World Series title in franchise history and the second in the past five years. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Anthony Volpe’s go-ahead grand slam in the third inning will be what Yankees fans remember most from Game 4 of the World Series.

It was the highest-leverage swing of his young career, the most pivotal play in the most important game this organization has played in at least 15 years. It was the main reason why in the ninth inning, once the game was well out of reach, the majority of the 49,000-plus fans at Yankee Stadium were chanting his last name, which Volpe said was “definitely number one” on his list of coolest moments. It restored the Yankees some level of dignity as they avoided getting swept out of the Fall Classic with an 11-4 blowout win over the Dodgers.

Indeed, if the Yankees pull off a miraculous comeback and become the first team to win the World Series after losing the first three games, Volpe’s blast will go down as the biggest turning point in the State of New York since the Battle of Saratoga. If the improbable happens — if the home run is going to be more than a fun little footnote to just another failed season — we’ll have plenty of time to rhapsodize about the local kid’s signature Yankee Moment. For now, though, I’d like to dig into the two other runs that Volpe scored in Game 4 and the events that led up to them, as they offer a window into the most important element he brings to the Yankees offense: his baserunning. Read the rest of this entry »

Scheduling a bullpen game in the World Series is, to some extent, outside Dave Roberts’ control. More than half of his useful starting pitchers are on the IL, so he has to do something. Game 4 isn’t the perfect spot for Johnny Wholestaff — the way MLB’s playoff format works, it’s the only game of the series that isn’t adjacent to an off day — but it’s also the only spot in a four-man rotation that’s guaranteed to only come up once.

The Dodgers’ manager was fortunate, however, in that by the time Game 4 rolled around, his team was already up 3-0 in the series. No team has ever overturned such a deficit in World Series play, and only once in baseball history has a team come back from 3-0 in any best-of-seven series. This we all knew going in. I was mildly surprised to learn that history is even less kind to clubs that spot their opponents the first three games of a Fall Classic: Before this season, teams with the opportunity to sweep a World Series had won Game 4 21 times in 24 attempts.

So Roberts entrusted Game 4 not just to his bullpen, but to his low-leverage guys: Ben Casparius, Daniel Hudson, Landon Knack, and Brent Honeywell. Sure enough, his team lost. Read the rest of this entry »

“What if they made the whole pitching staff out of high-leverage relievers?” That line of thinking has infiltrated baseball over the past 15 years, and you can see why. The Dodgers built their team around it, and used it to perfection in the first three games of the World Series. When the Yankees weren’t dealing with three solid starters attacking the lineup in short bursts, they were facing an endless array of pitchers who sit in the upper 90s with venomous breaking balls. No wonder the Yankees only scored seven total runs across those three games.

In Game 4, the Dodgers asked another question: What if you made the whole pitching staff out of swingmen? Dave Roberts and the front office always planned on a bullpen game; they’ve been doing those all October. But this one was a wholly different animal than the efforts against the Padres and Mets, and the Yankees took advantage.

Want an example of how it was different? Ben Casparius drew the start, and Roberts gave him two innings, no questions asked. He was shaky as can be. Three walks, a 105-mph double off the top of the wall in dead center, and a few hard-hit balls besides; he spent the entirety of his two innings of work on the ropes, faced 10 batters, and was lucky to escape having only allowed one run. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees came home from a resoundingly unproductive trip to California bloodied, but not beaten. A 2-0 deficit in the World Series is nothing to the Bronx Bombers, who have won four World Series after spotting their opponents two games. (Two of those — 1956 and 1978 — came against the Dodgers, in fact.) That’s more championships than 20 of the 29 other teams have won total.

But a comeback from 3-0? That’s only happened once in major league history — you don’t need to remind the Yankees when — and never in the World Series. So Game 3 was idiomatically, if not literally, a must-win.

From the pregame festivities, in which Fat Joe delivered an unsatisfying sequel to Ice Cube’s performance at Dodger Stadium two days ago, to the first inning, in which two of the first three Dodgers hitters scored, the Yankees were a step behind. The Dodgers, 4-2 winners, are one win from repeating a feat they haven’t achieved since 1963: sweeping the World Series. The Yankee comeback, in the unlikely event it happens at all, will have to start tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of reasons to watch this World Series. There’s the history, the star power, the drama. We’ve had Ice Cube concerts and walk-off grand slams, controversial pitching decisions and defensive gems. I’m going to tell you a secret, though: None of those things has been my favorite part so far. The two preeminent strike zone controllers in the entire sport are facing off, and a showdown between Juan Soto and Mookie Betts is always worth watching.

Game 2 was a wonderful encapsulation of just what I’m talking about. Soto came up first, and he engaged Yoshinobu Yamamoto right away. Soto has a plan in every at-bat. It’s quite often the same plan: find a fastball, preferably high or inside, and hit it for a home run. He got started right away with a rip at a first-pitch fastball:

Advantage Yamamoto – but not that much of an advantage. Soto took two straight curveballs low – it’s really hard to fool him. Then Yamamoto came back with another fastball and Soto tried to hit it to Pasadena:

Read the rest of this entry »