On Monday night in Los Angeles, Shohei Ohtani made his first major league start for the Dodgers. For any other starter signed before the 2024 season, that would be a disastrous sentence to type. Ohtani, of course, became the charter member of the 50/50 club, won the National League MVP, and then helped his team win the World Series. But he came to the Dodgers to hit and pitch, not just to play DH, and last night marked a key step in that process, his first game action as he rehabs from a 2023 elbow surgery.
I watched every pitch of Ohtani’s one-inning outing to compile a report. Obviously, these are the observations of a data analyst, not a scout. I’ve supplemented them with the Statcast and pitch model data generated overnight. I’m not the type to ignore the numbers, but realistically speaking, 28 pitches isn’t enough for a real sample, so the data is more supporting than primary. I’ll start with my first impressions, walk through each of the four pitch types Ohtani threw, and then share some general conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »
The San Francisco Giants are acquiring Rafael Devers from the Boston Red Sox for Jordan Hicks, Kyle Harrison and more, according to sources familiar with the deal.
That’s the kind of blockbuster you don’t see every day. Rafael Devers is the best healthy Red Sox hitter. The Sox are above .500 and in the thick of the AL playoff hunt. They’re desperate for offense – though they came into the year with more hitters than spots, injuries to Alex Bregman, Triston Casas, Wilyer Abreu, and Masataka Yoshida have left them scrambling for depth. Abraham Toro has been batting high in the order of late. Romy Gonzalez is their backup DH. And they just traded their starting DH – hitting .271/.400/494, good for 14 home runs and a 145 wRC+ – for salary relief? We’re going to need a deeper dive.
Let’s start with the return. The Sox sent Devers and his entire contract – 10 years and $313.5 million at time of signing, with about $250 million and 8.5 years left on it today – to the Giants. In exchange, they got a wide mixture of players. There’s a major leaguer, Jordan Hicks. There’s a recently graduated prospect, Kyle Harrison. There’s a well-regarded hitting prospect, James Tibbs III. There’s another, further away prospect, pitcher Jose Bello. Finally, there’s that sweet, sweet financial flexibility, something the Sox are no stranger to.
If you look at baseball completely in the abstract, with bean-counting surplus value as your only guiding light for evaluating a trade, this one looks reasonable enough. Devers is under contract for a lot of years at a lot of dollars per year, and projection systems consistently think that he’ll generate low WAR totals for his salary in the back half of his deal. Harrison was a top 25 prospect not so long ago. Tibbs was a first round draft pick last year. Bello is an interesting lottery ticket. Hicks – okay, Hicks might have been a salary offset. But the point is, it’s likely that if all you care about is WAR accrued per dollar spent, the Sox come out ahead on this deal for most reasonable models of surplus value. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I took a week off to indulge in a little French Open binge-watching, and after one of the greatest finals of my lifetime, I was ready to charge back into baseball. That feeling – charging ahead – has been something of a theme across baseball of late. You want speed? Chaos? Huge tools and do-or-die choices? This week’s list is for you. It starts, as usual, with a nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for originating this format. It also starts, as everything seems to these days, with a green-and-gold blur.
1. The Flash
If you turn on a random A’s game of late, you’re liable to see something like this:
And if you’re lucky, something like this afterward:
Denzel Clarke is on quite the heater right now. That spectacular play doesn’t even come close to his greatest major league feat, this absurd home run robbery:
In the sixth inning of Monday’s game between the Blue Jays and the Cardinals, George Springer got a pitch to hit, a hanging curveball that split the center of the strike zone. He recognized the pitch late and fouled it off:
His post-swing demeanor suggests that he considered it a missed opportunity, and it’s clear to see why. With a pitch like that, he was thinking extra bases; instead, Andre Pallante got a strike for his troubles. Now Springer’s back was against the wall. Pallante came back with a much better pitch on 1-2, but Springer spoiled it:
Unlike the previous miss, this looked like a calculated act to me. Springer was late on the pitch, but it was too close for comfort, so he took a defensive cut, meeting the ball early in his swing and punching it harmlessly away.
Welcome to the confusing world of analyzing foul ball rate. Both of Springer’s swings produced the same result, but the first one was a poor outcome for him and the second a desirable one. You can argue that the second pitch would have been a ball if he hadn’t swung, but he certainly wasn’t sure of that when he committed to swinging; living to fight another day against such a well-located pitch is a good outcome.
You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Luis Arraez, Nick Allen, and Brice Turang are among the leaders in early-count foul ball rate (foul balls per swing). They swing a lot, make a lot of contact, and spray their contact to all fields, including foul territory in every direction. On the other side of the coin, you’ve got sluggers like Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and yes, Springer. These guys don’t swing as often, which means a few things. First, they swing at better pitches on average, which leads to better contact. Second, they make less contact on average, and less contact means fewer fouls, even for the same rate of fouls-per-contact.
I’d rather be in the second camp than the first there. Early-count foul balls are a waste, literally the same as a swinging strike. They might be worse, even – baserunners can’t steal, catchers can’t block poorly and allow a passed ball. A full 46% of Arraez’s swings – 48% for league leader Wilyer Abreu – end up as foul balls. Sure, contact is great, but when half of it counts as a strike, it’s a lot less enticing.
Things change with two strikes, though. When a foul ball extends the at-bat instead of ending it in a strikeout, it becomes valuable instead of detrimental. Have you ever watched Jake Cronenworth hit? With two strikes, he turns into a lacrosse goalie, trying to redirect everything in the vicinity of the strike zone. He’s not trying to hit a homer unless the pitcher truly grooves him one; he’s specifically looking to avoid a strikeout. Cronenworth sports the highest foul-per-swing rate in baseball with two strikes at 51.2%. It works – he still strikes out a decent amount because of his penchant for running deep counts, but he walks 16% of the time because eventually pitchers miss the zone.
The bottom of the two-strike foul ball rate list, on the other hand, is filled with strikeout-prone types. Javier Báez makes foul contact on just 27% of his two-strike swings. Judge, who still strikes out a ton even as he rewrites the record books, is towards the bottom. So are Jackson Chourio, Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Kyle Schwarber, and all nature of excellent sluggers. You can get away with it if you hit like those guys, but Andrew Vaughn, Brenton Doyle, Miguel Andujar, and Michael Toglia are floundering under the weight of their inability to fight pitches off. This isn’t a disqualifying statistic, in other words, but it’s surely a bad thing; it’s directly leading to higher strikeout rates, and unless you have light tower power, many of the pitches you swing at with two strikes aren’t the kind you can hit for extra bases anyway.
I’d posit that high foul ball rates before two strikes are bad, while high foul ball rates with two strikes are good. Early in the count, fouls are a waste, while late in the count, they’re a get out of jail free card. Assuming that these two events are equivalent doesn’t make much sense to me; hitters behave differently, and if we don’t credit them for that different behavior, we’re missing something essential about the act of hitting.
To measure this, I had to put everything on the same scale. I first took every hitter who has swung at 200 or more pitches early in the count, found the average foul ball per swing rate, then normalized each player’s foul ball rate into z-scores. I did the same for every hitter who has swung at 100 or more pitches in two-strike counts. That gave me two scores for every hitter: early-count foul rate and two-strike foul rate. I flipped the sign of the early-count foul rate scores – lower is better – and then summed the two.
This let me separate out the hitters who always have high foul ball rates or always have low foul ball rates – they don’t demonstrate this skill of changing their approach in a measurable way. Arraez, for example, makes foul contact on 46.2% of his early-count swings and 46.3% of his two-strike swings. It’s the same approach, and because the league as a whole cuts down on their swings and makes more foul contact with two strikes, Arraez rates below average in this metric. He’s two standard deviations above average in his early-count foul rate and only 1.6 above average in two-strike foul ball rate, a net of -0.4 for his “foul score.” Allen is even worse – he makes foul contact on 47.1% of early-count swings, but only 39.3% of two-strike swings. When pitchers try to throw the ball past him, they succeed. His foul score is a woeful -2.15.
That’s among the worst marks in the majors, but the actual worst hitter is doing a lot worse than that. That would be Andujar, who is making a ton of foul contact early (44.6%) but almost never when he needs it to stay alive (27.4%). The result is a foul score of -4.2. If you’re wondering why a guy with his skills – solid bat speed, elite contact rate – has never taken off in the majors, it might be related to this. Likewise, if you’re trying to puzzle out what’s ailing Xander Bogaerts this year, it can’t help that he makes foul contact 39% of the time early but only 30% of the time late, for a foul score of -2.2.
Most big leaguers aren’t outliers to this degree. More than 60% of the league has a foul score between -1 and 1, and 93% fall between -2 and 2. The top 10 hitters by this metric have an aggregate wRC+ 20 points higher than the bottom 10, but most players fall into the broad, undifferentiated middle. I’m not saying that this is a skill that everyone in baseball has or should use, but I do think that it’s measuring a real ability.
That brings us back to Springer, a paragon of adaptability. Early in the count, he’s allergic to foul balls, fouling the ball off just 30.6% of the time. Put him in a two-strike count, however, and he goes into protect mode, fouling off the ball with 42% of his hacks. He’s demonstrated some version of this skill throughout his career, in fact. His worst two years for modulating his foul ball rate were 2023 and 2024 – perhaps not coincidentally, those were the two worst offensive years of his career.
Another standout in the field? Springer’s erstwhile teammate, Carlos Correa, who is roughly Springer’s equal in foul score this year and has been even better over the course of his career. Was this part of the Astros’ famed no-strikeouts transformation? I obviously can’t say with any certainty, and they might have been doing a few other things to tilt things in their favor, but a solid approach like this can’t hurt.
It’s not all former Astros. Harper has learned this skill over time. During his Nationals tenure, he didn’t change his approach much at all when reaching two strikes. Since joining the Phillies, however, he’s running one of the largest differences between early-count foul rate and two-strike foul rate in the entire major leagues. And hey, would you look at that, he has a huge foul score this year, too – his 28% early-count foul rate and 37% two-strike foul rate land him fourth in the majors in foul score.
When fans and analysts talk about smart hitters with bat control, I’d argue that they’re implicitly describing this skill. The ability to take different swings depending on the context – prioritizing loud, fair contact early, then choking up and defending late – thrills old-school and new-school fans alike. That ability to adapt is more valuable than always slapping at the ball or always trying to hit it out of the park.
If you’re like me, you have one big question: Is this a sustainable skill, or does it flicker in and out from one year to the next, introducing noise into hitters’ production? The outliers here clearly seem to have an edge – Harper, Springer, and Correa do it consistently. Allen and Andujar have always made more foul contact with two strikes than early in the count; they’ve never possessed this skill. Still, I wanted to check whether it’s a talent (or hinderance) held by only a few.
To do so, I took data from 2023 and 2024. I identified the top 10% and bottom 10% of hitters in 2023, then compared their performance to 2024. The top 10% of hitters averaged a score of 1.7 in 2023 and 0.6 in 2024. The bottom 10% of hitters averaged -2 in 2023 and -0.4 in 2024. Expand it to the top 25%, and you get a similar result: 1.2 in 2023 and 0.3 in 2024 for the top 25%, -1.6 in 2023 and -0.4 in 2024 for the bottom 25%. There was a 0.3 correlation between year-one foul score and year-two foul score. It’s a real skill – not as strong as, say, home run rate or swinging strike rate, but nevertheless something where hitters who are good at it in one year tend to be good at it in the next.
So the next time you see George Springer foul off an early hanging breaking ball, you’ll know: That’s a rare event. And next time you see Bryce Harper turn an 0-2 count into an all-out foul ball battle, yep, that’s years of training showing through. These guys are good at what they do, and it’s a thing that you, the fan, implicitly know is a good thing. Isn’t baseball cool?
Last week, I turned on the tail end of a Blue Jays-Phillies clash. I was hoping to get some notes for an article on Alec Bohm that didn’t really come together. The game was a complete laugher, with Philadelphia leading by five runs in the ninth. All I wanted was to see Bohm put a ball in play, but instead this happened:
Braydon Fisher came out firing in that low-leverage chance. He came out firing curveballs, to be specific – 12 of his 18 offerings in the inning. The Phillies swung at them like they were learning how physics works on the fly. But so what? Anyone can look that good for one game. Major league pitchers have good stuff, more at 11.
Then I started looking at Fisher’s prior games, and I started getting more intrigued. Wait, this guy almost never throws his upper-90s fastball? Wait, he has two different plus breaking balls? Wait, his walk rate was what in the minors last year (14.2%, and above 15% in Triple-A)? I started watching more at-bats and started getting interested. The slider? It’s nasty:
The key characteristic here is velocity. At 88 miles an hour, sliders don’t give opposing hitters much time to adjust. The tight gyro shape of the pitch means it works against lefties and righties alike. His over-the-top release gives the pitch a ton of downward plane, too: Though he doesn’t induce much break on the pitch, it seems to vanish downward when he locates it around the knees. Read the rest of this entry »
You know Shohei and Clayton and Freddie and Mookie. Teo and Will Smith and Blake Snell and Roki. But do you recall the least heralded Dodger of all? Well, that’s not exactly fair, and I didn’t even name all the famous Dodgers, but here’s the point: I’m writing about a Dodger who isn’t one of the guys who seem to steal every headline.
Meet Andy Pages, the Dodgers’ everyday center fielder. A year ago, Pages was just another hopeful, the latest in a line of plus-bat, where-can-he-play-defense-though options cycling through the corners in Chavez Ravine. Pages’ prospectreports paint a clear picture: a swing built for lift, plenty of swing-and-miss, and sneaky athleticism that exploded after Pages returned from shoulder surgery. In 116 games of big league play, he took over center field (mostly out of necessity — he looked stretched there at times) and posted a league average batting line, though without the home run power that evaluators expected from him.
If you could freeze time there and give the Dodgers the option of having exactly that Pages for the next five years, I think they would have begrudgingly accepted it. Teams as full of stars as Los Angeles’ current squad need role players to fill the cracks in the roster, and outfielders who can handle center and hit at least okay are always in high demand. That isn’t to say that there weren’t encouraging signs – Pages’ athleticism was better than advertised and he showed plus bat speed – but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and he was already an excellent cog in the machine even without fully unlocking his power.
Flash-forward to this season. Pages started the year playing center and batting ninth. That’s the lineup spot for a complementary piece, a defensive specialist or fourth outfielder. He started slow, with a 70 wRC+ over his first month of play. The Dodgers didn’t have better options defensively, and in fact, Pages looked downright smooth out there, both to my eyes and to defensive model grades. When your team posts a collective 126 wRC+ for the months of March and April (for the months of May and June so far, too — this team is pretty good!), you can live with a below-average hitter playing a tough defensive position, so the Dodgers kept running Pages out there, slow start and all. And that brings us to April 22, when Pages got hot and didn’t stop. Read the rest of this entry »
Author’s note: Five Things will return next week. In the meantime, enjoy an article about one of my favorite players.
Do you want to know how much Carlos Santana loves playing baseball? From 2020 through 2023, he played for five teams, got traded midseason twice, and compiled a 94 wRC+. He was 37, had earned more than $100 million in his career, and didn’t have an obvious everyday starting job lined up. He could have hung up his spikes right then – but he took a one-year, $5.5 million deal with the Twins and turned back the clock with a 114 wRC+. Then he signed another one-year deal, this one for $12 million with the Guardians, and kept the train rolling. Through the first third of the season, he’s on pace for his best year in more than half a decade.
What’s his secret? As a fellow 39-year-old, I wanted to find out – for, you know, mostly professional reasons, but also because sometimes my knees hurt after going on a particularly brisk walk. Bad news for me, though. I’ve found out one thing that Santana has done in 2025 to rejuvenate himself, and I’m not sure that I can replicate it in my personal life.
Let me explain. If you look at Santana’s Baseball Savant percentile rankings, you won’t come away impressed:
Yes, we get it, the man has an elite sense of the strike zone, and he’s still great at defense — no big surprise — but it’s a bit of a bummer if we look only at the bar graphs above Chase%; there’s not a ton of loud contact, not a ton of squared-up contact, and he’s rarely hitting the ball on the sweet spot. That’s a lot of blue for a guy running a 123 wRC+ and getting an article written about his late-career resurgence. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael McLoone, Eric Canha, and Brian Fluharty-Imagn Images
There’s a war going on across major league baseball. It’s been waged over decades, in fact, between two opposing factions of the game. Pitchers, at times aided by their catchers, want to own the top of the strike zone, the place where their fastballs have the easiest time missing bats. Hitters want to hit home runs, and the top of the zone is an ideal launching pad. But while both sides would dearly love to own the territory, they can’t both win at once. What follows are some dispatches from the front, the latest moves and counter-moves by some of the game’s best in this contested space.
Chad Patrick lives at the top of the zone. No pitcher in baseball throws upstairs fastballs more frequently. He might not seem like the type. He’s a soft tosser in the context of the modern major leagues, sitting in the low 90s with his four-seamer and sinker, and the high 80s with his cutter. But for Patrick, shape is more important than velocity.
As Alex Chamberlain has extensivelyexplained, the plane of a pitch when it reaches home plate is a key determinant of its success. That’s most true at the top of the zone for four-seamers. Pitches that come in high and flat act like optical illusions – the average fastball thrown to that area falls more, because it’s falling at a steeper angle. Read the rest of this entry »
