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 »

Maybe Walker Buehler will be all right, after all. Through his first two starts with the Red Sox — his first two since nailing down the final three outs of the 2024 World Series with a surprise bullpen appearance on his throw day — the 30-year-old righty had been pummeled, allowing three homers and nine runs in 9 1/3 innings. On Thursday afternoon at Fenway Park, he turned the page, putting on a “pitchability clinic” opposite Toronto’s Chris Bassitt.

Buehler shut out the Blue Jays over his first six innings of work, allowing just four hits without a walk while striking out seven. Bassitt matched him with zeroes until the sixth, when Jarren Duran walked with one out, stole second base, advanced to third on a fly out, and scored on an Alex Bregman single. Buehler departed two batters into the seventh, after he’d walked rookie Will Wagner on four pitches to lead off the inning and retired Ernie Clement on a fly ball to center. When reliever Justin Wilson allowed two hits and shortstop Trevor Story made a throwing error on a potential inning-ending double play, Buehler could only watch from the dugout as the Blue Jays took a 2-1 lead. The Red Sox tied the game up in the eighth, and won 4-3 in 10 innings when Toronto second baseman Andrés Giménez bobbled Story’s grounder with the bases loaded — and, oddly, threw to first base for a meaningless out as David Hamilton crossed the plate.

This was the kind of start the Red Sox envisioned when they signed Buehler to a one-year, $21.05 million deal in January, hoping that he could build upon the great postseason run with the Dodgers that helped him salvage his first season back from his second Tommy John surgery. During the regular season, Buehler pitched to an ugly 5.38 ERA and 5.54 FIP in 16 starts covering 74 innings, and missed eight weeks due to inflammation in his right hip. He showed faint signs of improvement in September, allowing two or fewer runs in three of his five starts, compared to just once over his first 11. Still, had the Dodgers rotation not suffered a variety of injuries and collapses, he wouldn’t have been anyone’s first choice for a playoff start, even given the big-game reputation he’d earned while helping the Dodgers win a pennant in 2018 and a championship two years later. Read the rest of this entry »

Their $200 million shortstop has grounded into more double plays than he’s hit singles. Their star center fielder is striking out 37% of the time. Their oft-injured third baseman is (sigh) injured again and won’t return until sometime next month, and their top starter left Tuesday night’s game with a hamstring injury. After squandering a playoff berth over the final quarter of last season, then mostly remaining on the sidelines this winter, the Twins opened this year by losing eight of their first 11 games, their worst start since 2016 — a season in which they went 59-103.

These Twins — who did win on Wednesday night to improve to 4-8 — aren’t likely to be that bad. In fact, our preseason Playoff Odds favored the Twins to win the AL Central, albeit with a modest 36.2% chance of winning the division and a forecast for just 84.1 wins, with the Tigers, Royals, and Guardians all packed within five wins of their total. The system estimated Minnesota had a 55.2% chance of making the playoffs, but so far this does not look like a team that belongs in the postseason.

The Twins stumbled out of the gate, dropping three straight to the Cardinals in St. Louis before getting stomped by the White Sox in Chicago, 9-0; through their first four games, they were outscored 28-6. They recovered to win their next two games against the White Sox, but then returned home and lost two out of three to the Astros. Now in Kansas City, the Twins have lost two out of their first three games of their four-game set against the Royals. The dispiriting start feels like a carry-over from last season’s collapse. To refresh your memory:

As of last August 17 — the last time they had a streak of more than two wins in a row, ahem — the Twins were 70-53, second in both the AL Central (two games behind the Guardians) and the AL Wild Card standings (a game and a half behind the Orioles), with a 92.4% chance of making the playoffs. Though their odds rose as high as 95.8% circa September 2, they proceeded to go just 12-27 after August 17, half a game better than the historically futile White Sox. At 82-80, they placed fourth in the division, 10 1/2 games out of first, and fifth in the Wild Card race, four games out. Adding insult to injury, both the Royals and Tigers (whose fortunes mirrored the Twins) earned Wild Card berths. Read the rest of this entry »

You lose some, and then you lose some. On Sunday at Oracle Park, the Mariners not only fell to the Giants 5-4, but they were forced to remove Victor Robles from the game after he injured his left shoulder making a remarkable catch on the game’s penultimate pitch. His injury is just one of a handful of notable ones suffered in the past several days.

Robles, who broke out last season after being released by the Nationals and signed by the Mariners, had played every inning of every game in right field until the injury. With the score tied 4-4 in the bottom of the ninth, one out, and Luis Matos on first base, Patrick Bailey fouled a drive into the right field corner. Robles sprinted 113 feet, leapt to grab the ball, and then fell over the half-height padded fence and into the netting. After extricating himself, he fell to his knees in obvious pain, rolled the ball to second baseman Ryan Bliss as Matos tagged up and reached third base, and remained on the ground. While he was tended to by Mariners head athletic trainer Kyle Torgerson, Giants manager Bob Melvin challenged the catch ruling, but the call on the field was upheld [as a reader pointed out, Matos was sent back to second under stadium boundary rules]. Finally, Robles was carted off the field, with Torgerson helping him to support his injured left arm.

Miles Mastrobuoni moved from third base to right field to replace Robles, but he didn’t need to for very long, because on the next pitch after play resumed, Wilmer Flores singled in Matos to send the Mariners to defeat, dropping them to 3-7. Medical personnel at Oracle Park popped Robles’ shoulder back into place, and after undergoing X-rays on-site, he was initially diagnosed with a dislocated left shoulder and placed on the 10-day injured list. The results of the follow-up MRI he underwent on Monday afternoon have yet to be announced. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to the latest edition of my weekly chat. I’m having some technical difficulties and need to restart my browser, so please give me a few minutes before we get up and running.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Ok, that’s better.

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Since it’s April 8, I’ll note a pair of important milestones:  today marks the 51st anniversary of Hank Aaron’s 715th home run, and the 50th anniversary of Frank Robinson making his debut as the first Black manager in AL/NL history.

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about the Reds’ offensive struggles and some interesting developments with Elly De La Cruz’s swing(s) https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-reds-offense-has-been-dreadful-so-far-…

12:09

Jay Jaffe: Today I’ve got a piece on Victor Robles’ spectacular catch and subsequent shoulder injury as well as some other injuries of note: Spencer Arrighetti, Iván Herrera, Ketel Marte and Blake Snell. Should be up before this chat ends

Read the rest of this entry »

The Terry Francona era in Cincinnati is not off to a rousing start, particularly on offense. Last week, the Reds became the first team to lose three straight 1-0 games in 65 years, and so far, they’ve lost all three series they’ve played, against the Giants, Rangers, and Brewers. Despite the promise of a good rotation headlined by Hunter Greene, and some eye-opening changes by Elly De La Cruz, it looks like it could be a long summer in Cincinnati.

The Reds are 3-7 and fourth in the NL Central entering Monday. They’ve actually outscored opponents 39-38, but two of their three wins were lopsided ones, a 14-3 blowout of the Rangers on March 31 and then an 11-7 win on Saturday over the Brewers. Between those games, they lost four straight, including a pair of 1-0 games against the Rangers on April 1 and 2, and then a third 1-0 loss to the Brewers on April 3. They actually went scoreless for 35 consecutive innings, the longest stretch that a Reds team has gone without a run since 1946. The streak began with the eighth inning on March 31 (a home game, so they didn’t bat in the ninth), ran through those three 1-0 losses, and extended until the eighth on April 4, when they were down 3-0; they scored a pair of unearned runs but fell short, 3-2.

Amid that streak, the Reds made some dubious history, becoming just the sixth AL or NL team to lose three straight 1-0 games since 1901:

Read the rest of this entry »

Kristian Campbell has come a long way in a short time. Less than two years after being drafted by the Red Sox out of Georgia Tech, with just 137 minor league games under his belt, he placed seventh on our Top 100 Prospects list in February, and won the starting second base job during spring training. Now, with just a week of major league service time under his belt, Campbell has agreed to an eight-year, $60 million extension that includes a pair of team options and escalator clauses that can push the contract’s value past the $100 million mark. It’s a deal that provides both security for Campbell and some opportunity for growth, though it’s not hard to notice the much more lucrative extension that the Padres announced for Jackson Merrill on Wednesday as well and wonder whether Campbell should have waited. Either way, the Red Sox have ensured that another talented youngster will be part of their foundation in the coming years.

The 22-year-old Campbell is raking at a .400/.500/.750 (258 wRC+) clip through the first week of his major league career. So far, five of his eight hits have been for extra bases, including a 431-foot homer off the Rangers’ Jacob Webb on Saturday. He celebrated the news of his extension on Wednesday night with a pair of opposite-field doubles off Orioles starter Zach Eflin.

While Campbell was a co-favorite to win AL Rookie of the Year honors in our annual staff poll, nobody expects him to continue at this breakneck pace. Still, buzz about an extension had been circulating in recent days, and while this move isn’t nearly as big as the six-year, $170 million extension the Red Sox announced on Monday for lefty Garrett Crochet, the team clearly views Campbell as an important piece of its future. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Tucker’s final year before hitting free agency is shaping up to be a big one. Traded from the Astros to the Cubs in a blockbuster deal last December, the 28-year-old right fielder has yet to play a regular season game with his new team at Wrigley Field, yet he’s settling into his new surroundings in impressive fashion. At this writing, he’s riding a streak of homering in four consecutive games, one that has helped him to a prominent spot on the leaderboards.

Tucker went hitless in his debut for the Cubs during the Tokyo Series against the Dodgers on March 18, though in his second game, he drove in a run with a bases-loaded walk against Roki Sasaki, then added a ninth-inning double. Still, he was just 2-for-16 through the season’s first four games before going to town on the Diamondbacks’ Brandon Pfaadt on Saturday, collecting a single, a double, and a two-run homer against the freshly-extended righty in a 4-3 win. He followed that up with a three-run homer off Arizona’s Joe Mantiply in a losing cause on Sunday, then on Monday went 4-for-7 in an 18-3 rout of the A’s in their Sacramento debut, with doubles off Joey Estes and Noah Murdock, a homer off Jhonny Pereda (the team’s backup catcher), and three RBI. Read the rest of this entry »

As you might expect from a team that set a record for futility with 121 losses last year, then traded its ace over the winter, the White Sox did not enter this season with a powerhouse rotation. In fact, according to our Positional Power Rankings, Chicago is projected to have the second-worst starting pitching in the majors, ahead of only the A’s. Yet that rotation has already earned a spot in the history books, as the South Side starters have yet to allow an earned run through the season’s first four games.

Admittedly, the word earned is a load-bearing one in that last sentence. But in becoming just the fifth team to pull off this feat in the 113 years since earned runs became an official statistic, Chicago’s unlikely accomplishment is worth noting, a fluky and probably fleeting performance that has at least earned its run in Small Sample Theater, particularly given the circumstances surrounding it. I’ll get to those, but first let’s meet the company the Sox are keeping:

That’s not a particularly heralded bunch of teams, at least outside of the 1914 Red Sox, who went 91-62 and finished in second the American League. Their season-opening rotation included Dutch Leonard, who still holds the AL record with a 0.96 ERA; in July, they added a 19-year-old lefty named Babe Ruth. The other three predecessors finished below .500, and not by a little; the Giants went 76-86 between championship seasons, the Brewers 66-95, and the Blue Jays 67-95. Even so, they all caught lightning in a bottle during the season’s first week, as have the White Sox, who are 2-2. Last year, they didn’t notch their second win until their 11th game. Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to my first solo regular season chat! It’s been a few weeks since I could occupy this slot; at this time last week, I was in the midst of a fruitless trip to the DMV, where a reservation apparently doesn’t mean what you think it means. Anyway, it’s the first of April, which means that it’s my mother’s 83rd birthday; she’s not reading this chat, but I note it merely to introduce the guarantee that none of what follows will be in the form of an April Fool’s joke. I spend enough time mixing bullshit with earnestness in my online persona that some people have enough trouble figuring out which is which, so let’s just skip that part. Anyway, yesterday I took a look at some goings-on in the Diamondbacks rotation https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jordan-montgomery-may-be-done-as-a-diamond…

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Hot off the presses, I’ve got a piece about the White Sox rotation, which through the season’s first four games has yet to allow an earned run — a fluky thing but one that’s earned them a run in Small Sample Theater. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-white-sox-rotation-has-put-up-mostly-z…

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Like, that sucker just went live while I started typing that paragraph. Don’t burn your hands. And now, on with the show…

12:07

Jay Jaffe: Let’s say 15 starts, some relief appearances, good performance and a spot in the postseason bullpen. Hope springs eternal!

Read the rest of this entry »