Davey Lopes was my first favorite ballplayer. In retrospect, I’m not sure how my eight-year-old self settled upon Lopes in a star-laden lineup featuring power hitters Dusty Baker, Ron Cey, Steve Garvey, and Reggie Smith, who the year before (1977) had become the first quartet of teammates to homer 30 times apiece in a season. I have a much better grasp of how Bill James helped my teenage self appreciate Lopes for his combination of high on-base and stolen base rates with mid-range power, but James wasn’t communicating those ideas via mass-market paperbacks circa 1978. Perhaps it was Lopes’ position atop the lineup I memorized while learning to decode box scores (my theory) or the Topps baseball card set that began my collection. Maybe it was simply his instantly recognizable, bushy mustache (my friends’ theory), but one way or another, even before later heroes such as Fernando Valenzuela and Jim Bouton, Lopes was my guy.

The news that Lopes passed away on April 8 at age 80 due to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases — a brutal double bill — reached me while I was traveling in Austria with my own 84-year-old parents and additional family as we tracked down the Vienna addresses of my long-deceased paternal grandparents. I had no shortage of thoughts regarding mortality, and yet the hits kept coming. Lopes wasn’t even the most recent former All-Star-second-baseman-turned-manager to pass away, as Phil Garner, his National League rival and then predecessor in managing the Brewers, died of pancreatic cancer on April 11. So it goes.

Though he didn’t debut until well past his 27th birthday, Lopes spent 16 seasons in the majors (1972-87), the first 10 with the Dodgers, whom he helped to four pennants and a championship while making four All-Star teams, winning a Gold Glove, and becoming team captain. From 1973–81, he manned the keystone in the longest running infield in major league history, along with Garvey at first base, Cey at third, and Bill Russell at shortstop — a unit that formed the foundation of those pennant-winning teams under managers Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. “He was the catalyst of the engine. It was 700 horsepower with the four of us, and the equation was his ability to get on base,” Garvey told CBS LA in the wake of Lopes’ death. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon! Welcome to my first chat of April

12:02

Jay Jaffe: I was out of town last week, traveling in Austria with my family, retracing some ancestral roots and testing out my newly-acquired dual citizenship. It’s very weird to drop in on baseball when there’s a 6-hour time difference in that direction, to say the least

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about Andy Pages, whose hot start I followed from afar https://blogs.fangraphs.com/with-a-hot-start-andy-pages-has-turned-the…

12:04

Jay Jaffe: For tomorrow I’ll be writing about Davey Lopes, my first favorite ballplayer, who passed away last week.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: if I’ve learned one thing, it’s never take the Brewers lightly. They always seem to find a way to contend, and in that division, that’s often more than enough

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Andy Pages was the starting center fielder — and the youngest starter, period — on championship-winning Dodgers teams in each of his first two campaigns, showing considerable year-to-year improvement in the regular season but practically disappearing in October due to epic slumps. Now, the 25-year-old has put those postseason indignities behind him and emerged as one of the game’s hottest hitters to start 2026, while also helping the team jump out to the best record in the majors.

Through 15 games, the Dodgers are 11-4, a game and a half better than the second-best team thus far, the Padres (10-6). Pages, who has played all but four innings, has multiple hits in eight of his 15 games; only the Rangers’ Brandon Nimmo (nine) and the Rays’ Chandler Simpson (eight) have as many or more such games. In his latest multi-hit effort, on Friday against Texas, Pages went 3-for-3 with a walk and two key extra-base hits. He smoked a two-run double down the right field line off Robert Garcia in the seventh inning, turning a 4-3 deficit into a 5-4 lead, and followed up with a two-run homer to left-center field off Luis Curvelo in the eighth to extend the lead to 7-4. The Dodgers needed all of those runs as they hung on to win 8-7 on Max Muncy’s walk-off home run, his third dinger of the game.

To date, Pages is hitting an absurd .429/.467/.714 (233 wRC+). He finished the weekend leading the NL in all of those categories except slugging percentage; he’s also first in WAR (1.2, tied with Jordan Walker) and RBI (17). Two and a half weeks into the season isn’t enough to confirm whether he’s unlocked a new level of performance — he’s obviously not going to maintain those slash stats — but he’s shown some promising signs, and his prominence atop the leaderboards at least merits a closer look. Read the rest of this entry »

Sal Stewart made a promising showing when the Reds called him up last September, clubbing five home runs in 18 games while helping Cincinnati reach the postseason for the first time since 2020. His 2026 campaign is off to a flying start, as well. Not only did he bank NL Player of the Week honors for the season’s opening week, but his performance underscores the notion — supported by both scouting and statistical projections — that he’s leveled up significantly.

Through the Reds’ first six games, the 22-year-old first baseman has put up video-game numbers, batting .474/.615/.947 (313 wRC+) with two homers in 26 plate appearances. His hot streak began with an eventful Opening Day; while the Reds lost to the Red Sox, 3-0, it was hardly his fault. He went 3-for-4, including a pair of bases-empty doubles, one apiece off starter Garrett Crochet and reliever Garrett Whitlock, as well as a single to right field off Crochet with men on first and second. With third base coach Willie Harris wary of testing two-time Gold Glove winner Wilyer Abreu’s arm, lead runner Matt McLain was held up and ultimately stranded.

Stewart also survived a scare in the fifth inning, when a 110-mph liner off the bat of Roman Anthony hit his left wrist as he tried to backhand the ball. He was shaken up but remained in the game, and reassuringly collected two of his three hits after being drilled. Read the rest of this entry »

Chase DeLauter got an odd start to his major league career last fall — and an inauspicious one, at that — when he became the sixth player to debut in a postseason game before playing in a regular season one. The Guardians’ rookie right fielder has fared much better in the early stages of his first regular season in the majors, going on a home run binge that made a bit of history.

Facing the Mariners in Seattle on Opening Day last Thursday, the 24-year-old DeLauter started things off by homering in his first plate appearance, launching a towering 358-foot solo shot off Logan Gilbert. It was the first Cleveland run of the season, and though at least 140 players in AL/NL history have homered in their first career at-bat, in the ninth inning he joined a much more exclusive club. With the Guardians ahead 5-4, DeLauter hammered a 422-foot solo home run off Cooper Criswell, helping to seal the victory and becoming just the sixth player to homer twice in his regular season debut:

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12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my first chat of the 2026 regular season.

12:02

Jay Jaffe: It’s a gorgeous day here in Brooklyn. Alas, we have no day baseball to accompany this chat; when I’m commissioner, I will mandate a minimum of one day game for every day through at least the first 30 days of the season.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, I’ve got a thing in the pipeline about Chase DeLauter’s hot start, which should go up sometime while we’re chatting.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday, I wrote about the Giants’ season-opening offensive futility https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-giants-opened-the-season-by-making-som…, and on Friday I wrote about Jackson Chourio’s injury https://blogs.fangraphs.com/scratch-that-jackson-chourio-lands-on-the-…

12:04

Jay Jaffe: and now, on with the show….

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On Saturday, in the third inning of their game against the Yankees at Oracle Park, the Giants scored a run. Normally, this wouldn’t rate as particularly noteworthy, but that was one more run than they’d scored in the previous 20 innings while dropping their first two games of the 2026 season. As far as their season-opening series went, it was a one-shot deal, as they didn’t score again.

Indeed, the Giants were utterly stifled by the Yankees over those three games. On Wednesday night, when the two teams had the stage to themselves for a nationally televised game on Netflix (don’t get me started about that production), Max Fried and three relievers held the Giants to three hits, all singles, in a 7-0 loss; the Giants reached base just four other times in that one via two walks, a hit-by-pitch, and an error by shortstop Jose Caballero. On Friday afternoon, following a day off, Cam Schlittler and four relievers limited the Giants to one hit in a 3-0 defeat, a second-inning double by Heliot Ramos; in that one, the Giants additionally reached base only twice, on walks in the seventh and ninth innings.

With that, the Giants and Yankees made some history. Those double zeroes marked the first time in the Giants’ 144-year history that they were shut out in their first two games of the season. It had happened just once to any other team within the past decade, the 2023 Royals (at the hands of the Twins). For the Yankees, it was the first time since their 1903 inception that they shut out opponents over their first two games. What’s more, according to the Associated Press it was the first time that any team was shut out and held to a combined total of five hits or fewer over a season’s first two games. Read the rest of this entry »

Nine days after the end of the World Baseball Classic, more than three weeks since he was hit by a pitch, and just hours before his team’s Opening Day game, another WBC participant landed on the injured list. Jackson Chourio, who served as the regular center fielder for Venezuela’s championship-winning squad and who is slated to be the starting left fielder for the Brewers, was placed on the IL on Thursday morning due to a fracture in his left hand.

Chourio, who turned 22 on March 11, was hit on the hand by a heater from Clayton Beeter in Venezuela’s exhibition game against the Nationals on March 4. Initial X-rays were negative, and he was diagnosed with a contusion. He sat out Venezuela’s first two games of pool play while the Marlins’ Javier Sanoja started in center field, but Chourio returned to the lineup on March 9, playing the final two pool games and the three knockout round games. For the tournament, he hit just .200/.278/.200 in 19 plate appearances, though he did barrel a few balls.

When Chourio returned to the Brewers, according to manager Pat Murphy, he underwent a scan of some sort — I’d guess a CT scan, which is much quicker than an MRI — but it did not show a fracture. He continued to play regularly, and even homered off the Padres’ Randy Vásquez on March 21, but after he felt pain in his hand during a check swing in an exhibition against the Reds on Tuesday, the Brewers sent him for an MRI, which reportedly revealed a small hairline fracture at the base of his third metacarpal. While the fracture has begun to heal, Murphy said the team is understandably “worried that there could be further injury if he doesn’t take care of it now.” Thus the IL move, which is retroactive to March 25. He’s expected to miss two to four weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Will three be the magic number for Tarik Skubal? Fresh off back-to-back Cy Young Awards and a record-setting $32 million arbitration win, the 29-year-old lefty will take the ball for the Tigers against the Padres on Thursday afternoon at Petco Park, the third year in a row he’s had the honor of an Opening Day start. He’s vying to become just the third pitcher to win three straight Cy Youngs — after Greg Maddux (1992–95) and Randy Johnson (1999–2002) — and the first American League pitcher to do so.

Though he didn’t repeat as the winner of the AL Pitching Triple Crown, Skubal was actually slightly better in 2025 than in ’24 by most key measures. He trimmed his ERA, FIP, and walk rate slightly, while improving his strikeout rate, innings total, and WAR:

The major difference between Skubal’s seasons was that his offensive support fell from 5.3 runs per start to 4.5, so his win total dropped. Even so, the Tigers went 21-10 in his starts in both seasons en route to claiming wild card berths. Read the rest of this entry »

Dean Kremer has been a staple of the Orioles rotation in recent years. Even while missing significant time due to injuries in a couple of seasons, he’s made more starts than any other Baltimore pitcher since the beginning of 2022, a span that encompasses both the division-winning Orioles from ’23 and last year’s basement dwellers. Yet this past weekend, Kremer was optioned to the team’s minor league camp, the odd man out in a rotation battle. He’s not the only familiar name among those slated to start the season in the minors due to such decisions.

Opening Day is full of fanfare and so often freighted with meaning, but it’s still just one day on the baseball calendar; the decisions regarding who gets to be there (and who doesn’t) don’t actually define the season. Still, unless they’re recalled to replace injured players — which is hardly out of the question — optioned position players need to remain in the minors for 10 days and pitchers for 15 days, counting from March 25 (Opening Day for the Giants and Yankees). In other words, they’ll be eligible to return on April 4 or April 9. Beyond that, circumstances change as the season progresses, and rosters are in a constant state of flux.

Kremer stands out because he’s fully established himself in the majors, while the other high-profile decisions I’ve highlighted below involve players who are or were recently considered top prospects. They’re all headed to Triple-A, and I expect them to stay past the aforementioned dates, but they’re notable because they’re still expected to play substantial roles in 2026. The players are listed alphabetically. Read the rest of this entry »