Through their ups and downs this season — a pair of 10-game winning streaks here, a 10-game losing streak there — the one constant for the Cubs has been injuries to their starting pitchers. On that front, this week brought a flurry of bad news. Not only did both Edward Cabrera and Ben Brown land on the injured list on Wednesday, bringing their current total of sidelined starters to six, but president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer announced that Justin Steele, who suffered a setback in late April while rehabbing from his second Tommy John surgery, isn’t likely to rejoin the rotation this season. In need of warm bodies to provide some innings, the team swung a trade with the Mets to acquire lefty David Peterson, a 2025 All-Star who has been getting lit up this year, but if the Cubs aspire to maintain their hold on a playoff spot, they’ll need significantly more help ahead of the August 3 trade deadline.

At this writing, seven of the 11 pitchers who have made at least one start for the team this season — including openers — have landed on the IL at least once, and that count doesn’t even include Steele. With Wednesday’s moves, five of the six pitchers forecast to throw the most innings for the team in our preseason Positional Power Rankings were out hurt, though Thursday’s scheduled activation of Opening Day starter Matthew Boyd from his second IL stint reduces that count. The Cubs rotation ranked 20th in projected WAR in our PPR, with a projected 4.03 ERA and a 4.15 FIP, but even that level of performance has been unattainable. Currently, Chicago is 26th in starting pitcher WAR (2.9), with a combined 4.64 ERA and a 4.79 FIP, and while the team’s use of the occasional opener fuzzes up those stats a bit, the bullpen (including bulk pitchers) has netted -0.3 WAR, with a 3.82 ERA and a 4.62 FIP. Don’t even ask about ready help from the minors, as the organization’s top upper-level pitching prospects — Jaxon Wiggins, Brody McCullough, Brandon Birdsell, Connor Noland — either are currently hurt or have been ineffective. It’s a bleak situation everywhere you look, at least at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Tucker’s tenure with the Dodgers hasn’t gone as well as anyone hoped so far, and on Monday night at Target Field, things took a turn for the worse. After walking during his first plate appearance, he yielded to a pinch-runner upon reaching second base due to back spasms. While he hasn’t yet landed on the injured list, the Dodgers have set a timetable that allows for “a mental reset” — to use manager Dave Roberts’ term — as Tucker tries to end a prolonged slump.

Tucker apparently began experiencing back spasms when the Dodgers took the field in the bottom of the first inning, though he didn’t have any balls hit in his direction. When he batted with one out in the top of the second, he fouled off Zebby Matthews’ first pitch — a four-seamer just off the plate — then looked at four straight balls, three of them in similar locations to that initial offering. Tommy Edman followed with a single, at which point Roberts replaced Tucker with pinch-runner Alex Call, who took over in right field.

“Back just like lit up and [I] went out there just tried to hope that it would calm down or go away or something, I’d just keep flying through it,” said Tucker afterwards, adding that “finishing the swing hurt.”

Roberts first noticed Tucker’s discomfort when he was batting. “I saw him take his at-bat — a little bit of wincing and kind of when he was jogging to first base,” the manager said. “And then once he got to second base, I think it was just more not seeing him move the right way, and I didn’t want to put him in any more jeopardy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Fireworks season came early to Citizens Bank Park, where on Saturday evening the Phillies collected 17 hits — 10 for extra bases, including four home runs — in a 15-3 win over the Mets. Kyle Schwarber launched three of those homers, with two traveling more than 450 feet in the third inning, and by the time the fifth inning ended, Bryce Harper had hit for the cycle for the first time in his major league career. At the wrong end of that onslaught was Freddy Peralta, who was tagged for 10 runs in 2 2/3 innings. It was the worst start of his nine-year career, as well as a reminder of just how poorly the team’s offseason acquisitions have panned out.

Saturday’s start began inauspiciously enough, with Peralta allowing a two-out solo shot to Harper in the first inning. After falling behind 2-0, he threw a 93.9-mph four-seamer inside, but Harper was nonetheless able to extend his arms and lift a 37-degree blast. In the second inning, Peralta surrendered two more runs via the combination of an Alec Bohm single, a one-out J.T. Realmuto double, and a two-out Justin Crawford double.

At that point, the Mets were down 3-0, not a good start but hardly catastrophic, but Peralta began the third inning by serving up a 456-foot solo homer to Schwarber on a changeup at the bottom of the zone, and from there the floodgates opened. Harper doubled, Brandon Marsh singled and took second on a Marcus Semien throwing error, and after the first out, Bryson Stott and Realmuto hit back-to-back doubles. A strikeout, a Crawford walk, and a Trea Turner single later, and the Mets were down 7-0. Peralta was done for the evening, but the official scorer wasn’t quite done with him. Crawford and Turner scored when reliever Cionel Pérez left a middle-middle sinker for Schwarber to demolish, a 457-footer for his second home run of the inning, putting the Mets into an 11-0 hole. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to the latest edition of my weekly chat. The queue for question is rather sparse so I’m going to give it a few minutes to fill up before I dive in. Remember, that while you don’t need to be a FanGraphs member to post a question to the chat, you do need to be logged into your user account to do so.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: On the subject of membership, please read David Appelman’s “The State of FanGraphs,” which is currently featured on the home page. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-state-of-fangraphs-2026/

12:05

Jay Jaffe: I have a piece on Freddy Peralta that should go live during this chat.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Prior to that, I wrote about Jackson Chourio’s step forward, which may be flying under some radars given that he missed the first 5 weeks of the season https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/jackson-chourios-big-step-forward

12:15

Jay Jaffe: That’s an interesting one to ponder, but I don’t think it makes great sense for the Mariners. Gilbert is a very good pitcher with one more year of club control, and the Mariners do seem to have rotation depth, but the margin between him and Skubal just isn’t big enough — to me at least — to give that up. I can certainly understand the impulse to go for it, though.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jackson Chourio got a late start to his season. A fractured metacarpal in his left hand, suffered during the run-up to the World Baseball Classic but not definitively diagnosed until three weeks later, knocked him onto the injured list just hours before the Brewers’ Opening Day game, and he didn’t make his season debut until May 4. Since then, the 22-year-old outfielder has not only been one of the majors’ top hitters, he’s shown notable improvements in a few key areas while helping to propel the Brewers into first place in the NL Central. He’s becoming the star the Brewers hoped he would when they signed him to an eight-year, $82 million extension in December 2023, before he’d even debuted in the majors.

On Wednesday night against the Guardians, Chourio hit his 10th home run of the season, turning a high cutter from Gavin Williams into a two-run opposite-field shot that helped the Brewers to a 9-4 win:

Read the rest of this entry »

Monday marked the one-year anniversary of the blockbuster trade that sent Rafael Devers from the Red Sox to the Giants in exchange for a four-player package. Neither team marked the occasion by throwing a party; mercifully, both were idle, and so didn’t sink further below .500. The deal hasn’t worked out well for either side, though it’s the Giants with an expensive and apparently declining slugger on the books. While Devers was fairly productive after being dealt last season, so far in 2026, the 29-year-old first baseman has surrounded one very good month (May) with a pair of miserable slumps that are just part of the reason the Giants are buried in the NL West standings.

We’ve told and re-told the story of the drama in Boston that led up to the Devers trade, but the streamlined version is that the signing of third baseman Alex Bregman bumped Devers off his natural position. After that, a lack of communication between the front office and the slugger — whose defense at the hot corner had eroded — exacerbated the team’s attempts to slot him first at designated hitter and then, after Triston Casas was injured, at first base, a position he had never played before and was reluctant to begin learning in-season. On June 15, 2025, the Red Sox sent Devers to the Giants for lefty Kyle Harrison, righties Jose Bello and Jordan Hicks, and outfielder James Tibbs III, with the Giants assuming the roughly $254 million remaining on Devers’ 10-year, $313.5 million contract, which runs though 2033.

The Red Sox were just 36-36 at the time of the trade, the Giants 41-30. Over the remainder of the season, the two teams’ fortunes reversed, with Boston going 53-37 and securing a Wild Card berth, just the team’s second trip to the postseason since winning the World Series in 2018, and San Francisco going 40-51 and missing the playoffs for the eighth time in nine seasons. Each team has changed managers since, with the Giants axing Bob Melvin in favor of Tony Vitello — the rare manager to make the jump directly from the college coaching ranks — last October and the Red Sox firing Alex Cora in late April. Those varying paths have led the two teams to similar spots: the Red Sox are 29-41, last in the AL East, while the Giants are 29-43, two games out of last place in the NL West. (Note that throughout this piece, stats from our site include those from Devers’ two plate appearances in Tuesday night’s suspended game against the Braves, while those from Baseball Savant do not.) Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon! It’s a gorgeous 71-degree day here in my corner of Brooklyn and here I am, stuck inside yappin’ at you folks — I kid, but maybe I’d better take a walk to get my lunch after this ends.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: The vibe here is still lovely in the wake of the Knicks’ NBA championship win on Friday night. As somebody who’s been hating on James Dolan and the Knicks for over 31 years since moving here, I did not climb aboard the bandwagon, but my wife and daughter greatly enjoyed it — the latter has never been swept up in sports fandom like that before, so that was cool to see.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: And of course we have the World Cup going on, the drama of which has already managed to outrun the awful underlying politics.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: And the baseball has been fantastic! Jacob Misiorowski’s one-hit, 15-strikeout game from Friday night was remarkable, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto chased a perfect game on Saturday evening.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about José Ramírez’s broken hamate https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-ultra-durable-jose-ramirez-has-been-fe…

12:06

Jay Jaffe: and late last week, I wrote about Dustin May (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/dustin-may-is-finally-having-his-day/) who made me look good by throwing a one-hit shutout last night against the Padres

Read the rest of this entry »

After building a 4 1/2-game lead just a few weeks ago, the Guardians (39-33) are now in a virtual tie with the upstart White Sox (38-32) atop the AL Central. As the two teams continue to battle for the division lead, however, the Guardians will have to do without their biggest star for the next several weeks. During Saturday’s 3-1 victory over the Tigers, José Ramírez fractured the hamate in his left hand, an injury that will require surgery and sideline him until some time after the All-Star break.

Ramírez suffered the injury during a fifth-inning plate appearance against Tarik Skubal, who was making his return from surgery to remove loose bodies in his elbow. According to manager Stephen Vogt, the slugger first felt the injury while swinging at a slider that he popped foul. He grounded out on the next pitch, and while he hoped to remain in the game because outfielders Angel Martínez and Chase DeLauter had already exited due to injuries, he was replaced by Daniel Schneemann — who had initially replaced DeLauter as a pinch-runner — at the start of the sixth inning.

“He tried to go back out,” said Vogt of Ramírez. “He knew the position we were in, grabbed his glove. He said, ‘Maybe I can at least play defense,’ and couldn’t squeeze his glove. [He] wanted to get back out there to help us win that game and just couldn’t.” Read the rest of this entry »

Dustin May’s 2026 season did not begin in auspicious fashion. He was chased in the fourth inning in each of his first two starts with the Cardinals, facing the Rays at home on March 29 and then the Tigers in Detroit on April 4. On the heels of his rough 2025 season, it was fair to wonder if St. Louis had grossly miscalculated by signing the 28-year-old righty to a one-year, $12.5 million deal. Since then, however, May has gone on a roll, putting together perhaps the best run of his injury-wracked career and placing himself among the game’s top starters during that span.

On Tuesday at Citi Field, May spun six scoreless innings against the Mets, holding them to four hits and one walk while striking out six. It was his first scoreless start since last August 12 while with the Red Sox, and with it, he collected his first win since April 21. Though he’d averaged a crisp six innings with a 3.86 ERA and a 3.03 FIP over his previous seven starts, the Cardinals had scored just 19 runs and posted a 2-5 record in those games.

Undoubtedly, the most frustrating of those strong outings was on May 27 in Milwaukee. May had held the Brewers hitless for seven innings, striking out nine and allowing only two baserunners; he hit Jake Bauers with a pitch in the second inning, and catcher Pedro Pagés interfered with Sal Frelick in the fourth. May had thrown just 72 pitches to that point, giving him a real shot at finishing the job without too much concern about pitch count. Alas, Garrett Mitchell led off the eighth with a double just over the head of left fielder Bryan Torres as he raced into the left-center gap, and then Luis Rengifo bunted for a base hit before manager Oliver Marmol called for the bullpen. The Brewers, who trailed 1-0 at the time, plated both runs against reliever JoJo Romero, and held on to win 2-1. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been an eventful start to June for Matt McLain. Fresh off the worst calendar month of his major league career, the Reds’ 26-year-old infielder snapped out of a 1-for-29 slide on June 1 against the Royals, the same day he began what the team hopes will be a brief residency at shortstop in place of the injured Elly De La Cruz. He homered in back-to-back games on June 6–7 against the Cardinals, with the second two-homer game of his career on the latter day. Then on Monday, McLain became the first player to win three ABS challenges in a single plate appearance, resulting in a base on balls. His brief binge hasn’t been enough to stop the Reds from slipping below .500, but it has offered some hope that he’s finally on the upswing after a prolonged struggle since tearing up his left shoulder in March 2024.

In the wake of De La Cruz straining his right hamstring while running out a single on May 31, McLain has started seven of the Reds’ eight games at shortstop. He has a fair bit of experience there, having played the position at UCLA and in the minors, then for about two and a half months as a rookie in 2023 before De La Cruz took over. Rookie Edwin Arroyo, who had primarily been playing shortstop at Triple-A Louisville, has been called up to cover second base.

I’ll get to the team’s infield picture below, but first, McLain. Monday night’s ABS adventure happened with two outs in the top of the eighth inning against Padres reliever Jason Adam, who was protecting a 3-2 lead. McLain challenged three sliders that were below the zone on 1-0, 2-0, and 3-1 counts, all of which home plate umpire Lance Barrett called strikes:

Read the rest of this entry »