Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

While “15 hits, 11 extra-base hits, six home runs, six walks and one stolen base in an eight-game span” is about as arbitrary and specific as a baseball feat gets, it’s nonetheless extremely impressive that Brenton Doyle finds himself in a group with five Hall of Famers.

Brenton Doyle is the sixth player to record at least 15 hits, 11 extra-base hits, six home runs, six walks and one stolen base in an eight-game span.

The other five are Larry Walker, Reggie Jackson, Willie Mays, Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. pic.twitter.com/ZMGG6I6z1d

— Rockies Club Information (@RockiesClubInfo) July 10, 2024

Doyle proved useful last season as a rookie, but only on one side of the ball. His brilliant center field defense (19 DRS, 15 OAA) was almost completely undercut by his awful 43 wRC+, which limited his value to 0.5 WAR.

But some mechanical adjustments geared at increasing his swing efficiency and cutting down on its moving parts have worked wonders in his sophomore season. His wRC+ has climbed all the way up to an above-average 112, and he’s already popped 13 homers after hitting just 10 in 2023. Additionally, because he is getting on base more — his on-base percentage has jumped from .250 last year to .346 — he is swiping more bags, too. He ranks ninth in the majors with 20 steals, and he’s just two shy of his stolen base total from last year.

In Doyle, the Rockies have a potential all-around star; he’s 26th in WAR among all hitters and third among primary center fielders, after Aaron Judge and Jarren Duran. That’s encouraging for Colorado, and his breakout presents a few options for the organization, chief among them: Should the Rockies build around Doyle or use him as a trade chip?

The Rockies are well on their way to a sixth straight losing season, and their playoff odds have hit 0.0%, so they are clearly in a position to sell before the July 30 trade deadline. That said, if history has any indication on how Colorado will approach this year’s deadline, the organization won’t blow up the whole squad to embark on a complete rebuild. That means players on expiring contracts, such as catching tandem Elias Díaz and Jacob Stallings, and lefty reliever Jalen Beeks could all be wearing new uniforms come August, as could players with another year before free agency, like starting pitchers Cal Quantrill and Austin Gomber.

Otherwise, though, the Rockies are likely to stay the course with the guys under club control long term, such as Doyle. Sure, it might be prudent for them to get rid of anyone of value and start over, but that’s just not how they operate. Some of the most notable examples of this include Troy Tulowitzki’s bitter end in Colorado and the organization’s underwhelming return for Nolan Arenado when he essentially forced the team to trade him. (Gomber is the only player from that trade still on the Rockies’ 40-man roster.)

Then again, maybe the Rockies shouldn’t cut ties with their guys just yet, especially not young, affordable players like Doyle (pre-arbitration, under club control through 2029), shortstop Ezequiel Tovar, who before the season signed a very team-friendly extension (seven years, $63.5 million), and third baseman Ryan McMahon, who has three years and $44 million left on his contract after this year. You don’t have to squint too hard to see a world in which the Rockies build around this trio and find a way to contend while they’re on the roster for fairly cheap.

Think of it this way: Kris Bryant’s disastrous contract finally ends after the 2028 season, and long-term deals with pitchers Kyle Freeland, Antonio Senzatela, and Germán Márquez all will have expired by then as well. Additionally, Colorado has some more talented youngsters coming up through the pipeline, among them are pitcher Chase Dollander, second baseman Adael Amador, and whichever player the team selects with the third overall pick in Sunday’s draft. The Rockies could have a solid core over the second half of this decade, especially when you consider that owner Dick Monfort is not opposed to spending money in free agency, though he doesn’t always (read: usually) spend wisely.

That’s not to say teams wouldn’t love to have Doyle if he were made available or if they could get into Monfort or GM Bill Schmidt’s ear with a huge offer, and Doyle could absolutely return players of intrigue and impact to join Colorado’s pipeline. I asked our Ben Clemens, whose Trade Value series will come out later this month, what he thinks of Doyle; while the center fielder won’t make the top 50, he’ll be included as an honorable mention, implying at least some value. That actually bodes well for the Rockies if they were interested in trading him; his value wouldn’t be too high that other teams would balk at Colorado’s asking price, but he’s also good enough that he’d net a decent return package. It would make a lot of sense for the Phillies or another contending club that needs a solid everyday center fielder to see if they can make a match without having to give up too much.

But would it really worth it for the Rockies to trade Doyle? I came into researching this piece thinking that the answer would be “yes, of course, because he’s a good player and they’re a bad team!” But I have now convinced myself otherwise. The prospects Colorado would get for Doyle would come with six years of club control, and Doyle himself has five. Even in a deal for multiple prospects, one extra year of control isn’t enough to trade away a player who has already reached the majors and had success there. It’s pretty risky to gamble that even one of the prospects in the return package would be as impactful on the field in the future as Doyle has been this season.

Another important thing to consider, Doyle’s all-around breakout has spanned just half a season. His lack of track record surely creates a disconnect in how teams currently value him. If the Rockies doubt their ability to contend while Doyle is on their roster, and therefore are willing to trade him, they might be better off holding on to him for another year or two so he can prove that his performance this season isn’t a fluke. It’s possible that he could regress between now and then, but as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, the return Colorado would likely get for him this summer wouldn’t be all that valuable to the organization.

Whatever the Rockies decide to do with Doyle, he is going to be an important part of their future — even if he never again gets to enjoy the company of that same quintet of Hall of Famers.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about homerless White Sox second basemen, the recent history of teams with homerless positions, and the upsides and downsides of the trend toward focusing on present-season performance in All-Star selections, then (37:11) answer emails about an award for utility players, a player’s debut age matching his debut number, whether an infielder could rob a home run, whether fatigue would make a four-player batting order of stars worse than a regular, nine-player lineup, whether championships reside with a city or a franchise, whether umpires could wear shorts, the definition of a “clean inning,” what it means for a throw/tag to be “not in time,” and the requirements for breaking out of a slump, plus closing banter (1:33:23) about Paul Skenes as an All-Star starter.

Audio intro: Alex Ferrin, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: The Shirey Brothers, “Effectively Wild Theme”

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With the Blue Jays a whopping 16 games out of first place in the American League East and eight teams in front of them in the wild card race, right-hander Chris Bassitt and several other notable Toronto players could be traded before the fast-approaching July 30 trade deadline. It would make a lot of sense for the Blue Jays to move on from Bassitt, a 35-year-old on a contract worth $22 million annually that extends through next season. No shortage of contenders are seeking pitching help, and Bassitt would seemingly yield an attractive return.

His track record is that of a reliable starter. Since the beginning of the 2021 season, Bassitt has logged a 3.43 ERA and a 3.79 FIP while tossing the seventh-most innings in the majors. Moreover, after a rocky first month (5.64 ERA, 5.55 FIP across his first six starts), he has been at the top of his game since the beginning of May. Bassitt boasts a 2.69 ERA and a 3.02 FIP over his past 13 starts, and he’s gone at least five frames in all of them. Overall, he is 8-7 with a 3.52 ERA, a 3.73 FIP, and 2.0 WAR across 107 1/3 innings this season.

How does the 10-year veteran approach his craft? I sat down with him earlier this month to find out.

———

David Laurila: Would you call yourself a pitching nerd?

Chris Bassitt: “I like to understand the art of it, for sure. I would say that it’s more been a fascination with just watching guys. I’ve been blessed to be teammates with a lot of guys who are really, really good, and I’ve always liked to watch the pitches they use, how they use them, who they use them against. Things like that.

“If I’m having struggles with, say, a certain type of hitter, I kind of go back to what I’ve seen in the past with other pitchers and what they’ve done. If that makes me a nerd, then yeah.”

Laurila: Are you mostly just watching — I’m sure video is a big part of that — or are you also digging into the data? Read the rest of this entry »

The National League Wild Card race is wide open, with eight of the league’s 15 teams separated by a grand total of four and a half games in the standings. Five of those teams are currently below .500, their flaws on display on a daily basis — and some of those teams are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to their defenses.

On Wednesday, I investigated what a handful of the major defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages) — told us about the teams with the best defenses. Some of them appear to be playoff-bound, while others are barely hanging onto hope thanks in part to those defenses, among them the Diamondbacks. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Ryan McMahon’s first stolen base of the season. McMahon, whose sprint speed was recently downgraded from the 19th percentile to the 18th, managed that first bag by way of a delayed steal. By completely dismissing McMahon as a threat, the Pirates presented him with a perfect storm of opportunity. He took an enormous lead off third base because no one bothered to hold him on, and he waited until catcher Yasmani Grandal unleashed a lollipop back to the pitcher, then waltzed home.

Where did McMahon, who had been caught stealing four times to that point in the season, get the idea for such a brazen daylight robbery? Probably from Garrett Stubbs, who had executed the same move just a few weeks prior, stealing third base right from under McMahon’s nose. Stubbs didn’t get the same gargantuan lead that McMahon did, nor did he get to take advantage of a catcher’s big, slow rainbow tosses back to the pitcher. He simply went because he saw that catcher Jacob Stallings was paying him no attention whatsoever.

On Monday, the Rockies were involved in yet another delayed steal. After walking in the bottom of the second inning, major league stolen base leader Elly De La Cruz somehow waited two whole pitches before taking off for second as Elias Díaz tossed the ball back to Ryan Feltner.

This latest delayed steal was very different from the first two. McMahon is extremely slow — and Stubbs, while not slow, is a catcher — but everyone in the ballpark was aware that De La Cruz would likely try to take second. Both broadcast crews were talking about the threat of a steal and both feeds made sure to cut to shots of De La Cruz’s lead. While Díaz has one of the quicker arms in the league, Feltner is extremely slow to the plate. He has allowed 20 stolen bases this season, second only to Corbin Burnes with 24. Díaz stared De La Cruz down before returning the ball to Feltner after the first pitch, and Feltner attempted a pickoff before delivering the second pitch. None of that mattered against a threat like De La Cruz, but I still found it surprising that he opted for a delayed steal considering that with a pitcher like Feltner on the mound, a conventional stolen base attempt was more or less a sure thing.

De La Cruz, being De La Cruz, stole third base four pitches later; then one pitch after that, he was caught stealing home on a first-and-third steal attempt because Díaz (legally) blocked home plate. Sam Miller wrote about the rise of first-and-third steals back in February and then again this weekend. “As long as I’ve been baseballing,” he wrote, “the first-and-third situation has been what separated the pros from the amateurs.” That’s no longer the case. Sam calculated that in May and June, the runner on first took off roughly 14% of the time, compared to 10.1% in 2023 and 6.6% in the 2010s. After watching all of those plays, he concluded that defenses still aren’t really sure how to handle that situation.

Much like first-and-third steals, delayed stealing has historically been reserved for amateur ball. Because it’s a difficult thing to search for, I’m not sure whether they’ve been happening more often too or whether I just happen to have noticed a cluster. Either way, this cluster made me wonder whether baserunners should be pulling this move more often. After all, the three that we’ve seen could not have been any easier. Only one of them even drew a throw, and that was a play when everyone knew a stolen base attempt was likely. It’s true that McMahon’s steal of home came when nobody was paying him the slightest attention and the catcher returned the ball to the pitcher like a grandfather pitching horseshoes, but Stubbs isn’t exactly a burner either, and his came on a normal throw from the catcher, following a pitch where both the pitcher and the shortstop were making a real effort to keep him from getting too big a lead. Maybe this is easier than we realize. Read the rest of this entry »

Like most things in baseball, baserunning is a blend of skills and smarts. It helps to be one of the faster guys in the league, but there are players who provide above average value on the bases despite not having above average speed, as instincts and feel can often make the difference between being safe or out.

One of my favorite parts of baserunning is the judgement calls that players are forced to make while running at full speed and expelling all their power and athleticism. In those moments, they have split seconds to weigh the many factors that can impact their chances of getting the extra base. While basestealing may be the single most exciting part of the game, the decision of whether to try and swipe a bag is much more black and white than other base-running plays.

Say you’re a major leaguer leading off first base and are determining whether to attempt to steal second. You already know the catcher’s pop time, and you have a pretty good idea of how long it takes the pitcher to deliver his pitch. You’re also familiar with the pitcher’s pickoff tendencies and footwork, as well as your own speed and ability to time your jump. Yes, maybe you can pick up on a pattern in real time that gives you a slight competitive advantage, or you notice either the pitcher, catcher, or both of them aren’t paying you much attention, allowing you to catch them by surprise. But for the most part, your decision to take off for second is still almost entirely going to come down to how fast all parties involved can boogie.

On the contrary, if you’re at the plate and lace a liner in the gap that splits two outfielders, you’re faced with several different variables that affect your decision outside of just your speed. How quickly do you get out of the box? Are you thinking two right away, meaning you’re running hard and already taking the angle that will allow you to cut the corner of first base and make a good turn that will give you a direct line to second.

From there, it’s based on feel and whatever data points you have in your head about the outfielders going for the ball. Which one is going to get there first? Does he have a strong arm? If so, is he accurate? Are his throws any weaker and less accurate if he’s pacing on a diagonal toward the gap and has to plant and throw off his back foot? Or, is the outfielder going to get to the ball quickly and have time to circle it, set his feet, crow-hop, and fire? There are other factors on top of these, too.

Let’s check out a few examples from some of the best base-running plays of the year. I’ll be using Statcast’s Runner Runs metric as a guide for choosing plays. This metric estimates the success rate for each base-running opportunity based on variables such as runner speed, outfielder arm strength, and distance from the given bag. Below, I’ve selected three plays — one at second, one at third, and one at home — that were worth at least .20 runs added.

We begin with a hustle double from Bobby Witt Jr.:

Sheesh! Out of the box, this looked like a clear single, even when you consider Witt’s 100th percentile sprint speed. This is a typical line drive to center field, not one that splits two defenders. But Witt knew that in this situation — runners on second and third with one out in the seventh inning and the Royals leading 4-2 — the Tigers might throw to the plate instead of second; he also knew who was playing center field.

Riley Greene, an above average left fielder, had shifted shifted over to center earlier in the game, and his skills don’t exactly fit as well there. He has 66th percentile speed and 48th percentile arm strength. On top of that, Greene throws left-handed, meaning that because he was roaming to his right side (toward the left-center gap), he’d either have to take a few steps to line his body up with second (as he did) or plant his feet in the ground and pirouette before getting rid of the ball. In other words, this play is easier for a right-handed thrower. Add up all those factors, and you have a perfect recipe for Witt to take a calculated risk with only one out. If Matt Vierling were still playing center, as he was at the beginning of the game, his speed and righty throwing might have kept Witt at bay. Every single one of these details matters!

The next play features Anthony Volpe pushing for a triple on a line drive down the right field line. Volpe has very good, but not elite, speed (28.6 ft/sec, 86th percentile), and because of that he’s a bit more reliant on his decision-making than Witt. On this play, he had a favorable spray angle, but it was going to be bang-bang as long as Jo Adell played it right:

To me, Volpe seemed to realize that he had a shot at a triple as he rounded first and saw the ball bouncing around off the curved fence in right field. He didn’t have a particularly great turn around the bag, but the slight ricochet gave him enough leeway. Typically, runners should look up at the third base coach once they’re getting to second base, but in this case, Volpe was going three no matter what and kept his head down.

Adell delivered a great throw to the cutoff man, but the relay to third was short-hopped, which made it more difficult for the third baseman to field it cleanly and apply the tag before Volpe slid in safely. This is an example of a challenge play, where Volpe put the pressure on the fielders to do everything correctly, and because there were multiple steps that had to be executed perfectly, Volpe liked his odds that one part of the chain would be off by just enough for him to make it.

Coincidentally, our final play comes from the same Royals-Tigers series that also featured the Witt double from above. And like that play, the outfielder was Riley Greene. Though this time, the runner was MJ Melendez, who despite his 68th percentile speed has done well on the basepaths this year, with +2 Runner Runs. The play we’re about to watch shows how a runner with just slightly above-average speed can put himself in a position to have above-average outcomes. Here it is:

Wait a sec, how did he get around to score on a fly ball that seemed likely to be caught? You can’t see it on the broadcast, but Melendez played this exactly right. On a towering fly ball like this one, a runner who begins the play at first should be waiting on second base, ready to pivot in either direction. Once Greene dropped the ball, it was time to take off, and even though the ball landed right at Greene’s feet, there was enough time for Melendez to make it home ahead of the throw. That’s despite the fact that Melendez stumbled on his way around third base; he made up for that because he was in the right place when the ball dropped. Also, remember that Greene doesn’t have a particularly strong arm and was all the way out at the warning track.

We could keep going, but by looking at plays at second, third, and home, we now have a better idea of the circumstances that affect base-running decisions. We saw how electrifying speed can manifest plays out of nowhere, but also how sound fundamentals can put runners in a strong position for success. As you’re watching ball for the rest of the summer, pay attention to these types of plays and see if you can pick up on the factors that baserunners must consider when weighing whether to take the extra base. These small details can have a major impact.

Clubs have begun their pre-draft meetings, with some teams already about a week into theirs, while the last team to start them (Milwaukee, as far as I know) begins today. The number of people in draft meetings varies significantly from team to team. Some have more than 20 people in the room, others five or so. When any one person in the draft room learns something new, whether it’s from a scout buddy with another team or during a conversation with an agent or media person, the other folks in the room tend to also learn that thing. It is during this window that the dope starts to flow in a way that makes a more specific, full-round mock draft more feasible.

Below are notes I’ve compiled across the last couple of days from conversations with scouts, front office people, and agents. There isn’t intel on every single team or first round player out there in the ether right now. In spots where I’m making an educated guess based on a player’s fit with past team or decision-maker behavior, I try to make it obvious that’s what I’m doing. I let you know when rumors are coming from industry sources, while being vague enough to not burn a source. I also have some thoughts peppered in that aren’t specific to teams’ picks, but instead what the arc of the first round of this draft might look like based on the nature of this year’s class. For more info on the players below, head over to The Board for scouting reports, tool grades, and rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

Last season, the college baseball game of the year was the national semifinal matchup between LSU and Wake Forest. It pitted the first two pitchers chosen in that year’s draft — Paul Skenes and Rhett Lowder — against one another, with a berth in the College World Series final on the line. The two star right-handers obliged, combining to strike out 15 while allowing just eight baserunners over 15 scoreless innings. The game remained tied, 0-0, until the very final at-bat, when Tommy White hit a two-run walk-off home run to win it for LSU.

The closest thing we had to that kind of pitching matchup in 2024 came in the losers’ bracket of the Greenville Regional. The top four college starters in this year’s draft — Wake Forest’s Chase Burns, Arkansas’ Hagen Smith, East Carolina’s Trey Yesavage, and Iowa’s Brody Brecht — all played in different conferences. The only time any of those four faced each other was in a win-or-go-home matchup between ECU and Wake on the second day of the NCAA Tournament, and the contours of this game were somewhat different as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Kansas City Royals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

The Guardians rate as one of baseball’s bigger surprises. After finishing 76-86 last year — their worst record since 2012 — they’ve rebounded to go 57-33 thus far, and entered Wednesday with the AL’s best record. Their offense is much more potent than it was last year, and despite losing ace Shane Bieber for the season due to Tommy John surgery, they rank second in the league in run prevention at 3.87 runs per game.

While Cleveland’s staff owns the AL’s second-highest strikeout rate (24.2%), a good amount of credit for the team’s run prevention belongs to its defense. By my evaluation of a handful of the major defensive metrics — Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages) — the Guardians rate as the majors’ second-best defensive team thus far this season. The Yankees, who spent much of the first half atop the AL East before a 5-16 slide knocked them into second place, are the only team ahead of them.

On an individual level, even a full season of data isn’t enough to get the clearest picture of a player’s defense, and it’s not at all surprising that a 600-inning sample produces divergent values across the major metrics. After all, they’re based on differing methodologies that produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom, spreads that owe something to what they don’t measure, as well as how much regression is built into their systems. Pitchers don’t have UZRs or FRVs, catchers don’t have UZRs, and DRS tends to produce the most extreme ratings. Still, within this aggregation I do think we get enough signal at this point in the season to make it worth checking in; I don’t proclaim this to be a bulletproof methodology so much as a good point of entry into a broad topic. Read the rest of this entry »