Tanner Scott is 15 appearances into the season, and by extension 15 appearances into his four-year, $72 million Dodgers contract, and a lot of things are working as normal. He has a 2.40 ERA, almost exactly the same as the 2.31 he posted in a breakout campaign with Miami two years ago. He has a 2.93 FIP, just one hundredth of a run up from his mark last season. He has eight saves, which is commensurate with his role: Closer on a really good team.

But he hasn’t walked anyone. In 15 innings, having faced 54 batters, he hasn’t walked anyone. This falls into the most annoying April blog category of: “Please don’t mess with my premise before this article runs,” but as of this writing, Scott has thrown more innings than any pitcher in the league with zero walks. Only three pitchers with two or fewer walks on the year have thrown more innings than Scott.

That’s because he’s pounding the zone. Scott’s first-pitch strike rate is an astounding 85.2%, the highest number in baseball. That’s helped by a 45.1% chase rate, which is the highest mark in the league among pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. But Scott is also throwing in the zone a career-high 57.1% of the time, which is in the 87th percentile for pitchers with at least 10 innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Roki Sasaki and the Dodgers’ bidets, baseball in The Last of Us, The Simpsons, and the (future) work of Lin-Manuel Miranda, walk-off groundouts, two possibly botched calls, Jesús Luzardo and how skilled teams are at evaluating medicals, a four-homer effort in a loss, the unexpectedly exciting NL West race, and Rob Manfred and Pete Rose, plus follow-ups on towering bat flips, players kissing, unequal leg lengths, and more.

Audio intro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ella Black series
Link to Ella Black event details
Link to Dodgers bidets article
Link to Ben’s bidet article
Link to Greinke quote
Link to Sam on TLOU
Link to 2003 Tigers on TLOU
Link to 2003 Tigers in Doctor Strange
Link to Simpsons episode
Link to Lin-Manuel story 1
Link to Lin-Manuel story 2
Link to Laurila on ground-offs
Link to Judge non-HR
Link to triple play
Link to triple play story
Link to Luzardo story
Link to BaseRuns standings
Link to Jay on the four-homer game
Link to Rangers-Giants walk-off play
Link to Contreras flip
Link to Twins Insta post
Link to one Correa kiss
Link to latest Correa kiss
Link to Dodgers depth chart
Link to Manfred comments

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The good news for the Baltimore Orioles is they won the first game of their three-game series against the first-place New York Yankees on Monday night. The bad news is the win only improved the team’s record to 11-17, the fourth-worst mark in baseball. As it stands Tuesday morning, the Orioles sit in last place in the AL East, and with nearly a fifth of the season over, it’s getting harder to dismiss the poor start as merely a blip.

Where the Orioles have struggled is not that hard to pinpoint: nearly everywhere. The rotation has combined for a 5.62 ERA/5.14 FIP and 6.4 strikeouts per nine innings, numbers that firmly place Baltimore at the bottom of the league. The defense hasn’t been much better, and after a decent start, the offense has evaporated over the last two weeks.

The season is longer than just April, of course, and the Orioles theoretically still have plenty of time to right the ship. But do they have the deckhands? To show whether or not they do, I took the current Orioles depth chart, and estimated the projected WAR based on playing time, using both ZiPS WAR from the preseason and the updated ZiPS WAR I ran overnight. Let’s start with the offense. Read the rest of this entry »

Jorge Polanco has always been a good hitter. He has a career 111 wRC+, and since he started getting regular playing time in 2016, he’s finished with a wRC+ below 100 only three times, one of which was the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. But he’s played 20 games so far this season, and he’s never had a 20-game stretch quite like this. He’s batting .377 with a 233 wRC+. How is Polanco – while injured – running the fifth-best xwOBA in baseball and second-best overall batting line?

As I mentioned, Polanco isn’t 100%. He underwent surgery in October to repair his left patellar tendon, and soreness in that knee has already cost him a couple of games this season. Polanco has also been dealing with a minor oblique strain, which has kept him from hitting right-handed since March 31. Polanco has a career 118 wRC+ as a lefty and a 95 wRC+ as a righty. That’s a legitimate platoon split, but it’s not big enough that we should have expected him to turn into Babe Ruth once he quit batting right-handed. Moreover, you have to imagine that the injury is slowing him down at least slightly, even from the left side. Maybe I’m wrong here, but it’s just hard to believe that any baseball swing could be completely unaffected by an oblique injury.

Just to recap, Polanco has a minor injury. He’s only batting left-handed and (with the exception of one plate appearance that ended with a strikeout) only facing righties. He’s also DHing and getting days off to protect the oblique. Oh, and he’s been the best hitter in baseball (non-Aaron Judge division). So let’s figure out what’s going on. We’ll start with the basics. Here are Polanco’s numbers from each of the five most recent seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to another edition of my weekly chat!

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about Eugenio Suárez’s four-homer game https://blogs.fangraphs.com/eugenio-suarez-joins-the-four-homer-club-a… and the changes he’s made over the past year.

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Tomorrow I’ll have something on the Logan Gilbert injury and the shape of the Mariners rotation.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Today I am alas nursing a sore lower back, something that’s dogged me for over a week and has me in a bit of a grouchy mood. I’m moving gingerly at best. Ugh.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: he’d have to convince me that his -115. 8 framing runs was just an accounting error.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Victor Scott II broke camp with the Cardinals behind an avalanche of buzz. He’d swiped 94 bags in the minors the previous year while playing elite defense in center field and posting a solid batting line. With the new rules providing a tailwind to speedsters, Scott seemed like the next exciting Cardinals position player. But then he hit the major leagues, or rather, didn’t hit in the major leagues. He batted .179/.219/.283 over 50 games of action and ended up down in Triple-A, a level he’d skipped during his meteoric rise, where he also struggled.

This year, Scott is back in the majors, but with considerably less hype surrounding him. However, a month into the season, he looks like a completely different hitter. He’s walking more, striking out less, and hitting for a higher average thanks to more line drives. He’s also living up to his potential on the basepaths and in the field, with a perfect 9-for-9 stolen base record and good defense. Last year’s version of Scott? Unplayable. This year? A fun upgrade on Kevin Kiermaier. Could the new version possibly be here to stay? I dug into the numbers to hazard a guess.

The main thing I’m interested in when it comes to Scott is how he gets on base. That’s what makes him intriguing – once he’s on first, he’s basically on second. Since you can’t steal first, that’s where the pinch point is. And in 2024, pitchers had a simple plan: Attack the zone and dare Scott to do anything about it. That helps explain his 3.9% walk rate – he got to a 1-0 count in about a third of his plate appearances last year. Similarly, he reached two or more balls in a count only about a third of the time.

There are major league players who succeed despite working from behind in the count so frequently, but they tend to have an elite compensatory skill. I’m talking about Luis Arraez’s contact, Jake Burger’s power, Bo Bichette’s feel to hit. Honestly, most hitters who get ahead in the count and walk so rarely just aren’t good. Pitchers don’t let them get into advantageous counts; the group is dotted with low-power defensive specialists who pitchers simply don’t respect.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds have had a promising start to the 2025 season, which is at most a modest surprise considering how many talented young players the organization has stockpiled over the past several years. What is surprising is how much of that success is owed to the Reds’ rotation.

Coming out of the weekend, Cincinnati is 14th in position player WAR, 23rd in reliever WAR, and seventh in starting pitcher WAR. It’s not that any individual Reds pitcher has had a shocking month of April; it’s more that four of them — Hunter Greene, Nick Lodolo, Andrew Abbott, and Brady Singer — have all gotten hot at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 16, Jackson Holliday ended an 0-for-17 slump with a second-inning grand slam that put the Orioles up 4-0 in an eventual 9-1 win over the Guardians. But a commanding win wasn’t the only momentous occasion taking place at Camden Yards that evening — it was also Bark in the Park night. When asked in his post-game interview if there were any furry friends he’d like to shout out, he replied, “Oh yeah, Coconut’s here,” referring to the one year old Bernedoodle that Holliday and his wife added to their family during spring training last year. Coconut attended the game wearing Holliday’s jersey and acted as his good luck charm, though Holliday believes dogs beyond his own have the power to bring him positive vibes at the plate. “I have a good track record in the minor leagues of performing on Bark in the Park, so maybe we’ll have to have these more often,” Holliday continued. That is a claim simply begging to be fact-checked.

Over Holliday’s tenure in pro ball, he’s played in eight games where fans were encouraged to bring their pups to the park, five in the minors and three in the majors. In the minors, Holliday’s teams went 1-4, as he amassed 19 plate appearances with four walks, five strikeouts, two singles, two home runs, and four RBI. That’s good for a .266/.421/.666 slash line, which isn’t bad, but when you consider Holliday posted a .303/.443/.485 line in the minors, it’s really only impressive from a power perspective (Holliday’s slash line in big league Bark in the Park games is .222/.300/.500 with four RBI over 10 PA). Still, the home runs are clearly what stand out in Holliday’s mind, and given that he went deep just 23 times over 218 games in the minor leagues and is driving the ball over the fence even less frequently in the majors, it makes sense that those four-baggers would feature prominently in his memory. Especially since all three put his team in the lead.

Now, I will confess that I only checked Holliday’s home games for Bark in the Park events. As you’ll soon see, I did an absurd amount of manual data collection for this piece, but I drew the line at checking the theme nights for every minor league affiliate Holliday faced. Maybe he disappointed dog owners up and down the Mid-Atlantic as he posted monster numbers in opponent ballparks. We’ll never know. But Holliday’s assertion that he gets a leg up from the presence of his four-legged friends led to a broader research question. Are there other players who consistently outperform their typical production with all those good boys and girls in the building? Read the rest of this entry »

The unpredictable nature of the early season has reared it’s head. You might have been able to guess that the Mets would have the best record in baseball after a month, but I doubt many would have foreseen the Tigers holding the AL’s best record entering the final week of April.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula.

…

Tyler Glasnow made an early exit from his start on Sunday after experiencing some shoulder discomfort. That leaves the Dodgers with three healthy starters and a lot of questions about how they’re going to fill out their rotation. Tony Gonsolin is on track to be activated from the IL to make his season debut this week, but it’s still troubling how quickly Los Angeles burned through its pitching depth.

The Mets completed a perfect seven-game homestand last week that culminated on Wednesday with a walk-off victory to seal a sweep over the Phillies. Jeff McNeil and Francisco Alvarez were activated off the IL on Friday, and the young catcher blasted his first home run of the season in Saturday’s 2-0 win. New York currently owns the best record in baseball, but the team had some trouble handling the Nationals over the weekend, coughing up two late leads on Friday and Sunday.

The growth of Pete Crow-Armstrong at the plate to go along with his elite defense and baserunning has been a huge difference maker for the Cubs. He nearly singlehandedly won a two-game set against the Dodgers last week, collecting six hits, two home runs, and two stolen bases. His evolution is one of many reasons why the Cubs have the best offense in baseball through the first month of the season.

The Tigers won their third straight series with a sweep of the Orioles as the exclamation point over the weekend. They’re currently the best team in the American League thanks to a pitching staff that’s allowed the fewest runs in the league. Unlike last year’s surprising playoff club, Detroit’s starting rotation has been a strength, posting the second lowest park- and league-adjusted ERA in baseball. Tarik Skubal has obviously been the headliner, but the Tigers have gotten strong contributions from all five starters this season.

The Yankees salvaged what had been a rough week with a doubleheader sweep of the Blue Jays on Sunday. With those two victories, they maintained their two-game lead over the Red Sox in the AL East. Aaron Judge has been hitting at an all-time-great pace, even as he has only two home runs over the last two weeks. He enters this week with a .406/.500/.717 slash line, eight home runs, a 247 wRC+, and 2.7 WAR. Unlike some recent seasons, Judge is far from the only offensive force in the lineup; Cody Bellinger is the only Yankee with at least 50 plate appearance and a wRC+ below 100. That high-powered offense has covered up some bullpen woes. Devin Williams has had a rough start to his Yankees tenure; another blown save on Friday shot his ERA up to 11.25, and he’s been removed from the closer role until he can get things back on track.

The Mariners may have dodged a bullet on Friday, when Logan Gilbert was removed from his start after pitching just three innings. He was diagnosed with a Grade 1 flexor strain rather than anything more serious. As it is, he’ll join George Kirby on the IL, and suddenly Seattle’s stellar starting rotation looks a lot thinner than it has in a long time. Thankfully, the bats have stepped up. With a 126 wRC+, the Mariners currently boast the second-best offense in baseball, and Cal Raleigh and his major league-leading 10 home runs are a big reason why.

Don’t look now, but the Braves have won three straight series and seven of their last nine games, putting them just three games under .500. It’s been quite a turnaround from their 0-7 start, though they’re not out of the woods yet. After making just one start this season, Spencer Strider returned to the IL last week with a hamstring strain. It should be about a month before Atlanta welcomes back both the ace and Ronald Acuña Jr., who is ramping up but has yet to begin a rehab assignment.

The Phillies snapped a five-game losing streak with a win on Saturday over the Cubs and backed it up with an extra-innings victory on Sunday night. There’s considerable daylight between them and the Mets atop the NL East — four games is the largest division lead in baseball — though it’s far too early to panic in Philadelphia. Encouragingly, Aaron Nola spun a seven-inning gem in his start on Sunday to snap out of his early-season funk.

The Rangers dropped their third straight series over the weekend in ugly fashion, losing Sunday’s rubber match with the Giants when Heliot Ramos led off the ninth and hit a walk-off dribbler back to the pitcher, courtesy of two throwing errors. It was their third walk-off loss of the week. Their vaunted offense has scored the fewest runs per game in the majors this season. The scorching starts of Wyatt Langford (215 wRC+) and Josh Smith (148) have been offset by the woes of Jake Burger (46 wRC+), Marcus Semien (25), and Joc Pederson (13). Making matters worse, Corey Seager (133 wRC+) landed on the IL last week with a right hamstring strain, though he’s not expected to miss much more time than the minimum 10 days.

The Rays bounced back nicely last week, winning a series in Arizona before sweeping the Padres in San Diego. Both of their victories against the Diamondbacks came in extra innings, and the pitching staff held the Friars to just three runs in three games. Maybe getting out of Tampa was exactly what they needed to give them a spark — that and Chandler Simpson running wild in center field and on the basepaths.

The Reds swept the Rockies over the weekend and now have a modest four-game winning streak going. The pitching has continued to impress and Elly De La Cruz is starting to heat up; he’s riding an 11-game hit streak. More importantly, he’s getting support from elsewhere in the lineup. Noelvi Marte collected 10 hits last week, including two home runs, and with a 221 wRC+ in 12 games (54 plate appearances), Austin Hays has provided a jolt to the offense since making his season debut on April 15.

The Orioles’ struggles have continued unabated. It’s not just their starting rotation, either. There was some hope that the offense would be able to carry the load until Zach Eflin or Grayson Rodriguez returned. Unfortunately, the lineup scored just 10 runs in six games last week, and key contributors like Gunnar Henderson, Adley Rutschman, and Jordan Westburg have gone cold. Cedric Mullins is essentially carrying the offense by himself. Baltimore has a critical three-game series against the Yankees this week, and it could be a bellwether for how the rest of this season is going to go.

The Marlins called up Agustín Ramírez on Monday and he promptly clubbed nine hits, three home runs, and four doubles during his first week in the big leagues. Miami’s offense as a whole hasn’t been all that bad, just a bit below league average. Rather, it’s the pitching that has let the team down. Max Meyer’s breakout has been great to see, but the rest of the starting rotation has been a mess, and the bullpen has been one of the worst units in baseball.

It’s probably too early to think about the Rockies “besting” the historically bad season the White Sox endured last year, but it’s the end of April and Colorado has won just four games. Things have been so bad that even when something exciting happens — like Jordan Beck’s five home runs in the span of two days last week — the team still finds a way to lose.

Read the rest of this entry »