Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the one (and only one) case where the zombie runner was warranted, why pitchers throw strikes to Aaron Judge (10:00), and MLB’s new Home Run Derby rules (21:11), then answer listener emails about how different baseball would be if runners didn’t have to tag up (34:49), the best arguments for full ABS over the challenge system (49:56), and what would happen if ejected players couldn’t be replaced (1:11:16), plus a few follow-ups (1:22:57).
Blake Treinen has spent an entire career as one of the best sinker-heavy relievers in all of baseball. Since his debut, he’s been one of the best relievers in baseball — period. That sounds like hyperbole but it isn’t. From 2014 through 2022, he ranked ninth in FIP-based WAR and fourth in RA9-WAR among all relief pitchers. He also ranked second in groundball rate among relievers who threw 400 or more innings. That’s elite performance, and he did it with a consistent attack of sinkers and sliders.
As his career has worn on, Treinen has made one big shift: He started throwing a huge sweeping slider. He was an early poster boy for the sweeper revolution. From 2014 through 2020, his slider averaged about an inch of horizontal movement. Starting in 2021, he changed the way he threw it, and that number blew up to nearly seven inches. That turbo-charged his strikeout rate, and 2021 was one of his better seasons despite intermittent command problems.
Those two things encompass most of what people know about Treinen. He gets a ton of grounders and he throws a big old sweeper. In fact, he was at the vanguard of a pitcher type that now seems to populate every major league bullpen: the sinker/sweeper righty. You can picture this guy, even if you don’t know his name on every single squad. He lives on the east/west plane, and produces plenty of ugly swings and probably a hit batter or two when his sinker veers into the righty batter’s box seemingly out of nowhere. Read the rest of this entry »
Tim Herrin is quietly having one of this year’s best seasons among pitchers who are unlikely to be named to the American League All-Star team later this month. The 27-year-old left-hander has come out of the Cleveland Guardians bullpen 38 times and boasts a 1.07 ERA and 2.48 FIP over 33 2/3 innings. Moreover, he’s punched out 34 batters, and none of the 18 hits he’s surrendered have left the yard.
Uncle Charlie has been his primary weapon. Herrin has thrown his curveball 40.6% of the time this season, the second-highest percentage — behind only Kansas City’s Nick Anderson at 45.1% — among pitchers who have worked at least 30 innings. The usage represents a marked change from a year ago. In his 2023 rookie season, Herrin threw his curveball just 12.2% of the time while logging a 5.53 ERA and 3.87 FIP.
Herrin discussed his hook prior to a recent game at Cleveland’s Progressive Field.
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David Laurila: Is the curveball your best pitch? You’ve certainly been throwing a lot of them.
Tim Herrin: “Yeah, I mean, the usage is up a lot compared to previous years. It’s a pitch I worked on throughout the offseason, trying to be able to command it a little bit better. It used to be more of a two-strike strikeout pitch, and now I can use it to get ahead in counts as well as to put guys away. It’s been a good pitch for me.” Read the rest of this entry »
Royce Lewis is one of the most intriguing hitters in the game right now. Despite how fantastic he has been on a rate basis, it’s hard to fully evaluate his overall value as a hitter because of how little he has played. He has amassed 4.1 WAR and a 159 wRC+ across 93 career games, but as is well known, he’s been limited due to a series of injuries that includes two ACL tears, quadricep and hamstring issues, and an oblique strain.
This season, his explosive performance has added some confidence in what he can be as a hitter. Despite suffering a quad injury on Opening Day that kept him out of the lineup for two months, he’s clobbered 10 home runs in 23 games, showing that he doesn’t need a bunch of plate appearances to shake the rust off his swing before catching fire. His raw talent has never been in question, but there’s one part of his game throughout his power surge that seems to defy logic and is worth keeping an eye on moving forward: His xwOBACON sat at .473 entering play Sunday. If he were a qualified hitter, that would rank in the top decile. Given what we’ve seen from Lewis, that isn’t all too shocking – he can really put a charge into the ball. But when zooming in a bit on a particular detail of his swing, it becomes a bit surprising. Here are the leaders in xwOBACON to date in 2024:
All players except for Lewis are qualified hitters.
I’ve included Vertical Bat Angle (VBA) here because, except for Juan Soto, Lewis has the lowest average VBA of all hitters on this list. After Lewis, the hitter with the next-lowest VBA is Giancarlo Stanton, who generates so much power and bat speed that it would be nearly impossible for him not to have a top-of-the-line xwOBACON, even with such an unorthodox swing. How Soto can impact the baseball with ferocity despite having one of the flattest swings in the entire game is a bit more complex. The simplest explanation is he has incredible upper body athleticism, which allows him to let the ball get extremely deep in the hitting zone and still adjust his bat path to get on plane with the pitch.
Otherwise, though, hitters hardly ever generate this level of contact quality with these types of VBAs. So it’s remarkable that Lewis is among the exceptions. For the rest of this piece, let’s ignore Stanton because he is, in the words of Yankees manager Aaron Boone, a “weirdo” and what he does with his violent, choppy swing is almost certainly impossible to replicate. Soto is also a singular hitter; the difference is that what he does — using his flatter bat path to make more consistent contact while still having the strength to do damage, and pairing that hit tool with 80-grade swing decisions — would be worth emulating if anyone were talented enough to do it. At a glance, it seems Lewis might have the skills to follow a somewhat similar recipe. So far this season, Lewis has a 98th percentile SEAGER, a metric from Robert Orr that weighs how selective hitter are and the rate at which they attack hittable pitches. It’s especially encouraging that Lewis lets only 28.2% of hittable pitches pass him by, meaning that when he gets a pitch he can crush, he’s attacks it. That’s a great foundation to have.
To better understand his swing, I’ll refer you all to the third hitting installment from Tess Taruskin’s invaluable video scouting series, specifically the part where she compares grooved and adjustable swings. Because Lewis is a hitter with such a flat swing, my initial hunch was that most of his damage comes against pitches down the middle or in top half of the zone, leaving a hole for pitchers to target at the bottom of the zone. This would indicate that Lewis would have a grooved swing, one that repeats a specific swing path over and over, leading to a limited space for barrels. Although Lewis’ sample size is still hardly significant this year, it’s worth looking at where his best swings in terms of contact quality have been located. Here are his 10 home runs this season:
Interesting. All of Lewis’ homers have come from the middle of the zone. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – the best hitters in baseball are the ones who crush mistakes the most often. And as we saw from his SEAGER, he is great at attacking pitches in hittable zones. Basically, we can’t just knock him simply because his homers come from meatballs. However, it’s relevant context to the conversation around distinguishing whether his swing is grooved or adjustable. To go a bit further than just his pitch chart on home runs, we can look at his performance by zone to see if he’s had a hole below the zone.
Lewis has actually been quite successful in the bottom of third of the zone, with a .380 wOBA and .355 xwOBA on pitches in this location. (I included both 2023 and 2024 to increase the sample size a bit.) That’s pretty impressive for a hitter with such a flat swing. Soto’s wOBA/xwOBA line in that span is .264/.260, though his sample is much larger. Lewis’ contact quality on lower-third pitches is also quite strong.
Looking at video, it becomes clear how Lewis is succeeding against lower-third pitches, and this is where he is different from Soto. Remember, it is Soto’s upper body flexibility that propels him to impact pitches that get deep in the zone against him. Lewis, on the other hand, uses his lower body to get down in the zone and do damage on pitches in the bottom third:
If you focus on where Lewis’ head starts on these swings versus where it finishes, you can see the angles he can create with his lower body to get his barrel to the lower third despite his flat swing. It’s reminiscent of Fernando Tatis Jr. The hands start high and stay high, but the lower body creates space for the barrel to still maintain a positive attack angle – the angle of the bat path at contact relative to the ground – at the bottom of the zone. It’s a difficult move to make, but when your swing is this adjustable, you can rely on it from time to time when you identify pitches correctly.
The contrast between Lewis and Soto is a great reminder of how different hitters can be, even when a key trait in their swings is similar. Lewis’ superpower lies in his lower body. Whether the pitch is inside, outside, or in the middle of the zone, he uses his legs and hips to go down and get pitches.
Now, if I were an opposing pitcher, I’d challenge Lewis to make these moves over and over again and prove he can still elevate pitches down in the zone. Like I’ve said, we’re dealing with a limited sample. However, based on what we’ve seen so far, there is reason to believe Lewis has the skills needed to continue producing elite contact with his flat swing.
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. 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 »
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.
With just four weeks to go until the July 30 trade deadline, now’s a great time to start taking a lay of the land and determining which teams will be buying, which will be selling, and which are caught in the middle. I’ll tackle the AL today and the NL on Friday. We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »
The Angels are in a rough place. With Mike Trout injured, Shohei Ohtani departed, and pitchers like Patrick Sandoval and Reid Detmers injured or struggling, it’s no surprise that they’re on pace for another 90-loss season despite a recent six-game winning streak. Their main source of their woes has been their long-struggling pitching staff, which this year has the third-worst ERA and walk rate in the majors. And while the Angels have taken extreme measures to add pitching depth to their farm system, the next generation of young pitchers in Anaheim aren’t exactly aces. This is to say that any short-term improvements to the staff will have to come from improvements to hurlers already on the big league roster. This year, they’re attempting to do just that by embracing the newest pitch to come into vogue: the splinker.
The splinker is still pretty new in the timeline of pitch design; its earlyadopters include Jhoan Duran and Paul Skenes. This sinker-splitter hybrid is difficult to classify because so few pitchers throw it, but such offerings generally sit in the same velocity band as four-seam fastballs while killing spin and lift in a manner similar to splitters and changeups. The end result can be downright nasty: Skenes has accumulated a +10 run value with his splinker across just nine starts, only a couple runs better than the first Angel to pick up the pitch, José Soriano. Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve reached the halfway point of the season and the playoff races are starting to take a more defined shape. While the group of teams vying for the NL Wild Card looks pretty big on paper, our playoff odds show that the postseason field is actually more clearly delineated than the standings might lead you to believe.
This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model 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 coinflip 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%). 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. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the most frequent questions I receive about ZiPS is folks wondering how the long-term projections for X hitter or Y pitcher have changed compared to what they were preseason. Since we’re right around the midpoint of the season, this is a good time to review just how the first half of the 2024 season has shifted expectations for individual players. The methodology I’m using is simple: comparing the current 2025-2029 WAR projections versus the 2025-2029 WAR projections as predicted at the start of the season. I’ve only included good prospects and players who are currently relevant to the majors (or injured) so we don’t get a bunch of random Double-A pitchers who are slightly more or less below replacement level than they used to be gumming things up. I’m also not including the pitchers who’d be on the list because of season-ending injuries; a list of 15 pitchers who have worse long-term outlooks because they’re out for the season with Tommy John surgery or thoracic outlet syndrome isn’t particularly interesting.
Since I’m such a cheerful and upbeat fellow, let’s start with the gainers. I’m also including each player’s updated top three comps, because comps are fun, even if the individual players listed don’t really mean a lot to the projection. At the very least, it contextualizes expectations in a non-WAR manner: Read the rest of this entry »
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