Count me among those who worried that, with about 12 teams in the National League playoff hunt in the week before the trade deadline, there might not be enough sellers to kickstart a trade market. Well, the Philadelphia Phillies — who have the best record in baseball — and the Baltimore Orioles — who are tied for the best record in the American League — have come together and said, “To heck with all that.”

The Orioles are sending outfielder Austin Hays north in exchange for reliever Seranthony Domínguez and outfielder Cristian Pache. This being a transaction between Baltimore and Philadelphia, I assume there’s a quantity of Old Bay changing hands in the deal, but how much is as yet unspecified.

An exchange of three major leaguers between two first-place teams? Hallelujah, a challenge trade! Read the rest of this entry »

This has been a relatively down year for the no-hitter. Entering play yesterday, Ronel Blanco’s masterpiece during the first week of the season was the only no-no of the season, a far cry from the first half of 2021, which saw six solo no-hitters in 41 days, along with the ever-increasing number of combined efforts in the modern era. And while the rookie Blanco was the unlikely hero in baseball’s first no-hitter of 2024, it was an established star who broke the nearly four-month drought: Dylan Cease.

We haven’t written about Cease since his blockbuster trade to San Diego, so let’s check in on his debut season with the Padres. By most metrics, he’s taken a leap forward with his new team. His 32.5% strikeout rate and 7.6% walk rate are both the best of his career, the latter mark a huge development from someone who’s always run a walk rate in the double digits. Both PitchingBot and Pitching+ view 2024 as his finest season; his 3.03 FIP and 3.01 SIERA are also personal bests, and his 3.50 ERA sits behind only his mark in 2022, when he finished as the AL Cy Young runner-up. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that Shohei Ohtani’s game is missing a dimension. After three straight seasons of excelling both at the plate and on the mound — a span that netted him two American League MVP awards, a runner-up spot, and a fourth-place finish in the Cy Young Award voting — the two-way phenom underwent his second ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction last September, and won’t pitch again until 2025. Even so, while moving from the Angels to the Dodgers via a record-setting 10-year, $700 million free agent deal, the now 30-year-old superstar is amid another dominant season, one that could earn him a third MVP award and bolster a unique case for the Hall of Fame.

Ohtani is a unicorn. No player in 20th- or 21st-century AL/NL history, not even Babe Ruth in his last two seasons with the Red Sox (1918–19), has sustained regular duty in both a rotation and a lineup over a full season, let alone excelled at both endeavors. From 2021 — after returning from a lost, pandemic-shortened season in which he threw just 1.2 innings — to ’23, Ohtani did just that. He hit a combined .277/.379/.585 across those three seasons, posting the majors’ second-highest slugging percentage and fourth-highest wRC+ (157) and home run total (124), as well as the fourth-highest strikeout rate (31.4%) and sixth-lowest ERA (2.84) of any pitcher with at least 300 innings. By FanGraphs’ reckoning, his 26.1 WAR for the span was 4.9 more than second-ranked Aaron Judge, while by that of Baseball Reference, the margin was 7.4 WAR (28.5 to 21.1).

While he’s not pitching every sixth or seventh day this season, Ohtani is balancing his daily presence in the Dodgers’ lineup with the typically arduous rehab from UCL surgery — he did not undergo a traditional Tommy John surgery but a hybrid procedure that involved both an artificial internal brace and the insertion of a tendon to repair the damaged ligament. Though he’s gone through streaks and slumps, you’d hardly know it from his numbers, as he’s hitting .312/.399/.635 while leading the National League in slugging percentage, homers (31), wRC+ (185), and position player WAR (5.5 fWAR, 5.7 bWAR). With six more steals, he’ll notch his first 30-homer/30-steal season, and with 0.4 more bWAR (or 1.1 more fWAR), he’ll set a career high for position player WAR. Per his rest-of-season ZiPS forecast, he’s projected to add another 2.1 WAR. (For the rest of this piece, I’ll be referring to the B-Ref version of WAR unless otherwise indicated.) Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams is one of the blossoming stars in today’s game. Entering play Friday, the 23-year-old shortstop who recently made his first All-Star appearance is batting .260/.333/.467 with 15 home runs, 16 stolen bases, a 122 wRC+, a .344 wOBA, and 1.9 WAR over 422 plate appearances. During the first month of what’s turned out to be his breakout season, I wrote about Abrams’ stellar offensive start. About a month-long slump followed, but he bounced back in late May and is showing that his plus-offensive profile is here to stay.

Now in his third season, Abrams is proving he can be the centerpiece that the Nationals can build around. Beyond his bat, his aggressive baserunning and speed make him one of the most dynamic young players in the game. Last year, despite his inconsistencies at the plate, Abrams was a menace on the paths. Thanks to his 28.6 ft/sec sprint speed (82nd percentile), according to Baseball Savant, he was worth +3 runs on the bases; he swiped 47 bags and had a 9.2 BsR.

This year, Abrams has been just as fast, but at least according to BsR, he is no longer a plus baserunner. (Baseball Savant says he’s been worth +1 run on the bases this year, which ranks 71st; he was no. 23 on last year’s leaderboard.) That’s because he’s been caught stealing 10 times already, with five of them coming via pickoffs, plus another pickoff that didn’t come on an attempted steal.

In 2023, Abrams went 47-for-51 on stolen base attempts. If he took off, the odds were in his favor. Pitchers weren’t exposing him for taking too big of leads or being overly aggressive. This year, his precipitous drop to 16-for-26 has been staggering. When a player who was so recently a great basestealer runs into a slump like this, it warrants a deep dive into understanding what exactly is going on. There are a few components of the steal that we have to pay attention to when trying diagnose this type of issue: the lead, the jump, and the situation. Let’s go through each piece and find out what’s gone wrong for Abrams. Here is a compilation of his pickoffs this year:

None of these look particularly great. He was either off balance or out by a good margin on almost every play. We can trace some of this back to his leads, so let’s start there. There are two main ways to take a lead against a lefty if you are thinking about attempting to steal second. You can take a normal 12-foot lead like Abrams did against Sean Manaea and then run on the pitcher’s first movement (as soon as the pitcher lifts his leg). Or, you can take a larger, one-way lead to possibly draw a throw over and get a feel for the pitcher’s pickoff move.

For the first one, you want to stay close enough to the bag so the pitcher doesn’t pick you off, but you want to get far enough out there that you have a good chance to be safe at second even if he does throw over; as soon as the pitcher lifts his leg, you break for second. For the one-way lead, you are an extra step or two toward second, but you are not attempting to steal on the upcoming pitch. Instead, you put all your weight on your left foot, toward first base, so you can dive back safely if the pitcher attempts to pick you off. If the pitcher doesn’t throw over, you are timing up his delivery so you can get a better jump if you decide to steal later. That doesn’t appear to be what Abrams was doing in the video above. All three times he has been picked off by a lefty this season have come early in the count, twice on the second pitch of the plate appearance and once on the first pitch.

In the 1-0 count against Manaea, Abrams took a standard 12-foot lead. He attempted to go on first movement but realized he would’ve been dead to rights, so he hesitated into shuffles instead. He should have just kept going and forced Pete Alonso to make a play. This was the most obvious mental mistake of the three. Against left-handers Kirby Snead and Alex Vesia, Abrams went on first movement, but because each pitcher expected him to go and was well-prepared to throw over, the defense caught him easily. As a pitcher, you know Abrams is an aggressive runner, but why in these two cases was it so easy? Well, this is a good time to point to Abrams’ tendencies.

Eight of his 16 swipes this season came on the first pitch, and of his six pickoffs, four were on the first pitch. If you’re a pitcher looking to control Abrams’ aggression, do it early. For lefties, it’s even easier to execute because you’re facing him as he leads off first. This goes back to the situational aspect I brought up before. Pitchers are smart, and these are the exact types of tidbits they become aware of as they prep for a good basestealer. Combine the early counts with pitchers being more willing to throw over if they haven’t yet used their allotted disengagements, and you have tough recipe for success. A potential solution here is for Abrams to wait for deeper counts before trying to steal.

The right-handed pitchers in these clips are equally prepared for Abrams to run early. He often uses the vault lead against righties. As a reminder, the vault lead is when you take your primary lead at about nine or 10 feet instead of 12. You take your same athletic stance and shuffle about 2-3 feet just as the pitcher lifts his leg. The momentum from your vault helps you accelerate into your sprint quicker than you would with a traditional, static lead, albeit with risks. The key to a successful vault lead is not the size of your shuffle; it’s your timing. If you venture too far out before or after the shuffle, or you mistime your vault and are in the air when the pitcher disengages to throw over, you risk getting picked off.

At times this season, Abrams has made both mistakes on his vault leads: Either his primary leads or his shuffles are too large. The vault lead is more technical than physical, based more on mechanics than reflexes and pure speed. Abrams is fast enough and reacts quick enough to steal bases with a traditional lead against favorable matchups, so if I were him, I would temporarily abandon the vault lead and work on getting the fundamentals down again before bringing it back in games.

Before letting you go, I also want to look at the plays on which Abrams was thrown out by a catcher to see if these caught stealings were because of bad decisions, poor jumps, or good defense. Here is a quick reel:

Off the rip, there are three plays that stick out. If you’re going to attempt steals against Gabriel Moreno and Patrick Bailey – perhaps the two best throwers in the sport – you have to pick your spots wisely. In the Arizona game, the Nationals were up two runs and the count was 0-2, providing a good opportunity to run and try to avoid a double play; against the Giants, my guess is he wanted to get into scoring position with two outs. These are valid enough reasons to run despite the poor matchups and are not comparable to the pickoff mistakes.

In the game against the Red Sox, righty Brayan Bello, who has an extremely quick slide step, was on the bump. Even runners who are faster than Abrams would have trouble reaching second safely when a pitcher delivers a 96-mph heater in the middle of the zone on a slide step. And perhaps not surprisingly, this came on the first pitch of the at-bat.

On the first play in the clip, against the Rockies, Abrams attempted to swipe third with a left-handed batter up. Even without seeing the quality of the lead that Abrams took, this was a bad decision. Dakota Hudson never took his eye off of Abrams before he delivered his pitch, making it much more difficult for him to get a good jump. On top of that, catchers love when this happens because with a lefty batting they have a clear throwing lane to third base; when righties are hitting, catchers have a more difficult play because they need to step back and around the batter before firing. Even with an inaccurate throw from catcher Jacob Stallings, Abrams was canned.

Abrams is an aggressive runner. Without his aggressions, he wouldn’t be able to steal nearly 50 bases in a season like he did last year. This isn’t something you want to take away from him. However, he does need to learn from these mistakes so he can use his speed and aggression more effectively. Most of these pickoffs and unsuccessful steals resulted from some a combination of being predictable and getting too jumpy. The good news is he is talented enough to make the necessary adjustments. Once that happens, we’ll get to see a much more complete version of Abrams, one who can swipe 40 bags at a high clip and pepper the gaps with line drives.

The Mariners have suffered through a pretty terrible stretch over the last five or so weeks. After blowing a 10-game lead in the AL West during a 24-game span — the quickest that any team has ever surrendered such a large divisional lead — they enter play Friday a game behind the first-place Astros and 3.5 games out of the final AL Wild Card spot. Over their last 30 games, they’ve gone 10-20 and have scored a measly 3.4 runs per game while their pitching staff has allowed the fewest runs in the American League. Things got worse earlier this week, when they were swept by the Angels and lost both Julio Rodríguez and J.P. Crawford to injuries. Rodríguez sprained his right ankle and there is no timetable for his return; Crawford, who fractured his right pinky, is expected to miss 4-6 weeks. Even before those two core pieces of the beleaguered lineup landed on the injured list, Seattle desperately needed an infusion of talent onto their roster.

With that need exacerbated by those two injuries, the M’s wasted very little time making their first addition ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline: On Thursday night, they acquired outfielder Randy Arozarena from the Rays. In exchange, Tampa Bay received minor league outfielder Aidan Smith (40 FV), right-handed pitcher Brody Hopkins (45+ FV), and a player to be named later. Dan Szymborski put together a hypothetical version of this trade just a few days ago and nailed all the broad strokes: The Mariners got the offensive upgrade they needed and the Rays got some really interesting prospects that they can now sculpt.

The former AL Rookie of the Year and All-Star got off to a agonizingly slow start to the season; through the first month of play, he was slashing .143/.220/.241 with three home runs, a strikeout rate just a hair below 30%, and a 37 wRC+. He started to pull himself out of his slump in May (104 wRC+) but was still underperforming. Since June 1, though, he’s been one of the hottest hitters in the league, putting together a .284/.397/.507 slash line with seven home runs and a 161 wRC+ across 179 plate appearances.

As Jay Jaffe noted back in April when he checked in on Arozarena’s woes, and then again during his replacement level killers series last week, “Rays hitting coach Chad Mottola had expressed the belief that Arozarena’s desire to use the whole field more often, in an effort to make himself an even better hitter, may have backfired.”

That change in approach might be related to his diminished contact rate early in the season, particularly on pitches in the strike zone.

His rebound in June and July aligns pretty clearly with his ability to put the bat on the ball when pitchers leave their pitches over the plate. And thankfully, almost all of his other plate discipline metrics are either improved or within range of his established norms.

He’s still making excellent swing decisions at the plate — his SEAGER is in the 84th percentile among all batters this year — and his batted ball metrics are as solid as ever. That two-month funk to start the season is dragging his overall offensive line way down, but make no mistake, it certainly appears as though Arozarena has put those struggles behind him.

He’ll immediately slot into the middle of the Mariners lineup as their regular left fielder and will give them a potent bat to help protect Rodríguez whenever he returns while providing dynamic run production himself. Perhaps more importantly for Seattle, Arozarena won’t reach free agency until 2027; he’s making $8.1 million this season, his second year of arbitration. The organization has developed a mostly homegrown rotation that has emerged as one of the best in the majors, but over the last few years, the Mariners have been reluctant to use free agency to improve their lineup. That makes it imperative for the front office to be aggressive on the trade market to acquire impact batters who can help the Mariners not just this season but throughout this competitive window, before their group of pitchers either breaks down or becomes too expensive to keep together. Arozarena boosts this lineup now and in the future.

For the Rays, this trade comes at an interesting time. They’re actually only a half game behind the M’s in the AL Wild Card standings and their pitching staff is getting a lot healthier. Shane Baz just came back from his Tommy John rehab earlier this month, Jeffrey Springs should be returning to the majors within a week or so, and Drew Rasmussen isn’t that far behind Springs. Tampa Bay has been hovering on the edge of the AL playoff picture for nearly the entire season, but a late-season surge wouldn’t have been out of the question. By moving Arozarena at this point in the season, the Rays have indicated that they’re more interested in ensuring they’re set up well for the future than in hoping for a long-shot playoff run over the next few months.

The timing also says a lot about what they think of the prospects they’re getting in this deal. Arozarena’s escalating salary now that he’s in the middle of his arbitration seasons had made him an obvious trade candidate this year, but the Rays could have waited until the offseason to move him if they didn’t like the players they were getting in return. That they acted now indicates they liked this package enough to pounce on it five days before the trade deadline. On the very fresh Mariners prospect list that Eric Longenhagen recently put together, Hopkins was ranked seventh and Smith 21st.

In a Seattle organization that is notorious for helping pitchers develop into the best versions of themselves, Longenhagen called Hopkins the most exciting pitching prospect in the system. He’s a converted outfielder who was selected in the sixth round of last year’s amateur draft and is still very new to pitching. He’s got a low-slot release with some deception in his mechanics, and that arm slot creates a ton of ride and life on his mid-90s heater and gives him a wipeout slider that flashes plus. He still needs to develop a third pitch to flesh out his repertoire to reach his ceiling as a mid-rotation starter, but even if he doesn’t, he appears to have a pretty nice floor as a two-pitch high-leverage reliever. He’s already 22 years old, which makes him pretty old for Single-A, where the Mariners had placed him in their organization, but as he gains development time as a pitcher, he should move quickly up the ladder.

As for Smith, he was Seattle’s fourth-round pick in last year’s draft and has hit very well in his brief professional career. A prep selection out of Texas, he’s an athletic outfielder with plenty of speed to stick in center field. He was slashing .284/.402/.470 at Single-A Modesto, and it looks like he had made the necessary adjustments to his swing to improve his feel for contact. He’s a ways away from the majors, but his physical projection and successful start to his minor league career were both intriguing enough for Tampa Bay to take a chance on him.

Even with Arozarena in the fold, the Mariners should not be done adding to their roster. Their offensive issues are too deep to be solved by one player. Even after moving Hopkins and Smith, Seattle has enough highly regarded prospects available to move for another big splash. They’ve been linked to Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. over the last few days — both would be significant upgrades to the black holes the Mariners are running out at second and first base this year. Given the Mariners’ place in the standings and the state of their roster and farm system, this move for Arozarena should not preclude them from continuing to improve their offense over the next few days.

There’s a saying: “God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers.” I guess it started as an earnestly encouraging axiom, but like everything in 2024 it’s gone through a car wash of irony and post-irony, emerging on the other side as something only an expert in semiotics could trace from the Christian bookstore to the Something Awful forum.

Nevertheless, it got me thinking about leverage index. (Most things get me thinking about leverage index.) “There’s nothing so much like a god on earth as a general on a battlefield,” Michael Shaara once wrote. Are the generals of baseball — managers — like God in this respect? Do they give their toughest battles to their strongest soldiers?

The age of managing a bullpen to fit the save rule is, if not over, then at least waning. Today’s relievers are young enough to have grown up mocking Jerome Holtzman, and they accept that the most important inning is frequently not the ninth. That makes the manager’s job a little trickier: Rather than lining up his best bullpen arms by inning, he has to feel the game out. To guess whether the time to use A.J. Minter is with two lefties coming up in a two-run game in the seventh, or to hold on for a higher-leverage situation that may or may not come. How are they doing? Read the rest of this entry »

As is tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the lead-up to the trade deadline to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at the players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.

For those of you who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2025-2029, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2029 (assuming the player is under contract or team control for those seasons). Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2023 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his technical wizardry. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all of the players who have been ranked up to this point.

A note on the rankings: As we ascend towards the top of the list, the tiers matter more and more. There are clear gaps in value. Don’t get too hung up on what number a player is, because who they’re grouped with is a more important indicator. There are three distinct tiers in today’s group of 10 players, and I think they have clearly different valuations; I’d prefer everyone in a given tier over everyone below it, but I’m far less certain within each group. I’ll note places where I disagreed meaningfully with people I spoke with in calibrating this list, and I’ll also note players whose value was the subject of disagreement among my contacts. As I mentioned in the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, I’ll indicate tier breaks between players where appropriate, both in their capsules and bolded in the table at the end of the piece.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the final batch of players. 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 (!!!) days to go until the July 30 trade deadline, let’s round up some more news and developments from the last few days and discuss how these nuggets might affect what happens over the next 96-plus hours. Here’s the latest:

Miller Trade Could Be off the Table Following Injury

All-Star closer Mason Miller, the most tantalizing reliever on the market this deadline season, went down with an unfortunate injury this week, making it more likely that he’ll remain with the A’s for the rest of the year.

After pitching a 1-2-3 inning on Monday night, Miller fractured the fifth metacarpal in his left hand. According to A’s manager Mark Kotsay, Miller was getting treatment when “he was reminded that he had a postgame lift to get in. Out of a little bit of frustration, he just kind of pounded his fist down on a padded training table.” Miller was placed on the IL on Thursday, and there is no timeline for his return. While this is certainly better if he hurt his pitching hand, the injury surely depresses his trade value because he won’t be pitching for at least a few weeks. As a result, Oakland would be wise not to move trade this season; he is under club control through the 2029 season, and the A’s were going to move him only if they were blown away by the return package. Now that his trade value is down, the organization would be better off holding onto him and then shopping him around in the offseason, after his suitors have seen him come back healthy. Read the rest of this entry »