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.

It’s understandable to want to blame injuries when your favorite team underperforms expectations. But every team deals with them, and the truly great ones are able to weather that storm and succeed when their best players aren’t in the lineup. The Brewers sure look like a great team right now, with a commanding seven-game lead in the NL Central even after dropping Monday night’s game in Philadelphia. They are where they are despite having a whole rotation’s worth of starters on the injured list, getting zero innings from star closer Devin Williams, and losing important position players Christian Yelich, Rhys Hoskins, and Garrett Mitchell to injury at various points this year.

How has Milwaukee thrived under less-than-ideal circumstances? The answer is one of my favorite topics: depth. For the most part, it’s fairly easy to look at a team’s Opening Day roster or offseason RosterResource page and prognosticate how things will play out if everyone stays reasonably healthy; it’s much harder to go two or three players deep at a position and figure how good a club will be if it has to depend on those guys. The Brewers have assembled a team that may not be as top heavy as some of the other contending clubs, but when it comes to the entire roster, few teams are deeper. So let’s run through some of the unlikely contributors for the Brewers this season.

All stats are updated through the start of play Monday.

Position Players

The Brewers haven’t been terribly unlucky in this department: Yelich missed 25 days with a back strain, Hoskins 17 with a hamstring strain, and Joey Wiemer 16 with knee discomfort. Mitchell has missed the entire season thus far with a fractured finger suffered in the final days of spring training, but if there’s anywhere the Brewers could’ve afforded an injury, it was out on the grass.

Still, the names covering for Mitchell aren’t exactly as expected. Top prospect Jackson Chourio has struggled out of the gate, batting .214/.257/.345 with a 71 wRC+ over 180 plate appearances. While his fielding (2 OAA, 1 DRS) and baserunning (1.7 BsR with seven steals in eight tries) have kept him above replacement level, he obviously hasn’t lived up to the hype thus far.

Fortunately, Blake Perkins has basically been what Milwaukee hoped Chourio would be. The switch-hitter was elite on defense in his rookie year last season, with 11 DRS and 7 OAA in just 400 innings in the outfield, though his bat lagged behind (88 wRC+). This year, his fielding has remained excellent while he’s taken a big step forward at the dish (98 wRC+), especially against righties (114 wRC+).

Perhaps overshadowed by Yelich, William Contreras, and Willy Adames, infielders Joey Ortiz and Brice Turang have both broken out in meaningful ways, lengthening a lineup that looked a little light entering the season. Ortiz leads all rookies this season with 2.0 WAR and his 155 wRC+ is the highest among all big league third basemen with at least 150 plate appearances. He’s also a slick fielder who can also hold his own at second and short. Turang has more than doubled his wRC+ from his rough rookie season last year. He’s also swiped 20 bases in 21 tries and has flashed an elite glove at the keystone. (If you’re noticing a trend here, yes, the Brewers have great defense across the diamond.)

Lastly, I’d be remiss if I failed to mention Gary Sánchez: He’s only caught 11 games so far behind the iron man that is Contreras but is getting plenty of plate appearances at DH. His seven home runs and 116 wRC+ make him one of the game’s best backup catchers, and he’s played some backup first base, too.

Pitching

Here’s where things could have gotten ugly for Milwaukee. Corbin Burnes is an Oriole. Brandon Woodruff and Wade Miley are both out for the entire year. Jakob Junis, Joe Ross, and DL Hall are all on the injured list as well. (Junis and Hall appear to be nearing returns, but they’ll likely pitch out of the bullpen when they’re back.)

How the heck have the Brewers stayed afloat with what’s basically been Freddy Peralta and a second-string cast of other starters? It’s twofold: The replacement arms have filled in more than admirably, and the bullpen has been excellent despite the loss of Williams.

Peralta and Colin Rea are the only arms who remain from the season-opening starting five, and they actually have the highest ERAs in the current four-man rotation (the team has been bullpenning every fifth game). Formerly a failed starter, Bryse Wilson has made a triumphant return to the rotation after working entirely in relief last year. Across seven starts he has a 2.76 ERA and a 3.35 ERA over his 15 total outings this season. (Wilson served as the bulk man in Monday night’s loss to the Phillies, tossing 5.2 innings and allowing three runs.) Robert Gasser, who despite failing to achieve nominative determinism (his fastball averages just 93 mph), has been excellent in his first five starts, walking just one (!) of the 114 batters he’s faced. Unfortunately, the beat will have to go on without Gasser, just as it has without Burnes and Woodruff: The rookie lefty has elbow tightness and soreness and is scheduled to get a second opinion sometime soon; it’d be hard to see him dodging the IL at this point. In the interim, the Brewers could turn to Aaron Ashby or Tobias Myers — both of whom have made starts this year — or perhaps righty Chad Patrick, who’s not exactly a prospect but has pitched well at Triple-A Nashville this year.

Papering over the ragtag rotation has been a well-performing bullpen, belying its 16th-ranked FIP with a sixth-ranked ERA. Going through a handful of closers by June isn’t usually a recipe for success, but the Brewers have kept on chugging despite pulling the plug on Abner Uribe (now in Triple-A) and Joel Payamps as primary closers. The guy right now is Trevor Megill; a concussion and bruised elbow have limited him to just 15 innings, but they’ve been 15 excellent ones, with 21 strikeouts compared to just three walks and a one homer allowed. It’s a continuation of Megill’s breakout 2023 in which he struck out 35% of the batters he faced over 34.2 innings. Before last year, he had a woeful 6.03 ERA in 68.2 combined innings for the Cubs and Twins.

Even more anonymous is Bryan Hudson, who was acquired in a minor trade with the Dodgers over the offseason and is now pitching to a 1.13 ERA (four runs in 32 innings). The 6’8” lefty is tough on both sides of the plate, but he’s been especially lethal against lefties, with a sub-.200 wOBA. Joining him off the scrap heap and pitching well are Enoli Paredes, Jared Koenig, and Kevin Herget, none of whom made the Opening Day roster but have stepped in and pitched like they belong. Like many good bullpens, the Brewers’ is defined by the performances, not the names.

All in all, Pat Murphy’s Brewers are much like the clubs of previous Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell: a whole team that is greater than the sum of its parts, creating a Voltron of a limited number of stars and mostly unheralded names who just get the job done.

The Mariners Add Victor Robles

As first reported by Locked on Mariners’ Ty Dane Gonzalez, former Nationals outfielder Victor Robles will be headed to the other Washington, joining Seattle as backup outfielder who will start primarily against lefty pitching.

Sources: The #Mariners will be filling their open 26-man roster spot with former Nationals OF Victor Robles.

— Ty Dane Gonzalez (@TyDaneGonzalez) June 3, 2024

Robles obviously hasn’t lived up to his prospect billing that plateaued with a fourth-overall ranking in 2018, but with the Mariners, he doesn’t really have to be the guy the Nationals were expecting. He’ll earn the prorated league minimum (under $500,000) while being paid the balance of the $2.65 million the Nationals owe him, and he’s not going to be relied upon to put up big numbers. Instead, he’ll spell Luke Raley or Dominic Canzone against lefties in the corner outfield. His main job will be to catch fly balls, a skill of his that cratered in center field last year but remains strong in left and right.

Baseball is big business and no team is infinitely patient with players who are struggling. While teams won’t generally describe it in such blunt terms, at the beginning of the season, every player has some unknown, invisible amount of leeway when it comes to poor performance. Established role players and fringe starters who just squeezed their way onto the big league roster in March may find themselves in the Pacific Coast or International League come late April or early May as they feel the heat of a poor start. As summer approaches, the names facing demotion become bigger, especially when those players are younger guys who still have minor league options remaining. On Sunday night, two of those bigger names ran out of rope, at least for now: Spencer Torkelson and Edouard Julien are headed to Triple-A to play for smaller crowds in smaller towns.

Before we examine what this pair of demotions means, I thought I’d put some numbers to the broader phenomena. I looked at the preseason ZiPS projections for players optioned during the season over the last 10 years. In nine of the 10 seasons, June was the month in which the players with the most combined projected WAR were sent to the minors. That holds true on a rate basis as well, with 0.75 projected WAR per June demoted player the highest monthly average. Naturally, demoted players tend to be worse performers than those who keep their jobs. To use last year as an example, of the 1,091 demotions, only 19 involved players projected for at least 2 WAR. Just one such player, Brayan Bello, was optioned in April, but starting on May 10 with Jose Miranda, bigger demotions started populating the list, with Miranda, David Villar, Oswald Peraza, Brandon Pfaadt, Alek Manoah, Josh Rojas, and Luis Urías all hitting the minors from mid-May through the end of June. Only four two-win players were demoted in July, with Manoah’s second demotion on August 11 the final one. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Kyle Schwarber became the first player in MLB history to drive in more than 100 runs (104, to be exact) in a season with a batting average below .200. He was also the first player to hit 40 home runs (he hit 47), score 100 runs (he had 108), or draw at least 120 walks (he drew 126) despite getting a hit in fewer than one-fifth of his at-bats. The fact that he finished tied for third in the NL in plate appearances (720) certainly helped him compile those counting stats – no other hitter has ever topped 650 PA with an average so low – but there was no denying that Schwarber was a valuable offensive player despite his league-worst .197 batting average. He became the second qualified, sub-.200 hitter in history to post an OPS above .800 and came just shy of beating 2021 Joey Gallo for the highest-ever wRC+ in a qualified, sub-.200 season; Gallo finished that year at 121, while Schwarber was at 119 in 2023.

When I hear those fun facts, my inclination is to celebrate Schwarber and his unusual accomplishments. Sure, he’d be a better ballplayer if he could bat .300 and still club 40-plus homers and draw 120-plus walks, but that’s not really saying anything. Just as chocolate cake would be better if it were chocolate cake with ice cream, Schwarber would be better with Luis Arraez’s batting average. That’s not analysis; it’s a Facebook graphic asking you to build your dream hitter with $15. The fact of the matter is that Schwarber is excellent at what he does, batting average be damned.

Unfortunately, not everyone is so inclined to focus on the positives. When Schwarber himself spoke about his season last September, he couldn’t help but lament his low batting average: “Heck, do I like seeing a .193 [batting average]? No. Do I wish I was hitting higher? Absolutely.”

Schwarber elaborated this spring, telling Scott Lauber of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “If you’d have told me I was going to hit .190-whatever and hit 47 bombs and drive in 100, score 100, and punch out 200 times, I would’ve said you’re crazy. But it happened, right? I lived it.”

In Lauber’s words, the slugger spent the winter “figuring out how to never, ever live it again.” To be clear, Schwarber understood that he was still productive at the plate last season, but he wanted to be more than a three-true-outcomes player. As he put it: “I just know that there’s more [of a] hitter in there.”

I hate to destroy the illusion of my journalistic objectivity, but I must admit the Phillies fan in me was scared by Schwarber’s comments. Except for Bryce Harper, who because of injuries played just 225 of the team’s 324 regular season games across 2022 and ’23, Schwarber was probably Philadelphia’s most dangerous bat over his first two seasons in the City of Brotherly Love. He didn’t need to change. Call me a metathesiophobic, but when it comes to a 31-year-old, nine-year veteran, I say if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Yet, 60 games into the year, it certainly seems like Schwarber’s offseason efforts are paying off. His TTO% is lower (50%, down from his league-leading 53.8% in 2023) and his batting average is significantly higher than last year’s .197. In fact, his .239 batting average is only a tick below league average. Among qualified players from 2023 and 2024, only seven have seen a higher year-over-year increase. What’s more, Schwarber’s overall numbers haven’t taken a hit like I worried they would. He is enjoying another strong season at the plate with a .341 wOBA, .356 xwOBA, and 122 wRC+, all of which place him among the top 25 qualified batters in the National League.

All that being said, I haven’t seen enough to allay my preseason fears. The best way for a hitter to reduce his TTO% and increase his batting average is to cut back on strikeouts and make more contact, but that’s not what Schwarber has done. He has struck out in 29.5% of his plate appearances, right in line with his 29.9% rate last season, and his 34.1% whiff rate is a career high. Instead, the 2022 NL home run leader is sacrificing long balls for base hits. If you’re familiar with the basic rules of baseball, you’ll see why that’s a problem: The farther you make it around the bases, the better.

Schwarber is on pace for 30 home runs this year. He hit 47 last year and 46 the year before. He crushed 32 home runs during an injury-shortened 2021 campaign. Thirty homers is nothing to scoff at, but Schwarber is sending the ball out of the park at the lowest rate of his career. The same is true for doubles and, thus, extra-base hits overall. He is currently averaging an extra-base hit once every 17.3 plate appearances; his career pace entering the season was once every 10.2 PA. To be fair, power is down across the league this season; the league-average isolated power (.147) has never been lower since Schwarber debuted in 2015. Even so, his career-low .170 ISO this season is only 20% higher than league average. That’s a big step back for a slugger whose career ISO (.259) is 56% better than that of the average hitter. Similarly, his .408 slugging percentage, which would be the lowest full-season mark of his career, is only 5.4% above average. For his career, his .486 slugging is 17.7% better than the average hitter in that span.

Without the context of Schwarber’s preseason comments, the simplest explanation for his dropping power numbers might be age-related decline. However, the poster boy of the Phillies’ “ball go boom” lineup has not lost a lick of strength. His 54.9% hard-hit rate, a new career high, places him among the top 10 qualified batters in the sport. And although we can’t compare his bat speed to previous seasons, the fact that it sits in the 99th percentile makes me pretty confident he has not entered his decline phase quite yet.

Another explanation for Schwarber’s low home run rate could be his typical streakiness. He has a reputation for heating up later in the season, specifically during June, August, and September. He had a 95 wRC+ through the end of May in 2023 and a 102 wRC+ through the end of May the year before. However, his extra-base hit rate was still significantly higher during the first two months of 2022 and ’23 than it is right now. He averaged an extra-base hit once every 12.5 PA in March/April/May during his first two seasons with the Phillies; as a reminder, that number is one extra-base hit every 17.3 PA so far this year.

Instead of representing a step back or a slump, this looks like a deliberate adjustment on Schwarber’s part. Although his hard-hit rate is higher than ever, his barrel rate is a career low. His launch angle sweet spot rate is the lowest it’s been since 2020, the worst season of his career. On a related note, his groundball rate (39.6%) is significantly higher than it was during his first two seasons with the Phillies (33.8%), while his fly ball rate is significantly lower (down from 50.3% to 42.4%). Among qualified hitters from the past two seasons, he has seen the eighth-largest decrease in fly ball rate. According to a recent piece by Phillies beat writer Alex Coffey, Schwarber’s teammates and coaches have started joking that “he’s a slappy leadoff hitter now.”

For what it’s worth, Schwarber has been a better groundball hitter this season than in years past, and I can’t say I’m surprised. He’s a talented hitter, and I didn’t doubt he could change his approach if he wanted to. He said he was going to improve his directional hitting this year, and he has done exactly that, pulling fewer groundballs in favor of sending them up the middle, and he is making more hard contact on those groundballs. It’s further evidence that he’s hitting more grounders with intention, but hey, at least it’s working. Except… his BABIP on groundballs is absolutely, undeniably, without a doubt unsustainable. The league average BABIP on groundballs this season is .242. Schwarber’s career mark entering the year was .204. So far in 2024, he is running a .368 BABIP on the ground. That’s not to say Schwarber has merely been getting lucky; his .246 xBA is actually slightly higher than his actual batting average. However, he can’t keep this up. No one can maintain a BABIP on groundballs this high, especially not such a slow runner. Schwarber is due for some regression, and it when comes, he won’t be able to continue replicating his past production with his new approach.

Another thing Schwarber wanted to improve this season was his consistency. He didn’t want to prop up mediocre performances in April, May, and July with strong showings in June, August, and September. Unfortunately, baseball is inherently volatile, and he might be about to learn that BABIP is even more fickle than home run-to-fly ball ratio.

I tend to think consistency and well-roundedness are overrated. Schwarbombs, on the other hand, are a thing of beauty. Including the postseason, no batter crushed more no-doubters last season than Schwarber. Indeed, thanks to his power stroke, he has been the author of some of the most exciting moments in recent postseason memory. A common criticism of the three true outcomes is that they make baseball less interesting, aesthetically speaking. However, that criticism is more relevant for the sport as a whole, rather than specific batters. On an individual level, TTO hitters are part of the diverse landscape of players that make the sport so wonderful. As Michael Baumann put it, “One of the beautiful things about baseball, or any sport, is the emergence of varied and seemingly contradictory paths to success.”

If Schwarber continues to produce like a top 30 hitter in the National League, I doubt the Phillies will complain about his new path to success. That said, as he strives to become a jack of all trades, he runs the risk of devolving into a master of none. For the sake of his slash line – and the sake of Schwarbombs – he might be better off going back to his old ways.

Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — In the early going on Friday night, it appeared that Luis Severino would wind up among the rocks at whatever bottom the Mets had found in recent weeks. The 30-year-old righty has been one of the team’s top starters since moving across town following a dismal final season with the Yankees, but facing the Diamondbacks and former teammate Jordan Montgomery, Severino struggled early, surrendering three first-inning runs while burning through 28 pitches. His teammates picked him up, however, and he salvaged a respectable 97-pitch outing that helped the Mets string together their first back-to-back victories in over three weeks.

“A battle for him today, especially the first couple of innings,” said Mets manager Carlos Mendoza while noting that Severino had trouble reaching his usual velocity. “It was a night where he wasn’t at his best and still found a way to go back out for the sixth and kept us in the game.” Severino’s final line score — 5.1 innings, six hits, five runs (four earned), one walk, and four strikeouts — won’t be mistaken for a gem, but just getting that far felt like a major accomplishment given the way his evening began.

The Diamondbacks pounced upon Severino from the game’s first pitch, a 93-mph sinker on the outside edge that Corbin Carroll dumped into left field before taking second on a balk. Severino then hit Ketel Marte in the left leg and surrendered a 102-mph RBI single to Joc Pederson, with Marte taking third. Severino finally recorded his first out by striking out Christian Walker on a low-and-away sweeper, but Pederson stole second on the third strike, then took third when the next batter, Lourdes Gurriel Jr., threaded a 99-mph single through the left side of the infield, scoring Marte. Pederson came home when Jake McCarthy grounded to second base and beat the throw from shortstop Francisco Lindor, putting the Mets in a 3-0 hole before they’d swung a bat. Severino then fell behind Eugenio Suárez 2-0 before battling back and getting him to fly out to right. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re now two months into the season, and the differences between the haves and the have-nots are becoming a little clearer with each week. That’s especially true in the American League, where a four-game gap separates the Mariners and the Red Sox, the sixth and seventh teams in the league standings. Meanwhile, in the National League, a pretty sizable group of teams is chasing the last two Wild Card spots, with eight or nine teams potentially vying for those playoff berths as the season continues.

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 »

Baseball is a game all about decisions. Some are minuscule, micro-level decisions that everyone will forget about after they happen. Should I sit fastball on this pitch? Should I take off for second base? Meanwhile, some are much larger, macro-level decisions felt over the course of one or multiple seasons. Should I try to lift the ball more? Should I change the grip of my slider? Everyday games over the course of a long season let us keep track of these larger trends, but no one could possibly analyze every substitution or pitching change over a 2,430-game regular season. So, instead, I’ll look at just three. In a midweek series last week, the Phillies and Giants put on a clinic of cat-and-mouse strategy and mostly excellent pitching. Let’s take a look at both the small- and large-scale decisions that contributed to this excellence on the mound.

Game 1 was a relatively high-scoring affair in which neither starter shined. There was nothing interesting to report from the Phillies side, as backend starter Taijuan Walker completed six innings but allowed as many runs. Opposite him was the struggling Blake Snell, who, in his typical inefficient fashion, lasted just four innings before being removed. To begin the fifth, manager Bob Melvin turned to rookie Randy Rodríguez, a sensible choice given his consistent multi-inning appearances to provide length to the Giants bullpen. In his first inning, Rodríguez retired the heart of the lineup in order on just 10 pitches, making him the easy choice to come back out for the sixth, due to face a pair of Phillies platoon hitters inserted into the lineup to face Snell.

Pache and Merrifield really aren’t guys you want hitting against a righty, especially one as nasty as Rodríguez, whose absolute hammer of a slider creates a difficult look for same-handed batters. Despite Marsh and Stott, the regular starters, ready to pinch-hit, Phillies manager Rob Thomson elected to keep them on the bench in a one-run game. His reason was the man standing on a bullpen mound beyond the center field fence: Lefty Erik Miller was warming up for the Giants.

While the Giants could have sent in Miller in response to a pinch-hitter, I still think using Marsh and Stott would’ve been the correct decision for Thomson. First, given Pache and Merrifield’s futility against right-handed pitching, almost any other scenario would have been more favorable. Indeed, the two managed a fly out and groundout against Rodríguez, combining for an xBA of .090. Furthermore, with lefty sluggers Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper at the top of the lineup (with a 91 and 72 point gap in projected OPS, respectively, between their splits vs. right-handed and left-handed pitchers), it would’ve been wise for Thomson to force Melvin to burn one of the two lefty relievers in the Giants bullpen, which could’ve led to more favorable matchups later in the game. Because Thomson decided not to make any substitutions, Miller wasn’t needed until the next inning, a scoreless effort in which he allowed just one hit, the popup single in front of home plate that Ben Clemens wrote about in Friday’s Five Things column. Marsh and Stott did eventually hit in the ninth, as did lefty bench bat Kody Clemens, but only after Philadelphia’s deficit had ballooned to four runs.

The fact that Miller only threw one inning in Game 1 became significant the next day, as he was fresh enough to slot in as the opener for bulk man Spencer Howard, a former Phillies top prospect who stalled upon hitting the majors and entered play with a career ERA north of seven. Thomson rolled out the lefty-heavy lineup hoping to feast on Howard’s mediocre fastball shape, so for the second day in a row, Miller faced the Phillies’ top three without allowing any damage. In traditional opener games, Howard would come out next and make his start as normal. Instead, Melvin went a different route, delaying Howard’s entrance in favor of bringing in Taylor Rogers, the only other available lefty he had. It’s not the first time a team has used multiple openers, but it’s certainly unorthodox during the regular season, with few off-days to rest the staff. The left-handed Rogers twin breezed through two scoreless innings, turning the lineup over before handing the ball off. Howard still had to get the job done, but Miller and Rogers lessened his load by nine outs, taking out a lefty-vulnerable lineup that wouldn’t turn to pinch-hitters so early in the game. Howard turned in four scoreless frames, and his team needed every bit of it, as they won 1-0 in extras.

Melvin’s management of his staff made the most of his available, although depleted, personnel. Under ideal circumstances, teams wouldn’t use emergency bulk arms, multiple openers, or an entire staff composed of swingmen, but an open rotation spot due to injury forced the Giants to scrap together innings by any means necessary. While Melvin’s tactical decisions were the best use of his limited arms, the opposite side of this matchup showed a fully operational, elite rotation at its finest. The Phillies currently have the best starting pitching in the league by every measure, and it’s not particularly close.

Most of that value comes from four excellent arms, two of which appeared in this series. First, in the second game, it was Zack Wheeler, who has continued his run as baseball’s most consistently excellent starter over the past half-decade. Even with his velocity finally starting to show signs of age, he’s on pace for career bests in ERA (2.32) and xERA (2.60), and his 29.0% strikeout rate is just below the career-high 29.1% mark he posted in 2021. Much of his success has come from an eagerness to change his approach and arsenal over time – first emerging as a Cy Young finalist after embracing the power of the elevated fastball, then adding a new pitch to his arsenal in each of the last two seasons. In 2023, a sweeper became his breaking pitch of choice; this season, like many other pitchers, he’s added a splitter. Wheeler now throws six pitches with regularity, a re-invention of his style from just a few years ago.

In dominating the Giants, Wheeler demonstrated the complementary power of his sinker and new split, with the former earning called strikes at a 29% clip and the latter inducing four whiffs on just 10 uses. The splitter has above-average run just like his two-seamer; it even spins on the same axis after adjusting for seam-shifted wake. It’s almost as if Wheeler precision engineered his splitter to travel on the exact same tunnel as his sinker for the first 40 feet of flight before diverging, making it extremely difficult for batters to tell them apart. The brand-new splitter is already Wheeler’s best secondary offering by run value, and it’s also helped make his sinker considerably more effective, with a 40-point drop in xwOBA compared to last season.

Wheeler put together one of his best starts of the season, striking out nine San Francisco hitters across six scoreless innings, but he couldn’t outdo his opponent’s parade of openers and was saddled with a no-decision. The next afternoon, in the series finale, Cristopher Sánchez enjoyed a Phillies offensive outburst that was absent from the first two games. In last year’s breakout campaign, the lefty Sánchez put up above-average numbers over 19 appearances, but what held him back from excellence was an abysmal showing against right-handed hitters, who ran a slugging percentage that was more than double their that left-handed counterparts. He’s leveled up this year, currently holding a share of the NL lead in FIP. And while he still runs an exaggerated platoon split, he’s been able to limit the power of opposite-handed hitters, as seen on Wednesday against a daunting all-righty Giants lineup.

The calling card of Sánchez’s arsenal is a changeup with few comps in terms of movement, boasting 97th percentile drop and 95th percentile run. This exceptional pitch generated gaudy whiff numbers during his time as a prospect, and has only continued in the big leagues. The problem is that Sánchez’s sinker, which he uses to set up the changeup, gets absolutely hammered, especially by righties. Drastically cutting his sinker usage wouldn’t be the solution, because that would allow batters to sit on his change and make it more hittable. So, rather than shelving the sinker, Sánchez made a change to when he used it.

Sánchez took advantage of the Giants’ passivity on first pitches by throwing juicy sinkers to 12 of the 24 batters he faced; none of them were put into play. In fact, over a third of his sinkers in the game were taken for called strikes, his highest mark of the season. After getting ahead in the count, Sánchez then let the changeups rain down, racking up strikeouts and groundouts. By the end of the start, Sánchez’s sinker — a pitch that had allowed loud contact like no other in the past — surrendered zero barrels and zero extra-base hits. Like Wheeler the day prior, Sánchez turned in six scoreless innings, while the Philadelphia bats knocked around the surprisingly hittable Kyle Harrison. The vulnerability of Sánchez’s sinker likely caps his upside as a mid-rotation guy, but certainly one more than capable of starting playoff games for his contending team.

The Giants won the series, taking two games out of three. They showed they could win even with a starting rotation depleted by injury and underperformance, tilting the odds in their favor with crafty personnel decisions that kept the Phillies’ offense guessing as to who would come out next. (Of course, over the weekend, the Giants were swept by the Yankees in San Francisco, perhaps displaying the limitations of a team with a shaky staff.) On the other side, Philadelphia’s buzzsaw of a rotation was created by decisions as well, albeit ones made on the more macro level. From arsenal tweaks to command improvements, these changes demonstrate why this team is top dog right now in the National League.

Matt Vierling has been swinging a hot bat with the Detroit Tigers. Over his last 11 games, the 27-year-old third baseman/outfielder is 16-for-41 with four doubles, a triple, four home runs, and 13 RBIs. His slash line over the span is .390/.435/.829 bringing his seasonal mark to a solid .292/.324/.509. While by no means an offensive force, he has nonetheless been an integral part of the lineup. Since being acquired by Detroit from Philadelphia prior to last season as part of the five-player Gregory Soto swap. Vierling has the second-most hits (175) on the team, and a respectable 106 wRC+.

Defensive versatility adds to Vierling’s value — his big-league ledger includes games at 3B, 2B, CF, RF, and LF — and there is a chance that another non-DH position could eventually be added to the list. Given the right circumstances, he might even pitch. It would be familiar territory. Vierling thrived on the mound as a prep, then was a two-way player at the University of Notre Dame from 2016-2018.

A Perfect Game showcase in Minneapolis is a standout memory for the St. Louis, Missouri native. Vierling recalls Carson Kelly’s brother, Parker, being one of his teammates, while Ke’Bryan Hayes and Josh Naylor — “I pitched against him if I remember correctly” — were among his notable opponents. Playing well against that type of talent garnered him attention from colleges and professional scouts alike, and while his bat showed promise, it was the arm that stood out the most. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley bring on FanGraphs associate editor Matt Martell to discuss the scenes at Citi Field that kicked off the Mets’ Jorge López saga, the resulting DFA and fallout, and what this silly/sad sequence of events suggests about the potential for player intent to be lost in translation, how off-the-field issues can manifest on the field, and the line between LOLMets and more serious situations. Then (42:00) Ben and Meg are joined by Trout-tier Patreon supporter Andrew Simard to explore the podcast as a sleep aid and answer listener emails about a jack-of-all-trades team vs. a specialist team, learning baseball lingo and the “double out,” the need for a nickname for Kyle Tucker, Anthony Rizzo and batter’s-box mobility, strike-zone multipliers, and spending surplus wins on playoff power-ups.

Audio intro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: The Gagnés, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to López comments
Link to López glove throw
Link to Matt’s thread
Link to DiComo tweet
Link to DiComo thread
Link to Beverley ball throw
Link to Beverley pod incident
Link to Mintz López column
Link to López Insta Story
Link to López Insta post
Link to MLBTR on López
Link to MLBTR on Díaz
Link to 2023 López IL stint
Link to Mets Reddit thread
Link to Mrs. Met story
Link to Hechavarría video
Link to Hechavarría story
Link to Becker on the Mets
Link to Baseball Sleep Radio
Link to Sleep Baseball host on EW
Link to lineup makeup research
Link to Ben on Trial By Content
Link to Ben on House of R
Link to Tucker HR robbery
Link to King Tuck’s Court video
Link to King Tuck’s Court Twitter
Link to King Felix’s Court
Link to recent EW on Tucker
Link to darts “double out”
Link to B-Ref career WAR leaders
Link to new Rizzo adjustment
Link to previous Rizzo adjustment
Link to Ben on moving the mound
Link to HBP penalty email
Link to Golden Batter rule
Link to Cosmic Baseball story
Link to listener emails database
Link to Ben on Button Mash
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

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During most baseball games, there are eight people calling the action. Both the home and away teams have radio and television broadcasts, and most of those crews consist of a play-by-play announcer and a color commentator. If those teams have a Spanish language broadcast, the number is even higher. More often than you might think, something notable happens in the middle of a game and not one of those eight people notes it. Maybe a player will square around to bunt but end up taking the pitch, and that detail just goes unremarked upon by everyone. It’s a small detail, but it’s part of the story of the game. It tells you about the batting team’s strategy and their confidence in the hitter. It informs the defense’s pitch selection and positioning. Maybe the television crews figure you already saw it. Maybe the radio crews need to squeeze in a promo or the color guy’s in the middle of an anecdote about that one time he got to be an extra in Little Big League. There’s only so much time between pitches, and the announcers all have a decision to make on how best to fill it. Either way, if you’re listening on the radio, or if you’re looking away from your television for a moment, you’ll never know it happened at all.

Something happened on Wednesday, in the first game of a doubleheader between the Tigers and Pirates. I found it remarkable, but apparently I was alone. No one else mentioned it. The Pirates were starting Jared Jones and Paul Skenes that day, and I was watching Detroit’s television broadcast. I did so partly because Jason Benetti is a delight, but mostly because when Jones and Skenes are on the mound, it’s fun to hear the opposing announcers react with awe as they watch batter after batter on their own team get taken apart limb from limb. Unfortunately for both Jones and me, the Tigers avoided dismemberment, hanging five earned runs and two unearned runs on Jones en route to a breezy 8-0 victory. On the bright side, Benetti and Kirk Gibson, who was serving as color commentator, decided that for much of the game, the best way to spend their time was by bickering like an old married couple.

Benetti: Do they know you at your local donut shop?

Gibson: No.

Benetti: They know you as the guy who orders all the chocolate fry cakes.

Gibson: I don’t. I’m on the sugar free now, so I’m not doing it now. So nobody knows.

Benetti: Well, everybody knows you’re on the sugar free diet because you keep saying it. Read the rest of this entry »