“Oh hi, Tyson,” I said, slightly startled. “We were just talking about you.”
Tyson Neighbors, the star closer from Kansas State, had appeared at my shoulder suddenly and completely noiselessly. He was shorter than the other pitchers I’d interviewed at the draft combine, not much taller than six-foot, but with the kind of upside-down triangle body you’d expect from someone who’d been a standout linebacker in high school. In 2023, his sophomore season at K-State, Neighbors had struck out nearly two batters an inning and won All-America honors for holding opponents to a .135 batting average. He’s one of the top reliever prospects in this year’s draft.
All of that made the expression on his face hilariously incongruous. He was staring at Eric Longenhagen’s laptop, wearing the exact mix of curiosity and excitement you’ll see from a kindergartener who’s about to ask if you have games on your phone. 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.
The Austin Slater-for-Alex Young swap that the Giants and Reds made late Sunday night wasn’t going to grab many headlines. Slater is a platoon outfielder who’s struggled to mash lefties this year the way he had in the past, and Young is a funky, somewhat fungible lefty reliever; the Giants immediately sent him to Triple-A Sacramento upon completing the trade. That said, the notable thing about such a minor move is this: Because there are a bunch of teams trying to win, but few that have actually separated themselves from the pack, trades like this could rule the rest of the month.
Entering Monday, 11 of the 30 teams had playoff odds between 10% and 60%, bubble teams that could convince themselves to buy, sell, or do a little bit of both ahead of the July 30 deadline. That doesn’t even include the Reds, who may yet buy, as evidenced by their addition of Slater to add outfield depth. These teams almost certainly won’t go all in by the end of this month. Why risk trading away useful prospects only to miss out on postseason play anyway? Instead, the ones that decide not to punt on this season could elect to trade from positions of depth to patch up the holes in their roster.
The Giants could afford to move on from Slater because they have Luis Matos and Tyler Fitzgerald, two righty batters who are better defensive options than Slater in center field. Meanwhile, Slater should provide the Reds with much-needed outfield depth and allow them to option 25-year-old prospect Blake Dunn, who could benefit from getting regular playing time at Triple-A. On the flip side, Cincinnati could spare Young despite his strong Triple-A performance because it already had lefties Sam Moll, Brent Suter, and Justin Wilson in its bullpen. Conversely, San Francisco could use Young to share some of the load in the most-used bullpen in baseball.
On a larger scale, we may even see something analogous to the 2022 trade that sent Josh Hader from the Brewers to the Padres. Both teams were in a playoff position at the time of the deal, and the Brewers were actually in the better spot despite being the “seller” in the trade; they held a three-game lead in the NL Central when the trade went through. San Diego got a struggling Hader back on track and advanced to the NLCS, while Milwaukee missed the playoffs altogether. However, two years later, it’s become clear that the Brewers also improved because of the move. Robert Gasser, one of the two prospects they received in the trade, made his big league debut in May and was excellent across five starts before he went down with a season-ending elbow injury; he’s a key part of the Brewers’ future. The other prospect, outfielder Esteury Ruiz, ended up as Milwaukee’s most valuable return piece, even though he played just three games for the team. The offseason after acquiring Ruiz, the Brewers flipped him to the A’s in a three-team trade for All-Star catcher William Contreras, then with the Braves, and a solid reliever, Joel Payamps, from Oakland.
Trading major league players like Hader always contains the risk of upsetting the apple cart and messing with team chemistry, but if better fits come in return, that certainly can soften the blow of losing an All-Star. The Orioles’ surplus of position players naturally comes to mind, with Cedric Mullins, Colton Cowser, Heston Kjerstad, and Austin Hays all jockeying for playing time in the outfield, and Ramón Urías and Jorge Mateo blocking prospects Connor Norby and Jackson Holliday. Baltimore could choose to move any of these position players (excluding Holliday) considering it is in dire need of controllable starting pitching; Corbin Burnes is a pending free agent, and Kyle Bradish and Tyler Wells are out of commission until at least the middle of next season.
Contenders with expendable pitchers are tougher to find, though the Mariners are the obvious exception. They have five solid starters and sorely need to upgrade their offense. It’s hard to imagine they would trade any of their top three guys (Luis Castillo, Logan Gilbert, and George Kirby), but Bryce Miller and Bryan Woo could and should be available for an impact bat. Seattle’s rotation depth beyond Miller and Woo is uninspiring, so if needed, president of baseball operations and master trader Jerry Dipoto could ask for a replacement fifth starter in the trade or swing a separate deal to get one. Perhaps the Mariners could swap strength for strength with the Orioles and also acquire lefty Cole Irvin in addition to a hitter.
More teams could use starting pitchers than the Mariners have to offer, though. Fortunately, fringier contenders like the Cubs, Mets, Blue Jays, and Rangers have a few possible trade pieces. Luis Severino, Jose Quintana, Yusei Kikuchi, Max Scherzer, Michael Lorenzen, and Andrew Heaney are all free agents after the year, and we might even see some non-rentals move, such as Jameson Taillon, Tylor Megill, Chris Bassitt, and Jon Gray. Giving up controllable starters likely would allow these teams to net a stronger return, and if they are worried about giving up starters who are under contract beyond this season, they could always replace them through free agency during the offseason.
That’s not to say teams won’t trade major leaguers for a package of prospects, because, as always, they certainly will do that! The White Sox and A’s, for example, won’t want major leaguers in return for anybody they trade. But teams who go right down to the wire in deciding whether to buy or sell almost definitely will try to contend again in 2025. For that reason, they probably won’t simply deal controllable players for anything other than controllable players who fit their roster a little bit better. And that sure could lead to some fun trades over the next three weeks, ones that are more impactful than swapping Slater for Young.
These next few weeks should go a long way towards separating the wheat from the chaff in the postseason race. For the teams on the fringe of the playoff picture, a timely hot streak could convince them to upgrade at the trade deadline, while a cold snap could push them into seller mode. With the All-Star break looming, it’s time for some serious introspection as teams gear up for the stretch run.
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 »
The Red Sox may never entirely live down the 2020 trade of Mookie Betts, but four years and change later, Boston’s last man standing from that deal is enjoying a breakout. Catcher Connor Wong just reeled off a 17-game hitting streak that spanned four weeks, and even made a case for a spot on the AL All-Star team, though he fell short on that front.
The 28-year-old Wong began his streak with a single off White Sox right-hander Jake Woodford on June 6, and added another single off Tim Hill later in the game. Despite taking a three-day paternity leave from June 24–27, he started 16 of Boston’s next 23 games, sprinkling in four other two-hit games.
With his single off Trevor Rogers last Tuesday, Wong extended his streak to 17 games, the longest by any Red Sox player this season and tied for the seventh-longest of any player this year; Phillies catcher J.T. Realmuto is one of three other players who also had a 17-gamer. The longest hitting streak ever for a catcher is 34 games, set by the Padres’ Benito Santiago in 1987. The closest any catcher has come to approaching Santiago in the last decade was in 2019, when the Mets’ Wilson Ramos went 23 games; all of the other hitting streaks by catchers of at least 20 games happened in 2003 or earlier. Read the rest of this entry »
One of my favorite articles to write is the “you won’t believe how this guy is succeeding” piece. You’ve seen me – and plenty of other writers – break it out over and over again. Maybe it’s a reliever with a weird pitch, or a starter with a blazing fastball who is nonetheless succeeding with secondaries. Perhaps it’s a hitter excelling thanks to a novel approach, or a slugger altering his game to prioritize something he didn’t before. In any case, it’s fun to subvert expectations, and it makes for a good story to boot.
Spare some thought for the players who succeed by doing exactly what you think they’re doing, though. They might not garner as many headlines, but that doesn’t make what they’re doing any less real. I have a specific example of this today, someone I was hoping to write about in the former style. I went looking for the one weird trick that made him tick, but I couldn’t find one. Brent Rooker is succeeding with one extremely normal trick: Every time he comes to the plate, he tries to hit a home run.
Here’s a representative Rooker swing:
Here’s another:
You’ll notice a few things right away. He swings hard – his average swing speed matches Bryce Harper and Matt Olson. He also swings with a pronounced uppercut. Most hitters hit more home runs on high pitches, thanks to the laws of physics. Rooker doesn’t have a single homer in the upper third of the strike zone this year; he’s either annihilating pitches down the middle or lifting low balls over the fence. Read the rest of this entry »
Dylan Cease was one of my interview targets when the San Diego Padres visited Fenway Park last weekend, and as part of my preparation I looked back at what I’d previously written about him here at FanGraphs. What I found were three articles partially derived from conversations I had with the right-hander when he was in the Chicago White Sox organization. One, from 2020, was on how he was trying to remove unwanted cut from his fastball. A second, from 2019, was on how he’d learned and developed his curveball. The third, from 2018, included Cease’s citing “body awareness and putting your hand and arm in the right spot” as keys to his executing pitches consistently.
And then there was something from November 2017 that didn’t include quotes from the hurler himself. Rather, it featured plaudits for his performances down on the farm. In a piece titled Broadcaster’s View: Who Were the Top Players in the Midwest League, Cease was mentioned several times. Chris Vosters, who was then calling games for the Great Lakes Loons and more recently was the voice of the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks, described a high-90s fastball, a quality curveball, and an ability to mix his pitches well. Jesse Goldberg-Strassler (Lansing Lugnuts) and Dan Hasty (West Michigan Whitecaps) were others impressed by the then-promising prospect’s potential.
With that article in mind, I went off the beaten path and asked Cease about something that flies well under the radar of most fans: What is the relationship between players and broadcasters, particularly in the minor leagues? Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Seattle Mariners. 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 »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a genuine, no-foolin’ instance of “Strategy” (aka a mid-PA pitching change), Christian Walker’s affinity for Dodger Stadium, a Triple-A Waxahachie Swap, the Nationals optioning EW legend Joey Meneses, the Marlins DFA’ing Tim Anderson, and the latest Royce Lewis injury, plus follow-ups about bullpen-cart-driver tipping and fan catches. Then (36:10) they bring on Patreon supporter Wayne Teeger to discuss responses to recent discussions about K-Zone, ABS, and the challenge system and answer emails about ABS at lower levels, broadcasts missing pickoff attempts, green-screen issues (and other ad problems) on broadcasts, whether the path a champion takes through the playoffs matters to fans, pinch-hitting to negate a mound visit, and tracking 10K games for pitchers. Next, they Stat Blast (1:41:13) about the most major leaguers ever to play for a non-major-league team, followed by (1:48:53) a Future Blast from 2187.
This is a bounce-back season for Yandy Díaz, and not in a good way. After two straight seasons with a wRC+ above 145, the Rays first baseman is at 106 so far in 2024. When Jay Jaffe checked in on him on June 13, Díaz had just climbed out of a hole. Through May 10, Díaz was running a wRC+ of just 77 with a 90.9 mph average exit velocity. Since that date, he’s been at 128, and his exit velocity has jumped all the way to 93.7 mph. Even more important, he was running a 60.3% groundball rate on May 10, but has run a 53.3% groundball rate after that point. For the season, that still leaves him at 56.4%, highest among all qualified players, but for Díaz, that handful of percentage points has always been the difference between being a good hitter and being one of the best in baseball. When his groundball rate is up, his wRC+ is down, and vice versa. The relationship is plain to see:
MLB’s new bat tracking data put the issue in stark relief. Blasts are a combination of two metrics: fast swings and squared up swings. The official definitions are here, but if you swing hard and you barrel the ball up, you’ll end up with a blast. That’s a good thing, because so far this season, blasts have a wOBA of .731, and a barrel rate of 27.7%. For Díaz, however, those numbers are .423 and 16.0%. He’s tied with Gunnar Henderson for fourth in baseball with 100 blasts, but just five of those blasts have turned into home runs. Of the 260 players who have hit at least 25 blasts this season, that 5.0% home run rate puts him in 248th place. Why? You know why. He has a launch angle of 1 on his blasts, tied for 259th out of 260. On the left, with the infield dirt almost completely obscured by dots, is Díaz’s spray chart on blasts. On the right, with home runs sprinkled liberally on top, is Henderson’s. Read the rest of this entry »
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