It’s been a hot start to the 2024 season for the Boston Red Sox. They started the season with a 10-game road trip to the West Coast and arrived home Monday at 7-3 after a four-game split in Seattle, a three-game sweep in what will likely be their final trip to play the A’s in Oakland, and a 2-1 series win over the Angels. While Boston hasn’t exactly met the highest of competition yet — this week’s home-opening series with Baltimore should be a serious test — the Sox entered Tuesday with the second-best run differential in the majors, at +26. Aside from the Trevor Story’s injury, which as Jon Becker explained yesterday is going to test Boston’s uninspiring middle infield depth, it’s been an encouraging first two weeks for Alex Cora’s club.

Somewhat unexpectedly, pitching has been the story of Boston’s early success, after the Red Sox redesigned their pitching infrastructure over the offseason. In this regard, two of the most important additions to the club are not current players but former big league pitchers: Craig Breslow, who replaced Chaim Bloom as the team’s chief baseball officer, and Andrew Bailey, the new pitching coach. After pitching as a reliever for 12 years in the majors, including parts of five seasons with the Red Sox, Breslow spent five years in the Cubs’ front office working to overhaul their pitching program. One of Breslow’s first moves was to hire Bailey, his former Red Sox teammate. Bailey, a two-time All-Star and the 2009 American League Rookie of the Year, came over from the Giants, where he held the same role and helped to develop the likes of Logan Webb, Kevin Gausman, and Carlos Rodón into some of baseball’s top pitchers recent years. Boston also hired Justin Willard to a role it titled “director of pitching.”

Entering Tuesday, Red Sox pitchers lead the majors with a 1.49 ERA, a 2.92 FIP, a 3.08 xFIP, 10.49 strikeouts per nine, and 2.4 WAR. Two times through the rotation, Tanner Houck hasn’t allowed a run, and Nick Pivetta, Kutter Crawford, and Garrett Whitlock have allowed one earned run each. The bullpen has supported this rotation capably, too — in 37.1 innings, Boston relievers rank second in baseball with 0.8 WAR, third with a 1.45 ERA and 3.40 xFIP, and fourth with a 3.18 FIP. All of this from a staff that features mostly the same members from a group that struggled last season. It’s too early to know for sure if 2024 will be any different, but this is an auspicious start. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2022, Jordan Hicks briefly converted from relieving to starting for the Cardinals. The experiment didn’t go particularly well. He made eight starts and lasted a combined 26.1 innings with an ERA of 5.47. He walked nearly 20% of the batters he faced, barely struck anyone out, and seemed to struggle to adjust from his old role. He threw sinkers or sliders 94% of the time, didn’t dial down his velocity much, and looked exactly how you’d expect a closer cosplaying as a starter to look. So much for that experiment; he promptly returned to late-inning duty.

When the Giants signed Hicks this offseason, rumors of his return to the starting ranks bubbled up, but I didn’t believe it. After all, we’d already seen this exact experiment before. But fast forward to today, and Hicks looks like a revelation. Through two starts, he’s thrown 12 innings and allowed a single earned run. His strikeout rate has barely budged from his career average, and he’s only issued two free bases (one walk, one HBP). It’s a remarkable turnaround, and one that I can’t help but dive into. How has he done it? Read the rest of this entry »

I think Mitch Williams deserves at least some of the blame.

See, I’ve been contributing to ranked lists of ordered baseball players for most of my adult life, and in general, people like to see their favorite team ranked highly. Baseball fans are pretty solipsistic, like dog owners, and struggle to imagine a world in which their special attachment to a particular thing is not shared by every sapient being on the planet. How dare you say Clayton Kershaw is better than Aaron Harang, and other salutations.

When our positional power rankings declared the Phillies to have the best bullpen in baseball two weeks ago, I don’t want to say Phillies fans reacted badly. (Not least because I’m the last person on Earth who wants Phillies fans to be perceived as a monolith, to be judged by their noisiest members.) Rather than hostility, it was more like the bemused skepticism with which one greets a man who knocks on your door trying to sell you solar panels. Sure, it sounds nice… but what’s the catch? Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

If last week’s news that Eury Pérez would need Tommy John surgery was bad, Saturday was a whole lot worse. Within a span of five hours, the baseball world learned that the Guardians’ Shane Bieber, the Yankees’ Jonathan Loáisiga, and the Braves’ Spencer Strider have all incurred significant damage to their ulnar collateral ligaments, with Bieber headed for Tommy John surgery, Loáisiga set to undergo season-ending surgery as well, and Strider headed to see Dr. Keith Meister, the orthopedic surgeon who will perform the surgeries of the other two.

The losses of those pitchers is a triple bummer, not just for them and their respective teams — each of which leads its division, incidentally — and fans, but for the sport in general. Underscoring the seriousness of the issue, by the end of Saturday both the players’ union and Major League Baseball traded volleys regarding the impact of the introduction of the pitch clock on pitcher injuries in general.

Bieber, a two-time All-Star, won the AL Cy Young award and the pitchers’ Triple Crown during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but missed significant time in two out of the past three years due to injuries. In 2021 he was limited to 16 starts due to a strain of his subscapularis, the largest of the four muscles that make up the rotator cuff, and last year he made just 21 starts, missing 10 weeks due to elbow inflammation. He had pitched very well this season, with a pair of scoreless six-inning outings, each totaling just 83 pitches. He struck out 11 A’s in Oakland on Opening Day and then nine Mariners (without a single walk) in Seattle on April 2.

Bieber experienced more soreness than usual while recovering from the Opening Day start, but the 29-year-old righty and the team decided to proceed without extra rest, according to MLB.com’s Mandy Bell, who wrote, “Bieber wanted to see if he could push through this, considering he hadn’t felt any pain in Spring Training.”

The discomfort persisted during Bieber’s second start, after which the team ordered additional testing, “which revealed the injury to the same ligament he had problems with last year,” wrote Bell. If I’m not mistaken, that last bit of information is new, as previous reports of last year’s injury did not specify as to the inflammation’s cause. “He really put in a ton of work this winter and throughout spring training, and we all felt he was on a good path to stay healthy and contribute for the balance of the season,” said president of baseball operations Chris Antonetti on a Zoom call with reporters. Antonetti additionally lauded the pitcher’s “sheer toughness and grit” in maintaining a high level of performance, while manager Stephen Vogt sounded a similar note in saying, “The amount of work that this guy’s put in over the last few years, the things that he’s pitched through, that’s a testament to who he is.” But those supportive statements raise the question of whether this juncture could have been avoided had Bieber taken a longer time to heal from the damage found last summer, as teammate Triston McKenzie did. Missing from that comparison, however, is information regarding the severity of the two pitchers’ tears, details to which we’re not privy.

As a pending free agent, Bieber is in a tough spot, as he’ll enter the market under a cloud of uncertainty, likely cutting into a payday that’s ceiling has already been reduced by his previous outages. As for the Guardians, their remaining rotation looks so shaky that it ranks 27th in projected WAR via our Depth Charts, and their Playoff Odds have decreased since Opening Day (from 33.5% to 32%) despite the 7-2 start that has put them atop the AL Central.

The 26-year-old McKenzie, who was limited to four starts last season by a teres major strain as well as his UCL sprain, was rocked for five runs (four earned) in 3.1 innings in his first outing on Monday against the Mariners. His four-seam fastball averaged just 90.5 mph, down two miles per hour from 2022, when he was fully healthy. Carlos Carrasco, now 37, is coming off a 6.80 ERA in 20 starts with the Mets. Both Tanner Bibee, a 25-year-old righty, and Logan Allen, a 25-year-old lefty, are coming off strong rookie seasons and have pitched well in the early going, but Gavin Williams, a 24-year-old righty who posted a 3.29 ERA and 4.05 FIP in 16 starts as a rookie last year, began the year on the injured list due to elbow inflammation himself and has not yet been cleared to begin a rehab assignment. Out on rehab assignments are 25-year-old righty Xzavion Curry, and 32-year-old righty Ben Lively, both of whom were sidelined by a respiratory virus during spring training. Both split time between starting and relieving last year but turned in ERAs and FIPs over 5.00, the former with the Guardians, the latter with the Reds. Joey Cantillo, their top upper level pitching prospect, is out for 8-10 weeks with a left hamstring strain.

As for the 29-year-old Loáisiga, he’s been so beset by injuries throughout his career — including Tommy John surgery in 2016 — that he’s thrown 50 innings in a major league season just once (70.2 in 2021) and has totaled 50 innings between the majors and minors just two other times, in 2018 (80.2, mostly as a starter) and ’22 (50 exactly). He was limited to 17.2 innings last year due to in-season surgery to remove a bone spur in his elbow, then less than five weeks after returning was sidelined by inflammation in the joint. Three appearances into this season, he was diagnosed with a flexor strain and a partially torn UCL, though based upon the reporting, it sounds as though he’s a candidate for the internal brace procedure that requires less recovery time. Via MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch:

Meister’s initial reading of an MRI performed on Thursday in New York suggests that Loáisiga could avoid undergoing what would be his second career Tommy John surgery, with the estimated recovery for Meister’s preferred procedure spanning 10-12 months.

It was Dr. Jeffrey Dugas who invented the internal brace procedure, in which collagen-coated FiberTape suture is used to anchor the damaged UCL, speeding up recovery by eliminating the time needed for a tendon to transform into a ligament. Meister has pioneered the combining of traditional Tommy John surgery with the use of the internal brace; when it’s referred to at all as different from traditional Tommy John, it’s as a “hybrid” procedure. It’s what Jacob deGrom had last year (with Meister performing the procedure), and it sounds like what Shohei Ohtani (who was operated on by Dr. Neal ElAttrache) underwent last fall as well. In a March 7 piece in the Dallas Morning News, Meister said he’s done over 300 hybrid surgeries since 2018, which suggests the distinctions are being blurred when we track such surgeries.

Regardless of the type of surgery, Loáisiga’s absence has dealt a significant blow to a bullpen that already looked considerably less formidable than in years past. After ranking third in the majors with 7.2 WAR in 2021 and fifth with 5.9 in ’22, the unit slipped to 16th (4.2 WAR) last year, and ranked 19th in our preseason positional power rankings; Yankees relievers are now down to 22nd. Beyond closer Clay Holmes and setup man Ian Hamilton, it’s a largely unfamiliar if not untested cast, featuring a pair of ex-Dodger southpaws (Victor González and Caleb Ferguson), a trio of righties with career ERAs above 5.00 (Nick Burdi, Dennis Santana, and Luke Weaver). Moreover, the 31-year-old Burdi has never thrown more than 8.2 innings in a major league season, and another righty, Jake Cousins, has just 55.2 career innings, 30 of which came in 2021. Maybe pitching coach Matt Blake and company can find some diamonds in the rough, and maybe the likes of Tommy Kahnle, Lou Trivino, and Scott Effross can recover from their various injuries and surgeries to provide help later this season, but this is a clear weakness for a team off to an 8-2 start.

Strider is coming off a stellar season — his first full one in the rotation — in which he led the NL in strikeouts (281), strikeout rate (36.5%), FIP (2.85), and wins (20) while making his first All-Star team and placing fourth in the Cy Young voting. After throwing five innings of two-run ball while striking out eight on Opening Day against the Phillies, he surrendered five runs in four innings against the Diamondbacks on Friday, then complained about elbow discomfort afterwards. The Braves sent the 25-year-old righty for an MRI, after which the team’s official Twitter account shared the bad news:

Spencer Strider today underwent an MRI that revealed damage to the ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. He will be further evaluated by Dr. Keith Meister in Arlington, TX, at a date yet to be determined.

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) April 6, 2024

Strider already underwent his first Tommy John surgery as a sophomore at Clemson in 2019. While it’s not a guarantee yet that he’ll need a second one, the Braves sound resigned to it, with manager Brian Snitker telling reporters, “The good news is he’s going to get whatever it is fixed and come back and continue to have a really good career.” Strider at least has security even if he’s never the same, having already signed a six-year, $75 million extension in October 2022, the largest pre-arbitration extension ever for a pitcher.

The Braves will certainly feel his loss. Of their remaining starters, 40-year-old righty Charlie Morton has been reliable and durable, taking the ball at least 30 times in each of the past three seasons, but 30-year-old lefty Max Fried was limited to 14 starts last year by hamstring and forearm strains as well as a blister on his index finger. Lefty Chris Sale, 35, missed 10 weeks last year due to a stress fracture in his scapula, which limited him to just 20 starts — nine more than he totaled over the three prior seasons combined while missing time due to Tommy John surgery and a stress fracture in his rib. Thirty-year-old righty Reynaldo López is starting again after spending nearly all of the past two seasons as a reliever. Twenty-four-year-old righty Bryce Elder was an All-Star last season but was optioned to Triple-A Gwinnett to start the year after a second-half fade and a rough spring. Prospects AJ Smith-Shawver, a 21-year-old righty, and Dylan Dodd, a 25-year-old lefty, are also at Gwinnett; the former was no. 63 on our Top 100 Prospects list. Ian Anderson and Huascar Ynoa are both recovering from Tommy John, the former from April 2023 and the latter from September ’22. One way or another, the Braves will cobble things together, but they can’t afford too much else to go wrong.

Saturday’s flood of UCL-related headlines followed a week that featured the bad news about Pérez as well as Tommy John surgery for A’s reliever Trevor Gott. On Saturday evening, Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Tony Clark released a statement that targeted the pitch clock as the culprit for so many arm injuries:

Despite unanimous player opposition and significant concerns regarding health and safety, the Commissioner’s Office reduced the length of the pitch clock last December, just one season removed from imposing the most significant rule change in decades.

Since then, our concerns about the health impacts of reduced recovery time have only intensified.

The league’s unwillingness thus far to acknowledge or study the effects of these profound changes is an unprecedented threat to our game and its most valuable asset – the players.

The league quickly countered:

This statement ignores the empirical evidence and much more significant long-term trend, over multiple decades, of velocity and spin increases that are highly correlated with arm injuries. Nobody wants to see pitchers get hurt in this game, which is why MLB is currently undergoing a significant comprehensive research study into the causes of this long-term increase, interviewing prominent medical experts across baseball which to date has been consistent with an independent analysis by Johns Hopkins University that found no evidence to support that the introduction of the pitch clock has increased injuries. In fact, JHU found no evidence that pitchers who worked quickly in 2023 were more likely to sustain an injury than those who worked less quickly on average. JHU also found no evidence that pitchers who sped up their pace were more likely to sustain an injury than those who did not.

Particularly in the wake of the recent in-house drama that resulted in a challenge to his leadership of the union, Clark’s statement is probably better understood as a political one than a scientific one. The majority of the players he represents are pitchers, and they may be looking for a target for their anger and fears regarding increased injury rates. It’s worth noting that those players — or at least the major leaguers who were part of the union when the most recent Collective Bargaining Agreement was hammered out in March 2022 — agreed to the structure of the Joint Competition Committee, which contains six owners, four players, and one umpire; “unanimous” is more likely referring to those four players rather than the 6,000-plus the MLBPA now represents.

As the league’s statement notes, and as The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh reported last week, MLB has been conducting a comprehensive study of pitcher injuries since October, and once it’s done (perhaps later this year) “intends to form a task force that will make recommendations for protecting pitchers.” The group will “try to come up with some solutions and implement some solutions,” according to Dr. Glenn Fleisig, who as the biomechanics research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute and as an injury research adviser for MLB is one of the experts being consulted.

To varying degrees, Fleisig, Meister, ElAttrache and the now-retired Dr. James Andrews have all publicly pointed to the extra stress on arms induced by the quest for increased velocity, increased spin, and maximum effort as the primary causes of increased pitcher injury rates, a quest that starts in youth baseball, while players’ bodies are still developing. Leaguewide data from the pitch-tracking era particularly points to the way major league players and teams have chased velocity:

The average four-seam fastball velocity has consistently crept up by 0.1–0.2 mph per year, with a couple jumps of 0.3 mph; while it’s down thus far this year, velocities tend to increase once the weather warms up. The percentage of four-seamers 97 mph or higher more than tripled from 2008–23, and shot up 54% from 2019–23. The average spin rate for four-seamers increased by only about 2% from 2015 — the first year of Statcast — to ’23, and while the average spin rate for all breaking pitches combined increased by about 12% in that span, most of that jump was in the first two seasons. Those spin rates have been pretty consistent since then, but the total volume of breaking balls has increased.

The idea that the pitch clock could be contributing by making pitchers dial up to maximum intensity with less time to recover between pitches has intuitive appeal, but injury rates had already risen before the clock’s introduction last year. As Baseball Prospectus’ Derek Rhoads and Rob Mains noted, the total of 233 pitchers who landed on the injured list last year was about the same as in 2022 (226) and ’21 (243), up from ’19 (192). Likewise for the number of Tommy Johns as measured by year, starting with the day that pitchers and catchers report (as opposed to a calendar year): 28 for last season, compared to 26 for 2022, 31 for ’21, 27 for ’20, and 16 for ’19. In a study published last June, my colleague Dan Szymborski found no meaningful relationship in injury rates with regards to the pitchers whose pace increased the most from 2022 to ’23, at least to that point. The Hopkins study that MLB cited has yet to be published, though it’s hard to believe that the league hasn’t shared its preliminary findings with the union. Notably, Clark did not point to any study that produced a result that reflected his constituency’s concerns.

On the subject of velocity, the link between Strider’s high velo and the propensity for such pitchers to require Tommy John is hard to miss. Of the top 15 starting pitchers in terms of average four-seam fastball velocity from 2021–23, 10 have undergone at least one surgery to repair their UCLs, and Strider is in danger of becoming the fourth to need a second:

Some of those pitchers have had little trouble recovering and maintaining their elite velocities after their first such surgery, but as the sagas of deGrom and Ohtani illustrate, that hardly makes them immune from needing a second procedure. As the big contracts of so many of the pitchers above remind us, velocity gets pitchers paid, and so discouraging them from throwing at maximum effort with such frequency may be a tough sell, particularly when the next guy is willing to do so, damn the consequences.

This is all one big, thorny mess that won’t be solved overnight. The sad fact is that dozens or even hundreds more pitchers will be injured before we see if MLB can introduce meaningful steps to curb injury rates. In the meantime, teams will just turn to the next man up — and if he gets hurt, the next man up after him — to get by.

It’s been an eventful start to the regular season and not all of it good. A rash of injuries to some of the game’s biggest stars has marred the first week and half of play, and a number of teams now have to face the rest of the spring and summer without some of their best players. The conversation around these injuries, particularly those to pitchers, and their root causes has drowned out a lot of the exciting action we’re seeing on the field.

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 now defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution, one that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.

To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing the 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.

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

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The Braves’ strong start has been overshadowed by the news about Spencer Strider’s elbow. After experiencing discomfort on Friday, the right-hander underwent an MRI over the weekend that revealed damage to his UCL; he was placed on the 15-day IL. A course of treatment has yet to be determined, and there’s no specific timeline for his return, but Atlanta should be prepared to play on without him for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, the Braves offense is already firing on all cylinders; they’ve scored nine runs or more in half of their games so far and had a couple of dramatic come-from-behind wins against the Diamondbacks this past weekend.

The Yankees started off the season with a four-game sweep of the Astros in Houston and a pair of series wins against the Diamondbacks and Blue Jays. Juan Soto was sensational during that opening series, and the powerful bats of Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton have provided plenty of pop behind him. So far, the Yankees haven’t missed Gerrit Cole. Luis Gil has done a commendable job filling in for their injured ace, striking out more than a third of the batters he’s faced in two solid starts.

The Astros have gotten off to a pretty lousy start. Their vaunted bullpen has blown leads in half of their games played so far and their offense is still in startup mode. Luckily, they’ve had a few brilliant moments sprinkled in through their misery. In their three wins this season, they’ve allowed a total of four hits, including a no-hitter spun by Ronel Blanco, who followed that performance with another 5.2 innings of no-hit ball on Sunday night.

No matter how good their offense is, the Rangers were always going to face a tough uphill battle during the first half of the season while they waited for their injured starting pitchers to return. At least they’ve gotten off to a hot start, with a pair of series wins over the Cubs and Rays. Unfortunately, they’ll have to keep things going without Josh Jung in the lineup; he broke his wrist a week ago and could be out until the All-Star break. With their two rookie outfielders, Wyatt Langford and Evan Carter, still getting up to speed this season, Texas’ margin for error in the competitive American League West is even slimmer now.

The Guardians have also seen their excellent start to the season marred by terrible injury news. After making two brilliant starts, Shane Bieber tore his UCL and will undergo Tommy John surgery, forcing him to miss the rest of the season. After graduating three of their top pitching prospects to the majors last year, there isn’t really an in-house option ready to step into Bieber’s shoes. The Guardians will have to make do as they try and keep their momentum going in a wide open AL Central race.

It’s hard to argue with the Pirates’ 8-2 start, especially when it was capped off by a pair of walk-off wins against the Orioles this weekend. Their youngsters are having fun, their veterans are producing, and things are looking up in Pittsburgh. And even if the good times come to an end in the near future, the exciting debut of Jared Jones is another reason for optimism. Along with Paul Skenes, Jones should give the Pirates two fantastic starters to anchor their rotation.

The Twins have gotten off to a rough start, one made all the worse by the injury to Royce Lewis on Opening Day. Their lineup just hasn’t been able to hit consistently — Lewis hit one of their three home runs on the season — with Carlos Correa essentially the only batter enjoying any kind of sustained success thus far. That’s a good sign for their star shortstop, but he’ll need help from the rest of the lineup soon.

Likewise, the Rays have struggled in the early going, though it’s their pitching staff that bears the brunt of the blame. The Rays have the third-worst team ERA in the majors thus far, though series against the Rangers and the Rockies in Colorado didn’t help in that regard.

The Mariners have already used a position player to pitch twice if that gives you any indication of how their season has started. It feels like they’re pretty lucky to be 4-6. As a team, they’re striking out at the second-highest rate in the majors, while their ISO is the second lowest. That’s a bad combination, and they’ll need their lineup to wake up soon if they want to keep pace in the AL West.

The Padres wound up losing a dramatic three-game set against the Giants over the weekend thanks to two bullpen meltdowns. Dylan Cease has been great in his first two starts for San Diego and Yu Darvish has been solid, but the rest of the pitching staff looks a little shaky. The lineup looks good, however, with plenty of contributions from both their stars and role players. Fernando Tatis Jr. seems to have put his injury issues behind him and looks like he’s back on the ascendant path he was on a few years ago.

The starting rotation with the second-best park- and league-adjusted ERA and FIP in baseball is none other than the Royals. (Let’s also pause here for a moment and recognize just how good the Red Sox pitching staff has been so far.) Cole Ragans looks like an ace, Brady Singer has spun two brilliant starts, and Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, signed as free agents this offseason, have looked good as well. After losing their first two series by razor thin margins, the Royals swept the White Sox in four games over the weekend.

The Marlins finally got into the win column on Sunday, snapping an 0-9 skid to start the season. Of course, they’re more worried about the health of Eury Pérez; he’s slated to undergo Tommy John surgery and will be sidelined for the season. It’s a brutal blow to a pitching staff that was already missing Sandy Alcantara and two other starters, Edward Cabrera and Braxton Garrett. With reports that manager Skip Schumaker is now a lame duck after his contract option for 2025 was voided this offseason, it’s pretty apparent that this season is already considered lost by the brass in Miami.

Another shoe finally dropped in the ongoing relocation saga in Oakland. While there hasn’t been much progress towards constructing a new stadium in Las Vegas, the Athletics announced that this will be the final year they’ll call Oakland home. The team will be moving to Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park, currently the home of the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, for the next three years (or possibly longer if their new stadium isn’t finished in time). It’s an ugly end to the franchise’s long and storied tenure in the East Bay.

Welcome back to another round of scouting lingo! If you’re new here, be sure to check out the first installment of the pitching visual scouting primer, which includes an introduction to this series, along with parts one, two, and three of the hitting visual scouting primer, to catch up on what I’ve already covered.

In this installment, we’re making our way back to the mound to delve into the rich world of pitch shapes, specifically those of four-seam fastballs. As usual, much of this may be familiar to you, but my hope is that these visual examples can serve as a reference for the various ways we distinguish between different pitch shapes in scouting reports. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

The Red Sox trounced the Angels on Sunday to bring their record to an excellent 8-3 in the early going. But the night before, they lost shortstop Trevor Story to a significant injury that could end his season, when he subluxated his shoulder diving for a grounder. Despite his slow start (67 wRC+), things were looking up for Story. He was fully healthy and at his natural position for the first time since he joined the Red Sox; he had slid over to second upon signing with the team ahead of 2022, when Xander Bogaerts was still around, and played just 43 games last year after undergoing internal brace surgery on a torn UCL in his elbow.

Indeed, Boston entered this season optimistic that Story’s health and production would return. And after offensive anchor Justin Turner left in free agency, the Sox were relying on Story’s righty bat to balance out a heavily left-handed middle of the lineup, which features Rafael Devers, Masataka Yoshida, and Triston Casas. Without Story, that job falls mostly on Tyler O’Neill’s chiseled shoulders.

Story’s injury is the second that Boston’s middle infield will have to weather; offseason acquisition Vaughn Grissom was set to play second base, but he strained his hamstring early in spring training and isn’t expected to be back until late April at the earliest. That leaves a ragtag middle infield, with two more lefties, Enmanuel Valdez at second and David Hamilton at short, expected to see most of the playing time up the middle. Righties Pablo Reyes and Bobby Dalbec will fill in against tough lefties, though the latter is more of a corner infielder. Valdez has been anemic in his first 35 plate appearances this year — his wRC+ is -13 — but he was solid in much more extensive rookie campaign last year, with a 102 wRC+. Hamilton’s start has been the opposite story: He mashed his first homer on Sunday in his first game back up after posting a 25 wRC+ in his first 39 big league plate appearances in 2023.

Both are decent role players and average-ish hitters (Hamilton is a 50-grade hitter, Valdez 45), with Hamilton also possessing blazing speed. But even when Grissom comes back, at least one of them will have to be a bit more than that somewhere on the middle infield. More importantly, O’Neill needs to keep hitting something like he is (I don’t think he’ll keep up his 73-homer pace), and Yoshida needs to get going.

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Unlike the Red Sox, the Nationals are doing what was generally expected of them: playing .333 ball. What does intrigue me, though, is how the defense has been aligned.

Despite keeping Victor Robles around instead of non-tendering him, he was relegated to the bench to start the year, only picking up a couple of starts (one against a lefty, and one with Jesse Winker out due to illness) before hitting the IL after suffering a hamstring injury in that second game. Instead, the Nationals not only rostered two lefty-hitting, outfield-playing non-roster invitees in Winker and Eddie Rosario, but they’re starting them both — with Rosario in center!

Rosario is 32, not fleet of foot (13th-percentile sprint speed), and not a very good outfielder; he was solid last year in left field but graded out negatively there in 2022, and of course center requires covering more ground. Even with Robles hurt and Jacob Young (who profiles more as a fourth outfielder-type) on the roster in his stead, playing Rosario up the middle doesn’t really make much sense. Offseason signee Joey Gallo is only 30, and he is more experienced and has performed better out there than Rosario has in his career — Gallo has five defensive runs saved in 463 innings patrolling center — but he has been relegated to first base entirely so far, with Joey Meneses as the regular designated hitter.

In a vacuum, I can understand why Washington wants to keep Lane Thomas in one spot; he’s the only outfielder on the roster who starts against righties and lefties alike, and his strong arm plays well in right. I can also understand, in a vacuum, wanting Meneses at DH, leaving Gallo (the only other player with extensive experience there) at first; Meneses isn’t a good first baseman! But if those decisions lead to playing an average-at-best left fielder in center field, one of the most consequential defensive positions on the diamond, they’re not the right ones.

…

One position switch that is paying off, though, is Spencer Steer’s multi-season willingness to keep switching positions. Ostensibly, he’s a third baseman; that’s where he played most of his innings in his first big-league action in 2022 and where he started out last year. But when Elly De La Cruz and Matt McLain came up, Steer slid across the diamond to first with Joey Votto sidelined by shoulder surgery. When Votto came back and Christian Encarnacion-Strand came up? No problem, Steer made 13 starts at second and played the outfield for the first time outside of nine innings in 2022.

All that bouncing around in 2023 didn’t affect his bat, as he finished sixth in Rookie of the Year balloting and put up a 118 wRC+. But having a full year of experience at the plate and settling in as the full-time left fielder could have Steer really turning a corner here in 2024. His 237 wRC+ is of course unsustainable, and it’s just nine games, but he’s walking at the same rate of over 10% and striking out less. He also has 10% of last year’s barrel total (three already) in just 6% of the plate appearances.

Adam Cimber is one of those pitchers that you notice, yet don’t spend too much time thinking about. The arm angle catches your attention, but at the same time, the side-slinging right-hander is neither overpowering nor a prolific ninth-inning arm. Working most often in the seventh and eight innings throughout his career, Cimber has a pedestrian mid-80s fastball and a meager 18.0% strikeout rate. Moreover, he’s been credited with just 23 wins and seven saves since debuting with the San Diego Padres in 2018.

Amid little fanfare, and with the exception of an injury-hampered 2023, he’s been one of the most reliable relievers in the game. Now 27 years old and with his fifth team — Cimber signed a free agent deal with the Los Angeles Angels over the winter — the University of Washington product has made 327 appearances, more than all but 13 hurlers during his big-league tenure. Killing a lot of worms along the way — his ground ball rate is north of 51% — he’s logged a 3.46 ERA and a 3.81 FIP over 304 innings.

Speaking to Cimber during spring training, I learned that he began throwing sidearm when he was 14 years old, this at the suggestion of his father, who felt he’d need to do something different if he hoped to make his high school team. Role models included Dan Quisenberry and Kent Tekulve — “my father grew up in that era of baseball, the 1970s and 1980s” — as well as a quartet of more-recent sidearmers and submariners.

“For the longest time it was Darren O’Day, Joe Smith, and Steve Cishek,” said Cimber, who has made four appearances this year and allowed one run in four-and-two-thirds innings. “But the pitcher I grew up watching that really helped me after I dropped down was Brad Ziegler. That was way back in the day. They’re all different in their own way — they went about it in a different way — but it’s always great to learn from guys that went before me.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the earthquake in the Northeast, Juan Soto’s choice of walk-up song, J.J. Hardy building a ballpark in his Arizona backyard, the pluses and minuses of living in or near a ballpark, and how Shohei Ohtani relates to the Tower of Babel, then (1:04:21) answer listener emails about the Moneyball A’s vs. the 116-win Mariners, Joey Votto and players’ skill with cursive script, how long a ceremonial first pitch thrower could potentially delay a game, the value of consistently throwing from multiple arm slots, and how much better a team would be if its opponents knew nothing about it in advance.

Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: The Gagnés, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to NYT on the earthquake
Link to Gleyber’s BP
Link to Soto song tweet
Link to “Empire State of Mind”
Link to Correa Dior store quote
Link to Hardy yardwork report
Link to Olerud tree story
Link to Target Field view
Link to Minneapolis apartment building
Link to converted Indianapolis ballpark
Link to Indy stadium lofts
Link to converted Osaka Stadium
Link to The Athletic on the Dodgers ball
Link to Dodgers follow-up article
Link to Ohtani video clip
Link to Ireton profile
Link to Tower of Babel wiki
Link to Votto tweet
Link to NPR on cursive
Link to The Atlantic on cursive
Link to NYT on cursive
Link to Rangers first pitch
Link to Padres exhibition game
Link to Ben on rookie pitcher comments
Link to research on MLB debuts
Link to listener emails database
Link to Strider article
Link to Ben on pitcher injuries
Link to info on “misles”
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

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