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.
As I continue to meticulously make my way through the prospect lists (Cincinnati is next), I’ve pushed all the scouting reports for rookies who are currently on National League active rosters live to The Board. These reports often include updated notes from this spring. The American League guys went up earlier in the week. Today’s players are:
Though they made the playoffs last year for just the fourth time in franchise history, the Marlins’ chances of repeating that feat took a pair of significant hits even before the World Series began. First Sandy Alcantaraunderwent Tommy John surgery, and then just over a week later, general manager Kim Ng departed after owner Bruce Sherman announced his intent to move her down the pecking order. Following a very quiet offseason and a rash of pitcher injuries this spring, the Marlins are off to their worst start in franchise history at 0-8, making them the majors’ only team without a win. Adding injury to insult, on Thursday the team announced that Eury Pérez would undergo Tommy John surgery as well.
The loss of Pérez is a serious gut punch, particularly given Miami’s efforts to monitor his workload. Signed out of the Dominican Republic for a $200,000 bonus on July 2, 2019, he rocketed through the minors, growing from 6-foot-5 and 155 pounds to 6-foot-8 and 220 pounds by last spring, when he placed fourth on our Top 100 Prospects list while still seven weeks shy of his 20th birthday. After striking out 42 hitters across 31 innings in six starts at Double-A Pensacola, he was called up by the Marlins. He debuted on May 12, made 11 major league starts, then spent most of July and early August back at Pensacola so the team could limit his innings. After returning to the majors on August 7, he wasn’t as effective, and was shut down following his September 20 start due to inflammation in his sacroiliac joint. He finished his rookie season with a 3.15 ERA, 4.11 FIP, and a 28.9% strikeout rate in 91.1 innings. His four-seam fastball averaged 97.5 mph and touched triple digits a handful of times, while his slider, curve, and changeup each produced whiff rates of 46.2% or better and xwOBAs of .227 or lower. That’s a recipe for dominance.
As that midseason interlude suggests, the Marlins handled Pérez with care. He threw just 78 innings split between two levels of A-ball in 2021 and 77 innings (all but two at Double-A) in ’22. He never threw more than six innings or 93 pitches in any of his professional starts and broke 90 in just three at the major league level. Fourteen of his 19 major league starts were made on five or six days of rest, with only five on four days. He threw a total of 128 innings last year, and the Marlins planned to limit his innings this year as well, though they hadn’t publicly disclosed the target.
Pérez was slowed early in the spring by a broken nail on his right middle finger, which forced him to exit his Grapefruit League starts on March 2 and March 13. After the latter, he reported soreness in his elbow and underwent an MRI. The Marlins soon decided he would begin the season on the injured list due to mild elbow inflammation, though they didn’t shut him down from throwing. After experiencing elbow tightness that cut short a bullpen session on Tuesday, he made a second visit to Dr. Keith Meister, who recommended surgery.
Apparently, Pérez had gotten something less than a fully clean bill of health at his previous visit. Here’s what Marlins president of baseball operations Peter Bendix told reporters on Thursday:
“It’s been a bit of a roller coaster… Initially having the frustration of the elbow soreness and followed by the positive outlook on you don’t need surgery right now. There was an understanding that the ligament was not in great shape and essentially, you can pitch with it until you can’t, and nobody knows when that’s going to be. You have to try and see when the symptoms return. And unfortunately, that happened now. Better now than in the middle of the season.”
Ugh. For as careful as the Marlins were, some arms just don’t stand up to throwing in the high-90s 40 or 50 times a night. Pérez will undergo surgery and miss all of this season and likely a good chunk of 2025. Unfortunately, his injury is just the latest in a wave of them among Miami starters dating back to last fall, a significant blow even to a franchise whose strength in recent years has been founded in its deep stockpile of young arms. From 2018–23 — a time period that dates back to the arrivals of Alcantara and Pablo López — no team has even come close to the 35.0 WAR generated by Marlins starters in their age-25 or younger seasons, with the Guardians second in the majors at 27.9. The gap is even larger if you shorten that window; those starters’ 28.2 WAR from 2020–23 is 11.1 more than the second-ranked Mariners.
The thing about young pitchers is that keeping them healthy is as challenging as herding cats. Alcantara won the 2022 NL Cy Young on the strength of a 2.28 ERA, 2.99 FIP, and 207 strikeouts in 228.2 innings, the highest total by any pitcher in six years, but he took a step backwards last year in terms of stuff and performance. He threw 184.2 innings with a 4.14 ERA and 4.03 FIP before being shut down in early September with what was initially diagnosed as a flexor strain. After reporting renewed tightness in his forearm following a September 21 rehab start, he was diagnosed with a sprained ulnar collateral ligament, and underwent surgery on October 6.
As Michael Baumann detailed a couple weeks ago, this spring 26-year-old lefty Braxton Garrett and 25-year-old righty Edward Cabrera both joined Alcantara and Pérez on the sidelines, though thankfully they’re on their way back. Garrett, who made 30 starts and threw 159.2 innings last year with a 3.66 ERA and 3.68 FIP, showed up to camp with a sore shoulder. He’s scheduled to begin a rehab assignment with Triple-A Jacksonville on Sunday and will probably need at least two starts to build up his pitch count before joining the Marlins. Cabrera, who made 20 starts and threw 99.2 innings for the Marlins with a 4.24 ERA and 4.43 FIP, was scratched from his March 10 start due to shoulder tightness and was diagnosed with an impingement, a condition that cost him a month last year. He’s already made one 43-pitch rehab start for Jacksonville and is scheduled for a second on Friday, with a third likely to follow.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that these outages have allowed for the major league returns of a couple pitchers we haven’t seen enough of lately, namely 25-year-old righty Max Meyer and 26-year-old lefty Trevor Rogers. The third pick of the 2020 draft out of the University of Minnesota, Meyer reached the majors just two years later but started just twice before tearing his UCL and undergoing Tommy John surgery on August 9, 2022. He hadn’t pitched in another competitive game until Monday, when he threw five innings and allowed two runs against the Angels. Rogers, who made the NL All-Star team in 2021 but slipped to a 5.47 ERA in ’22, was limited to four starts last year due to biceps and latissimus dorsi strains. His March 31 start didn’t go great, as he allowed four runs in five innings against the Pirates, but he lived to tell the tale.
Also checking in for the first time since 2020 is righty Sixto Sánchez, who’s now 25 years old. Sanchez made seven starts totaling 39 innings with a 3.46 ERA for the Marlins in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, then missed all of the next two seasons due to shoulder surgeries, first a posterior capsule repair in July ’21 and then a bursectomy in October ’22. After rehabbing he closed the 2023 season by throwing a single inning for Pensacola on September 12. Out of options, he made the team as a reliever thanks to an impressive spring training, but he’s been scored upon in all three of his appearances thus far. On Thursday against the Cardinals, he retired just one of four batters he faced, with Paul Goldschmidt reaching base on a Luis Arraez error, and Nolan Arenado and Iván Herrera following with singles. All three runners eventually scored, turning a 5-3 lead into a 6-5 deficit; Sánchez was charged with the loss. While his four-seamer was clocked as high as 98.2 mph in his March 28 debut, he maxed out at 94.2 mph in his next appearance two days later, and at 95.2 on Thursday. It’s great to see him back, but it could be a bumpy ride.
For as welcome as all these returns have been, the Marlins’ staff is carrying a 6.00 ERA (27th in the majors) and 4.94 FIP (24th), this after the rotation and bullpen respectively ranked 10th and 14th in our preseason positional power rankings, accounting for two of the three spots where they landed in the majors’ upper half; center field, where Jazz Chisholm Jr. and friends ranked 12th, is the other. Thus far the starters (Rogers, Meyer, Jesús Luzardo, A.J. Puk, and Ryan Weathers) have combined for a 5.35 ERA and 4.76 FIP, with Puk, who had previously spent the entirety of his career in the bullpen, getting rocked for a 9.00 ERA and 5.76 FIP in a total of just six innings in his first two starts. The bullpen has a 6.50 ERA and 5.10 FIP, and ranks in the majors’ bottom third in walks (11.6%), strikeouts (19.6%), and home runs (1.36 per nine). Closer Tanner Scott hasn’t had a single save opportunity yet, but has been charged with two losses; entering in the 10th inning on March 31 against the Pirates, he bobbled a leadoff sacrifice bunt and gave up two runs, and then the next day against the Angels, entered a tied game at the start of the eighth inning and walked Anthony Rendon, Nolan Schanuel, and Mike Trout before generating a groundout that brought home the go-ahead run.
The Marlins’ offense hasn’t helped, scoring just 3.63 runs per game and hitting a combined .204/.276/.313; their 60 wRC+ is 28th in the majors. Jake Burger is their only batter with a wRC+ above 92 or a WAR above zero, and even Arraez is hitting just .188/.316/.219.
Maybe Bendix, whom the Marlins hired away from the Rays after a 15-year run in Tampa Bay, the last two as GM, should have upgraded an offense that ranked dead last in the NL in scoring (4.11 runs per game) and 10th in wRC+ (94). He signed just one major league free agent all winter: Tim Anderson, who inked a one-year, $5 million deal after a dismal end to his eight-year run with the White Sox. He didn’t do anything to replace slugger Jorge Soler, whose 36 homers led the team and whose 126 wRC+ ranked third, after he opted out. Bendix has made just three trades since taking the reins, acquiring utilityman Vidal Bruján and righty reliever Calvin Faucher from the Rays in exchange for a trio of prospects in November, adding Nick Gordon from the Twins in exchange for lefty reliever Steven Okert in February, and — taking advantage of Brujan’s and Gordon’s versatility — dealing everyday utilityman Jon Berti to the Yankees last week. Miami’s current $99 million payroll ranks 25th according to RosterResource.
That minimal upkeep follows last fall’s drama. Ng presided over the Marlins’ first full season above .500 since 2009 with a team that made the playoffs despite having just a $110 million payroll, the majors’ eighth-lowest and the lowest of the six NL teams that made the postseason. But instead of granting her the latitude to expand and reshape the front office under her own vision, cutting ties with holdovers in the scouting and player development department that she didn’t mesh with, Sherman planned to bring in a president of baseball operations above her, which wasn’t what she had in mind. She declined her end of a mutual option for 2024, ending her groundbreaking three-year run. Bendix did fortify the front office by bringing in former Giants manager Gabe Kapler as an assistant GM, former Yankees Single-A affiliate manager Rachel Balkovec as director of player development, and former Rangers assistant direct of baseball operations Vinesh Kanthan as director of baseball ops, but when set against his management of the roster of a team that had playoff hopes, it looks like another cycle of kicking the can down the road.
Indeed, given this start — which not only has doubled the Marlins’ previous longest season-opening losing streak (from both 1995 and 2001) but also ranks as the majors’ longest since 2016 — more trades are likely in the offing if the losing continues, as The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal detailed earlier this week. Scott is a pending free agent, as is Josh Bell, who at $16.5 million is the team’s highest-paid player, but Bendix could look to make impact moves by dealing Arraez, who has one more year of arbitration eligibility, as well as Luzardo, who has two. It’s all par for the course in Miami. As we’ve seen throughout the history of the Marlins, regardless of owners, executives, or high-quality young players, this is a franchise where nothing good ever lasts long.
Today, we’ve made some changes to Wins Above Replacement that completes the move from UZR to the full suite of Statcast equivalent metrics in FanGraphs WAR. This process began in 2022, when we replaced UZR’s range component with Statcast’s Fielding Runs Prevented, which is Outs Above Average (OAA) converted to runs above average. UZR will continue to be calculated on FanGraphs through the end of the 2025 season. Today’s changes are retroactive to the 2016 season. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the triumphant return of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, the longest-named column in baseball. Rogers Hornsby famously stared out his window all winter waiting for baseball to return. I can’t claim to have done the same, but I’m still overjoyed it’s back, and what better way to celebrate than by talking about some weird and delightful things that caught my eye while I soaked in baseball’s opening week? As always, this column is inspired by Zach Lowe’s basketball column of a similar name, which I read religiously.
1. Non-Elite Defenders Making Elite Defensive Plays
Great defenders make great plays. I’m sure you can picture Nolan Arenado making a do-or-die barehanded throw or Kevin Kiermaier tracking down a line drive at a full sprint. That’s why those guys are such storied defenders; they make the exceptional seem expected. There are plenty of other players in baseball, though, and many of them make the exceptional seem, well, exceptional. When someone you wouldn’t expect turns in a web gem, it feels all the better, and this week had a ton of them.
That was brilliant, and it came at the perfect time. Plenty has already been written about it, but that doesn’t make it less impressive. Soto is at best an average outfielder and likely worse than that, and his arm is one of the weaker parts of his game. But he’s capable of brilliance out there from time to time, particularly when accuracy matters, and this one delivered.
But there were so many more! How about Brett Baty doing his best Arenado (or Ke’Bryan Hayes, shout out to the real best third base defender) impression on a tough grounder:
That’s phenomenal work. The combination of a weakly hit ball and fast runner meant that Baty had to make every instant count. Any wasted movement on a gather or pivot would’ve made Matt Vierling safe. This wasn’t your normal plant your feet and make a strong throw kind of out; Baty was either going to fire off balance or eat the ball. Check out his footwork, courtesy of the always-excellent SNY camera crew:
That throw came against his momentum and with his left leg completely airborne. As an added bonus, fellow lightly regarded defender Pete Alonso received the throw perfectly. Baty was a top prospect because of his hitting. If he keeps making plays like this, we might have to tear up that old scouting report.
Speaking of prospects who aren’t known for their fielding, Jordan Walker was one of the worst outfield defenders in baseball last year – understandable for a 21-year-old learning a new position in the major leagues. He’s fast and has a powerful throwing arm, so the building blocks are there, but the numbers don’t lie: He was out of his element in the outfield.
Maybe this year is different, though:
Simply put, that’s a great play. Jackson Merrill’s liner was headed toward the gap, which meant that Walker had to come in almost perpendicular to the ball to make a play. A bad step early in the route likely would’ve left him high and dry. But he got it right and turned a double into an out.
These guys won’t always make the right plays. In fact, they often won’t. That only makes it more fun when they nail it. Even bad major league defenders are capable of brilliance. Stars – they’re absolutely nothing like us!
2. Location, Location, Location
Pop ups are death for hitters. Infield pop ups are particularly so. Every other type of hit has some chance of finding a hole, but the combination of short distance and long hangtime mean that if you hit the ball straight up and it doesn’t go far, you’re going to be out. Batters hit .006/.006/.006 on infield fly balls from 2021 through 2023 – 12,583 pop ups led to 74 hits. You generally need some wild wind, a collision, or perhaps an overzealous pitcher trying to field for himself to have any shot at a hit. Mostly, though, it just turns into an out.
So far, 2024 has had other ideas. In the first five days of games, two infield pop ups turned into singles. One even turned into a double. It’s silly season for bad contact, in other words. It all started with Eddie Rosario:
That’s one of the hardest-hit infield pop ups of the year, one of only two hit at 95 mph or harder. That meant that the Reds had all day to camp under it, but unfortunately for them, it was a windy day in Cincinnati on Saturday. Gameday reported 17 mph winds from right to left, and you can see Santiago Espinal and Christian Encarnacion-Strand struggle to track the ball. If your infield pop up is going to drop, that’s a common way for it to happen.
Another unlikely but possible option is to hit the ball extremely softly, as Matt Carpenter demonstrated on April Fool’s Day:
That was a pop up, but it didn’t go very far up. With the infield playing at medium depth and Graham Pauley guarding third base after an earlier bunt single (yeah, Carpenter had quite a day), there was just no time to get to it. Maybe Matt Waldron could have made a play, but pitchers generally stay out of the way on balls like those for good reason. Even then, it would have required going over the mound and making a running basket catch. Sometimes, your pop ups just land in the exact right spot.
But wait, there’s one more. This one was a real doozy by René Pinto, also on April 1:
This one is the last pop up hit archetype: a Trop ball. There’s no wind in Tampa Bay’s domed stadium, but there is a blindingly white roof. White, conveniently enough, is the color of a baseball. So when you really sky one, as the Rays catcher did here, things can get dicey.
How easy of a play was this? In some ways, it was phenomenally easy. After all, five different fielders had time to converge on the ball, and Corey Seager easily could have made it there if he weren’t covering third. That ball hung in the air for more than six seconds, plenty of time for everyone to judge it. It didn’t carry very far, and there was no pitcher’s mound to stumble on.
Leaguewide, hits like this are the least likely of any pop up to land. Even at the Trop, batters are hitting only .011/.011/.011 on them in the Statcast era. But in other ways, it’s not a probability but a binary. This was Jonah Heim’s ball, but he just plain couldn’t see it:
From there, it was academic. And the Rangers’ diligence in heading for the ball meant that no one was covering second, so Pinto got to jog an extra 90 feet with no one stopping him. That might be the slowest home to first time on an in-play double that I’ve ever seen. That screenshot up above was only a few seconds before the ball landed, and Pinto was still near home plate.
In the long run, these things will even out. Most infield fly balls get caught. But sometimes things get really weird – and weirdness can be sublime. Naturally, Yandy Díaz smoked the next pitch for a 331-foot frozen rope – and made the last out of the game. What a sport.
3. Oneil Cruz Is Chaotic, and Good
I watched Saturday’s Pirates-Marlins tilt closely to write about Jared Jones, but my eyes kept straying. Catch a Pittsburgh game, and I’m pretty sure you’ll feel the same way. Oneil Cruz isn’t always the best player on the field. Sometimes, in fact, he’s a hindrance for Pittsburgh’s chances. But one thing you can never say is that he’s boring.
When Cruz is on the basepaths, his speed means trouble. For who? It’s not always clear, because he’s aggressive to a fault. When he’s on third base and the ball is hit on the ground, you better believe he’s going home:
I think that was a good decision, but it’s close. A perfect throw from Josh Bell probably gets him there; Bell had already thrown out Michael A. Taylor at the plate on a similar play earlier in the game, for example. But the throw wasn’t quite perfect, and Christian Bethancourt couldn’t corral it anyway. Cruz would have been safe even if Bethancourt caught it cleanly, but the ball rolled to the backstop to bring in another run.
In the long run, pressure like that tends to pay off, at least in my opinion. Taylor would have been out at first if Cruz didn’t go for it, and the difference between second and third with two outs (Cruz stays) and first and third with two outs (Cruz tries for home and makes an out) isn’t particularly huge. Sure, it’s a chaotic play, but it’s a positive for the Pirates.
Cruz’s defense is a work in progress, but no one can doubt his tools. Sometimes he’ll make a mess of a play that should be easy:
I’m not in love with his decision to stay back on that ball, but Jesús Sánchez is slow enough that it all should have worked out anyway. But staying back meant Cruz had to crow hop and fire a laser to first. He has a huge arm, but it’s not the most accurate, as you can see here. A different setup would have made that play far easier.
On the other hand, sometimes he’ll make a mess out of a play, only to recover because of that cannon arm. This is definitely not how Tom Emanski would teach it:
Cruz handcuffed himself on the initial attempt; instead of being able to make a clean backhanded pick, he got stuck with the ball coming straight at him and flubbed the scoop. For most players, that would be the end of the play, even with a catcher running. But Cruz has a get out of jail free card: He can pick the ball up barehanded and then unleash havoc. The NL Central has a ton of big shortstop arms: Masyn Winn set the tracked record for an infield assist at the Futures Game last summer, and Elly De La Cruz is no slouch. But Cruz might have them both beat when he can set his feet and get into one. Even flat-footed, that throw got on Connor Joe in a hurry.
This game had a ton of Cruz action; not every Pirates game is like that. I watched Monday’s Pirates-Nats tilt hoping for an encore, but Cruz held onto a ball rather than attempt to turn an outrageous double play and was restrained on the basepaths. At the plate, he’s striking out so much that hard contact is barely keeping him on the right side of a 100 wRC+. His trajectory in the majors is still extremely uncertain. Still, I’m going to keep tuning in and hoping for some excitement. You never know what will happen next when Cruz is on the field.
4. The White Sox Get Feisty
It’s going to be a rough season on the south side. The White Sox are a bad team, they don’t have any obvious reinforcements in sight, and they got swept in the season-opening series against the Tigers. The Braves were due up next – after treating the White Sox like a de facto farm system over the winter – and Atlanta romped to a 9-0 rain-shortened victory Monday.
Tuesday promised more of the same. The temperature at game time was a miserable 44 degrees. Remarkably, 12,300 courageous fans showed up, but not all of them were there for the home team. After all, rooting for a club that seems likely to get battered by the best team in baseball on a frigid Tuesday night doesn’t sound particularly appealing, so a meaningful percentage of the audience was audibly cheering for Atlanta. Things were looking grim, in other words.
Something funny happened, though. The White Sox and their fans made a game out of it. Garrett Crochet spun an absolute gem in his second start of the season: seven innings, eight strikeouts, one walk, and one lone run on a Marcell Ozuna homer. When pinch hitter Paul DeJong smacked a solo shot of his own, it gave Chicago a 2-1 lead with only two frames left to play.
That set the stage for an explosive finish. Almost immediately, Atlanta threatened again. Jarred Kelenic worked a one-out walk in the top of the eighth, bringing Ronald Acuña Jr. to the plate. “MVP! MVP!” The Atlanta fans in attendance made their presence known as Acuña worked a walk to put the tying run in scoring position.
But Chicago’s fans, few though they might be, weren’t going quietly. They drowned out the MVP chant in a series of boos, then started a “Let’s go White Sox” cheer as a counter. After a sleepy start, the game suddenly had some juice.
Michael Kopech came in to relieve John Brebbia after that walk, and he promptly walked Ozzie Albies to load the bases. But Yoán Moncada turned a slick double play to keep the Pale Hose out in front. The dugout loved it:
The Sox tacked on an insurance run in the bottom of the eighth, and it turned out they needed it. Kopech had a tough time closing things out. Ozuna smashed his second solo shot to cut the lead to 3-2 before Kopech walked Michael Harris II after an extended plate appearance in which Harris fouled off a string of high fastballs and spit on a low slider. Orlando Arcia wouldn’t go down quietly, either. Kopech again missed with the one slider he threw, and Arcia eventually slapped a cutter through the infield to put the tying run in scoring position for the second inning in a row.
Was this fated to be a crushing loss? Kopech couldn’t find the zone against Travis d’Arnaud, falling behind 3-1 with four straight elevated fastballs. The slider was totally gone; perhaps the adrenaline that came with the potential for his first big league save was too much. The crowd and players were rowdy now, treating this early April game like one with huge implications. Boos rained down after not particularly close pitches got called balls. Braves fans tried to start their own cheers but got repeatedly drowned out by the Sox faithful.
With Acuña on deck, walking d’Arnaud was unacceptable. Kopech tickled the strike zone on 3-1, which brought it all down to a full count pitch. He hit his spot perfectly, and d’Arnaud could only pop it up:
The crowd roared. The lights dimmed as fireworks went off. Kopech looked relieved more than excited as the team celebrated around him. For a day, at least, Chicago’s best was enough to hold off the best team in baseball.
This isn’t how the year will go for the White Sox. They’re headed straight into a rebuild with an unpopular ownership and front office group. I’m not sure that the fans will be able to muster up the same excitement for a July tilt against the Pirates. For a day, though, the atmosphere felt electric and the underdogs came up big. What a magical sport that lets us find moments of excitement even in seasons of despair.
5. Nolan Jones Tries To Do Too Much Nolan Jones is one of my favorite young players to watch. He’s what you’d get if you took a garden variety power hitting outfielder and stapled a bazooka to his right arm. His outfield defense is below average if you ignore his throws, but you can’t ignore throws. Statcast has him in the 100th percentile for arm strength and runs saved with his arm; in other words, he’s a highlight reel waiting to happen when he picks the ball up. He had 19 outfield assists last year in less than 800 innings, leading baseball while playing 500 fewer innings than second place Lane Thomas.
This year, things haven’t gone quite so well. Jones already has more errors than he did in all of last season. One sequence against the Cubs summed up what I think is going wrong. Everyone knows Jones has a cannon, and so when Christopher Morel singled to left, Ian Happ wasn’t thinking about trying to score from second base:
That’s just smart baserunning. There’s no point in testing the best arm in the game when he’s running toward the ball from a shallow starting position. Only, did you see what happened out in left? Let’s zoom in:
Jones planned to come up firing. He absolutely didn’t need to; as we saw, Happ had already slammed on the brakes. But if you have the best arm in the game, every play probably feels like a chance to throw someone out, the old “every problem looks like a nail to a hammer” issue. He tried to make an infield-style scoop on the run and paid for it. That’s a particularly big error given the game state and location on the field; there’s no one backing Jones up there, and with only one out, it’s not *that* valuable to keep the runner at third anyway.
The ball rolled all the way to the wall, which was bad enough. Happ and trail runner Seiya Suzuki both scored easily. But Jones compounded the error. Let’s see what happened next from Morel’s perspective:
Like Happ, Morel slammed on the brakes as he got to third. After all, Jones has a huge arm and there’s still only one out, so trying to squeeze in the last 90 feet doesn’t make that much sense. Even with his eyes on the play the whole time, he decelerated to a stop. But Jones overcooked his relay throw:
I’m not quite clear about what happened there. That was a situation for a lollipop; the play was over, and all he had to do was return the ball to the infield. Maybe he got a bad grip on the ball, maybe he slipped as he was throwing it, but he just spiked it into the ground and Ryan McMahon couldn’t handle the wild carom.
This feels to me like a clear case of Jones trying to do too much. He appears to be pressing, trying to throw the world out after last year’s phenomenal performance. But part of having a huge arm is knowing when you don’t need to use it. That experience comes with time, and I’m confident that he’ll figure it out, but his aggression has hurt the Rockies so far. Oh, and those other errors? Sometimes you just miss one:
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.
Injuries are unfortunately nothing new in Josh Jung’s short major league career. The Rangers third baseman emerged during the first half of last season as one of baseball’s top young talents until a fractured thumb in early August kept him out of action for six weeks and limited him to 122 games. His overall numbers — 110 wRC+ and 2.5 WAR — were strong enough for him to finish fourth in the AL Rookie of the Year balloting despite a rough final stretch upon his return; he had a 38 wRC+ in his 54 plate appearances to close out the regular season. He rebounded just in time for the postseason, hitting three home runs and posting a 128 wRC+ in 70 plate appearances as he helped lead Texas to the franchise’s first World Series championship.
Despite missing almost all of spring training with a calf strain, Jung looked poised to take another step forward in 2024, coming out of the gates hot with a .412/.474/.941 batting line in his first 19 plate appearances. But regrettably, that potential breakout came to a crashing halt on Monday when Jung was hit by a pitch at which he swung and broke his wrist. The injury requires surgery that could keep him out of action for six to 10 weeks.
The Rangers, who over the last two offseasons decided not to significantly augment their offense through trades and free agency, have interesting internal options to fill in for Jung. Infielder Justin Foscue was called up from Triple-A earlier this week when Jung was placed on the injured list. Foscue, who can also play first and second, is not a premier prospect, but he grades out as a 70 hitter and has walked more than he’s struck out at Triple-A, making for a high-floor hitter who can slide in nicely at the bottom of the order. For now at least, it looks like he and Ezequiel Duran will be on the short side of platoons in the corner infield with first baseman Jared Walsh, who is filling in for the injured Nathaniel Lowe, and Josh Smith at third.
Jung’s injury is a big blow for a Texas team that was relying on its potent lineup to carry the load while four of its starting pitchers — Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, Tyler Mahle, and Michael Lorenzen — work their way back from injuries of their own. That was never going to be easy in the competitive American League West, but the Rangers had the offensive talent to make it work. They were banking on Jung to build upon his solid rookie campaign, top prospect Wyatt Langford to make an immediate impact, and Corey Seager, Marcus Semien, and Adolis García to play up to their All-Star pedigrees. Instead, with Lowe and now Jung hurt, the Rangers are not at full strength on either side of the ball. Their margin for error in the playoff race, which was already expected to be thin, just got even smaller.
…
The Mets have unmatched vibes thus far this season, and I don’t mean that in a good way. Fortunately for them, they scratched out a win in game two of their doubleheader against the Tigers on Thursday at Citi Field despite being no-hit into the eighth inning. But they’re still a 1-5 team that has been rained out three times already this year.
That said, I’m not here to talk about the Mets coming out of the gate colder than any team besides the Marlins; I’m here to talk about Julio Teheran. The veteran right-hander debuted in 2011, and since then he’s pitched in every major league season except for 2022. While he’ll probably always be best known for his nine seasons in Atlanta, he’s bounced around quite a bit after leaving the Braves. He pitched 10 atrocious games for the Angels in 2020, made one start for the Tigers in 2021 before going down with injury, and delivered 71.2 perfectly decent innings (0.3 WAR) with the Brewers last year.
With that underwhelming of a recent track record combined with his age (33) and lack of stuff (his sinker averaged under 90 mph last year), it was surprising to see the Mets sign him to a $2.5 million contract for the remainder of the season, even though he couldn’t make the Orioles out of spring training. With the Mets in the highest tax bracket, the $2.5 million contract will effectively cost them $5.25 million, assuming he’s a Met for the entire season.
But the Mets have the financial muscle to flex, and they’ll continue to make moves like this ad infinitum as long as Steve Cohen will sign the checks. Teheran is an entirely unsexy pitcher, but he gives the Mets something that teams need more and more desperately in each successive season: relatively high-floor innings. He’s probably not better than prospects like Christian Scott and José Buttó — and, frankly, I probably would have just gone with one of those two instead — but depth isn’t a bad thing, even if one has to overpay for it. (Teheran will cost the Mets more, including taxes, than the Rangers will pay Michael Lorenzen.) As the Mets look to rebound from a rough start without ace Kodai Senga, they’re taking the quantity approach to pitching, and pitchers like Teheran go a long way in solving the season-long innings puzzle.
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Athletics’ intermediate move to Sacramento, the Royals’ failed public funding referendum, a Davis Schneider self scouting report, a wild Diamondbacks-Yankees game that ended with a pitcher at the plate, whether a DH day is really like a partial day off, whether the Triple-A Norfolk Tides are better than the Colorado Rockies, Josh Jung and when to classify a player as “injury-prone,” Eury Pérez’s Tommy John surgery and MLB’s study on pitcher injuries, and an incandescent start by Mookie Betts, plus a few follow-ups.
We’ve known for almost a year that the Oakland Athletics are moving to Las Vegas. Eventually. Someday. And every excruciating step of that process has dominated the news.
Team and city waged a years-long cold war over the construction of a new Bay Area stadium, plans for which finally fell through last year. That tipped off 12 months of open conflict with fans and government in both Oakland and Nevada, stemming from the inconvenient reality that even if the club could finance a stadium in Sin City, it would not be ready before the team’s lease at the Coliseum expired at the end of the 2024 season.
After mooting various solutions, including a stopover in Salt Lake City or the world’s most awkward stadium lease extension, John Fisher’s club is headed for Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, currently home of the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, the Sacramento River Cats.
With a new baseball season comes a fresh set of box scores to pick apart daily, but the ink on the first one wasn’t even dry, so to speak, when it lodged itself in my brain at an ungodly early hour on March 20 and stuck there like a flashing neon sign: EIGHT SHORTSTOPS! On Opening Day in Seoul against the Dodgers, the Padres fielded a lineup that except for its battery of Yu Darvish and Luis Campusano was entirely made up of shortstops past and present; by contrast the Dodgers had resorted to placing six-time Gold Glove-winning right fielder Mookie Betts at short to accommodate their own uneven roster. To this baseball-addled mind, it felt like a collision of four decades worth of reading about scouting philosophies and sabermetrics, from Dollar Sign on the Muscle and Future Value through Bill James’ defensive spectrum and the basic construction of WAR, with its positional adjustments. It took a remarkable confluence of circumstances to arrive at this arrangement, which to be fair was never intended to be permanent, though manager Mike Shildt has used that same lineup more often than any other since then.
Shortstops tend to be some of the most gifted and athletic players on the diamond. As Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel put it in Future Value, the requirements for the position include “an above-average arm, plus speed/range, plus footwork, and average hands/action.” A very high percentage of right-handed players were shortstops at some point as amateurs; indeed, playing the position at that stage is “a strong indication of a player’s all-around athleticism,” as Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper wrote last month when noting the Padres’ increasing stockpile. Most of those amateur shortstops migrate across the defensive spectrum to less demanding positions as their bodies grow and they progress through the minors and into the majors, with the development of their offensive skills helping to determine where they might find homes. As James observed long ago, the more difficult the defensive position, the lower the bar for offensive production.
Here’s the lineup in question:
Making (Pretty Much) the Whole Team Out of Shortstops
* = Total games at shortstop in KBO League, not affiliated minor leagues
That’s a collection of parts that don’t yet look like they make up a whole. The lineup shows the contours of the boom-and-bust cycle weathered by general manager A.J. Preller, who has committed nearly $1 billion to Machado (11 years, $350 million after the six-time All-Star opted out of his original 10-year, $300 million deal), Tatis (14 years, $340 million), and Bogaerts (11 years, $280 million) alone. While the Padres reached the NLCS in 2022 after knocking off both the 101-win Mets and 111-win Dodgers, Preller’s vision hasn’t translated into full-blown success; after winning just 82 games with a club record $255 million payroll ($280 million for tax purposes) in 2023, he’s been forced to retool — most notably by dealing away late-’22 acquisition Juan Soto — and may be nearing the end of his rope.
Long story short, Preller invested a whole lot of money while packing the Padres’ roster not just with stars, but with stars of a certain type (most of them in line with the trend toward increasingly large but athletic men playing the position), then moving them around as they began to crowd each other. With the team now stretched thin, he’s filling in the gaps with light-hitting utilitymen and an interesting experiment. It’s worth a look at how the Padres got to this point.
The Fringe Guys
Likely the most transient member of this lineup is Wade. A former Yankees prospect, he grazed the Baseball Prospectus Top 101 Prospects list at no. 101 in 2017, following a .259/.352/.349 season at Double-A Trenton and then a stint in the Arizona Fall League learning to play the outfield. Vice president of player development Gary Denbo and others in the organization envisioned Wade as the Yankees’ answer to superutilitymen Ben Zobrist and Brock Holt, but his complete lack of power and failure to make consistent contact prevented him from realizing that lofty goal. Seven years and four DFAs later, the 29-year-old lefty swinger is the owner of a career .220/.297/.302 (68 wRC+) batting line with a 1.7% barrel rate and 24.7% strikeout rate in 726 plate appearances. Signed to a minor league deal in November after getting just 55 PA with the 112-loss A’s last year, Wade has started five of the Padres’ nine games at third base in place of Machado, who’s still recovering from October surgery to repair his right extensor tendon in his elbow. Of the four games Wade hasn’t started, two apiece have been started by 24-year-old righty rookie Eguy Rosario (who has pinch-hit for Wade three times and who himself has played 130 minor league games at shortstop) and 23-year-old lefty-swinging third base prospect Graham Pauley, who finished last season with 20 games at Double-A, but whose infield defense was described as “currently untenable.”
Also on the fringe is Profar, who goes further back with Preller than any other Padre, having been signed out of Curaçao by the Rangers on July 2, 2009, when Preller was the team’s director of professional and international scouting. By 2013, the 20-year-old Profar was the game’s top prospect, but with a trio of All-Stars — Ian Kinsler, Elvis Andrus, and Adrián Beltré — blocking his path to regular playing time in the Texas infield, he was limited to utility duty as a rookie. His trajectory shifted once he lost nearly two full years to right shoulder injuries, first a torn teres major that cost him all of 2014, then a torn labrum that required surgery and limited him to a rehab stint in late ’15. He’s tasted only intermittent success since, finishing with least a 100 wRC+ and 1.0 WAR just three times in the last seven years while more or less playing himself out of the infield; in 2022–23, he logged one inning at second base and 151.1 at first.
After hitting 15 homers with a 111 wRC+ and a career-high 2.5 WAR in 2022, Profar opted out of the final year of his three-year, $21 million deal with the Padres, then went unsigned into mid-March ’23 before catching on with the Rockies. His season was such a disaster that the team released him in late August, and while he enjoyed a bit of September success upon being picked up by San Diego, he finished with a 76 wRC+ and -2.0 WAR. Yet he’s back on a one-year, $1 million-plus-incentives deal, starting in left field because of the team’s lack of outfield depth.
The Cornerstone
As for the other six (former) shortstops, they’ve basically been shoehorned into the lineup by whatever means necessary in a process that dates back to 2019, when the team signed Machado to a 10-year, $300 million deal with the intention of returning him to third base after he had spent most of the previous season at shortstop for the only time in his major league career.
When the Orioles drafted Machado out of a Miami high school with the third pick in 2010, he had already played shortstop for the legendary 2009 under-18 U.S. national team that won a gold medal at the Pan American Junior Championships. Machado played almost exclusively at shortstop in his three minor league seasons (the first of which was only five games long). By the spring of 2012, the 19-year-old phenom was the no. 11 prospect in the game according to Baseball America, drawing comparisons to Alex Rodriguez but also concerns that he might physically outgrow the position. Meanwhile, the Orioles already had a shortstop they were quite satisfied with in 29-year-old J.J. Hardy, who was coming off a 30-homer, 4.5 WAR season and who had recently signed a three-year, $22.5 million extension. Machado began that season at Double-A Bowie, but when the Orioles, who had gone 69-93 in 2011 — their 14th consecutive losing season — found themselves in contention, they called up Machado in early August and stuck him at third base, where he had just two games of professional experience. He quickly proved to be a spectacular defender, a major upgrade over incumbent Wilson Betemit, who was soon lost to a wrist injury anyway. The Orioles won 93 games and claimed a Wild Card spot in 2012, and the Machado-Hardy left side remained in place through two more playoff appearances over the next four years before the latter’s body broke down.
During Hardy’s injury-related absences in 2015–16, Machado filled in at shortstop, playing a total of 52 games there. After Hardy retired following the 2017 season, Machado returned to his old position, first with the Orioles, who were amid a tear-down phase, and then with the Dodgers, who traded for him on July 18, 2018. Though he produced 7.0 WAR in his walk year, Machado’s metrics at shortstop weren’t great (-10 DRS, -6.5 UZR, 1 RAA), and by the time he signed with San Diego in February 2019, the 20-year-old Tatis was on the cusp of the majors, ready to make the jump from Double-A. Back at third, Machado has made two All-Star teams and had two top-three finishes in the MVP voting while emerging as a team leader — so much so that the Padres lavished a new extension on him after he opted out of his original deal at the end of the 2022 season. As for when he’ll return to the field — thereby trimming the shortstop total down to a reasonable (?) seven, with Machado replacing Wade at third and a better hitter than Wade starting at DH — the timeline is tentative at best, “possibly by the end of April.”
The Prodigy
While Machado didn’t have a great first year with the Padres in 2019, Tatis was a revelation on the offensive side, hitting .317/.379/.590 (151 wRC+) in 84 games before a stress reaction in his lower back ended his season in mid-August. His defensive metrics were another story, in the red across the board (-3 DRS, -5.8 UZR, -12 RAA); while Machado’s were somewhat better during a 37-game stint at shortstop when Tatis missed nearly six weeks due to a hamstring strain, the Padres opted to restore their previous configuration during the shortened 2020 season. Both players performed well; Tatis’ defensive numbers even improved across the small sample, and the team went 37-23, making the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, albeit via an expanded field.
With the infield getting increasingly crowded due to the arrivals of Cronenworth (in a December 2019 trade with the Rays along with Tommy Pham) and Kim (from the KBO in the winter of 2020–21), the Padres inked Tatis to a massive extension in the spring of 2021, then experimented with him in center and right field while he was in the midst of a monster 42-homer, 158 wRC+ season that again included mostly below average defensive metrics at shortstop (-7.5 UZR, -6 DRS, 2 RAA). The plan to go forward with him as an outfielder in 2022 was interrupted by Tatis’ misadventures, first a fracture in his left wrist that required surgery and may have occurred during one of the multiple motorcycle accidents he was involved in while in the Dominican Republic that offseason, and then an 80-game PED suspension that landed while he was on a rehab assignment. When he finally returned last year, it was as a right fielder, and while his offense wasn’t up to his usual level, his defense was elite. He led all right fielders with his 29 DRS, 13.8 UZR, and 10 RAA, taking home not only a Gold Glove but the NL Platinum Glove.
The Swiss Army Knife
Drafted as a second baseman out of the University of Michigan — where he pitched and played first, second, third, and left field but not shortstop — in 2015, Cronenworth spent most of the next four seasons playing short in the Rays’ organization, albeit with healthy servings of second base and third base. He even pitched in seven games at Durham in 2019, and might have continued to do so if not for MLB’s dumb rule changes, which included one that set a 20-inning bar for someone to be considered a two-way player; otherwise, he could only enter when his team was winning or losing by more than six runs.
As a rookie in 2020 he hit a robust .285/.354/.477 (126 wRC+) while playing mainly at second base, but he started at shortstop in the three games Tatis did not, and served as a late-inning replacement in eight others. During Tatis’ initial outfield foray, it was Cronenworth who took over at shortstop, starting 31 of 34 games and performing right around average according to the metrics.
He held the second base job in 2022, and was a Gold Glove finalist while hitting for a 110 wRC+ with 4.2 WAR, but the arrival of Bogaerts the following winter pushed him to first base, a position where the Padres had long struggled for offensive production due to their misguided belief in Eric Hosmer, who netted 0.4 WAR in four and a half seasons before being traded. Unfortunately, Cronenworth’s offense has declined since the move, putting the Padres at a deficit offensively; he slipped to a 92 wRC+ and 1.1 WAR last year.
The (Kiwoom) Hero
The infield got even more crowded in 2021 with the arrival of Kim, who had starred as a shortstop for the Nexen (later Kiwoom) Heroes in the KBO. When he first came stateside via a four-year, $28 million deal, he scuffled at the plate, hitting .202/.270/.352 (71 wRC+) while backing up at second, short, and third. He filled in for Tatis during a COVID-related IL stint in May, but was mainly consigned to pinch-hitting duty during Tatis’ outfield experiment.
Once the Padres committed to making Tatis an outfielder, it was Kim they chose to play shortstop for 2022. He rewarded their faith by doing standout work (10 DRS, 4.9 UZR, 4 RAA), becoming a Gold Glove finalist while improving to a 106 wRC+. He accommodated the team by moving to second base with the arrival of Bogaerts in 2023, winning a Gold Glove while hitting 17 homers with a 112 wRC+ and 4.4 WAR. In February, the Padres decided they would be better with the smaller, rangier Kim at shortstop and Bogaerts at second, a move that not only makes sense on paper but seems geared to keeping Kim around past his current deal (he has an $8 million mutual option for 2025).
The Interloper
Signed out of Aruba just shy of his 17th birthday in 2009, Bogaerts played exclusively at shortstop until he reached Triple-A four years later. Following a quick initiation at Pawtucket, the Red Sox squeezed the 20-year-old prospect into their lineup as a third baseman alongside shortstop Stephen Drew, and won the World Series with that combination. When Drew opted out, Bogaerts began the 2014 season at shortstop; he shifted back to third when Drew belatedly re-signed, but when the veteran didn’t hit a lick, the Red Sox foisted him on the Yankees in a July 31 trade and reinstalled the rookie at short. Over the next eight seasons he emerged as one of baseball’s best shortstops, hitting for a 125 wRC+ with 34.0 WAR (second at the position) from 2015–22 and signing a six-year, $120 million extension in ’19. Even so, he accumulated -50 DRS and -25 RAA in that span.
Bogaerts exercised an opt-out in his contract after 2022 and signed a massive deal with the Padres with the understanding that a position switch might happen down the road. He was solid defensively in his first season in San Diego (-4 DRS, 2 RAA, 0 UZR) while hitting for a 120 wRC+, but during spring training, the Padres convinced him to swap places with Kim. “I signed here as a shortstop,” Bogaerts said in late February. “But to me, I just live and die baseball… I’m just doing it in the best interests of the team, and in the end, I feel like I’m at peace with moving off.”
The Latest Experiment
Given the flimsiness of their outfield and the logjam in the infield, the Padres decided late last year to try Merrill, their 2021 first-round pick, in the outfield; as Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin wrote when they placed him 30th on this year’s Top 100 Prospects list, his below-average hands suggest that he’ll permanently move off shortstop eventually. Merrill played five games in left field at Double-A San Antonio, and the Padres prepared him for the likelihood of continuing down that path. They tried Merrill in both left and center field this spring, and the 20-year-old (whose birthday is April 19) impressed them enough to open the season at the latter spot. So far, he’s hit a respectable .240/.321/.440 while starting seven of nine games there and taken over after pinch-hitting for the light-hitting José Azocar in the other two. If Kim leaves after this season, Merrill could be back in the shortstop mix, but for now, this is how the Padres are rolling.
Will it all work? The early returns are mixed, as the Padres are just 4-5. Their offense has been robust, scoring 5.78 runs per game (sixth in the NL), but their shaky pitching has allowed an even six runs per game (10th). It’s far too early to get a read on defensive metrics, but for now we’ll note that the team’s .651 defensive efficiency is 11th, 24 points below the league average. Stay tuned.
Baseball is back! Well, I guess it never really left, what with winter leagues and spring training and all. But major league games that count are back, and I’ve been parked on my couch watching as much as I can all week. Naturally, then, it’s time to talk about a guy who hasn’t debuted in the majors yet.
The Orioles are one of the best teams in the American League, and before the season, it seemed like they were going to debut one of the top prospects in the game for a third straight year. Jackson Holliday tore up the minors in 2023, and though he only got a shot of espresso at Triple-A, he was the team’s presumptive starter at second base.
At first glance, nothing Holliday did in Sarasota this spring changed that likely path. He hit .311/.364/.600 in 48 plate appearances while largely playing second base. Then the Orioles did something no one saw coming: they sent him down to the minors.
For years, sending a good prospect down for a few weeks at the start of the season – to “work on their defense” or “learn to hit lefties better” or some other fig leaf – was an economic decision. Players who earned less than a full year’s service time – 172 days out of the roughly 187-day season – reached free agency a year later, with that near-year giving them Super 2 status: an early dip into arbitration, more or less. Read the rest of this entry »
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