Orion Kerkering enjoyed a meteoric rise to the big leagues last year. The 2022 fifth-round draft pick began the campaign in Low-A Clearwater, and when
October rolled around he was taking the mound for the Philadelphia Phillies in the postseason. His numbers along the way were eye-catching. Pitching out of the bullpen at four minor-league levels, the University of South Florida product logged a 1.51 ERA and a 38.9% strikeout rate over 53-and-two-thirds innings. Called up in late September, he proceeded to fan six batters and allow one run in three appearances comprising the same number of innings.

That Kerkering was then entrusted to take the ball in the playoffs was a testament to his talent — a big part of which is a bat-missing offering even more impressive than his 98.6-mph fastball.

“That’s hard for me to do,” Kerkering replied when asked to describe his signature pitch. “I call it a slider and everyone says it’s one of the best ones out there. To that, I’m kind of, ‘OK, whatever. That’s fine.’ I just trust it as much as I can.”

The 22-year-old right-hander started throwing a slider as a Venice, Florida prep. Velocity-wise, it was 78-81 mph early on, and from there it got “faster and faster” to where it is now a crisp 86-87. The shape is basically the same — “with maybe a little more movement” — as is the grip.

“It’s kind of like how you teach a 12-year-old a curveball,” he said of the grip. “But instead of spinning on top of it, I spin on the 1:20-2:00 o’clock axis. If you think of [Clayton] Kershaw’s curveball, it will spin and then drop. Mine is the same way. It has the gyro spin, then it takes off.” Read the rest of this entry »

How about this: How about you and I forget for a couple minutes that we’re at FanGraphs, deep in the stat-swamped soul of the sabermetrics community? Let’s just pretend you’re reading an article on a website with a name like SuperCoolBaseballStuff.com. This is not the time to get lost in the weeds. Spring is in the air, and we’re rhapsodizing about the smell of the freshly cut grass. The birds have returned, and they’re waking us up at dawn with their incessant noises. Now is the time to be excited about baseball (and annoyed about the birds), and quite simply, nobody does more exciting stuff on a baseball field than Oneil Cruz and Elly De La Cruz. So let’s keep it simple. Let’s talk about all the superlatives that make the pair so exciting as we race toward the 2024 season.

For the first time, both Cruz and De La Cruz will be in the show at the same time. Cruz was called up for good in June 2022, and he finished the season on a high note, running a 133 wRC+ over the final month. He came into 2023 with the stated goal of a 30-30 season, but in just his ninth game, he fractured his left fibula during a collision at the plate. De La Cruz was called up in June 2023 and promptly went supernova. He ran a 179 wRC+ with eight stolen bases and 10 extra-base hits over his first 16 games, but struggled over the last few months. This year, they’ll be the Opening Day shortstops for their respective teams, and Cruz is on record saying that his ankle feels not just 100%, but 200%, which may very well be a record.

Somehow, the two players are extremely similar while also being completely unprecedented. The similarities start with their surnames, and then there’s the fact that they’re both young, ridiculously tall shortstops who hail from the Dominican Republic and play in the NL Central. The height thing is likely a bigger deal than you realize. Cruz is 6’7” and De La Cruz is 6’5”. According to Stathead, that makes them just the seventh and eighth players ever to be 6’5” or taller and play a single inning of shortstop in, ahem, the bigs. They’re the only ones ever to be regular starters at the position; those other six combined for a total of 113 games at short. You’re not going to believe this, but until Cruz dethroned him, the leader was Michael Morse, with 57 games. The 6’5” Morse, who finished his career with -73.2 total defensive runs, totaled 450 innings at short for the Mariners in 2005, racking up -13 DRS and a UZR/150 of -20.9.

Cruz and De La Cruz have both played in exactly 98 big league games, and their skillsets are nearly identical, as well. They’ve both walked 35 times, struck out 33.7% of the time, and posted batting averages and on-base percentages within two points of one another. Here’s what that similarity looks like courtesy of some cherry-picked Baseball Savant sliders:

Not that it matters much, but 2022 Cruz is on the left and 2023 De La Cruz is on the right. There’s so much red and so much blue. These are insanely fun profiles. Cruz and De La Cruz do everything at 100 miles per hour, except for hitting the baseball, which they do at 120. They run like cheetahs who were genetically modified for maximum speed and then shot out of a cannon. They crush baseballs like PETA-members who just found out that the baseballs were responsible for performing the illegal experiments on those cheetahs. They throw the ball over to first as if they heard you get an extra out if you manage to blast it right through the first baseman’s solar plexus. They whiff like they think they can generate enough wind power to solve the climate crisis all by themselves. They’re boom and bust personified. They’re the middle schoolers who figured out that you could game the typing test by absolutely going for broke, because 150 words per minute minus a 50% error rate still leaves you at 75 words per minute. They’re like basketball played on roller skates. It’s poetry when it works, carnage when it doesn’t, and impossible to turn away from.

As for whether the whole package will work, well that’s trickier. Here are the final grades the two players received from our prospect team upon graduation:

Again, the numbers are very similar, but Cruz, all of two inches taller, has a tougher path defensively. He’s always been capable of making a great play, but he’s never looked like a sure thing at short, in terms of either range or hands, and he didn’t look at home in left field when the Pirates tried him out there in the minors. In 2022, he graded out as a hair above average according to DRS, but the other defensive metrics didn’t love him. As he continues to fill out, he’s less likely to maintain his speed and range. On the other hand, he owns a career 106 wRC+. He managed to cut his chase and whiff rates toward the end of 2022. In the short samples of 12 LiDOM games and nine MLB games, he boasted vastly improved walk and strikeout rates in 2023. Those trends have now held through nine spring training games as well, long enough for Cruz to tie for the MLB lead with five homers.

As Robert Orr demonstrated over at Baseball Prospectus, the switch-hitting De La Cruz made his own plate discipline gains during the 2023 season, going from a 38.8% chase rate in July to 25.7% in September and October. In fact, according to Pitcher List, by the end of the season, his swing decisions were well above average.

Although he ended the season on a low note in terms of performance, De La Cruz actually posted a .334 xwOBA in September and October, his best figure of the season by a wide margin. De La Cruz put up a 24.5% HR/FB in 2023, 10th-highest among qualified players, but that masked the fact that his 53.9% groundball rate was the 11th-highest. It’s possible that chasing less soft stuff below the zone will help him to put more balls in the air going forward. Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s possible that he’ll just keep hitting the ball hard enough that he doesn’t need to lift it very often to do damage. Moreover, De La Cruz is better positioned to stick at shortstop. He graded out well according to OAA and UZR, though DRS and DRP were less impressed. Importantly, he’s also just 22, and he has time to improve. Although he put up just an 84 wRC+ last year, his defense and his propensity to take any and every base helped him put up 1.7 WAR in his 98 games.

For both players, the future has some truly massive error bars. They’re just 22 and 25 years old, and they’ve yet to play a full season’s worth of games. With apologies to Michael Morse, there just aren’t many comparable players we can look to for insights on their development. Their tools are so preposterous that their ceiling is somewhere out by the asteroid belt. But their long levers and their unproven eyes could keep them from ever making enough contact to take advantage of all that power. All the same, even if they just manage to stick it out as league-average shortstops, they’ll achieve it by way of some of the most electric, entertaining baseball the world has ever seen. They’ll also be doing it in an era where each 100 mph throw from deep in the hole and each 122 mph rocket off the bat can be tracked and marveled at in all its gaudy splendor. It’s time to get excited.

If you’ve been reading me with any frequency for the past 20-some years — the last six of them here at FanGraphs — you may have noticed that I’m prone to dropping the occasional number into my prose. In fact, Statcast says I do so in 57.6% of my sentences, which ranks in the 93rd percentile even among my FanGraphs colleagues. Admittedly, I just made that part up, but the point is that I’m someone who tends to present a fair bit of data to the reader in support of my analysis.

At this site, we feature a lot of data, and as a consequence, not all of it is easy to find, but we do our best to organize it logically so that users can do so. Once again, I’d like to highlight a particular area as part of our series on the useful site features you’ll find at FanGraphs.

Back in 2007, for the Baseball Prospectus book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets and have adapted an expanded form of it into a midsummer series that serves as a trade deadline preview, highlighting the particular trouble spots on each contender. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers were already coming out of this offseason with more unanswered questions than a contending team would typically like. They’ve lost their top two starting pitchers to trade or injury, they’ve changed managers, and their big offseason free agent signing hasn’t played a meaningful game since the 2022 postseason.

And the questions continue to pile up. Devin Williams, one of the best closers in baseball and arguably Milwaukee’s best player, is going to be out for the next three months. The good news is it’s not an arm or shoulder injury that would lead to long-term problems or a multi-year absence. But it’s a pretty gnarly-sounding injury nonetheless: Not one but two stress fractures in his back.

Williams pitched through back soreness since at least last September — and with two fractures in a vertebra at the bottom of his ribcage, “soreness” is probably an understatement. Williams won’t need surgery, but he’ll be totally shut down for the next six weeks. The long ramp-up to game fitness will take at least another six weeks, which puts the target date for his return sometime in late June. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, in the second installment of this ongoing series, I started picking apart the language used to describe baseball swings. But given how many elements make up a player’s swing, and therefore how much terminology exists to describe the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between them, I could only fit so much into that post before I had to cut myself off.

I’m skipping the preamble this time, so if you’re not quite sure what you’ve stumbled into with this primer, you can catch up with the first and second editions of this series, and meet me back here when you’re ready. I will, however, reiterate that the point of this is not to identify “good” or “bad” elements of baseball mechanics, but rather to define these terms as descriptive tools, as opposed to value-based judgements. And just like in my last post, I’m focusing on big leaguers for this one, thanks to the availability of side views of their swings, which are featured in MLB broadcasts, but missing from most MiLB game feeds.

Now, as promised, I’ll pick up exactly where I left off.

Short Swing vs. Long Swing
In Hitting, Part One, I dug into players’ loads, i.e. where a player’s hands come set before he starts his forward motion toward an incoming pitch. When a swing is described as being either “long” or “short” to the ball, that is referring to how quickly and directly a player can get the barrel of his bat to the ball. There’s some debate as to whether the length we’re describing is a measure of time, or of distance, but in either case, a “short” swing is one where a player’s bat moves directly to the ball, while a “long” swing is one where the bat’s path is less direct.

Typically, being short to the ball is favored, in the same way that a pitcher’s repeatable delivery is often more favorable than a violent one (see Pitching, Part One, for more on that). Of course, there are many exceptions to that rule, but generally, being short to the ball is considered a good thing. This is largely due to the fact that the simplicity of a short swing is often seen as more reliable and sustainable, particularly as a player is still developing in the minor leagues. A short swing allows a player to wait longer before deciding whether to swing at a given offering, which can be valuable by way of pitch selection, and for a minor leaguer who hasn’t yet faced advanced pitching, that bodes well for how he’ll fair as opposing pitchers’ velocities increase and their command becomes more precise.

Short swings come in many flavors. Here are some examples:

Short to the Ball, With Power: Yordan Alvarez

Yordan Alvarez’s simple load and short bat path allow him to attack pitches and get the sweet spot of his bat to the ball quickly. He guides the knob of his bat directly to where the pitch is coming at him, and the barrel of his bat quickly follows the same route.

Short to the Ball, Without Power: Steven Kwan

Kwan is short to the ball, but his swing differs from Alvarez’s cut. Whereas the appeal of Alvarez’s being short to the ball allows him to apply his upper body strength to pitches throughout the strike zone, Kwan’s swing is more about simply getting his bat on the ball, even if he’s not trying to send it out of the park. As such, a side-by-side look at their respective swings shows similarly short bat paths, but by the time they’re making contact, their postures are very different, illustrating the difference between a power swing and a contact swing (more on that later).

Sometimes, adding length to a swing is valuable. For example, Fernando Tatis Jr.’s deep load, and Junior Caminero’s bat wrap (both featured in my previous entry), create a longer distance for their bats to travel, but are also contributors to those players’ bat speed and power production.

Long to the Ball: Davis Schneider

In Schneider’s case, his long swing isn’t due to a particularly deep load or a bat wrap. His bat simply takes a longer route to the strike zone from his load to his point of contact.

A side-by-side comparison with Alvarez’s direct bat path makes this easier to see. Switching back to a front view of their respective swings (the camera movement in Schneider’s side view makes for a nauseating side by side), keep an eye on the heads of their respective bats. You’ll first see the swing all the way through, then with a few freeze frames thrown in to illustrate the moments when their bat paths differ the most, with Schneider’s dipping down behind him, rather than making a straight line to the ball.

Thus far, Schneider has used his long swing to optimize his launch angle, despite his middling average exit velocity. Because he raked during his first taste of the majors last year, albeit in just 35 games (141 plate appearances), it is acceptable for him to maintain his current mechanics (weirdos welcome!), but if he encounters timing issues in the future, he may have to adjust to shorten his swing.

Shortening Up: Alec Bohm

Adjusting swing length can make a huge impact on a player’s ability to consistently get to his power in a game. After a headline-making 2020 season, Bohm’s power dipped significantly the following year. This may have been due to his swing becoming too long.

Here’s a look at his swing in 2020:

And here’s what it looked like in 2021:

And to make it even clearer, here’s a side by side, first all the way through, and then with some handy freeze frames:

These camera angles are slightly different, so I can’t overlay these videos to make my point, but you can see that his 2021 swing starts earlier, and begins with his back elbow dipping, and his bat head looping back toward the catcher, whereas in 2020, his hands and bat moved directly to the ball. As of 2023, his power was back, as was his short swing.

Power vs. Contact Swing
As I hinted above, in the Alvarez-Kwan comparison, players will often develop swings that are geared specifically toward either power or contact. The reasons why players do this are relatively self explanatory, and based on body type, speed, positional profile, or countless other attributes that may make a player more valuable if he focuses on either power or contact, rather than both.

Power Swing: Kyle Schwarber

Schwarber generates power with a stable, balanced lower half, with his weight evenly distributed, if not slightly shifted toward his back foot. He uses his strong hands and arms to generate bat speed without sacrificing that stable base. Schwarber’s swing has always been geared for power, though he has simplified it in significant ways since he came up with the Cubs.

Schwarber’s old swing included a much noisier load, an obvious hitch (or trigger), and a more pronounced leg kick. The leg kick, in particular, caused Schwarber to shift his weight during his swing, whereas his current mechanics finish with his weight distributed in more or less the same way as before he starts his swing, allowing for an even stronger and more stable base. In other words, while it’s always been a power swing, the simplifications he’s made over the years have enhanced the power-driven aspects of it.

Contact Swing: Luis Arraez

Arraez is MLB’s current king of contact. Dating back to his debut in 2019, he’s never finished a season with a contact rate below 90%. He’s short to the ball, and adjusts the barrel of his bat to pitches throughout the strike zone. In contrast to Schwarber, Arraez’s lower half is less stable, with his back foot rarely staying planted, and he lets his arms extend as he makes contact with the ball, essentially allowing the weight of the bat, combined with basic physics, to do more of the heavy lifting, when it comes to power generation (or lack thereof).

He doesn’t hike his back elbow up like Schwarber does, and he’s not clubbing the ball with his upper body, so when he makes contact, he doesn’t focus on activating the muscles in his arms to drive the ball a great distance, opting instead to throw his hands toward the ball, and simply spray line drives to whatever part of the field makes the most sense, based on the pitch’s location. (He led the majors in line drive percentage in 2023.) In slow motion, you can see that the impact of the ball on the bat causes his arms to wobble in a noodly kind of way, which you’ll rarely see from a pure power hitter like Schwarber, whose arms stay bent and flexing as he makes contact.

That’ll do it for this installment, but I’ll be back soon with yet another batch of hitting terminology, and after that we’ll get back to the pitching side of things. Stay tuned!

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Dylan Cease trade, the post-trade outlooks for the Padres and White Sox, and the incomparably chaotic Padres POBO A.J. Preller, then (31:22) discuss who the best pitcher in baseball is with Gerrit Cole on the shelf, Shohei Ohtani’s wife reveal (41:33), and (49:34) ESPN’s planned on-screen win probability graphic on Sunday Night Baseball. Finally (1:01:58), they draft (or at least list) their favorite trades and signings of the winter.

Audio intro: Nate Emerson, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Clemens on Cease
Link to Rosenthal on Cease
Link to Getz quote about Cease
Link to DotF on the Cease trade
Link to BA on Preller’s prospect trades
Link to Padres farm rankings
Link to Kram on trading prospects
Link to Eric on Sox prospects
Link to team SP projections
Link to MLBTR on Kopech
Link to payrolls page
Link to Langs tweet
Link to Sam on best pitchers
Link to Ben on innings eaters
Link to non-pitcher projections
Link to pitcher projections
Link to Strider’s curve
Link to Shohei photo
Link to ESPN win probability tweet
Link to “calculating win probability”
Link to EW nVenue episode
Link to story on Toles
Link to story on Blooper
Link to Blooper wiki
Link to Longenhagen on Fedde
Link to MLBTR’s Cole update
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

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Almost all professional baseball players played at least one other sport growing up. Moreover, many of them were athletically gifted at a young age and thus excelled against their school-age contemporaries in their formative years, often all the way through high school. Fast forward to today, and many continue to play other sports in a recreational capacity — golf is prominent — especially in the offseason.

Watching other sports is also popular activity for ballplayers. Much as they tuned in to see their favorites on the family TV, they now do so as adults. Like the rest of us, they enjoy sitting on their couches, or hanging out with friends at sports bars, rooting for successful shots, goals, and touchdowns. Temporarily apart from the game they get paid to play, they get to be fans.

With those things in mind, I asked a dozen players about their “other” sport. Besides baseball, what did they most enjoy playing, and what do they now most enjoy watching?

———

Dansby Swanson, Chicago Cubs shortstop: “Basketball. I was pretty good. I could really shoot. My basketball game was somewhat similar to my baseball game. I kind of did the right things. I knew what to do. I knew where to go. I averaged around 15 points in high school. It was [a big school]. We had over 2,000 kids. There are a lot of big schools in Georgia.

“I grew up in very much a sports family. I love watching all sports, honestly. I love watching football. I love watching basketball. Obviously, I watch a lot of soccer; I watch my wife [Mallory Swanson, who plays for the Chicago Red Stars and the U.S. Women’s National Team]. Golf is on the TV. An underrated sport to watch is tennis. I have sports on TV all the time.”

———

Mike Trout, Los Angeles Angels center fielder: “I played basketball and football throughout high school. I’d probably say that basketball was my best other sport. I was a small forward and an OK player. Read the rest of this entry »

There are so many great defenders in the majors right now. In the infield, there are elite shortstops, like Francisco Lindor and Dansby Swanson. In the outfield, there are the dudes who don’t let anything drop, such as Brenton Doyle and Harrison Bader. But none of these players are projected to lead baseball in Def, according to ZiPS. That title belongs to San Francisco Giants catcher Patrick Bailey.

Last year, Bailey led all players in Def with 26.8 runs. On the Statcast side of things, he was second in Fielding Run Value with +18, behind Doyle. He is unquestionably one of the most valuable defenders in the game, and much of that is due to his elite framing. He accumulated +16 framing runs and recorded a 52.9% strike rate – both the highest marks in baseball.

If you look at the Statcast framing leaderboard, you’ll notice one color for Bailey: red. He is above average in all nine parts of the shadow zone. That is simply unheard of. Typically, for catchers to be elite in one area, they tend to sacrifice another part of the zone. Take Adley Rutschman, for example. He is elite at the top of the zone but slightly below average at the bottom. Sean Murphy has the opposite tendency. He steals at the bottom while losing some at the top. Bailey is a departure from the norm. He can steal strikes in any part of the zone without sacrificing elsewhere.

That’s an impressive skill that made Bailey stand out last season. It’s also the exact kind of statistical quirk that warrants a video deep dive to uncover how he does it. Before jumping in, let’s discuss the two things we’ll be paying attention to here: Bailey’s pre-pitch stances and glove turns. To be this efficient around the strike zone, catchers not only have to have multiple stances, but they also have to know when to use them. By understanding their pitching staff and their movement profiles, they know when to deploy what stance and how to best use their hands.

The following clips will display how Bailey switches up his approach depending on the pitcher and/or location. Let’s start with Logan Webb – the sinkerballer and command artist:

Sinker

Where Bailey sets up behind the plate dictates his stance. He favors his inside knee down most of the time, but there is some variance depending on the pitcher and pitch. More so than when he is catching other pitchers, he has no problem setting up closer to the edges of the plate for Webb.

The key difference between the two sinkers is how he uses his glove turn in preparation for the pitch. On the arm side sinker, he uses more of a straight down quarter turn. Whereas with the glove side sinker, you’ll notice a more deliberate rounded turn. As a catcher, matching the plane of the pitch leads to the smoothest reception. If you don’t alter the rotation of your glove as you catch the ball, it appears as natural as possible to the umpire, resulting in a better chance at a strike call. Bailey has a perfect understanding of this, which can also be seen when he receives sliders:

Slider

On the arm side, it’s pretty standard. The glove side is where the quarter turn sticks out. Pushing a breaking ball back toward the middle of the plate can often look forced. But if a catcher is already tracing that movement before he receives the ball, it appears natural and can lead to stolen strike calls. Additionally, Bailey’s ability to switch which leg is down lets him be as loose as possible with his movements after the pitch is released. This allows him to smoothly shift his positioning to ensure that he catches the pitch closer to the center of his body, which makes it look more like a strike to the umpire.

While the one-knee catching stance has swept through the league, it’s still not common for catchers to switch from knee to knee as often as Bailey does. It puts him in a better position to handle pitches coming in from different angles. When a catcher has his inside knee up, that leg can sometimes make it difficult for him to reach across his body. Since Bailey almost always has his inside knee down for horizontal moving pitches, that’s not a concern. But there are some situations in which Bailey will alter this approach, such as when Webb throws his changeup:

Changeup

He switched from his typical stance, with his outside knee up, when catching the changeup with the lefty-hitting Jonah Heim at the plate. Bailey is most likely more comfortable putting his right knee up when Webb throws his changeup because that pitch doesn’t get much horizontal movement, and his glove turn probably feels more natural when he has space on his glove side. However, he is forced to switch his stance when there is a runner on first and second base is vacant because he can’t make throws with his left knee down. But that isn’t an issue for him, because he is comfortable flipping his stance.

Now, let’s see how Bailey handles Camilo Doval, whose arsenal — 100 mph rising cutters, 98 mph sinkers, 90 mph sliders — is completely different than Webb’s repertoire. Bailey knows that, so he takes a slightly different approach:

There are a few things to note here. First, Bailey gets in a lower stance with the slider coming and a runner on third, which puts him in a better position to block anything in the dirt. His low glove turn also prepares him to either flip his mitt over to get into a blocking stance or quickly shift it for a backhand pick. With high velocity sliders, a pick can often be more effective than a traditional chest block because there isn’t much time for a catcher to drop to his knees and get in front of the pitch. Meanwhile, Bailey hardly moves his glove in preparation for the cutter. Doval probably needs the high target for a visual marker, and an exaggerated glove turn isn’t needed for high pitches anyways.

Watching Bailey handle all types of high pitches is one of his best skills as a framer. No matter if it’s a heater or breaker, he knows when to attack pitches and when to be more patient. Doval’s cutter is one example of that, but the way he receives high sinkers and high sweepers perfectly displays that dichotomy:

Sinkers

Sweepers

Since Bailey sets up on the edges, it’s important his glove gets to the spot where the sinkers are going before they arrive, so long as that location is within the width of his shoulders. Anything outside of his frame will clearly look like a ball to an umpire, and the whole point of framing is to be inconspicuous. So when he’s expecting a backdoor sinker from Taylor Rogers (top left), he receives the pitch in the middle of his body while slightly pointing his shoulders toward the batter, Corbin Carroll. The pitch was out of the zone but appeared right on the edge because of how Bailey presented it. On the pitch from Alex Wood (top right), Bailey knows to keep his posture high and eyes over the squared bunt. That lets him beat the pitch from going too far out of the zone while giving the umpire a clear look at it. It was a great mid-pitch adjustment that led to another strike on a borderline pitch.

His approach to sweepers is much more patient. This is a pitch that will keep moving as long as the catcher lets it. If it starts out of the zone, letting it travel as much as possible gives it a better chance to scratch the edge of the plate. Even if the pitch passes the plate out of the zone – like against Randal Grichuk (bottom left) – the catcher can let it get deep enough so that it still looks like a strike when he catches it behind the plate. This is a good time to refocus on Bailey’s stances. It’s more difficult for a catcher to let these pitches travel with his leg or knee in the way. Keeping the inside knee down lets him adjust his upper body as needed while giving his arm the space it needs to move freely. The more space for smooth movement, the better prepared he is to let the pitch get deeper into the zone.

It’s hard to consistently do what Bailey does when it comes to switching stances. Not all players have the mobility on both sides of their body. On top of that, Bailey demonstrates an advanced understanding of pitch movement and matching planes with glove turns no matter who is one the mound. It’s the full pitch framing package. With a full season of work, I’m excited to see how much defensive value Bailey can bring. We could be in store for one of the best defensive seasons in recent memory.

After a pair of runner-up finishes in 2019 and ’21, Gerrit Cole finally won a Cy Young Award last year, but it doesn’t look like he’ll become the first American League pitcher to repeat since Pedro Martinez in 1999–2000. On Wednesday, the New York Post’s Jon Heyman reported that the 33-year-old righty will miss at least one to two months of the regular season due to an elbow issue, and is heading to Los Angeles for an in-person consultation with Dr. Neal ElAttrache, one of the industry’s top orthopedic surgeons — a move that has fueled speculation his injury could be even worse. At the very least, the loss of Cole exposes the Yankees’ lack of rotation depth and jeopardizes their chances of returning to the playoffs after missing out in 2023.

In one of the most nerve-wracking days in recent Yankees history, the team sent both Cole and Aaron Judge — two players making a combined $76 million in 2024 — for an MRI on Monday. The slugger had been experiencing discomfort in his abdominal area, which he believes stems from work he did over the offseason to correct his mechanics in the wake of his right big toe injury. He got a clean bill of health and expects to return to the lineup this weekend. As for the ace, his difficulties in recovering from his starts sent him to the MRI tube. Said manager Aaron Boone, “He described it as his recovery before getting to his next start has been more akin to what he feels during the season when he’s making 100 pitches… When he’s throwing 45 and 55, he usually doesn’t have the recovery issues he’s having.”

The exact nature of Cole’s diagnosis has yet to be reported, only that he’s experienced inflammation and “a twinge in his elbow.” It’s not uncommon for a team to get input from multiple doctors and have a player undergo additional tests, such as a dye contrast MRI to get a better look before determining a course of action; at the very least, Cole reportedly had x-rays and a CT scan on Tuesday. As this has played out, the high stakes and the Yankees’ opacity in handling the extended absences of Judge, Anthony Rizzo, Carlos Rodón, Luis Severino and other players in recent years has fed into a cottage industry that presumes cover-ups and worst-case scenarios. That Boone and general manager Brian Cashman have sometimes downplayed initial concerns ahead of prolonged outages in such cases has further fanned those flames. Read the rest of this entry »