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

Losing your starting shortstop and no. 2 hitter all at once is one of the worst things that can happen to a team, but somehow, the Phillies have weathered the absence of Trea Turner better than anyone could have hoped. The All-Star departed Philadelphia’s May 3 game against the Giants (in which he also scored from second on a wild pitch!) with a strained hamstring; at the time, he was expected to miss about six weeks, though he is “progressing at a surprising pace given the original timetable,” as Matt Gelb of The Athletic recently reported.

Obviously, the Phillies would love to have Turner back ahead of schedule, but they have more than held their own without him. They are 12-3 in their 15 games since May 4, their first following Turner’s injury, and their 123 wRC+ is the second-best mark in the majors during that stretch, behind only the Yankees. Philadelphia’s success isn’t due to the other positions carrying the load; though they’ve certainly been playing well, too. Rather, Philadelphia’s shortstop platoon of Bryson Stott and Edmundo Sosa has combined for a 163 wRC+ over that 15-game span; that’s better than every other NL team’s shortstop production. Only the Orioles, led by Gunnar Henderson, have gotten more offense at short.

Since Turner went down, Stott leads the Phillies with a 230 wRC+ and ranks fourth in the majors among players with at least 50 plate appearances in that span. Meanwhile, Sosa’s 167 wRC+ as a shortstop is the second-best mark since May 4, behind Henderson (187). Catcher J.T. Realmuto (153), first baseman Bryce Harper (180), and DH Kyle Schwarber (129) have also propelled the offense over these last 15 games. Additionally, the Phillies have received surprising contributions from utilityman Kody Clemens, who’s popped a couple of homers and has a 183 wRC+ across his 25 plate appearances since he was recalled to replace Turner on the roster. Even right fielder Nick Castellanos has woken up a bit, mustering a respectable 117 wRC+ during the 15 games without Turner after having posted a woeful 42 wRC+ from Opening Day through May 3.

On the other side of the ball, Phillies pitchers have kept up their end of the bargain for pretty much the whole season, and they’ve continued to perform well over the last 15 games, ranking fifth in ERA (2.78) and third in FIP (3.22).

All in all, even without Turner, everything’s clicking for the Phillies this season. They enter play Tuesday with a five-game lead over the Braves in the NL East, with the highest scoring offense (5.33 runs per game) and by far the most valuable pitching staff (9.3 WAR) in the majors. As Jake Mailhot noted in yesterday’s Power Rankings, Philadelphia has played the weakest schedule in baseball so far this season, so perhaps the team won’t maintain its .708 winning percentage the rest of the way. Even so, the Phillies have been winning at an .800 clip without their superstar shortstop. That is certainly encouraging.

Quick Hits

Let’s run through some other notable things from the past few days of games:

• The Yankees’ seven-game winning streak was snapped Monday night in heartbreaking fashion, when closer Clay Holmes allowed his first four earned runs of the season to blow a 4-1 ninth-inning lead against the Mariners in an eventual 5-4 Seattle win. Nevertheless, New York is playing its best baseball of the year right now. Aaron Judge has continued his reign of terror on opposing pitchers, going his 14-for-28 with 10 extra-base hits, including four homers, in his last eight games, and after a mini-slump, Juan Soto is catching fire again; over his last four games, he is 7-for-15 (.467) with two homers. Luis Gil, who wouldn’t have made the rotation if not for Gerrit Cole’s injury, struck out 14 in his start on Saturday. The Orioles lost on Monday as well, keeping the Yankees’ division lead at two games. The two sides don’t meet again until June 18.

• Like the Yankees, the Astros also coughed up an early lead on Monday night after a recent stretch of excellence. Houston led 6-1 before the Angels scored seven runs in the top of the fifth inning in what ended up as a 9-7 Astros loss. Still, the Astros have won each of their previous three series and jumped back into the AL West race after their dreadful start. They enter play Tuesday 4.5 games behind the first-place Mariners. Less than two weeks ago, on May 8, they were 8.5 games back. Yordan Alvarez still isn’t hitting anywhere near his abilities — though perhaps a double, single, and walk on Monday portends the start of a hot streak — but Alex Bregman has woken up and Kyle Tucker is playing like an MVP.

• Red Sox third baseman Rafael Devers set a franchise record Monday night when he homered in his sixth consecutive game. His home run, a two-run blast, came in the fourth inning off Rays righty Taj Bradley and extended Boston’s lead in its 5-0 win. Over his last six games, Devers is 7-for-24, his only non-homer hit being a single, with a 1.042 slugging percentage. With his home run Monday night, Devers surpassed the six other players who went yard in five straight games with the Red Sox: Bobby Dalbec (2020), Jose Canseco (1995), George Scott (1977), Dick Stuart (1963), Ted Williams (1957), and Jimmie Foxx (1940). The major league record for consecutive games with a home run is eight, shared by Dale Long (1956), Don Mattingly (1987), and Ken Griffey Jr. (1993).

This article isn’t really about Joey Ortiz. Or, well, it is, but it’s also about how numbers will fool you. Let’s start with a few numbers, then. Ortiz is walking 12.9% of the time so far this year, far more than average and far more than he ever did in the high minors. He’s chasing pitches outside of the strike zone only 24% of the time, a huge change in approach. Last year in the minor leagues, that number stood at 34.5%. As a result, he’s swinging and missing far less often. There’s the story of how Ortiz has improved.

Just one problem: That story doesn’t hold up to closer examination. Let’s break the strike zone up into four parts the way Baseball Savant and the Statcast team do it. There’s the heart of the plate (heart), the edges of the plate and the area just off of it (shadow), the area where good breaking pitches often end up (chase), and the land of non-competitive pitches (waste). You’d expect Ortiz to swing less frequently than average at chase and waste pitches. You’d be wrong:

That’s baffling. For comparison’s sake, teammate Rhys Hoskins has similar chase and zone swing rates, and he’s swinging at 17% of chase pitches and 1% of waste pitches. He’s also swinging more frequently than Ortiz at pitches over the heart of the plate.
Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

With his combination of power and speed, Elly De La Cruz may be the eighth wonder of the world, or merely one of baseball’s most improved players, but lately he’s been just about the only one keeping the Reds relevant. After starting the season in promising fashion, Cincinnati has now dropped seven straight series, most recently losing three out of four against the Dodgers in Los Angeles while slipping into last place in the NL Central. Thanks to an offense that’s gone missing, the Reds own a major league-worst 3-14 record in May. Yuck.

They had their chances to arrest their slide against the Dodgers. After winning 7-2 on Thursday, the Reds fell behind early 3-0 on Friday as Mookie Betts and Shohei Ohtani both homered off Frankie Montas. They clawed their way back to tie the game, and looked to build upon that when Mike Ford singled off James Paxton to open the seventh. Paxton got the hook in favor of righty Michael Grove, while Jake Fraley pinch-hit for Stuart Fairchild and Jacob Hurtubise pinch-ran for Ford. On a 1-1 count, Grove picked off Hurtubise, and he soon escaped the inning; the Dodgers responded by putting up two runs apiece against relievers Fernando Cruz and Alexis Díaz in the next two innings to pull away for a 7-3 win.

After being shut out by Walker Buehler and friends on Saturday, the Reds squandered numerous opportunities that would have allowed them to escape with a split. They left 10 runners on base in Sunday’s 10-inning loss, and while they erased a 2-0 deficit to tie the game in the seventh, De La Cruz struck out with men on second and third in both that inning and the ninth, part of a tough 0-for-5, four-strikeout day. The Reds lost when Díaz walked Will Smith with one out, forcing him to pitch to Ohtani, who singled for his first walk-off hit since September 4, 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

The various division races are starting to shape up now that we’ve passed the quarter pole in the regular season. The Astros finally woke up from their early season slumber, reminding us that it’s still not too late for some of these disappointing teams to make a run into the playoff picture.

This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.

To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coinflip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

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.

…

The Yankees leapt to the top of these rankings with sweeps of the Twins and White Sox last week. They’ve now won seven straight and 13 of their last 15. Juan Soto and Aaron Judge are powering the offense as expected — along with a resurgent Giancarlo Stanton — but the most impressive part of this hot streak has been their pitching staff. During this stretch, New York has allowed just 2.4 runs per game and gave up a total of six runs last week. The entire starting rotation has stepped up in Gerrit Cole’s absence, with Clarke Schmidt and Luis Gil representing the two biggest surprises.

The Phillies stretched their division lead over the Braves to five games with a wild series win against the Mets and a sweep of the Nationals last week. It’s true Philadelphia has played the weakest schedule of any team thus far — it faced the Braves in the first series of the season and hasn’t met a team with a record over .500 since then — but the Phillies are banking enough wins now that it might not matter if they come back down to earth once the schedule toughens up.

While Elly De La Cruz may have stolen the spotlight on Thursday in Los Angeles, the Dodgers won the final three games of their series against the Reds to take the series and held De La Cruz hitless over the weekend. They own the largest division lead and best run differential in baseball.

Max Fried slipped up on Friday after a long stretch of dominant starts, allowing three runs on nine hits against the Padres. After a rainout on Saturday, the Braves lost a stinker on Sunday and are lined up for a doubleheader today. They can still be counted among the upper echelons in baseball, but it’s clear they’re not firing on all cylinders yet.

Both the Royals and Guardians swept their weekend series, though Cleveland’s wins against the Twins are much more impactful than the three wins Kansas City racked up against the A’s. The Guardians still lead the AL Central and knocked Minnesota down a notch, but the Royals are on pace for their second best season in franchise history if they can keep this up.

The Mariners went 3-3 against two of the other teams in this tier last week, which is pretty much what you’d expect from their solid but flawed roster. They still haven’t solved their run scoring issues and Julio Rodríguez’s power outage to start the season is starting to become a little concerning. Meanwhile, the Orioles are trying to keep up with the high-flying Yankees; Baltimore’s series win over Seattle certainly helps in that regard.

A lot of ups and downs in this tier last week. The Twins’ hot streak flamed out after they were swept by the Yankees and Guardians; the Cubs didn’t do much better, losing both of their series to the Braves and Pirates. On the other end of the spectrum, the Rays went 5-2 against the Red Sox and Blue Jays, banking two key series wins against some division rivals.

Here come the Astros. With two wins against the Brewers over the weekend, Houston has now won three series in a row and nine of its last 11 games. Alex Bregman’s bat has suddenly awoken as he raised his wRC+ from 58 to 87 over the last week. The Astros have a huge four-game series in Seattle looming in a week and they’ll hope to continue their momentum ahead of that showdown.

A bunch of the teams in this tier continued their early season struggles and have fallen even further behind in the playoff picture. The Giants and Tigers were the only two among these teams to win a series last week.

San Francisco emphatically swept the Rockies over the weekend, though that’s a small consolation considering the bad news it received about Jung Hoo Lee’s shoulder injury; the Giants’ center fielder will be out for the season after dislocating his shoulder last Sunday. Blake Snell is on the mend and should be activated off the IL soon, but there are still far too many role players sidelined currently, forcing the Giants to turn to their shallow depth. Thankfully, Luis Matos has made an immediate impact, collecting 16 RBIs and recording hits in five of the seven games since being recalled to cover for Lee.

The Cardinals, Pirates, Angels, and Marlins all showed some pluck last week, earning series wins over some high profile opponents. St. Louis won both of its series against the Angels and Red Sox and can’t be counted out of the NL playoff picture just yet; Pittsburgh took three of four from the Cubs over the weekend, a series highlighted by a dominant start from Paul Skenes; and the Marlins picked up series wins over the Tigers and Mets.

With Mike Trout sidelined for the foreseeable future, the Angels have had very few reasons for optimism recently. Thankfully, Jo Adell’s long-awaited breakout is something they can build upon. It’s not a franchise-altering development, but it’s a positive note for an organization that has desperately needed one this year.

After reaching .500 with a 20-4 win over the Marlins on May 4, the A’s have won exactly twice in the 15 games since then. Their nosedive has coincided with a particularly tough stretch in their schedule, with series against the Rangers, Mariners, Astros, and Royals bringing them back down to Earth. Mason Miller has gotten all of the attention as the standout on this roster, but there are a few other breakouts that could become valuable trade bait later on this summer.

The Rockies put together a nice little seven-game win streak with sweeps of the Rangers and Padres before getting swept by the Giants last weekend. Ezequiel Tovar has rewarded the organization’s trust in him with a fantastic start to the season. Nolan Jones should be activated off the IL this week and hopefully he can start pounding the ball again so that Colorado can properly play spoiler to the rest of the teams in the NL West.

The Houston Astros are in an unfamiliar situation: five games under .500 with Memorial Day approaching in the distance like a looming mountain out an airplane window. And they’ve won nine of their past 11 to even get that close.

The Astros have had their ups and downs during their ongoing run of seven straight ALCS appearances, including a season in which they finished under .500 but came within a game of making the World Series anyway. But barring another pandemic — which might well happen if you jokers keep drinking unpasteurized milk — that isn’t going to cut it in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Weems was in his 10th professional season when he was featured here at FanGraphs for the first, and heretofore only, time in July 2020. His story was one of resilience, but also of change. Then 27 years old, Weems was a converted catcher soon to make his big-league debut as a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics. Drafted by the Boston Red Sox in 2011 out of Columbus (GA) High School in 2011, he moved to the mound five years later after dwelling in Mendoza-line territory while wearing the tools of ignorance.

Weems is now in his third season with the Washington Nationals, and by and large he’s forged a decent career as a reliever. The 6-foot-4 right-hander has made 118 appearances at baseball’s highest level, and his numbers include 140 strikeouts in 130 innings. The first of his Ks came against Trevor Story, the first batter he faced while toeing a big-league rubber.

I recently asked the personable hurler if he ever thinks about that initial punch out.

“Absolutely,” replied Weems, who has a 3.94 ERA over 16 innings in the current campaign. “You have to kind of stay where your feet are in this game — what you did in the past is in your past — but at the same time, if you’d have told me early on in my [professional] career that I’d be a pitcher in the big leagues, I would have laughed. Looking back, what I’ve done is pretty cool.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Rays running out of mound visits and various visit-related hypotheticals, then (21:00) answer listener emails about “due up” vs. “on deck,” strikes vs. pitches in the strike zone, whether focusing on wins instead of runs makes WAR less intuitive, Quinn Priester and FIP-based pitcher WAR, Ronald Acuña Jr.’s ping-ponging strikeout rate, whether the ball-strike challenge system hampers strikeout celebrations, how much infielders help control the running game, advanced pitching machines and the minors-to-majors transition, why there aren’t more major league trick plays, cathartic uniform-burning, and timeout-induced injuries.

Audio intro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Rays mound visit story
Link to mound visits rule
Link to story on get-back coaches
Link to OnDeck Capital wiki
Link to Birnbaum on runs vs. wins
Link to lowest K-BB%
Link to highest HR/9
Link to defense behind pitcher
Link to FG RA/9 WAR
Link to Jaffe on Acuña
Link to Dan S. on zStats
Link to Petriello on Acuña’s Ks
Link to ESPN on Báez tags
Link to BP on tags
Link to Ben on pitching machines
Link to Rosenthal on MiLB-MLB gap
Link to Ben on MLB-MiLB in 2015
Link to Skunk in the Outfield
Link to Grand Illusion play
Link to KK play
Link to Skenes gamer
Link to Fletcher story
Link to EW on equipment destruction
Link to uni-burning story
Link to listener emails database
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

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Over the course of his storied career, Andrew McCutchen has stood there and watched ball four go by 1,075 times. I watched something like 750 of those pitches on Thursday, and then I cut them down into supercuts. I hope to God I never to see another ball four. I was watching for something specific. I noticed the other day that McCutchen flips his bat a lot, which caught me off guard. If you’re a Pirates fan, I’m sure you know exactly what I’m talking about, but I suspect people outside Pittsburgh might be startled by it, too. After all, McCutchen is a veteran who tends toward a more traditional playing style. That’s not to say that he plays without any flair or that he doesn’t have a sense of humor (he definitely does), just that he’s on the staid side of things. In fact, in October of 2017, McCutchen tweeted his disapproval of the trend.

The issue is not that McCutchen has necessarily changed his mind. He doesn’t really flip his bat when he hits a home run. He’ll do it on rare occasions, but most of the time, he handles his homers with a quiet cool. He finishes his home run swing one-handed, with the bat held low, and he simply drops the bat head toward the ground and lets go of the handle in a smooth continuation of that move. It’s a classic look, and though it’s hard to imagine that McCutchen doesn’t know he looks cool while he’s doing it, it doesn’t come off as an affectation.

Instead of home runs, McCutchen flips his bat when he earns a walk. I’m not the only person to notice this. A Ke’Bryan Hayes fan account started a Twitter thread of McCutchen’s bat flips back in May of 2023, adding a video each time he did it for the next two weeks. In July, the Pirates posted a compilation video on TikTok with the caption, “Either pitch to Cutch or risk getting bat-flipped on.” If you think about it, for someone who really loves bat flipping, the walk is the perfect time. First of all, just about everyone walks more often than they homer, which means more chances to party. Second, while a walk is good for the batter and bad for the pitcher, it’s not a big enough deal that the pitcher will feel like you’re rubbing their nose in it. Third, nothing is expected of the batter after a walk. There’s no risk of flipping your bat dramatically and then realizing that you should have been running around the bases because the ball isn’t carrying like you thought it would. Read the rest of this entry »

During spring training, I asked 10 current big leaguers how they followed the game growing up, and how that has changed since they began playing professionally. As expected, all of them noted significant differences. No longer fans following their favorite teams and players, they consume baseball in a distinctly different way, even as the mediums through which they take in the game remain much the same.

Following up on that March 8 piece, I asked a new subset of baseball professionals much the same question. Four are former players who are now managing, while two are former players who are now broadcast analysts. In each case, how they consume the game has evolved not once, but twice.

Here is what they had to say. Their answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.

———

John Schneider, Toronto Blue Jays manager:

“For me, it’s always been similar. That maybe sounds funny, but whether it was as a fan, player, coach, or manager, I’ve always been interested in the strategy of the game. Being a catcher, you kind of look at a game that way naturally. What most fans want to see is their favorite players — you want them to hit home runs, things like that — and then as a manager, you’re always wondering what strings another manager might pull, or at least try to pull. So, it’s similar for me, but at the same time obviously a little different. Read the rest of this entry »