Brandon Pfaadt — former top prospect, 2023 postseason hero, recipient of a long-term extension after just one full season of big league work — lasted only three starts in the major league rotation at the beginning of 2026. After allowing 12 runs in 16 2/3 innings, the Diamondbacks had seen enough. Big contract or no, Pfaadt went off to middle relief.
Pfaadt had a 5.94 ERA and 5.37 FIP when he made his last start on April 11. In 10 bullpen outings that followed — including, it must be said, a couple very strong bulk relief stints — Pfaadt posted a 5.91 ERA and 5.47 FIP in 21 1/3 innings. The next demotion was to Triple-A Reno, an indignity for a pitcher who’d started 65 games across 2024 and 2025. Only Logan Webb and Jake Irvin had made more big league starts in that time.
Pfaadt spent less than four weeks in the minor leagues. When he came back, he went straight back into Arizona’s rotation, and immediately started pitching better than he ever had before. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I saw Aaron Ashby lean on his loopy curveball when he found himself in a jam:
Later that day, I was watching the Tigers when Drew Anderson used his own big hook to finish off an at-bat:
I’m a longtime admirer of the giant 12-to-6 curveball, a pitch that is on the decline across the majors. There’s a good reason for that – without delving into it too deeply, velocity is very important. The league-wide curveball rate is down by nearly a quarter over the last decade, and the curves that remain tend to be harder and sharper than the ones I grew up seeing. But no amount of cold hard data about the pitch’s effectiveness would make it less visually enjoyable for me. So in this, the age of the looping breaker’s decline, I set out to find some good examples of my favorite pitch, even as guys throw it less and less frequently.
How do you define a looping curveball? My first thought was to look for the curveball that falls the most from its initial trajectory as it heads home. There’s just one problem with that definition, and that problem’s name is Victor Robles:
Amazingly, this clip doesn’t come from either the 22-0 or 19-2 blowouts the Mariners endured last week; they’re having some kind of month on the “getting blown out” front. But that perfectly located curveball had an absurd amount of downward movement because he threw it at 46 mph. I don’t even think it’s a curveball, to be honest; Statcast says it had nearly a foot of positive vertical break from backspin. In any case, clearly this criteria isn’t sufficient for our purposes. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about takeaways from ESPN’s 30 for 30 podcast on Shohei Ohtani and Ippei Mizuhara, disappointing parity (46:41), the latest public-funding ballpark boondoggles in Kansas City and Tampa (52:22), and which AL wild card contender most deserves to squeak into October (1:12:58).
I had Tuesday’s Cubs-Diamondbacks Bridge League game circled on the calendar. Chicago’s big league squad is in town this week (for a series that has become spicy), and I thought this meant the organization’s recently drafted pitchers might throw in front of traveling Cubs brass who could see their new talent in the morning before heading to Chase Field for the second game of that series. “Bridge League,” for those unfamiliar, is a fairly informal, month-long slate of backfield games that take place at the spring training complexes between the end of the Arizona and Florida Complex League schedules and the end of the other minor seasons in September. It mostly exists to give newly drafted players a soft landing spot to start their pro careers.
But instead of a first glimpse at Cade Townsend or Carson Jasa, I ran into multiple, big-name rehabbers from both clubs: Justin Steele (who threw a live BP) and Ben Brown of the Cubs, and Corbin Burnes and Zac Gallen of the Diamondbacks. Here is a rundown of my day and how those guys looked, as the two teams eagerly await reinforcements during their respective playoff pushes. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve been watching the Mariners the last couple of nights, you might feel like you’re back in the halcyon days of 2025. Seattle took the first two games of its series against one of baseball’s best teams, the Phillies, and Cal Raleigh launched four home runs over two nights, including a three-dinger outburst on Monday. Unfortunately, that feeling has been fleeting in 2026, as the Mariners are comfortably below .500 and have only remained in the divisional and Wild Card races because their competition has been exuberantly mediocre. As for Raleigh, after hitting 60 home runs and just missing out on the American League MVP award to Aaron Judge, he’s suffered through easily the worst season of his professional career. Raleigh’s collapse this year has been historic in its magnitude, yet both he and the M’s could still come out of this playing October baseball.
When you see a season like Raleigh’s 2025, it’s natural to expect some kind of regression toward the mean. Indeed, it’s so expected a phenomenon that a whole panoply of curses have been coined to explain it without having to get all mathy about it. Did you just have a horrible season after a great one? Well, you may have been cursed by the Sports Illustrated cover, the Madden NFL cover, a Wheaties box, a Heisman award, a sophomore slump, or an MLB the Show cover. Or maybe you just drank Jobu’s rum. Whatever you call it, Raleigh’s 2026 is well past regression to the mean and more like regression to the really frigging mean. I swear, that’s a technical term.
So just how bad a season has Raleigh had compared to expectations? You could probably just say “Austin Hedges has a wRC+ more than 20 points higher than Raleigh.” Or maybe graph Raleigh’s year-to-year home run totals, with the chart properly labeled so that people don’t think they’re viewing a win expectancy graph from a game where late-period Craig Kimbrel was the closer. But since we have a projection system handy, we can do better than that. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric Canha, Mark J. Rebilas, and Brad Penner-Imagn Images
Three years ago, Chris Sale appeared to be pretty close to the end of the line. After missing the abbreviated 2020 season due to Tommy John surgery, he made just 11 starts totaling 48 1/3 innings in 2021–22 while battling further injuries, including a stress fracture of a rib and fractures of his left pinky and right wrist. When he was sidelined by yet another stress fracture — this one in his scapula — in June 2023, he missed 10 weeks, and his ERA ballooned to 4.88 after returning to make half a dozen starts. It was fair to think the 34-year-old lefty’s most productive days were behind him, as his wiry 6-foot-6 frame could no longer withstand the rigors of regular duty.
Lo and behold, Sale made a strong showing over his final three starts of 2023, capturing the attention of the Braves, who traded infielder Vaughn Grissom to the Red Sox in a straight-up exchange in December 2023 and soon restructured his contract. Sale rewarded Atlanta’s faith by winning both the pitching Triple Crown (with 18 wins, a 2.38 ERA, and 225 strikeouts) and the Cy Young award that had long eluded him. Though he was limited to 20 starts last year by a fractured rib, he has continued to dominate; this year, the 37-year-old southpaw ranks second in the NL in ERA (2.20), FIP (2.26), and strikeout rate (30.6%) behind Cy Young favorite Jacob Misiorowski, as well as third in FanGraphs WAR (4.9) behind The Miz and Cristopher Sánchez. And while he’s “only” sixth in Baseball Reference WAR (4.5), Sale’s run with the Braves has pushed his S-JAWS past 2025 Hall of Fame inductee CC Sabathia (50.8). Sale won’t catch any of the big four from this era — Justin Verlander, Clayton Kershaw, Zack Greinke, and Max Scherzer, the last of whom may be the only one active after this season — but he’s the only other active or recently retired starter with an S-JAWS above 45.0. As voters scramble to recalibrate their Hall of Fame standards for starting pitchers in an age of diminished workloads, Sale has likely punched his ticket to Cooperstown.
It hasn’t been a great season for veterans vying to shore up their Hall of Fame credentials, as I noted on Monday, with injuries sidelining hopefuls such as Carlos Correa, Francisco Lindor, José Ramírez, Juan Soto, and Giancarlo Stanton, and age seemingly catching up to Jose Altuve, Manny Machado, and others. Yet Sale isn’t alone among mid-career players who have advanced their causes. What follows here is a partial position-by-position roundup of some others whose odds of earning a spot Cooperstown have improved this season, at least by my reckoning. Not every position is covered, and at some positions, the top candidates wound up in the previous installment because their chances have taken a hit. I’ve included each player’s JAWS standing, his 2026 WAR (Baseball Reference’s version unless otherwise indicated), and his ZiPS rest-of-season projection. Read the rest of this entry »
With Week Four wrapped, we are now two-thirds of the way through the WPBL’s first season. Each team has just five regular season games remaining on the schedule over the next two weeks. Over this past week, the teams at the bottom of the standings were able to close the gap against the teams at the top. Following Week Three, the California teams had the west coast looking like the best coast, but as we’ll explore, reports of beasts in the east are growing louder all the time.
As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.
Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors section discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into a new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »
Summer is nearly over. The Premier League is back in business and the NFL is close behind. Kids are going back to school. The other day, I opened a window and it didn’t feel like sticking my face in a pizza oven.
That means it’s time for me to look at the Cleveland Guardians’ lineup and wonder what the heck they’re doing in the playoff race. But rather than do a deep dive on whoever this year’s load-bearing Tyler Naquin or Owen Miller is, I want to take a step back and look at this issue from a historical perspective.
Because this year, the Guardians aren’t the only team with playoff aspirations and a lineup full of question marks. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about baseball’s new reigning fun fact (courtesy of Pete Crow-Armstrong and Randy Arozarena), Kade Anderson’s debut and Dan Wilson’s slow hook, a Cal Raleigh rally, and the firing of Astros GM Dana Brown, then Stat Blast (41:51) about a Phillies comeback, a strange Yankees streak, an unusual double play, getting hit by both pitched and batted balls, and consecutive same names in lineups, before finishing by discussing (58:37) follow-ups and errata pertaining to the previous week’s podcasts and (1:18:02) a sign-stealing/unwritten-rules controversy courtesy of the Cubs and Diamondbacks.
Bryan Balzer is arguably the most intriguing prospect in the San Diego Padres system. Currently ranked eighth with a 40 FV, the 21-year-old right-hander had virtually no pitching experience when he entered pro ball in 2023. Moreover, he blew out his elbow and had Tommy John surgery following his lone turn on the mound. That was at Joso Gakuin High School, roughly an hour northeast of Tokyo.
His current season has been somewhat of a mixed bag. Between Low-A Lake Elsinore (60 1/3 innings) and High-A Fort Wayne (32), he has a record of 6-2 to go with a 4.58 ERA, a 5.17 FIP, and a 23.4% strikeout rate. But while at times he’s been all too hittable, he has also shown flashes of high-ceiling potential. When I saw him toe the rubber for Fort Wayne in mid-July, Balzer fanned eight batters — including Tigers top prospect Bryce Rainer with two out and the bases juiced — while holding West Michigan to one run over five frames. A day prior, I asked him about his decision to sign with the Padres rather than joining another MLB organization or staying home to pitch in NPB.
“My goal was to be a professional baseball player; I didn’t care if was Japan or America,” replied the Yokosuka native. “But I grew up watching Yu Darvish and wanted to be on his team.”
Balzer, who was mostly raised in Nippon but spent a few years stateside while in grade school, went on to say that his decision was also influenced by his Tommy John surgery; the Padres expressed less concerned than other MLB teams about his having gone under the knife. As for the NPB teams he might have landed with — this via the league’s draft process — the Hanshin Tigers were the first to have a scout approach him after his lone pitching appearance. In terms of overall interest, he recalls the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants having been “the main ones.” Read the rest of this entry »
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