Jim Palmer faced 870 different hitters over the course of a Hall of Fame career that spanned from 1965 to 1984. A Baltimore Oriole throughout, the now-80-year-old broadcast analyst did so while fashioning a 268-152 won-lost record and a 2.68 ERA. A six-time All-Star who captured three Cy Young Awards, he is widely considered the best pitcher in franchise history.
How well does Palmer remember his matchups against Carl Yastrzemski, Rod Carew, and other notables from his era? Moreover, can he correctly answer questions such as “Who did you strike out the most times?” and “Who did you surrender the most home runs to?” I decided to find out. Given his reputation as an entertaining storyteller with a good memory, Palmer seemed like a perfect fit for our Challenging Career Quiz series.
That he didn’t know who he had faced the most times came as a surprise. Palmer faced Yastrzemski a whopping 197 times, with his next most frequent matchup, Graig Nettles, lagging well behind with 160. Of course, his not being able to name the Red Sox icon didn’t mean there weren’t stories. With Palmer, there are almost always going to be stories. Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Szymborski: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: Except maybe SzymChat.
12:02
war2d2: Dan! Good news! I just realized you can sing your name to the tune of “Black Betty” by Ram Jam. Do with this information what you will.
12:04
Dan Szymborski: I’m not sure if the lyric “Szymborski had a child bam ba lam” really works
12:04
Chandler White: How does Zips react to a player repeating a minor league level and performing much better? The general notion is that it’s expected from potential major leaguers but was unsure if Zips is only factoring in age and other league factors or if there was something built into the algo to reference a repeat in level.
12:04
Dan Szymborski: There’s a bit of a penalty for repeating after a previous stint of at least 1/2 a season
12:05
war2d2: I felt the Cubs did an okay job at the deadline, addressing the needs they had with decent options (ZiPS seems to agree, judging by your piece on the deadline). Obviously I’m disappointed they didn’t land Skubal, as I think anyone would be. You had said previously that, from a playoff odds perspective, Skubal made the most impact on the Cubs’ chances out of anyone. Would he have made more of an impact alone than the package of Gausman et al did in aggregate?
I thought I’d left this life behind. I thought my We Tried tracking days were behind me. I spent the past week covering trades that happened. Real trades, where one player (or two players, or three players, or a theoretical pile of international bonus pool money) moved from one team to another in exchange for one other player (or two other players, or, well, you get it). But just when I thought I was out, the Brewers pulled me back in. Of all teams, the Brewers! I started tracking We Trieds following the 2024 season, and over two offseasons, Milwaukee put up two goose eggs. The Brewers never gave me a single We Tried to track. Now they’ve had such a dramatic We Tried that they’re dragging me kicking and screaming out of We Tried retirement. What a world. Oh, and the Red Sox roped me back in too, because of course they did. But let’s start in Milwaukee.
As you might have learned from Michael Baumann, the Brewers were considered a real contender to land Tarik Skubal. That alone does not a We Tried make, but on Tuesday, MLB.com’s Adam McCalvy spilled all sorts of beans about their ace chase. McCalvy talked to “multiple club officials” and found the Brewers uncharacteristically forthcoming. He learned that although top overall prospect Jesús Made was off limits, the Brewers offered shortstop Luis Peña, whom we have ranked 26th overall on our updated Top 100 Prospects list, and two other position player prospects. One of those other prospects was also a Top 100 talent, which, depending on whose top 100 you’re talking about, could mean Brady Ebel, Jett Williams, Josh Adamczewski, or Luis Lara (though probably not Lara, as the Brewers signed him to an extension in June). That’s quite a lot of specifics.
A friend sent this article to me within an hour of its publication. It hits all the We Tried hallmarks. It lays out the offer the Brewers made, speculates on the players included and the players the Dodgers would have liked them to include. As I read on, I couldn’t help myself. I knew I’d have to get back in the game. Read the rest of this entry »
That’s a tough question. Whatever answer you come up with will certainly say just as much about your methodology as the pitch itself. That’s OK. We’re open-minded people here, and there’s more than one way to approach this problem. Read the rest of this entry »
Ranked and briefly analyzed below are the prospects who have been traded during the loosely defined “2026 deadline season,” which for simplicity’s sake we consider all of July. Most of the deals these prospects were a part of have been analyzed at length on this site. An index of those pieces can be found here; you can also click the hyperlink in the “Trade” column below, which will take you to the relevant article. We’ve moved all of the 35+ FV and above players listed here to their new orgs over on The Board, so you can click through to see where they rank among their new teammates and read their full scouting reports. You can also view all of the traded prospects on the 2026 Trade Deadline tab. The Farm System Rankings, which update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up following the draft and the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »
Opening weekend of the WPBL’s inaugural season is officially in the record books. Around 5,200 fans happily crowded into a wet and windy Robin Roberts Stadium in Springfield, Illinois on Saturday for the privilege of being able to say they were present for the league’s first pitch. A rain delay lasting just over an hour prolonged the suspense that had been building since the league was first announced early last year, but women are used to waiting their turn.
With the season now underway, I’ll be recapping 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 will 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 list will discuss the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. And to round things out, we’ll touch on 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 their new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »
Kevin Gausman has been a fan favorite for most of his 14 big league seasons, and for good reason. Now a Chicago Cub after Sunday’s swap with the Toronto Blue Jays, the 35-year-old right-hander has not only performed well on the field, he is widely regarded as both a good teammate and an all-around nice guy. With that reputation in mind, and the trade deadline fast approaching, I broached the subject of fandom with him at Fenway Park in the final week of July.
I began by asking about his boyhood allegiances.
“I was more a fan of players than teams,” replied Gausman, who was born and raised in the Denver area. “I wouldn’t say I was a huge Rockies fan — I was more fair-weather — although when I was in high school, they did go to the World Series. Even so, I was more a fan of the Cargos [Carlos González], the Tulos [Troy Tulowitzki], and guys like Todd Helton and Ubaldo Jiménez. It wasn’t so much, ‘This is my favorite team.’ I didn’t have that. I did have my favorite uniforms, which is kind of funny looking back. I always liked the old Blue Jays uniforms.” Read the rest of this entry »
After talking Tarik Skubal and a few other early acquisitions in the preceding pod, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley recap the rest of the trade deadline in detail, from Adell to Zeferjahn (with many non-ex-Angels in between): the biggest surprises, the winners and losers, and the various reminders that life comes at you fast.
In this trade deadline season where everyone’s within reach of a playoff spot, the Marlins were one of several teams that attempted to chart a middle path. Sure, we’ll sell off some of our best players — including, in Liam Hicks and Lake Bachar, some guys with plenty of team control left — but we’ll add in other trades and try to backfill those roles.
Miami’s big major league add was 26-year-old reliever Victor Vodnik, late of the Colorado Rockies. That sounds like damning with faint praise, and it is: Vodnik has a 5.25 ERA in 36 innings this season, and at the time of the trade, he was fifth among Rockies relievers in gmLI, which is the average leverage index when he enters the game. In other words, the Rockies don’t think Vodnik is a high-leverage reliever, or at least they hadn’t been using him that way.
The trade deadline was yesterday. Are you tired? I’m tired. But we’re not done yet. We’ve still got to break down the three trades the Reds managed to swing at the bell. Let’s get to it, and then let’s take a nap. First, the Reds sent reliever Caleb Ferguson to the Cardinals in exchange for $250,000 of international bonus pool space. Then the Reds hooked up with the Guardians for two intrastate deals: Cleveland sent Cincinnati pitching prospect Alejandro Rivera in exchange for first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, and, in a separate transaction, traded rookie second baseman Juan Brito in exchange for a pile of money whose size has not yet been revealed. Were I in charge of one of these Ohio franchises, I might have combined those deals into one move, as it likely would have made everyone feel a bit better. Brito would definitely feel a bit better if he thought his contract hadn’t simply been sold outright, and Lowe might have an extra bit of pep in his step if he thought he got traded for not one but two players (plus he could’ve delivered the cash considerations himself, saving the Reds a trip to the post office for a money order). Let’s take these in order, shall we?
Ferguson must be getting used to this. He got traded at the deadline from the Yankees to the Astros in 2024 and the Pirates to the Mariners in 2025. At least Cincinnati to St. Louis is his shortest move yet. The 30-year-old lefty reliever is running a 4.01 ERA and 4.23 FIP this season. That FIP is grumpy, his highest since 2019, because he’s walking 10.1% of the batters he faces and running his worst home run rate since 2020. Although his hard-hit rate is still excellent and he has a great groundball rate, batters seem more comfortable. Their bat speed against him is up more than two ticks from last season, a huge jump that makes it seem like the high home run rate might be more than just bad luck. Still, we should note that we’re talking about a small sample here. Ferguson has only made 26 appearances (24.2 inning) because he missed the first two months of the season with an oblique injury (that is, an injury to his obliques; not some sort of obscure, unparsable injury). He is also running the second-highest BABIP of his career and his expected ERA is 3.49, almost exactly the same as last year, so Statcast isn’t too worried about his contact quality.
However, we do need to note some real changes in Ferguson’s profile. His average fastball velocity has dropped from 93.9 mph last year to 92.4 mph this year. His arm angle has also dropped significantly, from 46 degrees to 39. These are big changes, and as you’d expect when a pitcher’s arm angle drops, Ferguson’s stuff has traded a small amount of vertical movement for some horizontal movement. Now, maybe this is intentional. Maybe it’s a result of the oblique injury, and Ferguson’s velocity, arm angle, or both will jump back up toward the end of the season. I don’t have a way of knowing, but it obviously didn’t scare off St. Louis.
As for why the Cardinals made this move, my only guess is that they weren’t planning on using that bonus pool money. They traded away Dustin May, JoJo Romero, and Lars Nootbaar at the deadline. After beating the Yankees last night, their playoff odds sit at 5.5%. Ferguson can take the left-handed Romero’s spot in a bullpen that ranks 24th in ERA and 21st in FIP.
That brings us to the Reds-Guardians trades. Lowe is the big-ticket item here. After a dismal 2025 season in which he ran a 91 wRC+ and put up -0.3 WAR, he is back where he’s been for most of his career, running a 120 wRC+ and, when he’s not DH’ing, providing first base defense that is better left unmentioned. However, in recent years, Lowe has been going about it in a very different fashion.
Lowe bats left-handed, but his career platoon splits aren’t that extreme. He’s got a 103 wRC+ against lefties and a 123 mark against righties. Last year, that changed. He put up a wRC+ of just 41 against lefties. It’s the main reason his season was such a disaster. This year, the Reds have been shielding Lowe from lefties at all costs. He’s only faced them 10% of the time, and while that’s a tiny sample, you can’t fault them: He’s running a 137 wRC+ against righties and a -52 wRC+ against lefties. Yes, I said negative 52. He’s going to keep on platooning in Cleveland.
To that end, the Guardians made room on the roster for Lowe and fellow trade acquisition Jo Adell by optioning Kyle Manzardo and David Fry to Triple-A. Manzardo had been platooning with Rhys Hoskins at first base, but after running a 113 wRC+ in his first full major league season last year, he’s backslid to a 95 wRC+. His defense, while not Nathaniel Lowe-bad, hasn’t helped much either. Lowe will slide into Manzardo’s spot, serving as the big spoon in the first base platoon with Hoskins.
This isn’t the sexiest move, and the defensive side will cost the Guardians some. Manzardo and Lowe have both put up -4 FRV at first base this season, but Lowe has accrued that negative value in just 30% of the innings (and to be fair to Manzardo, DRS actually thinks he’s actually been a good defender). Still, the offensive bump will more than offset that, and – stop me if you’ve heard this before – the Guards need some help at the plate. With a 93 wRC+, they rank 25th in baseball. This isn’t exactly a new problem, but Lowe should be able to provide some real help.
Cincinnati’s return for Lowe is intriguing, though the player is a ways off from the majors. The Guardians signed the 19-year-old Rivera out of Venezuela, and he’s spent the past two seasons dominating the DSL to the tune of a 1.60 ERA and a 3.97 FIP. (I know the FIP doesn’t sound that impressive, but in the DSL, that still works out to an impressive FIP- of 78.) Rivera ran a 2.44 ERA with a 3.59 FIP and a huge 36% strikeout rate in the complex this year, and made one start at Low-A before the deadline. Eric Longenhagen likes Rivera’s athleticism, noting that although the righty is just 5-foot-10, he generates six-and-a-half feet of extension. He’s got a plus changeup, and a low release gives his fastball, which sits 90-94 mph, an uphill angle. Eric put a 35+ FV on Rivera, noting that the “lack of size makes it tough to comfortably project him as a starter.”
That brings us to our last move: Juan Brito for a mystery amount of cash. You don’t need me to break down the present or future value of cash. That’s helpfully printed on the corners, so we can get right to Brito, whom the Guardians DFA’d a few hours before the trade. The 24-year-old infielder made his major league debut in April, and in 15 games, he’s put up a wRC+ of 45 and struck out more than 30% of the time. He’s mostly hit in the minors. In 2022, he ran a 131 wRC+ as a Colorado farmhand in Low-A. In 2023, he ran a 128 wRC+ across three levels for the Guardians. In 2024, he ran a 114 wRC+ at Triple-A, and in 2025, that number was 110. But you might have noticed that those numbers have trended downward over time, and Brito has been worse this year, running a 98 wRC+ at Triple-A to go with the short, ugly debut.
Even worse, as Eric and Brendan Gawlowski noted back in January, Brito’s defense has been trending downward too. While he once looked like he’d play a passable second base, “Brito has tumbled down the defensive spectrum, and after experimentation at third base and in the outfield, it’s starting to look like his best position is first base. He’ll still play second, but not particularly well.” Eric and Brendan put a 40 FV on Brito, noting that “he hits righties well enough to play a small role.” With Matt McLain struggling for the second year in a row, maybe Brito will get a chance to show the Reds what he can do at some point in the next couple months.
So those are our trades. The Cardinals bought a lefty to replace the lefty they didn’t need anymore because they were giving up on the season. The Guardians gave up an interesting young pitcher to make a small upgrade at first base, and the Reds are giving a look to an infielder whose arrow is pointing down. We did it, you guys. Let’s take that nap.
Dan Szymborski
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