In the sixth inning of Monday’s game between the Blue Jays and the Cardinals, George Springer got a pitch to hit, a hanging curveball that split the center of the strike zone. He recognized the pitch late and fouled it off:

His post-swing demeanor suggests that he considered it a missed opportunity, and it’s clear to see why. With a pitch like that, he was thinking extra bases; instead, Andre Pallante got a strike for his troubles. Now Springer’s back was against the wall. Pallante came back with a much better pitch on 1-2, but Springer spoiled it:

Unlike the previous miss, this looked like a calculated act to me. Springer was late on the pitch, but it was too close for comfort, so he took a defensive cut, meeting the ball early in his swing and punching it harmlessly away.

Welcome to the confusing world of analyzing foul ball rate. Both of Springer’s swings produced the same result, but the first one was a poor outcome for him and the second a desirable one. You can argue that the second pitch would have been a ball if he hadn’t swung, but he certainly wasn’t sure of that when he committed to swinging; living to fight another day against such a well-located pitch is a good outcome.

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Luis Arraez, Nick Allen, and Brice Turang are among the leaders in early-count foul ball rate (foul balls per swing). They swing a lot, make a lot of contact, and spray their contact to all fields, including foul territory in every direction. On the other side of the coin, you’ve got sluggers like Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and yes, Springer. These guys don’t swing as often, which means a few things. First, they swing at better pitches on average, which leads to better contact. Second, they make less contact on average, and less contact means fewer fouls, even for the same rate of fouls-per-contact.

I’d rather be in the second camp than the first there. Early-count foul balls are a waste, literally the same as a swinging strike. They might be worse, even – baserunners can’t steal, catchers can’t block poorly and allow a passed ball. A full 46% of Arraez’s swings – 48% for league leader Wilyer Abreu – end up as foul balls. Sure, contact is great, but when half of it counts as a strike, it’s a lot less enticing.

Things change with two strikes, though. When a foul ball extends the at-bat instead of ending it in a strikeout, it becomes valuable instead of detrimental. Have you ever watched Jake Cronenworth hit? With two strikes, he turns into a lacrosse goalie, trying to redirect everything in the vicinity of the strike zone. He’s not trying to hit a homer unless the pitcher truly grooves him one; he’s specifically looking to avoid a strikeout. Cronenworth sports the highest foul-per-swing rate in baseball with two strikes at 51.2%. It works – he still strikes out a decent amount because of his penchant for running deep counts, but he walks 16% of the time because eventually pitchers miss the zone.

The bottom of the two-strike foul ball rate list, on the other hand, is filled with strikeout-prone types. Javier Báez makes foul contact on just 27% of his two-strike swings. Judge, who still strikes out a ton even as he rewrites the record books, is towards the bottom. So are Jackson Chourio, Shohei Ohtani, Fernando Tatis Jr., Kyle Schwarber, and all nature of excellent sluggers. You can get away with it if you hit like those guys, but Andrew Vaughn, Brenton Doyle, Miguel Andujar, and Michael Toglia are floundering under the weight of their inability to fight pitches off. This isn’t a disqualifying statistic, in other words, but it’s surely a bad thing; it’s directly leading to higher strikeout rates, and unless you have light tower power, many of the pitches you swing at with two strikes aren’t the kind you can hit for extra bases anyway.

I’d posit that high foul ball rates before two strikes are bad, while high foul ball rates with two strikes are good. Early in the count, fouls are a waste, while late in the count, they’re a get out of jail free card. Assuming that these two events are equivalent doesn’t make much sense to me; hitters behave differently, and if we don’t credit them for that different behavior, we’re missing something essential about the act of hitting.

To measure this, I had to put everything on the same scale. I first took every hitter who has swung at 200 or more pitches early in the count, found the average foul ball per swing rate, then normalized each player’s foul ball rate into z-scores. I did the same for every hitter who has swung at 100 or more pitches in two-strike counts. That gave me two scores for every hitter: early-count foul rate and two-strike foul rate. I flipped the sign of the early-count foul rate scores – lower is better – and then summed the two.

This let me separate out the hitters who always have high foul ball rates or always have low foul ball rates – they don’t demonstrate this skill of changing their approach in a measurable way. Arraez, for example, makes foul contact on 46.2% of his early-count swings and 46.3% of his two-strike swings. It’s the same approach, and because the league as a whole cuts down on their swings and makes more foul contact with two strikes, Arraez rates below average in this metric. He’s two standard deviations above average in his early-count foul rate and only 1.6 above average in two-strike foul ball rate, a net of -0.4 for his “foul score.” Allen is even worse – he makes foul contact on 47.1% of early-count swings, but only 39.3% of two-strike swings. When pitchers try to throw the ball past him, they succeed. His foul score is a woeful -2.15.

That’s among the worst marks in the majors, but the actual worst hitter is doing a lot worse than that. That would be Andujar, who is making a ton of foul contact early (44.6%) but almost never when he needs it to stay alive (27.4%). The result is a foul score of -4.2. If you’re wondering why a guy with his skills – solid bat speed, elite contact rate – has never taken off in the majors, it might be related to this. Likewise, if you’re trying to puzzle out what’s ailing Xander Bogaerts this year, it can’t help that he makes foul contact 39% of the time early but only 30% of the time late, for a foul score of -2.2.

Most big leaguers aren’t outliers to this degree. More than 60% of the league has a foul score between -1 and 1, and 93% fall between -2 and 2. The top 10 hitters by this metric have an aggregate wRC+ 20 points higher than the bottom 10, but most players fall into the broad, undifferentiated middle. I’m not saying that this is a skill that everyone in baseball has or should use, but I do think that it’s measuring a real ability.

That brings us back to Springer, a paragon of adaptability. Early in the count, he’s allergic to foul balls, fouling the ball off just 30.6% of the time. Put him in a two-strike count, however, and he goes into protect mode, fouling off the ball with 42% of his hacks. He’s demonstrated some version of this skill throughout his career, in fact. His worst two years for modulating his foul ball rate were 2023 and 2024 – perhaps not coincidentally, those were the two worst offensive years of his career.

Another standout in the field? Springer’s erstwhile teammate, Carlos Correa, who is roughly Springer’s equal in foul score this year and has been even better over the course of his career. Was this part of the Astros’ famed no-strikeouts transformation? I obviously can’t say with any certainty, and they might have been doing a few other things to tilt things in their favor, but a solid approach like this can’t hurt.

It’s not all former Astros. Harper has learned this skill over time. During his Nationals tenure, he didn’t change his approach much at all when reaching two strikes. Since joining the Phillies, however, he’s running one of the largest differences between early-count foul rate and two-strike foul rate in the entire major leagues. And hey, would you look at that, he has a huge foul score this year, too – his 28% early-count foul rate and 37% two-strike foul rate land him fourth in the majors in foul score.

When fans and analysts talk about smart hitters with bat control, I’d argue that they’re implicitly describing this skill. The ability to take different swings depending on the context – prioritizing loud, fair contact early, then choking up and defending late – thrills old-school and new-school fans alike. That ability to adapt is more valuable than always slapping at the ball or always trying to hit it out of the park.

If you’re like me, you have one big question: Is this a sustainable skill, or does it flicker in and out from one year to the next, introducing noise into hitters’ production? The outliers here clearly seem to have an edge – Harper, Springer, and Correa do it consistently. Allen and Andujar have always made more foul contact with two strikes than early in the count; they’ve never possessed this skill. Still, I wanted to check whether it’s a talent (or hinderance) held by only a few.

To do so, I took data from 2023 and 2024. I identified the top 10% and bottom 10% of hitters in 2023, then compared their performance to 2024. The top 10% of hitters averaged a score of 1.7 in 2023 and 0.6 in 2024. The bottom 10% of hitters averaged -2 in 2023 and -0.4 in 2024. Expand it to the top 25%, and you get a similar result: 1.2 in 2023 and 0.3 in 2024 for the top 25%, -1.6 in 2023 and -0.4 in 2024 for the bottom 25%. There was a 0.3 correlation between year-one foul score and year-two foul score. It’s a real skill – not as strong as, say, home run rate or swinging strike rate, but nevertheless something where hitters who are good at it in one year tend to be good at it in the next.

So the next time you see George Springer foul off an early hanging breaking ball, you’ll know: That’s a rare event. And next time you see Bryce Harper turn an 0-2 count into an all-out foul ball battle, yep, that’s years of training showing through. These guys are good at what they do, and it’s a thing that you, the fan, implicitly know is a good thing. Isn’t baseball cool?

One of the many common themes in mythology, across myriad cultures, is the tragic tale of a protagonist who is undermined and ultimately defeated by the original source of their strength. Oedipus was brought down by his search for truth, Karna by his generosity, and Cú Chulainn by his obligations to his code of honor. Luis Arraez isn’t the hero in an ancient tale, but his ability to hit baseballs at will is the stuff of a modern baseball legend. And like those heroes and heroines in lore, his greatest strength is contributing to his downfall.

Arraez is so fun because he defies an unfortunate aspect of today’s game, what I’ve referred to in the past as its “Anna Karenina problem.” Every lousy lineup seems incompetent in their own way, while most great lineups are nearly indistinguishable from the others. It certainly feels like there’s less run-scoring variety than there was when I was young, a concerningly long time ago. Nobody could possibly mistake Arraez for the greatest player in baseball, but he has won three straight batting titles despite being so very different than the type of player you would see on the cover of a Modern Hitter magazine. He doesn’t work counts to draw walks or pull a bunch of barrels into the stands. Instead, he can turn nearly any pitch into a line drive hit, leading to high batting averages in an era when that has become a relative rarity. In 2025, Arraez has struck out only five times; there are five players this season who have done that in a single game, including former MVP Jose Altuve and two young phenoms, Dylan Crews, Jackson Chourio.

Without boasting the traditional markers of a valuable offensive player, Arraez has nonetheless been one since he broke into the league with the Twins in 2019. He entered this season with a career 120 wRC+ across nearly 3,000 plate appearances, even though he’d hit just 28 home runs. Still, that doesn’t mean Arraez has maintained the same level of nonconformity throughout his career. He remains a contact extraordinaire without much power, but some of his defining characteristics have become more extreme as his career has progressed. With a 103 wRC+, Arraez is having his weakest offensive season, and it’s largely because his signature formula for success isn’t quite mixing the way it did before. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been writing about Cal Raleigh a lot lately, as we should. He’s currently on pace for 9.9 WAR, which would constitute the greatest season of all time for a catcher. Although his defense has taken a step back from its previous heights, Raleigh is running an absurd 182 wRC+ and leading baseball with 26 home runs. He’ll have to come down to Earth at some point, but he’s all but certain to lead all catchers in home runs for the third straight season. He’s nearly doubled the second-place Logan O’Hoppe’s 14. Raleigh has a real shot to break Salvador Perez’s record of 48 home runs by a catcher – if he keeps up his current pace, he’ll break it by 16 homers!

On May 19, Ben Clemens wrote about how well Raleigh’s new, more selective approach was working out. Even though Raleigh was taking more pitches over the heart of the plate in hitter’s counts (a trend that has continued in the ensuing weeks), the patience has allowed him to get ahead more often and do damage. “Does all of this mean that Raleigh is going to maintain his 170 wRC+?” Ben asked. “No way.” That was the only answer he could have given. To suggest otherwise would have been sabermetric malpractice. But, uh, Raleigh didn’t exactly regress back to the mean from there on out. From May 20 to June 8, Raleigh was the best hitter in baseball, slashing .348/.427/.894 with 13 homers for a 267 wRC+. His average exit velocity was 97.2 mph! That’s what it takes to – barely – hit better than Aaron Judge. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I turned on the tail end of a Blue Jays-Phillies clash. I was hoping to get some notes for an article on Alec Bohm that didn’t really come together. The game was a complete laugher, with Philadelphia leading by five runs in the ninth. All I wanted was to see Bohm put a ball in play, but instead this happened:

Braydon Fisher came out firing in that low-leverage chance. He came out firing curveballs, to be specific – 12 of his 18 offerings in the inning. The Phillies swung at them like they were learning how physics works on the fly. But so what? Anyone can look that good for one game. Major league pitchers have good stuff, more at 11.

Then I started looking at Fisher’s prior games, and I started getting more intrigued. Wait, this guy almost never throws his upper-90s fastball? Wait, he has two different plus breaking balls? Wait, his walk rate was what in the minors last year (14.2%, and above 15% in Triple-A)? I started watching more at-bats and started getting interested. The slider? It’s nasty:

The key characteristic here is velocity. At 88 miles an hour, sliders don’t give opposing hitters much time to adjust. The tight gyro shape of the pitch means it works against lefties and righties alike. His over-the-top release gives the pitch a ton of downward plane, too: Though he doesn’t induce much break on the pitch, it seems to vanish downward when he locates it around the knees.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates beat the Phillies 2-1 on Sunday, and near as I can tell everyone was pissed about it. The Phillies, a would-be World Series contender, had just gotten swept by a team they’d been hoping to do some damage against, and dropped to 1-9 in their previous 10 games. The Pirates, for their part, had just gotten one over (three over, actually) on their intrastate rival, but Paul Skenes didn’t get the win.

The biggest, scariest pitcher in the league had gone 7 2/3 innings, allowing only one unearned run, but had left the game while it was tied in the top of the eighth. That left the NL Cy Young frontrunner with an ERA of 1.88 in 91 innings, but a record of just 4-6. Is it important for Skenes to get the win? Not exactly. But the incongruity between record and performance was just another reminder of how little support this disappointing team is giving the generational talent that had fallen into its lap.

Skenes is the class of the Pirates rotation, but he’s not the only talented pitcher the Bucs have. Even with Jared Jones and Johan Oviedo in the shop getting their elbows worked on, Mitch Keller is having a solid season. Keller is top 25 in the league in innings and WAR, and despite some indifferent strikeout numbers, he’s kept the ball in the yard and scratched out a 4.13 ERA — that’s a 100 ERA- on the dot — with a 3.27 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about good news and bad news for Ben’s recent Meet a Major Leaguer subject Christian Montes De Oca, Craig Kimbrel’s short-lived return to Atlanta, the promotions of Roman Anthony and Jacob Misiorowski and a proposal for automatic call-ups, Denzel Clarke’s incredible catch and extreme stat line (and the nature of quantifying defense), Jhonkensy Noel’s offensive outage, two uncommon occurrences involving baseballs in strange places, Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s mic’ed-up error, Clayton Kershaw’s payback against the Cardinals, and (1:10:26) “Hometown Hero,” a baseball-themed episode of Poker Face.

Audio intro: Garrett Krohn, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to MaML episode
Link to Montes De Oca debut
Link to MLBTR on Montes De Oca
Link to The Athletic on Kimbrel
Link to BP on Kimbrel
Link to MLBTR on Kimbrel
Link to Orioles/Braves episode
Link to O’s/Braves since 5/6
Link to Anthony homer
Link to Misiorowski pitch
Link to Clarke catch
Link to Arneson posts
Link to A’s sprint speed leaderboard
Link to FRV leaderboard
Link to Clarke on-pace projection
Link to Sam on Clarke
Link to 2015 Trout robbery
Link to GMJ robbery
Link to White robbery
Link to JBJ robbery
Link to Pillar robbery
Link to Schanuel bat training
Link to worst wRC+ ranking
Link to Weathers story
Link to Weathers clip
Link to fan-thrown-ball story
Link to fan-thrown-ball clip
Link to Jazz error
Link to Ben on in-game interviews
Link to Kershaw story
Link to Kershaw clip
Link to Kershaw velo
Link to Panthers/Oilers fights
Link to Bing Bong explainer
Link to Hang Up and Listen
Link to recent reinstatements
Link to “Hometown Hero” wiki
Link to “Hometown Hero” IMDb

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Four years ago, LaMonte Wade Jr. seemingly came out of nowhere — he was acquired in a minor trade following a couple cups of coffee in Minnesota — to help the Giants win 107 games and their first division title since 2012. His stream of clutch hits in a close NL West race earned him the nickname “Late Night LaMonte,” and while he couldn’t quite replicate that timeliness in subsequent seasons, he continued to do solid work in a platoon capacity for the Giants, at least until this year. Last week, with the team in the midst of a 2-6 slide during which they scored just 13 runs, president of baseball operations Buster Posey designated Wade for assignment as part of a shakeup aimed at upgrading the offense.

The 31-year-old Wade, who played with Posey on that 2021 squad, was dealt to the Angels for a player to be named later or cash on Sunday, with the Giants sending some unspecified amount of money towards the remainder of his $5 million salary. He was replaced on the roster by Dominic Smith, who had opted out of a minor league contract with the Yankees earlier in the week. Backup catcher Sam Huff was also DFA’d, while infielder Christian Koss was optioned to Triple-A Sacramento. Catcher Andrew Knizner and outfielder Daniel Johnson were both called up from Sacramento to replace them; each had signed minor league contracts with the Giants in May.

[Update: Shortly after this article was published on Tuesday, the Giants placed Matt Chapman on the 10-day injured list with a right hand injury — suffered while diving back to first base on a pickoff — and recalled Koss. Chapman was later diagnosed with sprained ligaments in the middle three fingers of his hand; he hopes to return before the All-Star break.]

With the three new players in the lineup, the Giants proceeded to reel off five straight victories against the Padres (salvaging a split of their four-game series) and Braves (sweeping the weekend series) to lift their record to 38-28, good enough to slide into second place in the NL West, 1 1/2 games behind the Dodgers. Not that the offense really awoke from its slumber. While the team did score 21 runs in those five games, breaking its streak of consecutive games scoring four or fewer runs at 16, its longest since 1965 (h/t Andrew Baggarly), the Giants hit just .200/.256/.327 (64 wRC+) over that stretch, worse than their .223/.304/.306 (77 wRC+) during the eight-game skid. The new guys, in case you were wondering, went 7-for-36 with two doubles and a walk. For the moment, correlation is good enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Brady House is a high-ceiling slugger knocking on the door of the big leagues. Drafted 11th overall by the Washington Nationals in 2021 out of Winder-Barrow High School in Winder, Georgia, the 22-year-old third baseman is slashing .299/.352/.521 with a 128 wRC+ over 256 plate appearances with the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings. Befitting his sturdy 6-foot-4 frame and plus power from the right side, House has hammered 14 doubles and 12 home runs.

His approach might best be described as old school. Asked about his M.O. at the plate, the promising youngster told me his primary goal is simply to hit the ball hard and get on base. And he definitely hits the ball hard. His max exit velocity this season is 112.4 mph, which ranks in the 90th percentile at the Triple-A level. As for his ability to leave the yard, House doesn’t hunt for homers so much as he buys into the process.

“I hit the most home runs when I go up there not trying to hit a home run,” he said. “If I go up there just trying to get a base hit, it just ends up accidentally happening.”

It’s not by accident that House hits home runs in all directions. He called using the entire field an important part of his approach, and the data back up the words. His spray chart shows three homers ripped to right, four blasted to center, and five launched to left. His overall pull rate is actually a career-high 49.4%, but that’s not necessarily by design. While an adjustment is part of the equation, how he’s being attacked is playing a bigger role in his pulling more pitches. Read the rest of this entry »

The wait is over. On Monday, the Red Sox called up Roman Anthony, the consensus top prospect in baseball. He batted fifth and played right field against the Rays, going 0-for-4 with a walk, an RBI, and a costly error. After spending the last few seasons absolutely torching the minors, it turns out Anthony just needed to smash a 497-foot grand slam – the longest ball hit in either the majors or the minors this season – in order to earn his spot in Boston.

What really brought Anthony to Boston was a left oblique strain to Wilyer Abreu, whom the Red Sox placed on the IL when they announced Anthony’s promotion (though the 497-footer certainly couldn’t have hurt). The team designated Ryan Noda for assignment to open a 40-man roster spot.

After all the anticipation, the promotion happened at the very last minute; there were no tear-jerker undercover boss videos. Although Abreu showed discomfort during Friday’s game against the Yankees, the team wasn’t sure until Monday afternoon that he’d actually need to go on the IL. The Triple-A Worcester Red Sox were on the bus about to head to their next series in the Lehigh Valley when the big club called and asked them to wait. Everybody piled off the bus, but the team’s gear was already en route to Pennsylvania. So Anthony drove up the Mass Pike after getting the news and played the game in borrowed cleats. Luckily, teammate Marcelo Mayer already had one of Anthony’s bats.

The Red Sox could certainly use a savior right about now. At 32-36, they’re in fourth place in the East, nine games behind the Yankees, and 4 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. We currently have them with a 15.7% chance of making the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball suffers from the same fundamental contradiction as every spectator sport. It is an entertainment product, a work of narrative nonfiction, if you like. A compelling narrative must adhere to certain norms and strictures; even when expectations are subverted, the audience responds best when those expectations are built up first.

The players and managers who act out the on-field drama, and the front office personnel who hire and direct them, aren’t in the business of storytelling. They’re in the business of problem-solving. That problem: How to put runners on base and, once there, to advance them home. And to prevent one’s opponent from doing the same.

The more we know about this problem, the greater detail in which it’s studied, the greater the risk that a solution will emerge. There might be more than one way to skin a proverbial cat, but if one method emerges as the most efficient, everyone will adopt it. And what’s the fun in that? Read the rest of this entry »