“He has the best stuff on the staff. His pitches move all over the place.”
Those words, which were spoken to me in the Progressive Field press box in late September, came from someone who had not only seen the Cleveland Guardians on a regular basis throughout the season, but a person whose background also includes having played in the big leagues. His assessment of 25-year-old left-hander Joey Cantillo was based both on experience and expertise. (As we were chatting informally, I’m opting not to quote him by name.)
Cantillo’s numbers in is first full major league season suggest that he has a bright future. Initially pitching out of the bullpen, the Honolulu native moved into Cleveland’s starting rotation in early July and proceeded to log a 2.96 ERA, a 3.21 FIP, and a 25.9% strikeout rate over 13 outings comprising 67 innings. Counting his 21 appearances as a reliever, he put up 3.21 ERA, a 3.55 FIP, and a 26.9% strikeout rate over 95 1/3 frames in 2025. All told, Cantillo held opposing batters to a .217 average and a .289 wOBA.
The southpaw was originally drafted by the San Diego Padres in the 16th round of the 2017 draft out of a Kailua, Hawaii high school. (Coincidentally, two picks earlier, the Minnesota Twins took Cleveland reliever Cade Smith out of a British Columbia high school, only to have him eschew signing and attend the University of Hawaii). The Guardians subsequently acquired Cantillo in August 2020 as part of a nine-player trade that included Mike Clevinger, Austin Hedges, and Josh Naylor.
Cantillo sat down to discuss his development path and his four-pitch arsenal in the final week of the regular season.
———
David Laurila: How much have you changed since coming here from San Diego?
Joey Cantillo: “A bunch. When I first got here I wasn’t really throwing very hard. I was one of those guys where it was like, ‘Hey, if he can throw harder he could really do some good things.’ Getting here, it was, ‘Hey, let’s start to move the body faster, get the body in better positions and use it better.’
“That’s what we focused on those first couple years, and it was a struggle. When you’re out there on the mound thinking about things like body positions, it takes away from your over-the-plate focus at times. I needed to learn to balance that. Mechanics and competing are two different things.”
For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Miami Marlins.
Batters
While the Marlins were expected to need to fight hard to get out of the NL East basement in 2025, the team was surprisingly solid from midseason on, and though they never reached .500, they at least flirted with it thanks to a winning record in the second half.
A lot of the happy surprises in Miami came from the starting lineup. While a team wRC+ of 96, good for 21st in the majors, doesn’t exactly occasion a “Mission Accomplished” banner, both marks were a notable improvement on the team’s recent history. Indeed, a 96 wRC+ represents the team’s best result since 2017, that year being one of only two seasons in which the Marlins passed the century mark. While there’s no direct comparison to the team’s terrific Marcell Ozuna/Christian Yelich/Giancarlo Stanton outfield of that era, there’s actually some good young offensive talent on the team. And importantly for Miami, it’s generally inexpensive. Read the rest of this entry »
While 29 American teams sit around twiddling their thumbs, the Toronto Blue Jays continue to run up their bill on the free agent market. After spending $210 million (with deferrals) to bring Dylan Cease in on Thanksgiving Eve, Toronto has now landed one of the top international free agents: right-handed pitcher Cody Ponce, late of the Hanwha Eagles of the KBO.
Even those of you who vaguely remember Ponce from his first stint in the majors might have trouble distinguishing him from any other of the dozens of big, replacement-level relievers the Pirates have thrown out there over the past decade. On some level, Ponce’s stint in Asia is just a chapter in a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants-type deal he’s stuck in with John Holdzkom, Nick Kingham, and Colin Holderman.
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
Before he turned 25 years old, Cole Hamels had already reached the pinnacle of the baseball world. At the tail end of his third major league season, the lanky lefty — listed at 6-foot-4, 205 pounds — had gone 4-0 with a 1.80 ERA during the 2008 postseason, leading the Phillies to their first championship since 1980 and winning NLCS and World Series Most Valuable Player honors along the way. Suddenly, the aura he projected — a handsome laidback surfer from San Diego — needed an upgrade. He became a celebrity, expected to dress the part and live up to outsized expectations, both of which he did with some amount of awkwardness but a fair level of success.
Hamels spent the first 9 1/2 seasons of his major league career with the Phillies, part of the nucleus that helped them climb out of the doldrums to become a powerhouse that won five straight division titles. Armed with a fastball that could reach the mid-90s, an above-average curve, and a killer changeup — inspired by watching Padres closer Trevor Hoffman in his heyday — Hamels was a master of deception thanks to his consistency in throwing those three pitches from the same release point. “It’s devastating for a hitter when all of them look like a fastball, and two of them aren’t,” pitching guru Tom House, who worked with Hamels when he was a junior in high school, toldSports Illustrated’s Ben Reiter in 2009.
Hamels’ career wasn’t without hiccups. He missed significant time due to injuries while in the minors, including both the usual arm troubles and a fracture in his pitching hand, sustained during a barroom brawl while standing up for a close friend. Although he helped the Phillies get a shot at repeating their title in 2009, his postseason was a disaster; during the World Series against the Yankees, he nearly came to blows with teammate Brett Myers. At times he was overshadowed by other members of his rotation, Cy Young winners for whom the Phillies traded in case Hamels wasn’t enough, namely Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay. For as well as he pitched, Hamels himself never came close to winning a Cy Young, and he made just four All-Star teams. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the John Brebbia and Devin Williams signings (in that order, obviously), share a few follow-ups, and (31:33) assess whether each team satisfied its season preview guest’s conditions for a successful year. Then (58:18) they answer emails about the origins of the concept of the “opposite field,” the meaning of the word “whiff,” how to refer to offseasons, whether umpires practice throwing, how much stock to place in regular-season wins without an accompanying championship, and two takes on the challenge system.
Devin Williams, the lights-out reliever with the M. Night Shyamalan changeup, has agreed to a three-year deal with the Mets. A two-time All-Star, Williams earned NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2020 and scored a down-ballot MVP vote as recently as 2023. Even after a disastrous 2025 season kicked his career ERA all the way up from 1.83 to 2.45, he still has a career ERA of – you guessed it – 2.45. Here’s my first piece of analysis: That’s so good, you guys! Assuming he won’t keep running a 55% strand rate from here on out, the Mets just signed up for three years of one of the best relievers in baseball; meanwhile, Williams just signed up for a quick ride from the Bronx to Flushing, but it’s important to note that the ride is always going to be longer than Google Maps predicts, because the odds of actually catching an express 7 train rather than the local are vanishingly small.
Let’s start with the terms of the deal and the credit for who reported which parts of those terms, and then we’ll take a nap and perform some more light analysis. Cool? Cool. Read the rest of this entry »
I never pitched in Little League, but I remember many of the lessons our coach imparted to this day. Most specifically, I remember him harping on “hard in and soft away.” This was silly. Nobody on my team could throw a curveball, and even from my youthful perspective, no one could throw anything hard either. We all mostly struck out or walked; pitchers with command were pretty much untouchable in my small-town East Tennessee league. But we’re losing the plot here – as it turns out, that advice is omnipresent in baseball, from little leagues to the majors.
I’ve always been enamored with this simple and yet fascinating rule of thumb. Why does it work? Does it work, even? What’s so special about “in” and “away” relative to pitch speed? I’ve never quite found a satisfactory way to classify it. But while I was taking a look at contact point data last week, I came up with an idea for how to measure this. When you look at the data, the evidence has been there all along.
I focused on the “hard in” aspect of the adage, because major leaguers throw so many different secondaries that honing in on what “soft” meant seemed impossible. To that end, I devised a quick test to see how conventional wisdom behaves in practice. I defined “inside” and “outside” pitches by removing the middle third of the plate, then extending out nine inches past the edge of the strike zone in both directions. I looked at sinkers and four-seamers thrown in these areas to define “hard in” and “hard away.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Samsung Lions of Daegu, South Korea, have entered the free agent market, scooping up former Detroit Tigers prospect Matt Manning on a one-year, $1 million deal. All Manning needs to do now is find a team called the Bears, and he’ll have the whole set.
Manning, 27, has a career 4.43 ERA in 50 starts in the majors, none since 2024. But he’s more famous than most players with those credentials, on account of being Detroit’s no. 1 pitching prospect for multiple years. Being a team’s no. 1 pitching prospect is not always as impressive as it sounds; at the moment, there are multiple teams without any minor league pitchers with a future value grade over 45 on The Board.
But for the Tigers, in the early 2020s, being no. 1 was a big deal. On the 2020 list, Manning was the no. 12 prospect in all of baseball, followed by Casey Mize, Riley Greene, Tarik Skubal, and Isaac Paredes in Detroit’s system. In 2021, Manning fell behind the previous year’s top draft pick, Spencer Torkelson, but still rated ahead of Skubal and Mize, in that order. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley respond to the responses to their response to a recent listener email, discuss (14:38) the Blue Jays’ Dylan Cease deal (including a Stat Blast about pitchers with big ERA-FIP gaps at 34:11), Anthony Rendon’s potential retirement (47:23), and the Orioles’ Ryan Helsley signing (1:05:37), before scrutinizing ESPN’s annual offseason survey of MLB executives (1:15:53).
Rest in peace, starting pitcher Ryan Helsley (November 23, 2025 — November 29, 2025.) Last Sunday, a trio of staffers at The Athleticreported that the Tigers, among other teams, were interested in converting Helsley into a starter. Even by the open-minded modern standards of reliever-to-starter conversions, this seemed like a stretch. As Michael Baumann noted when he pondered the possibility, Helsley’s arsenal, comprised almost exclusively of four-seamers and sliders, is about as limited as it gets, and his extreme over-the-top arm angle leaves little room for projection.
On Saturday afternoon, Helsley’s illustrious starting career came to a close. ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that the Orioles and Helsley had agreed on a two-year, $28 million pact, with an opt-out after the first year. According to Passan, Baltimore expects Helsley to handle the closer job.
Given the Orioles’ competitive ambitions and their considerable payroll space, they were all but a lock to spend a little cash on a backend reliever. President of baseball operations Mike Elias said as much earlier in the offseason, telling reporters that they were working to acquire an “experienced ninth-inning guy.” Following a season in which their bullpen delivered a 4.57 ERA, their top internal options to handle the late innings were Keegan Akin and Kade Strowd — fine pitchers, but not the leverage arms of a team with division-winning aspirations. After swinging a trade for setup man Andrew Kittredge in early November, Baltimore landed its “experienced ninth-inning guy” in Helsley.
Whether he’s up for the task is a reasonable question. After three straight dominant seasons with the Cardinals — book-ended by All-Star selections — Helsley had himself a nightmarish 2025, particularly after St. Louis traded him to the Mets at the deadline; he had a 7.20 ERA and a 5.19 FIP with New York after posting a 3.00 ERA and a 3.55 FIP before the trade. His 89-mph bullet slider was as effective as ever, racking up a 41.6% whiff rate and staying off barrels, but the fastball got rocked. In an interview with The Athletic’s Katie Woo a few days prior to his signing, he gave his theory for why his season went off the rails.
“I felt great, and the Mets’ models showed I was actually having the best stuff of my career, so it didn’t make sense for me to struggle as bad as I did,” Helsley told The Athletic. “But I was being really predictable in certain counts. It was almost a double-confirmation for hitters. They see it with their eyes, and they also had a stat behind it saying I’m more likely to throw this pitch in a certain count. It just gave them that much more comfort in the box, and more conviction.”
When hitters put his fastball in play, they slugged .667. And they had no issues putting it in play. His 17.8% four-seam whiff rate ranked in the 26th percentile of all pitchers with at least 300 fastballs thrown, surrounded by names like Jake Irvin, Miles Mikolas and Bailey Ober. That’s not ideal company.
Assuming his slider is fine, the merit of the Helsley deal boils down to whether his triple-digit fastball is still a good pitch. The way I see it, there are three possible explanations for its poor performance in 2025. The first is that Helsley was tipping with some sort of visual cue. Helsley told Woo that he believed his hand position “as he was becoming set” revealed whether the pitch would be a fastball or a slider.
“It was pretty obvious,” Helsley told The Athletic. “I’m not the greatest at (spotting pitch tipping), and even I could see it (on film with) the majority of the pitches.”
For whatever it’s worth, it didn’t look that obvious to me. For those on the public side, pitch-tipping analysis often looks like paranoid pattern-matching, like Charlie Day’s Pepe Silvia red string board. There’s little from the center field cameras, at least, that makes it clear. Here’s Helsley’s setup on a fastball that Harrison Bader launched 109 mph to the pull side:
And here is the previous pitch, a slider. Do you see any difference in the setup? To me, there’s no there there.
Here they are right next to each other:
(Helsley changed his setup after this game for the rest of the season, bringing his hands down and holding the ball closer to his body. The results weren’t much better; as Helsley himself said in that interview, it’s hard to make an in-season adjustment.)
While the physical tipping evidence is ambiguous, the count-level predictability is pretty clear-cut. In a broad sense, Helsley maintained a roughly 50/50 usage of his slider and fastball, occasionally tossing in a curveball as a wrinkle. But looking at the overall usage patterns belies the predictability of his pitch selection.
In 0-0 counts, Helsley opted for the heater 57% of the time. In deep hitter counts (2-0, 3-1, and 3-0), that leapt to 75%. Heavy fastball usage in these contexts is somewhat excusable, but Helsley’s full count approach underlined his reliance on the heater in tight spots. Of the 50 pitches thrown in 3-2 counts, 37 (74%) were four-seamers. (Perhaps another reason Bader smashed that 3-2 heater into the stratosphere.)
A similar story could be told with the slider. Heavy slider use in two-strike counts is to be expected, but even in 1-1 counts, Helsley threw it 72 times in 99 opportunities. For a pitcher with essentially two pitches, this type of predictability is lethal, no matter the nastiness of the stuff.
If Helsley’s ineffectiveness comes down to pitch-tipping and count issues, the Orioles have good reason to be confident in a bounce back. But if his stuff is starting to decline, they may have a problem on their hands.
Is there evidence this is the case? If you squint, maybe. Helsley broke out in 2022 with a superhuman 39.3% strikeout rate while tag-teaming the closer role with Giovanny Gallegos. The breakout was fueled by a massive velocity jump — from 2021 to 2022, Helsley’s fastball gained over two ticks, jumping to an average of 99.6 mph. In 2025, that dropped all the way down to… 99.3 mph.
The case for Helsley’s fastball losing its juice, then, would need to be about something other than velocity decline. Here, there is a bit more to latch onto. In that 2022 season, Helsley’s average arm angle on his four-seamer was around 52 degrees. By 2025, that had climbed all the way to 62 degrees with no concurrent improvement to the pitch’s vertical movement.
A fastball’s effectiveness can be largely explained by its vertical movement relative to its release point; more movement from a lower release or lower arm angle makes it tougher for a hitter to pick up. Because the excellent induced vertical break (18 inches) on Helsley’s fastball now comes from a more “vertical” arm angle, it doesn’t have the same deceptive qualities. Once near the top of the scale in terms of Alex Chamberlain’s dynamic dead zone measurements, his fastball has declined to merely “very good.” If Helsley needs to keep hiking his arm angle up each year to maintain the same level of induced vertical break, that could start to look like a concern.
As it stands, this seems to be more of a minor concern than a red flag. The stuff models on FanGraphs — Stuff+ and PitchingBot — both still consider Helsley’s fastball to be a well above-average pitch, even if they agree that the quality has declined slightly from 2022 or 2023. He’s sitting 99 mph, after all — even with poor shape, a four-seamer with that velocity should still play.
Overall, I’m inclined to say that both sides found a good deal here. The reliever market is the first of any position group to take shape in this early offseason, with both Phil Maton and Raisel Iglesias inking deals prior to Helsley. Iglesias is older, but received $16 million for a single year’s work; Maton, a solid middle reliever, got two years and $14.5 million. If this is the range for the second-tier relievers, and if the three top guys — Edwin Díaz, Devin Williams, and Robert Suarez — are in line for a good chunk more, Helsley’s signing starts to look pretty reasonable for the Orioles, especially because he is only one year removed from being in that elite group. For Helsley, it’s another shot at ninth-inning duty, with a chance to hit the market again next offseason, assuming all goes well.
From 2022-2024, Helsley ranked fourth among all relievers in FIP. His stuff is essentially the same as it was during that run. Assuming he sorts out the tipping issues and gets a little less predictable in certain count contexts, the Orioles just signed a high-end closer at an eminently reasonable price – even if it only proves to be for one year.
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