Steven Kwan has been instrumental in helping the Guardians climb to the top of the AL Central and compile the league’s second-best record (23-12) and largest division lead (2.5 games). Unfortunately, the 26-year-old left fielder won’t be around to help them for awhile due to a hamstring strain, though if there’s a silver lining, the injury has opened the door for the debut of one of their top prospects, 23-year-old Kyle Manzardo.

Kwan felt tightness in his left hamstring and departed after the third inning in Saturday’s game against the Angels. During the inning, he had run into foul territory to make a basket catch on a Mickey Moniak fly ball, and afterwards, showed some discomfort:

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There were a ton of fascinating matchups last week — Dodgers-Braves, Brewers-Cubs, and Orioles-Yankees — and the victors of those series set the tone for what could be very interesting playoff races over the next few months.

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 some of the 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.

All power rankings stats, including team records, are updated through Sunday’s games. The information included in the comments are current as of Tuesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I looked into the strange fact that starter usage hasn’t declined as precipitously as it first seemed over the past half decade. It’s downright strange that pitchers are throwing nearly as many pitches per start as they did in 2019, because it sure doesn’t feel that way. It’s even stranger that the average start length has declined by a mere half inning since 2008; I’m still scratching my head about that one even though I’m the one who collected the evidence.

One potential answer stood out to me: maybe I was just measuring the wrong thing. Meg Rowley formulated it a bit better when we discussed the article: Maybe by capturing all the pitchers in baseball, I was missing the change in workloads shouldered by top starters. In other words, no one remembers the pitcher who made the 200th-most starts (Xzavion Curry in 2023, Ryan Tucker in 2008), and the usage patterns of back-end starters don’t leave much of an impression in our minds. We care about the horses, the top guys who we see year after year.

Time for a new measurement, then. I took the same cutoff points from last week’s study, which serves to control for early-season workloads. But I further limited the data this time. I first took the 100 pitchers who had thrown the most innings in each year and called them “established starters” for the next year. Then I redid my look at pitch counts per start and innings pitched per start, but only for top pitchers in each year. Read the rest of this entry »

Juan Soto is a tricky player for me to write about, because the numbers speak for themselves — no literary flourish needed. Trying to get cute while writing about a guy performing miracles isn’t baseball blogging, it’s the Gospel of John.

Nevertheless, Soto is operating on such a level (he’s hitting .316/.421/.559 through the weekend — all stats are current through Sunday’s games) that it begs examination. Soto has the best batting eye of his generation; therefore, for him, every year is a walk year. But this season, specifically, is his final one before he hits the open market in search of a record long-term contract.

It’s been a complicated couple years for us Soto zealots. How can this player demand more money than the (deferral-adjusted) Shohei Ohtani deal? He’s never won an MVP and only finished in the top three once. He’s never recorded a 7-WAR season, never hit 40 home runs. He’s a bad defender, and in the past two seasons, he hit .242 and .275 respectively. If he’s such a uniquely valuable player, how come two teams gave up on him before he turned 25? Read the rest of this entry »

In the seventh inning of Sunday afternoon’s game in Houston, Bryce Miller left a sweeper over the inner third of the plate, and Jon Singleton didn’t miss it, hammering a towering two-run shot to right field that yielded a bat flip and gave the Astros a 4-3 lead. With that, the Mariners were stopped short of tying a major league record — a semi-obscure one, but an impressive one nonetheless: the most consecutive games with a starting pitcher allowing no more than two earned runs. The Mariners did rally to win 5-4, sending them to their sixth straight series victory and lifting their record to 19-15, enough to help them preserve their half-game lead over the Rangers (19-16) in the AL West.

The starters’ streak began back on April 10, when Logan Gilbert held the Blue Jays to one run in 7.2 innings, and extended to 21 games through Saturday. Most of the starts were exceptional, and for the stretch, the unit pitched to a 1.38 ERA and a 2.91 FIP, but two of those starts depended upon the earned/unearned run distinction to extend the streak, and two were short outings of four or fewer innings; one of those starts, Emerson Hancock’s clunker last Wednesday against the Braves, was both. Still, even including unearned runs, their 1.86 runs allowed per nine allowed during the streak is impressive. Read the rest of this entry »

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A.J. Preller must have been getting itchy. It’s too early in the season for substantial trades; they generally happen before the start of the year or when the calendar has flipped to July. Teams that thought they were going for it usually haven’t accumulated enough evidence to change that view, and even if they want to trade someone, the potential of finding a higher bidder closer to the deadline makes sellers hesitant to move. But the Marlins and Padres overcame those factors and linked up on a deal that sends Luis Arraez to San Diego for a sampler platter’s worth of prospects: Dillon Head, Jakob Marsee, Nathan Martorella, and Woo-Suk Go.

There’s a lot to unpack in this deal. We’ll start in San Diego and then head east, because the Padres’ side is more straightforward. It’s like this: the Padres had roughly eight batters they wanted to use every day. Luis Campusano is more journeyman than star, but the team seems comfortable with him at catcher. With Manny Machado back to playing the field after an injury limited him to DH to start the year, the infield is set. The outfield likely isn’t changing, either: Jurickson Profar looked like the weakest link before the season, but he’s been the team’s most productive player so far.

Their only plausible route to offensive improvement, then, is at DH. That’s great, though! You can play anyone at DH, more or less. But if you play an excellent defender there, you’re wasting that talent, and the Padres have one of the best defenses in baseball this season, so whoever they acquired probably wasn’t going to displace one of their regulars. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Oakland Athletics. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

In the modern game, pinch-hitting is seen as something of a lost art. This likely started with teams prioritizing roster spots for extra bullpen arms over spare position players. With that came a heavier emphasis on positional flexibility off the bench, rather than plus contact skills (think Ross Gload) or a big bopping bat (à la Matt Stairs). As an angry Facebook commenter might tell you, it’s one more way that sabermetrics has ruined America’s pastime. Yet, the numbers bear it out; the best arm is often a fresh arm, while conversely, fresh bats off the bench tend to perform significantly worse than their counterparts in the starting lineup. Ahead of the 2020 season, Ben Clemens found that the pinch-hitting penalty, first theorized in 2006, still held 14 years later. Contemplating Ben’s findings, Patrick Dubuque of Baseball Prospectus penned a line that stuck deep in my brain: “Pinch-hitters are just difficult to justify, except when they’re mandatory.”

Pinch-hitters were mandatory far less often in 2020 after the universal DH came into play. However, the age of the universal DH is also the age of expanded rosters and pitcher limits, and those new roster rules may just have saved the pinch-hitter from a slow demise. Pinch-hitters are rarely mandatory anymore, but they haven’t disappeared as much as you might think. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 28, the Mets walked off the Cardinals in the 11th inning. It was a huge moment, made even bigger because the embattled Mark Vientos delivered the knockout blow in just his second big league game after starting the season in the minors. That night, John DeMarsico, director of SNY’s Mets broadcasts, posted a video of the play that was shot from inside the production truck. It’s something he does occasionally, though this video had a twist: the audio from the triumphant final scene of Moneyball was overlaid on the broadcast.

Walk-Off: A behind-the-scenes featurette #Baseballiscinema pic.twitter.com/ZrgRleH9SB

— John DeMarsico (@JohnDeMarsico) April 29, 2024

DeMarsico is renowned for adding cinematic flourishes to SNY’s broadcasts, but when I watched this particular video — hearing dramatic music play as the voices in the truck worked together to decide what shot should come next — I was struck by the way DeMarsico is entrusted with telling the story of the game. SNY’s team is universally acknowledged to be one of the best in the business. At any given moment, DeMarsico can choose multiple shots that would look great and tell the viewer what is going on, but his job is bigger than that. His job is to use those images to craft a narrative. Read the rest of this entry »