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The Astros currently rank third in the American League in runs scored — not an uncommon sight for a franchise that has only been outscored by the Dodgers and Red Sox over the last decade. But they’ve done it with a lineup with some pretty big holes, with half of their eight players with at least 300 plate appearances this season posting an OBP under .300. The team’s offense has been driven this year mainly by four players: Kyle Tucker, Yordan Alvarez, Alex Bregman, and Chas McCormick, with an assist from Yainer Diaz. A year ago, Houston signed Alvarez to a six-year, $115 million contract extension that ensured he would remain in town until the end of the 2028 season. Tucker, though, does not have a long-term deal and is scheduled to hit free agency after the 2025 season. What would a possible deal look like?

There’s certainly interest from the Astros’ side, as there ought to be. The team has discussed an extension with Tucker in the past, though there are no active talks right now. But general manager Dana Brown did use his weekly radio spot in part to discuss making Tucker an “Astro for life,” so some kind of deal coming together is hardly implausible. Read the rest of this entry »

Lenin might not have actually said: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” But that doesn’t mean not-Lenin was wrong. College football just lived through such a week, as the Big Ten’s addition of UCLA and USC for the coming football season snowballed into an all-out raid on the Pac-12. Oregon and Washington are following the two Los Angeles schools to richer pastures. The Big 12, already in the process of adding four mid-major schools to replace the outgoing Texas and Oklahoma, is swooping in to pick Arizona, Arizona State, Colorado, and Utah from off the curb. Left with the proposition of propping up a rump four-team conference, Cal and Stanford are being courted by the ACC. Those schools, with their sterling academic reputations, are considered a good cultural fit for a conference that already includes Duke and Virginia; the same could be said about UCLA and the Big Ten.

If those institutions want to keep up the pretense of looking smart, they’re going to have to rename these conferences. An Atlantic Coast Conference with two teams in California? An 18-team Big Ten? A 16-team Big 12? People are going to start to think these jokers can’t count or read a map. But that’s of secondary importance. What this audience wants to know, surely, is what this means for college baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

LOS ANGELES — In an honor that was decades overdue, the Dodgers finally retired Fernando Valenzuela’s number 34 on Friday night at Dodger Stadium. The festivities kicked off Fernandomania Weekend, a three-day celebration of the transcendent superstar’s impact on the franchise, first as a pitcher during his initial 11-season run (1980–90) and then as an analyst on the team’s Spanish-language broadcasts (2003–present). Beyond starring on the field by winning NL Rookie of the Year and Cy Young honors and helping the Dodgers capture a world championship in 1981, Valenzuela emerged as an international cultural icon. He brought generations of Mexican-American and Latino fans to baseball and helped to heal the wounds caused by the building of the very ballpark in which he starred.

Valenzuela’s rise is something of a fairy tale. The youngest of 12 children in a family in Etchohuaquila, Mexico (pop. 150), he was discovered by Dodgers superscout Mike Brito at age 17 and signed the next year (1979). Taught to throw a screwball by Dodgers reliever Bobby Castillo during the 1979 Arizona Instructional League, he went on a dominant run at Double-A San Antonio the following year and was called up to the Dodgers in mid-September. The pudgy and mysterious 19-year-old southpaw spun 17.2 innings of brilliant relief work without allowing an earned run during the heat of a pennant race. He made the team as a starter the following spring, and his career took off when he tossed an Opening Day shutout against the Astros in an emergency start, filling in for an injured Jerry Reuss. He kept putting up zeroes, going 8–0 with seven complete games, five shutouts, and a 0.50 ERA in 72 innings over his first eight starts, drawing outsized crowds in every city where he pitched. Despite speaking barely a word of English, he became an instant celebrity on the strength of a bashful smile, preternatural poise, and impeccable command of his signature pitch, delivered with a distinctive motion that included a skyward gaze at the peak of his windup.

To borrow a metaphor from Erik Sherman, author of the new biography Daybreak at Chavez Ravine, Valenzuela was baseball’s version of the Beatles, a composite of the Fab Four with a universal appeal. He landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated less than two months into his rookie season, an unprecedented event in the magazine’s history. Fernandomania took hold of baseball and survived that summer’s seven-week player strike. In October, the rookie displayed incredible guile, winning two elimination games and preventing the Yankees from taking a 3–0 series lead in the World Series. His Herculean 149-pitch effort in Game 3 turned the tide, helping the Dodgers capture their first championship since 1965. He would play a vital part on two more NL West-winning Dodgers teams and make six All-Star teams before leaving the fold and making stops with half a dozen other major league teams, though he never matched his success in L.A.

On Friday night, a crowd of 49,315 fans, many of them wearing replicas of Valenzuela’s Dodgers and Team Mexico jerseys, showed up early to pay tribute to the beloved pitcher. U.S. senator Alex Padilla, the first Hispanic senator from California; team president and CEO Stan Kasten; retired Dodgers broadcaster Jaime Jarrín, who served as his interpreter during Fernandomania; and former battery-mate Mike Scioscia spoke about Valenzuela’s impact upon the team, the city, and a fan base that expanded radically as it supported him. Sandy Koufax, Julio Urías, and broadcaster Pepe Yñiguez joined them onstage, with broadcaster Charley Steiner serving as master of ceremonies. A mariachi band accompanied a beaming Valenzuela’s walk to the stage. Afterwards, former teammates Orel Hershiser and Manny Mota unveiled the number 34 on the Dodgers Ring of Honor. Read the rest of this entry »

What a difference a week makes. With plenty of teams streaking up and down the standings, the playoff picture in both leagues is as murky as ever. We’re also at the point in the season where we can start thinking about which teams are positioned to play spoiler down the stretch.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

The Rangers continued their red-hot August with series wins against the A’s and Giants last week. They’re just three games behind the Orioles for the best record in the American League and have held off the surging Astros and Mariners to maintain their grip on the AL West.

The Braves emerged from their most congested portion of their schedule with five wins in eight games last week. They outscored the Mets 34–3 over the first three games of their four-game weekend series before losing on Sunday night, 7–6. Matt Olson took over the MLB home run lead by blasting four last week; he’s now up to 43 on the season, already a career high.

All of a sudden, the Rays are facing all sorts of woes. On Saturday, they placed Shane McClanahan on the 60-day IL with a forearm injury that will cost him the rest of the season. For a team that’s already lost Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs to season-ending injuries (not to mention the back issue that forced Tyler Glasnow to miss his start last week), it’s another unfortunate hit to the pitching depth. Then, on Sunday, reports emerged that Wander Franco was being investigated regarding some concerning social media posts.

The Blue Jays have struggled with consistency all season long; to wit, they split a series with the Guardians and lost a series to the Cubs last week, allowing the surging Mariners to come within a game and a half of the final Wild Card spot in the AL. With Hyun Jin Ryu back from his Tommy John surgery and Yusei Kikuchi in the middle of the best run of his career, Toronto optioned Alek Manoah back to Triple-A to continue working out his issues. Bo Bichette still looks like he’s a couple of weeks away from returning from his knee injury, though Jordan Romano and Kevin Kiermaier look like they’ll be back from the IL this week.

The Dodgers have lost just once in August and pushed their current win streak to eight games with a sweep of the Rockies last weekend. They didn’t have the splashiest of trade deadlines, but Lance Lynn has surprisingly provided some stability to a starting rotation that is only just now getting healthy again, and Clayton Kershaw was activated from the IL last week and contributed a solid start on Thursday. Los Angeles now has a commanding 8.5-game lead in the NL West, a shocking gap considering it wasn’t even in first place at the All-Star break.

Wednesday was a night of celebration for the Phillies: Weston Wilson crushed a home run in his first major league plate appearance; Nick Castellanos blasted two home runs, the second of which was his 200th career dinger; and as the headlining act, Michael Lorenzen fired a no-hitter in his first start in Philadelphia since coming over at the trade deadline. They couldn’t keep the good vibes going over the weekend, scoring just once over their final two games against the Twins. Still, the struggles of every other NL Wild Card hopeful have given the Phillies a three-game lead in that race.

The Giants barely avoided a sweep at the hands of the Rangers with a dramatic, walk-off win in the tenth inning on Sunday. That victory salvaged a 2–4 week and helped them stay 1.5 games ahead of the Marlins in the NL Wild Card race. That series against Texas began an extremely tough stretch of schedule against playoff contenders that includes the Rays, Braves (twice), Phillies, Reds, Padres, and Cubs before finally easing up in September.

The Padres are quickly running out of opportunities to turn their season around at the last minute. After a particularly lackluster performance in a losing effort in Seattle on Wednesday, there were some pointed comments from Juan Soto after the game. They bounced back in their first game against the Diamondbacks in a huge weekend series but lost on Saturday and Sunday and are now 5.5 games back for the final wild card spot. They’ll have another shot at Arizona this weekend, which now seems like a make-or-break series.

After an ugly 2–8 stretch to start the month, the Red Sox have gotten back on track with series wins against the Royals and Tigers last week. Trevor Story, Chris Sale, and Garrett Whitlock are back off the IL, and Triston Casas is powering the offense nearly singlehandedly. That’s a lot of last-minute reinforcements for Boston, which has a lot of work to do to get back into the AL Wild Card race.

The Angels showed some signs of life in a series win against the Giants early last week, but they were short-lived; the Astros handed them back-to-back 11–3 defeats over the weekend, and Los Angeles barely avoided a sweep with a close 2–1 victory on Sunday. The Angels’ postseason hopes are hanging by a thread, and they’re almost at the point where they need to start looking toward an Ohtani-less season next year. They’ll have plenty of opportunities to affect the playoff picture by playing spoiler down the stretch, but they need to find ways to get some of their youngsters more playing time to assess what they’re working with moving forward.

The four-way race for the final NL Wild Card spot ended this week with the Marlins a half-game ahead of the Reds and Cubs. They got there thanks to a series win against Cincinnati earlier in the week and then a dramatic series win against the Yankees capped off by a walk-off victory on Sunday. All four teams won their series over the weekend, though Arizona is at a significant disadvantage thanks to its slide down the standings earlier in the month.

The race for the final two protected draft lottery picks is probably going to come down to these five teams. They’re separated by just a single game in the standings, and each of them looks stronger than the bottom four teams in the standings (though the Nationals are actually ineligible to receive a lottery pick since they earned one last year). These five teams are also the most likely to play spoiler down the stretch, since all of them can put together a competitive performance on any given night.

If there’s one thing Rockies fans could enjoy about their team during these lean years, it was a winning record at home. Over the last decade, Colorado has posted a losing record in Coors Field twice, and one of those years was the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. They’re at risk of losing that home field advantage this year, having gone 25–30 so far. They still have home series against the Diamondbacks, Braves, Blue Jays, Cubs, Giants, Dodgers, and Twins on the docket, which means they could play a significant role as a spoiler down the stretch — but only if they can turn Coors Field back into a tough place to play in.

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Kenley Jansen was a 19-year-old catching prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization when he played for the 2007 Great Lakes Loons. Sixteen years and 417 saves later, he looks back at his time in Midland, Michigan fondly. The All-Star closer didn’t hit much — his conversion to the mound in 2009 came for a reason — but the overall experience shaped who he is today.

“I loved everything about that city, man,” said Jansen, a native of Curaçao who also called Midland home in 2008. “It was cold, but probably also my favorite city from my time in the minor leagues. We played at Dow Diamond and that place was packed every night. The fans were great. I lived with Rob Wright and Lori Wright — Danny Wright, too — and I don’t even consider them my host family anymore; they’re part of my family now. I didn’t play very well, but a lot of good things came out of that whole experience. Great Lakes helped transition me from being a kid to being a man.”

The 2007 season was also notable because of his manager and a pair of teammates. Longtime Detroit Tigers backstop Lance Parrish was at the helm of the Midwest League affiliate, the club’s primary catcher was Carlos Santana, and a teenage left-hander was the most-prominent member of the pitching staff. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Turner has faced a lot of fastballs over the years. Now in his 15th season, and his first with the Boston Red Sox, the 38-year-old infielder has logged 5,597 plate appearances, a good number of them against pitchers with elite heaters. Moreover, he’s had his fair share of success. One of the game’s most-respected hitters, he has a 128 wRC+ to go with a .289/.365/.467 slash line for his career.

Four years after interviewing him for one of the early installments of my Talks Hitting series, I caught up to Turner to focus on one specific aspect of his craft: the art of hitting a fastball.

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David Laurila: How different is it to prepare for high-velocity fastballs when not all high-velocity fastballs are the same? Does that make sense?

Justin Turner: “It does. There are guys in the game that throw hard and put up big [velocity] numbers, but for whatever reason it doesn’t feel that hard when you’re in the box. There are also guys that don’t throw as hard. but in the box it feels like they’re throwing harder than what the number says. When you get a guy who throws hard and it feels hard, that’s a pretty good combination for their side of it.”

Laurila: Who are some of the pitchers who stand out in those respects?

Turner: “I don’t have a specific example in mind, but there are just some pitchers where you get in the box and… I mean, guys will talk about it. It’s like, ‘Man, that actually feels a little light, it doesn’t feel like 100 [mph].’ I don’t want to call anyone out, trash their fastballs or anything like that.”

Laurila: What about guys where it does feel hard?

Turner: “Spencer Strider is a guy that throws hard and it feels hard. Jacob deGrom throws hard and it feels hard. There are guys where the fastball comes out of their hand and it looks like an aspirin. The ball looks smaller because they’re throwing so hard.” Read the rest of this entry »

One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small samples. Full seasons result in specific numbers that have minimal predictive value, such as BABIP for pitchers. The predictive value isn’t literally zero; individual seasons form much of the basis of projections, whether math-y ones like ZiPS or simply our personal opinions on how good a player is. But we have to develop tools that improve our ability to explain some of these stats. It’s not enough to know that the number of home runs allowed by a pitcher is volatile; we need to know how and why pitchers allow homers beyond a general sense of pitching poorly or being Jordan Lyles.

Data like that which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s more elemental, such as exit velocities and launch angles and the like — things that are in themselves more predictive than their end products (the number of homers). StatCast has its own implementation of this kind of exercise in its various “x” stats. ZiPS uses slightly different models with a similar purpose, which I’ve dubbed zStats. (I’m going to make you guess what the z stands for!) The differences in the models can be significant. For example, when talking about grounders, balls hit directly toward the second base bag became singles 48.7% of the time from 2012 to ’19, with 51.0% outs and 0.2% doubles. But grounders hit 16 degrees to the “left” of the bag only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, and toward the second base side, it was 9.8%. ZiPS uses data like sprint speed when calculating hitter BABIP, because how fast a player is has an effect on BABIP and extra-base hits.

And why is this important and not just number-spinning? Knowing that changes in walk rates, home run rates, and strikeout rates stabilized far quicker than other stats was an important step forward in player valuation. That’s something that’s useful whether you work for a front office, are a hardcore fan, want to make some fantasy league moves, or even just a regular fan who is rooting for your faves. If we improve our knowledge of the basic molecular structure of a walk or a strikeout, then we can find players who are improving or struggling even more quickly, and provide better answers on why a walk rate or a strikeout rate has changed. This is useful data for me in particular because I obviously do a lot of work with projections, but I’m hoping this type of information is interesting to readers beyond that.

Yesterday, I went over how pitchers zStats for the first two months of the season performed over the last two months. Today, we’ll look at the updated data, through the games on August 10. Read the rest of this entry »

After a frantic trade deadline with an excess of buyers, a few committed sellers fielding offers, and a handful of in-betweeners on the cusp of contention, the month of August is doing its best to separate the real contenders from the rest. Ten days in, five teams — the Angels, Yankees, Guardians, Reds and Diamondbacks — have seen their playoff chances slashed by more than half, and a sixth (the Red Sox) has gone from 24.6% to 13.8%. Meanwhile, the Rangers responded to a late-July skid with an eight-game winning streak, the Cubs doubled their playoff odds with series wins over the Reds and Braves, the Phillies played their way into the top Wild Card spot in the National League, and the Mariners swept the Angels and Padres to leapfrog New York, Boston, and Los Angeles in the AL Wild Card race. It’s been quite the shuffle for a ten-day stretch.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another week, another chance to look around baseball and see something that amazes you. That’s part of what I love about the game: weird and wonderful things are always happening. As always, I noted a few that particularly tickled my fancy, and now I’m going to write a bunch of words about them in the hope that you like them too. Shout out, per usual, to Zach Lowe, who came up with this idea for a column years ago and became my favorite basketball writer as a result. Let’s get going.

1. Cavan Biggio’s Instinctual Brilliance
When the Jays’ trio of legacy-admission prospects were breaking into the majors, I was highest on Cavan Biggio relative to industry consensus. I’ve definitely been wrong in that assessment. Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. turned into stars, but Biggio is more of a luxury backup. He can play a lot of defensive positions, but none of them particularly well, and he’s a league-average hitter. That’s a perfectly serviceable addition to your team, but it’s hardly going to set the league on fire, and he’s been worse than that in 2023.

But my Biggio crush is still around, and you better believe that I’m going to highlight his fun plays. Let’s set the scene: Monday night in Cleveland, a scoreless game in the top of the eighth. Biggio drew a start at second base, and with Daulton Varsho on first, he clubbed a no-doubter to dead center to give the Jays a 2–0 lead. Hey! Biggio heads, unite, he’s back in business. Read the rest of this entry »