Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. I was at a wedding this past weekend, a generally fun event for a baseball writer. That’s because strangers ask me what I do, and then I get to say, “I’m a baseball writer.” That plays a lot better than, “I work in accounting/finance/tech,” no offense to any of you in those fine fields. But this weekend, someone inquired deeper. “Oh, like sabermetric stuff?” “Yeah! Kind of. Also I make GIFs of dumb and/or weird plays. And bunts, lots of bunts.” Yes, it’s a strange job being a baseball writer, but also a delightful one, and this week delivered whimsy and awe in equal amounts. So unlike guests milling around at a wedding, let’s get straight to the point – after the customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the inspiration for this article format.

1. Not Reaching Home
The third time a runner was tagged out at the plate in Wednesday’s Cardinals-Pirates clash came at a pivotal moment. Locked in a scoreless tie in the bottom of the 11th, Pittsburgh finally looked like it would break through when Joey Bart singled to right. But, well:

That was a good throw by Lars Nootbaar and a clean catch by Pedro Pagés, and that combination turned a close play into a gimme. I mean, how often are you going to be safe when the catcher already has the ball in his glove and you’re here:

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Baltimore Orioles. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

Their $200 million shortstop has grounded into more double plays than he’s hit singles. Their star center fielder is striking out 37% of the time. Their oft-injured third baseman is (sigh) injured again and won’t return until sometime next month, and their top starter left Tuesday night’s game with a hamstring injury. After squandering a playoff berth over the final quarter of last season, then mostly remaining on the sidelines this winter, the Twins opened this year by losing eight of their first 11 games, their worst start since 2016 — a season in which they went 59-103.

These Twins — who did win on Wednesday night to improve to 4-8 — aren’t likely to be that bad. In fact, our preseason Playoff Odds favored the Twins to win the AL Central, albeit with a modest 36.2% chance of winning the division and a forecast for just 84.1 wins, with the Tigers, Royals, and Guardians all packed within five wins of their total. The system estimated Minnesota had a 55.2% chance of making the playoffs, but so far this does not look like a team that belongs in the postseason.

The Twins stumbled out of the gate, dropping three straight to the Cardinals in St. Louis before getting stomped by the White Sox in Chicago, 9-0; through their first four games, they were outscored 28-6. They recovered to win their next two games against the White Sox, but then returned home and lost two out of three to the Astros. Now in Kansas City, the Twins have lost two out of their first three games of their four-game set against the Royals. The dispiriting start feels like a carry-over from last season’s collapse. To refresh your memory:

As of last August 17 — the last time they had a streak of more than two wins in a row, ahem — the Twins were 70-53, second in both the AL Central (two games behind the Guardians) and the AL Wild Card standings (a game and a half behind the Orioles), with a 92.4% chance of making the playoffs. Though their odds rose as high as 95.8% circa September 2, they proceeded to go just 12-27 after August 17, half a game better than the historically futile White Sox. At 82-80, they placed fourth in the division, 10 1/2 games out of first, and fifth in the Wild Card race, four games out. Adding insult to injury, both the Royals and Tigers (whose fortunes mirrored the Twins) earned Wild Card berths. Read the rest of this entry »

Matthew Boyd has exceeded most outside expectations. Selected in the sixth round of the 2013 draft out of Oregon State University, the 34-year-old southpaw was ranked 29th when our 2015 Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list was published that March. He’d pitched well the previous year — a 3.17 ERA between High-A and Double-A — but as our then-lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel wrote, “Some scouts still think there isn’t enough here to stick as a starter.” Given Boyd’s relatively short track record of success, the skepticism was understandable.

The left-hander’s own expectations were loftier, and he wasted little time in proving his doubters wrong. Boyd made his major league debut three months later, and not only did he do so as a starter, he’s gone on to make 170 of his 184 career appearances in that role. Now in his 11th big league season, and his first with the Chicago Cubs, Boyd has never been front-of-the-rotation good — his career ERA and FIP are 4.79 and 4.56 respectively — but he’s been effective when healthy. The problem is that Boyd often hasn’t been healthy; over the past four years alone, he’s missed 390 days of the season due to injury. It’s early, of course, but so far in 2025, Boyd has been both healthy and effective. Across his two starts, he’s thrown 11 scoreless innings.

What did Boyd’s 2015 scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think of it a full decade later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what McDaniel wrote and asked Boyd to respond to it.

———

“Boyd was a senior sign out of Oregon State in 2013 that got $75,000 in the 6th round after making real progress in his last amateur year.” Read the rest of this entry »

Some days, we analyze all of baseball here at FanGraphs, and maybe come up with some tools that will help predict all of future baseball. Injury-aware depth charts, payroll matrices, top prospect lists: You get the idea. Today, however, is not one of those days, at least not for me. That’s because after watching some videos of Tyler Soderstrom being very strong, I tried to figure out whether his early-season success will continue.

Being very strong is a valuable skill, at least when it comes to hitting a baseball. People don’t ooh and aah over Aaron Judge because his name makes for a fun fan section; they do it because he hits the ball so far. There are countless different ways to be good at hitting, but let’s be honest with each other: Being really strong is one of the best ways. Chicks don’t dig the well-placed opposite field sinking liner, you know? Or, if they do, no one made t-shirts about it.

How strong is Tyler Soderstrom? Well, watch this swing:

I’m sure you’ve heard of taking what the pitcher gives you, going to the opposite field when the ball is away rather than trying to pull it. I’m fairly certain that the people giving that advice don’t mean that you should flick your wrists and smash the ball over the fence at 100 miles an hour, though.
Read the rest of this entry »

If White Sox fans hadn’t already been inured to calamity by now, surely the ending of Tuesday afternoon’s game would’ve sent them into an incoherent, frothing rage. Having made it to the bottom of the ninth inning in Cleveland tied 0-0, Mike Clevinger took the mound. Clevinger, for reasons I do not remotely understand, is Chicago’s closer, and the inning before he’d come in to retire José Ramírez with two outs and the bases empty to preserve the tie.

Clevinger started the inning by allowing an infield single to Carlos Santana, alerting the world to the hitherto unknown fact that Santana can still run at this phase of his career. Then, the once-coveted workhorse walked three straight Guardians on a combined 21 pitches to force in the winning run. By the end of his stint, Clevinger’s fastball velocity was dipping into the 91 mph range. It was the second time in the first 10 games of the season that Clevinger took the decision in a 1-0 defeat, and Chicago’s second walk-off loss in as many games.

A game like this invites many questions, most of them more easily answered by the works of Nietzsche or C.S. Lewis (depending on your philosophical predilections) than baseball analysis. But there is good news, other than the fact that we’re all going to die one day, and when we do, we won’t have to watch the White Sox anymore.

See, Shane Smith was nails. Again. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s big bonus, Edmundo Sosa’s beginner’s home run robbery, how much of a difference depth makes, and the relative levels of alarm about the shoulder injuries of Reynaldo López, Victor Robles, and Blake Snell. Then (49:14) they talk to MLB.com’s Michael Clair about what it was like to attend the amateur baseball event of the year: the Division III showdown between Yeshiva and Lehman, who entered their Wednesday doubleheader on the two longest active losing streaks in college baseball.

Audio intro: Dave Armstrong and Mike Murray, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Rosenthal on Vlad
Link to Sosa play
Link to Clemens on depth
Link to Clemens on depth on EW
Link to MLBTR on López
Link to team SP projections
Link to MLBTR on Snell
Link to MLBTR on Robles
Link to Petriello on Robles
Link to Robles batting change
Link to Michael on the game
Link to original Reddit post
Link to postgame Reddit post
Link to Caltech story
Link to Yeshiva team stats
Link to Yeshiva vs. Lehman stats
Link to Game 2 video
Link to Ben on Salina
Link to Michael’s manuscript
Link to Michael on the Czech team

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This seems like an apt moment to reexamine the concept of value. What is a relief pitcher worth? What is anything worth? The context matters quite a bit. In boom times, when you can barely remember a past in which the arrow pointed any direction but up, the upside feels so real that it’s hard to resist. Sure, a premier setup man with a short track record is a luxury, but what’s the harm in splurging? In the darker times, when the eggs sitting in your refrigerator have suddenly gone from basic staples to commodities so precious that you can’t afford to waste them on something as trivial as breakfast, you need to hunt for value wherever you can find it.

For an Astros team determined to reset its luxury tax penalty, that means trading away reliever Rafael Montero and eating 72% of the money remaining on his contract in order to be free of the other 28%. For the Braves, reeling from a series of early-season setbacks, that means taking a chance on the discounted Montero and his untested splitter in exchange for a player to be named later. Read the rest of this entry »

Early enough in the season, you’ll find some weird stats. This is a well-established fact of baseball in April. There’s even a song about it. As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, Kyle Tucker leads the league in position player WAR, with Aaron Judge third and Corbin Carroll fifth; if the leaderboard looked like that at the end of September, it’d probably be a mild surprise — a highly, highly lucrative one for Tucker — but nobody would write a book about how weird the 2025 season was or anything.

But Wilyer Abreu is second in WAR and Tyler Soderstrom is fourth. Both of them are promising young players, but nobody worth listening to had either one in the preseason MVP discussion.

In short, these things will shake out soon enough. There was an old saying to that effect: Baseball season hasn’t really started until Mike Trout leads the league in WAR. Read the rest of this entry »