Before Game 2 of last year’s AL Wild Card Series, I asked Brandon Hyde a kind of stupid question. The Orioles, having been swept in the ALDS the year before, found themselves down 1-0 to the Royals in the series and were facing another rapid postseason elimination. The Orioles’ rebuild had gone on so long, and developed so much talent, that their progression to World Series contention had been assumed.

Hyde, the rare manager who’d survived a 100-loss tanking season through to the playoffs, had yet to win even one postseason game. So I mentioned that in other sports, coaches in his position have levers to pull in such desperate times. Was there anything a baseball manager has up his sleeve in a must-win game?

“I’m planning a spot to onside kick, try to get the ball back as quick as I possibly can in good field position,” Hyde joked in response. “Or I’m going to try to be like UNLV back in the early ’90s with Stacey Augmon and Larry Johnson, and try to get up and down the court as fast as possible. Besides that, I’m going to use my relievers as best I possibly can, try to put some zeroes up and try to score some runs.” Read the rest of this entry »

Which players most often hit the ball to the positions that they themselves play when they’re in the field? It’s a simple question, but it also begs larger, murkier philosophical questions. Is hitting the ball to your own position the height of baseball narcissism? Or is it that hitting the ball to your special spot just feels right? Maybe the batter just stands at the plate, surveys the great green-and-brown expanse before them and gets overwhelmed. “What shall I do?” they ask themselves as the pitch clock ticks down and the hot dog vendors emit their indecipherable warblings. Then they see an oasis of familiarity, the one patch of earth that has welcomed them through a lifetime of baseball-related activities. Hitting the ball there just might feel like coming home. “I know just what I’ll do,” they think, twisting their gloved hands against the handle of the bat. It is their pen, and with it they will write what they know.

So who does that the most? Before I dug into the numbers, I put the question to my colleagues. None of us got it right. I thought I was pretty clever by picking Steven Kwan. He’s a contact maven who specializes in dumping the ball into left field, a position famously played by none other than multiple Gold Glove winner Steven Kwan. I felt all the more clever when Ben Clemens picked Kwan, too. We were wrong. So were Jon Becker, who picked Bo Bichette, Jay Jaffe, who picked Luis Rengifo, and Jake Mailhot, who picked Nico Hoerner. None of the players we picked was even at the top in his respective position, either on a counting basis or a rate basis. Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Fluharty is flying under the radar as one of baseball’s most effective lefty relievers. Since making his major league debut with the Toronto Blue Jays on April Fools Day, the 23-year-old southpaw has a 1.96 ERA and a 2.94 FIP over 18 appearances. Moreover, he’s allowed just seven hits in his 18-and-third innings, and prior to surrendering a solo home run to former Jay Danny Jansen this past Tuesday he’d retired 21 consecutive batters. All three of his decisions are in the win column.

His initial two outings were especially challenging. The first batter Fluharty faced in the bigs was Washington Nationals 2024 All-Star CJ Abrams, who lined a run-scoring double. Three days later, the first batter in his second outing was Juan Soto; the New York Mets superstar also stroked a run-scoring double.

I asked the 2022 fifth-round pick out of Liberty University about those welcome-to-the-big-leagues ABs prior to his third appearance.

“Get put into the fire and see what happens,” said Fluharty, who later that same day faced Rafael Devers [E-6], Alex Bregman [K], and Rob Refsnyder [DP]. “I’m glad they have faith in me. While I obviously would have preferred better outcomes in those first outings, it’s all about adjusting. This game is hard.”

The pitches that were turned around for two-baggers? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about listener suggestions for terms for tandem home run robberies (and the opposite of home run robberies), whether it’s so O’sver in Baltimore, Jacob deGrom succeeding despite slightly less dominant stuff, and the realness of the rivalries in MLB’s inaugural “Rivalry Weekend,” then (48:46) answer listener emails about awarding hit by pitches based on location, not contact, which player actually “starts the scoring,” whether defenders should save the ball from their first putout, a pitcher hitting month, and pantsless mascots, plus a postscript (1:38:32) on Ayami Sato, the first woman to play pro baseball in Canada.

Audio intro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: The Shirey Brothers, “Effectively Wild Theme”

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If motor preferences were the final word on pitcher performance, Nathan Eovaldi would be sitting on a beach somewhere.

Eovaldi throws from a low slot, releasing his pitches from an average arm angle of 30 degrees. (Zero degrees is fully sidearm; 90 degrees is straight over the top.) Many low-slot pitchers have a supination bias. There are downsides to being a supinator — their preference for cutting the baseball tends to produce crummy four-seam fastballs — but they usually have no trouble throwing hard breaking balls; they can also more easily harness seam-shifted wake to throw sinkers, sweepers, or kick-changes. Low-slot supinators, like Seth Lugo, can basically throw every pitch in the book. High-slot pronators like Ryan Pepiot or Lucas Giolito don’t have that sort of range, but make up for it with excellent changeups and high-carry fastballs.

Eovaldi is, tragically, a low-slot pronator. Not many low-slot pronators make it to the big leagues. The pronation bias blunts their ability to throw hard glove-side breakers, and the low arm angle obviates the pronator’s nominal advantage, killing the carry on their fastball. As Tyler Zombro of Tread Athletics (now a special assistant of pitching for the Cubs) said in his primer video on motor preferences, “I know in stuff models and just off of Trackman alone, this arsenal with this slot is not that attractive.” Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I watch Oneil Cruz hit, I end up thinking about pull rate. It seems like he’s always using his long arms to yank a ball into right field even though the pitch came in all the way on the outside corner. I’m not quite right, though. According to our leaderboards, Cruz ranks 35th among all qualified players in pull rate. According to Statcast, he’s at 55th, not even in the top third. Maybe it’s just that seeing someone do something as bonkers as this can warp your perspective:

But there is more than one way to think about pull rate. Sometimes you get jammed. Sometimes you have to hit the ball where it’s pitched. Sometimes the situation demands that you shorten up and sell out for contact. Those three examples might tell us a bit less about the intent behind your swing, because you didn’t get to execute your plan. We have ways to throw them out. Today, we’ll look into players whose overall pull rate is notably different from their pull rate when they square up the ball. As a refresher, Statcast plugs the respective speeds of the ball and the bat into a formula to determine the maximum possible exit velocity, and if the actual EV is at least 80% of that number, it’s considered squared up.

I pulled numbers from 2023 through 2025 for each player who has squared up at least 250 balls during that stretch. As you’d expect, the numbers are mostly pretty similar. Of the 219 players in the sample, 165 of them have a difference between their overall pull rate and their squared-up pull rate that’s below three percentage points. No player has a pull rate when squaring the ball up that’s more than 6.5 percentage points off their overall pull rate, but there are a few interesting names here. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Actually, the title is a misnomer today. A week of baseball is great, but you know what else is great? A single game of baseball. Monday night, Paul Skenes and the Pirates took on the scalding-hot Mets. It was one of the most exciting matchups we’ll get all regular season, pitting my pick for the best pitcher in baseball against one of the top offenses in the game. This being baseball, the best pregame matchups don’t always lead to the most exciting events. This time, however, the hype was warranted, and the game was both delightful and delightfully weird. So with apologies to Zach Lowe for changing the format he created, let’s try this again: Welcome to Five Things I Liked During The Mets Pirates Game From Monday.

1. My Skenes vs. Your Team
It’s downright crazy how good Skenes is. He’s so fun to watch, at least as long as he isn’t making your team look silly. He throws everything, and all of it is nasty. He drew swinging strikes on five different pitch types, and some of them left batters baffled:

Juan Soto doesn’t look like that very often. But that’s because pitchers like Skenes also don’t come around very often. Seriously, this pitch was 94 miles an hour?! This is unfair:

The Mets hassled Skenes repeatedly throughout his six innings. He surrendered six hits, tying a career high, and walked three. But when there were runners on base, Skenes found another gear. Five of his six strikeouts came with men on. He threw harder, pitched for whiffs, and generally flummoxed his opponents. He’s not always going to allow only one run, but despite the Mets finding occasional cracks in his armor, one earned run felt like a fair result. When Skenes is on the mound, the other team starts at a disadvantage. Read the rest of this entry »

The Kansas City Royals have an excellent starting rotation. Starting pitching (along with Bobby Witt Jr. turning into Honus Wagner with a mullet, I guess) carried the Royals to the ALDS last year. It’s also why the Royals will be well-positioned in the AL Central race if the Tigers ever realize that they’re not actually the 1975 Reds.

But even in such a deep, well-rounded unit, one man must lead the charge. Is it ace Cole Ragans? No. Is it one of Seth Lugo, Michael Lorenzen, or Michael Wacha, Kansas City’s army of rejuvenated Millennials? Again, no.

It’s Kris Bubic! Read the rest of this entry »