Tanner Houck has had a tough start to his 2024 season. Prior to going on the injured list in mid-May with an elbow strain, the 28-year-old Boston Red Sox right-hander logged an 8.04 ERA over nine mostly tumultuous outings. His track record shows that he is far better. Houck’s year-to-year consistency has been a bit on the uneven side, but he nonetheless possesses a 3.97 ERA and a 3.71 FIP since reaching the big leagues in 2020. Last season was his best. A mainstay in Boston’s rotation, he made a career-high 30 starts and put up 3.9 WAR and a 3.12 ERA.

His future role was in question when our 2019 Red Sox Top Prospects list was published in January of that year. As Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel explained at the time, some scouts preferred the 24th overall pick in the 2017 draft as a starter, while others saw him as a reliever. Our prospect analyst duo ranked the University of Missouri product fifth in the system and assigned him a 40+ FV.

What did Houck’s 2019 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what Eric and Kiley wrote and asked Houck to respond to it.
———

“Houck was a projection prep arm from Illinois whose price was just high enough to get him to Missouri.”

“I committed to Mizzou fairly early in the process,” explained Houck, who was born in St. Louis and attended high school in nearby Collinsville, Illinois. “I really wasn’t a big prospect. I was only throwing 84-87 [mph] at the time. So that was probably a fair judgement. I definitely grew up and got stronger. I filled out my frame a little bit. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Hannah Keyser, of the excellent Bandwagon newsletter, threw down the gauntlet on Bluesky. She posted a screenshot from MLB Network’s daily research packet and wrote, “I challenge the researches at MLBN who put out the daily stat packet to find a split that makes the Rockies look good.” The screenshot featured a single line of text:

The daily research packet is exactly what it sounds like, a multi-page document that contains tons of research on the day’s slate of games, broken down into bit-sized pieces of interesting information. A team of researchers assembles it each morning, then distributes it far and wide across the baseball media ecosphere. Although you’ve probably never seen this document, it has unquestionably informed your experience as a fan. Each broadcast team has its own researchers, of course, but if you’re watching a game and you hear the announcer casually mention that Mickey Moniak is batting .333 with a .476 slugging percentage when he represents the go-ahead run, you can feel pretty confident that they read that fun fact verbatim from the packet. Read the rest of this entry »

If, like me, you’re a weird baseball transactions sicko, you probably first heard of Luis Torrens at the tail end of 2016. That’s when the Padres, in the midst of an A.J. Preller-led teardown, shocked baseball by taking three low-minors players in the Rule 5 Draft and putting them all on the major league roster for 2017. It was a bold, unheard of tactic. The three players – Allen Córdoba, Miguel Díaz, and Torrens – were clearly not ready for the majors. Torrens, the most advanced of the trio, was 21 and had around 200 plate appearances of full-season minor league ball under his belt, and he was still learning his new position of catcher.

That trio was famously overmatched in 2017. Torrens racked up -1.3 WAR in 139 plate appearances, Córdoba -1.0 WAR in 227 of his own, and Diaz -0.7 WAR in 41 2/3 innings pitched. The whole experiment was an embarrassment for the league, and no one has since tried similar chicanery. The Padres sent them down after the season, as soon as they were eligible to do so without having to return them to their previous organizations; Torrens and Córdoba spent all of 2018 in the minors, and both struggled in A Ball. Torrens did finally return to the majors as a backup in 2019, but Preller flipped him to Seattle a year later and he slid into journeyman status. From 2019 through 2023, he bounced around, rarely getting consistent playing time, ending up with 668 plate appearances, a 92 wRC+, and -0.4 WAR thanks to iffy defense.

I’ve used what San Diego did in this particular Rule 5 Draft as a cautionary tale when people ask me about the risks of rushing low-level minor leaguers to The Show. I firmly believe that this Rule 5 manipulation interrupted each of their career arcs – they just weren’t ready for the challenge, which is hardly unexpected given where they’d been playing. Each was a promising prospect, but in the six years after the Padres selected them, the amount of time you’d expect them to be under team control, they combined for -3.2 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Diego Padres. 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 »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Taylor Walls fulfilling a preseason podcast prediction by being ejected after tapping his helmet following a questionable call (and the many notifications Ben and Meg received from EW listeners), Luke Weaver’s stretching injury, the Rockies’ purported improvement, the decline of the closer as bullpen protagonist, a miraculous softball-delivery dirt clod, an unfortunate instance of replay review, the LSU Shreveport Pilots’ undefeated college season, Jac Caglianone’s call-up, Corbin Burnes’s bum elbow, Mookie Betts’s improved defense, the death of Japanese baseball legend Shigeo Nagashima, and more.

Audio intro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ted O., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Walls story
Link to Reddit comments
Link to @EWStats ruling
Link to Walls and Trump
Link to Walls and DeSantis
Link to Revere ride info
Link to Weaver stretching story
Link to Dan S. on Weaver
Link to carrots myth
Link to Rockies quotes
Link to Rockies 10-day offense
Link to Rockies 10-day pitching
Link to Denver Post story
Link to The Athletic on Kenley
Link to Ben on saves
Link to Ben on SP protagonists
Link to softball clip
Link to softball story
Link to Ben on Capps
Link to Springer clip
Link to Springer story
Link to Dave on slides 1
Link to Dave on slides 2
Link to Shreveport story
Link to Wake Forest story
Link to Hill Triple-A game
Link to MLBTR on Burnes
Link to CBS on Mookie
Link to Ohtani Nagashima post
Link to Nagashima obit
Link to Whiting quote
Link to Nagashima NPB Stats page
Link to Oh NPB Stats page

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Tireless reporter Jeff Passan of ESPN reported late Monday night that the hamstring pain that caused Yankees closer Luke Weaver to be held out of Sunday night’s game against the Dodgers would land him on the IL, for as long as 4-6 weeks, with a more specific timetable to be presented at a later time. The extent of Weaver’s injury was previously unknown, as he was still in the trainer’s room well after the final pitch, through the end of postgame media access.

Weaver has been nearly flawless all season — allowing just three runs in 25 2/3 innings across his 24 appearances, though two of those runs have come in his last three games — and in late April, he took over as the team’s closer for Devin Williams, who was removed from the role after his atrocious start. While Weaver’s microscopic 1.05 ERA probably isn’t for real, given his more “normal” 3.04 FIP, even the latter number makes him one of the most important members of the New York relief corps, and losing him for a significant amount of time is a blow. Weaver represents one of the most successful rotation-to-bullpen conversions in recent memory, going from a struggling journeyman starter, who was released and then later claimed on waivers in 2023, to being a candidate for his first All-Star appearance this July. Since his transitioning to the bullpen, which also came with a reinvention of his delivery that featured a minimalist windup, Weaver has put up a 2.46 ERA and a 3.26 FIP over 109 2/3 innings. He also gave up just one hit across his four World Series appearances last October.

While this can hardly be considered good news, the impact of the bad news is mitigated by a couple of factors. First, Weaver’s injury comes at a time when the Yankees have a 5 1/2-game lead in the AL East. That’s certainly not an insurmountable lead, but it’s a comfortable one at this point of the season. Back in April, our preseason projections had the Yankees with only a 31% chance of winning the division, and ZiPS was even less confident, at 24%. As of Tuesday morning, these divisional probabilities are at 89% and 86%, respectively. The ZiPS number factors in Weaver’s injury, projecting him to miss a full six weeks as the worst-case scenario, in order to illustrate this point: The Yankees only get a 0.8% percentage bump if he happens to miss the minimum amount of time before he can come off the IL, meaning they’re in fairly strong shape either way. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Astros awoke on May 7, they were 17-18 and had just slipped into fourth place in the AL West. They had recently placed Yordan Alvarez — who had struggled mightily to that point — on the injured list with what had been diagnosed as a muscle strain in his right hand. First baseman Christian Walker, their big free agent addition, was scuffling along below replacement level, and both new left fielder Jose Altuve and the group that replaced him at second base were playing every bit as badly. Meanwhile, their already-thin rotation had been further compromised by the loss of Spencer Arrighetti. But even while receiving more bad news on Alvarez, and losing two more starters — Ronel Blanco and Hayden Wesneski — to Tommy John surgery, the Astros have turned things around, winning 15 of 24 and briefly sneaking into first place in the AL West.

At this writing, the Astros are now 32-27, and have trimmed the Mariners’ division lead from four games to half a game:

By comparison, the Mariners started 21-14, but have gone 11-12 since. Since May 6, the Astros have won four series (against the Reds, Royals, Mariners, and A’s), lost one (Rays), and split two (Rangers and Rays). They took three out of four from the Mariners at home from May 22-25, capped by Walker’s walk-off two-run homer off Casey Legumina on May 25. That was one of three walk-off victories during that span; Isaac Paredes‘ solo homer off the Royals’ John Schreiber on May 13 and Yainer Diaz’s solo homer off the Rays’ Garrett Cleavinger on May 30 were the others. The latter shot lifted the Astros’ record to 31-26, allowing them to sneak past the Mariners and into first place, but since then, Seattle beat Minnesota in each of its next two games while Houston split a pair with Tampa Bay, restoring the Mariners to first place by the barest of margins:

Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my Tuesday afternoon chat. Please bear with me a moment while I get my lunch order squared away…

12:03

Jay Jaffe: OK that’s done — fried chicken sandwich on the way…

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I took a look at the Alexis Díaz trade (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/dodgers-hope-to-fix-alexis-diaz-and-bolste…), the latest in a long line of fix-it attempts by the Dodgers, who now have an astounding 15 pitchers on the injured list.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Speaking of which, last night’s Mets-Dodgers game was a thriller that kept me up way too late. A Lindor leadoff homer! An Ohtani answer homer with a great call by Gary Cohen, and a game-tying sac fly in the 9th! And yet another Tanner Scott meltdown that decided the game.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: I’ve got a piece on the Astros’ recent surge and slew of injuries that should go up shortly. And now, on with the show

Read the rest of this entry »

Just over a year ago, the Brewers made the best kind of baseball history: weird baseball history. On May 31, 2024, they hosted the White Sox in Milwaukee, shellacking them 12-5. That part wasn’t weird. It’s hard to imagine anything less weird than the 2024 White Sox losing a baseball game (unless it’s the 2025 Rockies losing a baseball game). The weird part was how the Brewers beat the White Sox. They put up 23 hits, and 16 of those hits came on groundballs. That’s the most groundball base hits ever recorded since the pitch tracking era began in 2008. Would you like to see them all? Of course you would.

That’s what a record looks like. Groundball after groundball finding the various nooks and crannies that made the 2024 White Sox defense so similar to an English muffin. We’ve been waiting until this game’s anniversary to write about it. According to Baseball Savant, since 2008, only one other team has surpassed 12 groundball base hits in a single game. The White Sox tallied 15 against the Tigers on September 14, 2017. And that’s it. That’s the only team that came within three groundball hits of Milwaukee. First, let’s talk about how the Brewers pulled off this feat of worm-burning ingenuity.

As with any record, a fair bit of luck was involved. Balls took crazy hops off the mound and the first base bag. The Brewers hit a perfectly placed chopper and sent a ball hugging the third base line on a check swing. They wouldn’t have broken the record if any one of those balls had bounced another way. But as the saying goes, luck is the residue of design, and there was plenty of design involved here too. Read the rest of this entry »

The Diamondbacks did things the “right way,” to the extent that the right way means anything. After making the World Series unexpectedly in 2023, they went into the offseason with an exciting group of hitters and an unsettled rotation, so they opened the vault and signed two of the top-10 free agents that year — Eduardo Rodriguez and Jordan Montgomery — both starting pitchers. When those two flamed out in 2024 but the hitters kept producing, they went back to the well and signed Corbin Burnes, another marquee option. They refused to include top starting prospects in trades. They already had Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly in the fold. This is how you build a top rotation.

Er, well, this is a way that you can build a top rotation, but this particular iteration hasn’t panned out. In Phoenix, things are falling apart on the mound. Let’s look through Arizona’s problem rotation spots (read: everyone other than Kelly) and see if we can find a solution for each before it’s too late for the team’s 2025 season.

Corbin Burnes

The Problem: Injury
Burnes got off to a slow start in the desert, but like the weather in his new place of work, he was heating up as the year wore on. His cutter isn’t quite the devastating weapon it was during his 2021 Cy Young season, but it’s still a menace. He’s still one of the best in the business when it comes to spinning breaking balls. A well-located Burnes curveball is an absolute masterpiece, a pitch that will make you question the very basics of physics and reality.

In Burnes’ most recent four starts, he’s gone nuclear: 31% strikeout rate, 2.19 ERA, 2.67 FIP. He’d also been stacking up volume: Three of his past five starts lasted seven innings. But the most recent start ended prematurely in the fifth inning, when Burnes felt sharp tightness in his elbow, saw his velocity drop, and left the game. Burnes said after the game that he didn’t know the severity of the injury, telling reporters, “I’ve never had anything like it before, so I really have nothing to compare it to.”
Read the rest of this entry »