Alexis Díaz is having a great season. He’s struck out 30 of the 61 batters he’s faced and held opponents to a .113 batting average. In most cases, that would make him the best pitcher in his own nuclear family. Unfortunately, he has an older brother. Last season, Edwin Díaz led all relievers in strikeout rate. This season, Alexis has the best strikeout rate among relievers. Edwin led the league in reliever WAR last season, and Alexis is currently tied for second. If Yennier Cano ever gives up a run, which does not look likely to happen anytime soon, Alexis could take over the league lead in that category as well.
The Díazes are the Sultans of Swing-and-Miss. I bet you thought I was going to go for “Brothers in Arms,” which is the reference that’s been busted out for every family of pitchers since humanity first discovered Mark Knopfler back in the 1970s. But no, Dire Straits has a wide and venerable catalog of songs appropriate for this situation. You might say that because Edwin’s return from knee surgery is So Far Away, the Mets are paying him Money for Nothing this season. Read the rest of this entry »
After a season in which he led the NL in WAR and finished second in the MVP voting, Manny Machado was supposed to be right in the middle of the Padres’ takeover of the NL West. Instead, he’s off to a subpar start for a stumbling, sub-.500 team, and now he’s added injury to those insults. Manager Bob Melvin revealed on Wednesday that Machado has been diagnosed with a fractured metacarpal in his left hand and may need a stint on the injured list.
The 30-year-old third baseman was hit by a slider from the Royals’ Brad Keller in the second inning on Monday night, and while he remained in the game, he was replaced by pinch-hitter Rougned Odor in the fourth inning and didn’t play on either Tuesday or Wednesday; the Padres had Thursday off. Initial x-rays did not show the break, but CAT and MRI scans taken on Tuesday revealed that he had suffered a hairline fracture of his third metacarpal.
That revelation was only part of a dark day for the Padres, as they dropped the rubber match of their series against Kansas City, 4–3, and heard their share of boos from the 32,416 fans at Petco Park. They didn’t lose for lack of opportunity, going just 2-for-9 with runners in scoring position and 0-for-3 with the bases loaded. They’ve lost nine of their last 12, including five out of six to the Dodgers, and fallen from 17–15, one game behind Los Angeles in the NL West, to 20–24, 7.5 games back. Their odds of winning the NL West have fallen from 55.4% as of Opening Day to 37.8% before the skid to 12.9% as of Friday morning; their 41.6-point drop in their odds of winning the division is the majors’ largest, and their 23.4-point drop in their odds of reaching the playoffs — from a season-opening 85.3% to 61.9% — is second only to the Cardinals’ 26.6-point drop among NL teams. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m a Pete Davidson fan. No wait, fan isn’t the right word. I’m obsessed with Pete Davidson? Fascinated by Pete Davidson? Transfixed by Pete Davidson? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I have spent a confounding amount of time thinking about Pete Davidson. He’s a math equation where I need to solve for x and just when I think I’m getting close, he produces more exes. The strangest part is how I consumed a cornucopia of content about this man before ever consuming any of his actual work. Eventually, I watched a few Saturday Night Live clips and his stand up special and Set It Up, and now I’m a regular Pete Davidson connoisseur. But I only know about Pete Davidson at all because he transcended the comedy corner of entertainment and elevated himself to being a full pop culture icon.
Though Davidson is a pop culture icon, he doesn’t have any obvious ties to baseball (I mean, Set It Up is a baseball movie, but Davidson doesn’t feature in the main baseball scene), so what’s he doing occupying the intro to an article on a baseball website? Well, this particular article is the last of a three-part series on marketing the game of baseball in service of growing the sport, and Pete Davidson is a marketing savant, whether intentional or not. But before further succumbing to the gravitational pull of Davidson’s charismatic wiles, why does growing the game matter at all? Doing so would generate more revenue, but team profit margins really only matter to those with a financial stake in a team. Still, growth matters to those of us with a non-financial stake in the sport because it holds the potential to improve the overall product. For example, more games on national television, more and higher quality media coverage, more kids playing, more teens choosing baseball as their primary sport thus leading to a larger pool of stronger prospects, more folks getting involved with baseball research, and so on and so forth.
Parts I and II of this series approached growth from the perspective of MLB and its teams, making the case for original content to supplement live games by using expanded storytelling situated on the right platforms and with an appropriate level of investment and access to captivate potential converts. Part III plans to take on growth from the perspective of individual players. While individual players would surely feature in the storytelling approach described in the first two parts of the series, here the focus shifts to strategies players might undertake independent of the league or their team. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another installment of my weekly look at five things that caught my interest in baseball. As always, I’m indebted to Zach Lowe of ESPN for the idea – his basketball column is a must-read, and his observant eye always inspires me to look a little closer at what I’m watching. This week’s edition features one of the best players in the game, a fourth outfielder, an old ace reinventing himself, a current ace who I’ve unreasonably projected my own mannerisms onto, and a switch-hitter who might not be switch-hitting anymore. Let’s get to it.
1. Ronald Acuña Jr., All-Everything Again
Baseball lost one of its most exciting young stars when Ronald Acuña Jr. tore his ACL in 2021. He was in the middle of breaking out – if you can truly break out from the elevated perch he already occupied – when it all just stopped. He didn’t play again for nearly a year, and 2022 Acuña wasn’t the same when he did return. He just didn’t have that extra gear that made him such a delight to watch when he debuted.
This year, it’s safe to say he’s back. His prodigious bat speed was already starting to reemerge in the second half of last season, but it’s on full display again in 2023. He’s back to being one of the fastest players in baseball, to boot; his 11 homers and 17 steals have me doing downright irresponsible 40/40 math on a nightly basis. He’s first in baseball in Wins Above Replacement among position players, which seems like a pretty good indication that he’s up to his old tricks. Read the rest of this entry »
Bryce Miller has come a long way in a short time. A fourth-round pick by the Seattle Mariners out of Texas A&M just two summers ago, the 24-year-old right-hander came into the current campaign ranked no. 83 on our Top 100 and made his major league debut earlier this month. Moreover, his three starts have been nothing less than stellar. Over 19 innings, Miller has fanned 18 batters while allowing just one run on seven hits and a single walk. His ERA is a minuscule 0.47.
Seattle’s pitching development acumen has played a big role in his success. Miller’s 96-mph four-seam fastball is in the 99th percentile for spin, but it wasn’t until he got to pro ball that he began utilizing it in an optimal manner. He has also advanced the quality of his secondaries and is attacking hitters with a more varied arsenal than he did as an Aggie.
“In college, we had Rapsodo and TrackMan, but I never really dove into that or really even knew what it meant numbers-wise,” explained Miller. “But with Seattle being pretty deep into analytics, that changed when I got here. They really opened my eyes on how my stuff plays and where I need to throw it.” Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve made another small series of updates to the Top 100 Prospects list, which you can find on The Board. For the first time this season, I’ve reshuffled some of the names in the top 15 to 20 spots. Mostly, I’ve done some incremental reordering near the top based on health and current level of play. For example, Mets catcher Francisco Álvarez, who has kept his head above water after being thrust into the primary catching role in Flushing, has hopped over Jordan Walker, who’s struggling to get comfortable on both offense and defense down in Memphis. Neither player’s evaluation has had an overhaul — this is just a better representation of how things line up right now.
The biggest mover in the 60 FV tier is Diamondbacks center fielder Druw Jones, who falls toward the back of that group due to his quad strain and early-season strikeout issues. It could make sense for Jones to rehab in extended spring training or during the early part of the Complex League schedule and hit his way back to Visalia. It sounds like he will be back sooner than Phillies righty Andrew Painter, who remains at the very back of the 60 FV tier while he continues to rehab from a UCL injury.
Changes to the top of the 55 FV tier buoy the hitters who are performing toward the top of that group. The players from no. 14 to 18 overall (Marcelo Mayer, Brooks Lee, Endy Rodríguez, Brett Baty, Josh Jung) now stack ahead of Jordan Lawlar and Diego Cartaya, who are both striking out a lot at Double-A. The other changes within the 55 FV tier come toward the back of that group. Red Sox outfielder Miguel Bleis and Pirates infielder Termarr Johnson slide about 20 spots (the two of them were stacked at no. 19 and 20 overall), while Rays infielder Junior Caminero (who had been floating among the high-variance hitters in the back third of the 50 FV tier for about a year now) moves up from 110 overall. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the sesame-seer Cardinals using a cheeseburger phone to predict home buns (er, runs) by hitters who are dialed in, the varying fortunes of three offseason big spenders (the Mets, Padres, and Rangers) and the stakes of their success, Kumar Rocker’s Tommy John surgery, Dustin May’s flexor strain, the proliferation of ranked prospects, Jackson Holliday, the Orioles’ infield future, and what it takes for tanking to be justified, the need for a Lab League to test the pre-tacked ball, José Abreu’s power outage, Zac Gallen’s bird omen, and more, plus a Past Blast (1:38:22) from 2008 and a few follow-ups.
Win Probability Added isn’t a great measure of true talent – it’s influenced by too many factors outside a player’s control – but ultimately, the best players tend to have the highest WPAs. Last season, AL MVP Aaron Judge led all position players in WPA, while NL MVP Paul Goldschmidt finished on top in the Senior Circuit. The year before, it was AL MVP Shohei Ohtani who finished first overall and NL MVP Bryce Harper who paced the National League. Even in the early days of the 2023 season, the WPA leaderboard is a veritable who’s who of superstars and MVP contenders. Yordan Alvarez leads all position players with 2.42 WPA, while Ronald Acuña Jr. leads the NL with 2.18. Following closely behind in the AL is Vladimir Guerrero Jr., with 2.12 WPA to his name.
After those three, only one other hitter has a WPA above 2.00 this year, and his name is rarely listed among the likes of Alvarez, Acuña, and Guerrero. In what will be his first full season, 27-year-old Jake Fraley has already notched 2.10 WPA for the Cincinnati Reds. Read the rest of this entry »
For the 2023 Red Sox, the starting rotation was always going to be about who could stay healthy. They entered the year with seven main rotation contenders in the organization: Chris Sale, Corey Kluber, Nick Pivetta, James Paxton, Garrett Whitlock, Brayan Bello, and Tanner Houck. With Paxton back from the injuries that have kept him out for over two years and Whitlock possibly eyeing a late-May return, the Sox could end up with all seven healthy for the first time by the end of the month. This would be great news for Boston, which has been struggling to find the right permutation of pitchers to make up a consistent starting unit. It wasn’t the best news for Pivetta, whom Alex Cora announced on Wednesday night will be moving to the bullpen. If all are still healthy when Whitlock returns, the Sox could have another tough decision on their hands.
Frankly, in terms of production, starting pitching has been a bit of a mess so far for the Red Sox, and Houck has been among those struggling. Through eight starts, he has a 5.48 ERA despite a 4.10 FIP and 3.96 xFIP; he’s allowed five home runs in 42.2 innings after giving up just eight in 146 career innings before this year. There are some indicators that bad luck is at play: his 13.5% HR/FB rate is nearly twice his rate from last season, and his 59.2% LOB% is far lower than his 75.5% rate in 2022. But since 2021, when he was last regularly starting, he’s fallen from the 85th percentile to the 54th in xwOBA/xERA, the 82nd to the 23rd in average exit velocity, and the 87th to the 38th in strikeout percentage.
Red Sox SP Percentile Rankings
Player
xwOBA
xBA
xSLG
EV
Hard%
K%
BB%
Whiff%
Garrett Whitlock
23
15
15
72
66
17
88
49
Brayan Bello
24
21
18
16
3
49
68
59
Chris Sale
63
73
63
55
70
79
70
57
Nick Pivetta
7
12
4
3
4
50
28
50
Tanner Houck
54
47
48
24
36
37
52
63
Corey Kluber
13
31
8
24
16
23
52
27
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Blue = Top quartile, Red = Bottom quartile
Aside from his struggles in the rotation, Houck’s pedigree as a reliever makes him a candidate to be bumped to the bullpen. (The same could be said of Whitlock, but the front office gave him the nod to start over Houck during the offseason.) After his final start of last year on May 8, Houck settled into a relief role quite nicely, first in a multi-inning capacity and then taking over the closer role from mid-June until he was shut down with a back injury late in the summer. In those 25 appearances, he allowed just six earned runs, posting a 1.49 ERA, 3.17 FIP, and 3.39 FIP. This is the run that might tempt Cora and his staff to slot him back into a relief role, despite Houck’s own wishes. Read the rest of this entry »
Sponsor Us on Patreon
Facebook Group
Twitter Account
EW Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
iTunes Feed
Get Our Merch!
Dan Szymborski