Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Shohei Ohtani’s near-cycle and newly hot hitting on days when he’s pitched, the Cardinals reinstating Willson Contreras at catcher (and Zac Gallen’s comments on the Cardinals Way), the Sean Murphy/William Contreras/Esteury Ruiz trade revisited, post-peak Christian Yelich and the breakout of Brent Rooker, the dominant Rays’ possible vulnerability, Aaron Judge peeking while at the plate, the verdict on the shift restrictions so far, the confounding seasons of the Red Sox, Cubs, and Padres, MLB app notifications about old games, mini-reviews of two new documentaries about Yankees icons, and more, plus a Past Blast (1:26:36) from 2007 and follow-ups.

Audio intro: Nate Emerson, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ohtani quotes
Link to Ohtani homer
Link to Ohtani’s yearly splits
Link to Ohtani’s career splits
Link to Ohtani Stat Blast
Link to post on Chisholm’s defense
Link to news on Chisholm’s injury
Link to Marmol’s Contreras quote
Link to Post-Dispatch on Contreras
Link to The Athletic on Contreras
Link to Nightengale on Contreras
Link to Woodward on Contreras
Link to Gallen comments
Link to FG on William Contreras
Link to Rooker story
Link to Rooker interview
Link to Jay on the Rays
Link to Judge story
Link to Judge video
Link to Tango on the shift
Link to Ben on the Red Sox
Link to BaseRuns standings
Link to story about Pint promotion
Link to Reggie
Link to It Ain’t Over
Link to 2015 greatest players
Link to Crane lawsuits info
Link to Mays doc episode
Link to 2007 Past Blast source
Link to article about 756 sale
Link to asterisk info
Link to article about 762 ball
Link to Hample incident info
Link to Hample banning tweet
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to Jays-Yanks story
Link to Rosenthal on tipping
Link to Casas clip

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2:03	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my Tuesday chat. I just published a piece on Will Smith’s outstanding work, particularly since coming off the 7-day concussion injured list https://blogs.fangraphs.com/with-the-return-of-will-smith-the-dodgers-…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about Drew Rasmussen’s injury and the blow it dealt to the Rays https://blogs.fangraphs.com/after-dominating-yankees-drew-rasmussen-be…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: And now, on with the show

2:07

Jay Jaffe: He looked terrible last night and his numbers this season are undeniably bad. However, the guy is 25 years old and was brilliant last year, so it seems a bit early to start declaring him cooked. Obviously, he and the Jays need to fix things. For now, he’s taken a detour off the road to success, not unlike dozens upon dozens of other pitchers in baseball history.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: the Dodgers have the National League’s best record. Just past the one-quarter mark of the season, the team that’s dominated the NL West over the past decade while winning three pennants is back on top with a 27-15 record, that after spending most of April struggling to steer clear of .500. Since April 28, they’ve won 14 of 16, a span that has coincided with the return of Will Smith to the lineup after experiencing concussion-like symptoms.

As he’s been doing so often lately, Smith played a key role in Monday night’s 12-inning win over the Twins at Dodger Stadium. In the first inning, with a man on first, he hit a 398-foot wall-scraper off Pablo López for a two-run homer that immediately preceded a solo shot by Max Muncy. In the third, Smith poked a single to center field and came home on Muncy’s second homer of the night. He didn’t get another hit, but reached on an error in the fifth inning, which prompted Twins manager Rocco Baldelli to pull López from the game. The Twins clawed back from a 5-1 deficit to tie the game via Trevor Larnach‘s three-run eighth-inning homer and send it to extra innings, where they scored first in the 10th. But Smith, serving as the Manfred Man in the bottom of the frame, hustled home on a J.D. Martinez single that re-tied it. The Dodgers won in 12 on Trayce Thompson’s walk-off walk.

Smith has been locked in lately, going 10-for-25 with two doubles, three homers and seven RBIs in his past six games, all wins over the Brewers, Padres, and Twins. In fact, he’s been locked in just about all season save for his time on the sidelines. The 28-year-old slugger started 10 of the Dodgers’ first 13 games behind the plate, but took two foul balls off his catchers’ mask during the team’s April 10-12 series against the Giants. He sat out the first two games of the Dodgers’ subsequent series with the Cubs; before the second one, he told the Dodgers he didn’t feel right but passed a concussion test. “He felt uneasy and foggy,” as manager Dave Roberts explained at the time. Preferring to take a cautious approach, the Dodgers retroactively placed Smith on the 7-day concussion injured list on April 16. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Goldschmidt has been one of baseball’s best players for over a decade. Seemingly Hall of Fame-bound, the 35-year-old St. Louis Cardinals first baseman boasts a career 145 wRC+ to go with a .296/.391/.527 slash line, 322 home runs, and 55.9 WAR. A seven-time All-Star and four-time Gold Glove winner, he’s been awarded five Silver Sluggers and is coming off a season where he was voted National League MVP.

He’s been as good as ever in the current campaign. Over 186 plate appearances, Goldschmidt is slashing .319/.403/.546 with seven home runs and a 163 wRC+. With the Arizona Diamondbacks from 2011-2018, he came to St. Louis prior to the 2019 season in exchange for Carson Kelly, Luke Weaver, Andrew Young, and a competitive balance pick.

Goldschmidt sat down to talk hitting when the Cardinals visited Fenway this past weekend.

———

David Laurila: Some guys are big into hitting analytics, while others like to keep things as simple as possible. Where do you fit in?

Paul Goldschmidt: “Somewhere in the middle? I mean, you’ve got to know your swing and you’ve got to know the pitchers, but once you get in the box, you’ve got to see the ball and react. So for me it’s kind of finding that happy medium.

“I’m also always changing. I’m always adapting. I’m always trying to learn and get better. I don’t think there’s any time that you quite figure it out, you’re always trying to find whatever it takes to perform.”

Laurila: In which ways do you utilize hitting analytics?

Goldschmidt: “The biggest thing for me is finding the why. Analytics are very good at telling you what is happening, but they don’t necessarily give you the answer to why something is happening, whether that’s fly ball rate, groundball rate, hard-hit ball rate, strike zone judgment — all those things. It’s good to identify things you’re doing well, or not doing well, but the real challenge in this game is the why. With that, you can make adjustments and hopefully perform to the best of your ability.”

Laurila: What tends to be the issue when you’re not going well? Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Goldschmidt’s 2022 was a year for the ages, literally: the Cardinals’ first baseman defied senescence to post a 7.1 WAR and 177 wRC+, numbers which respectively tied for the 25th-best season among hitters 34 and older and the 15th-highest among those same elders with at least 500 plate appearances since 1920. This year, the slugger has largely picked up where he left off, with a 164 wRC+ through his first 186 trips to the plate. And according to xwOBA, he’s been significantly better than last year.

In case you’re not familiar, Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA) evaluates overall offensive performance in one stat, using linear weights to measure the relative value of each offensive outcome and then putting that number on the same scale as OBP. xwOBA, a product of Baseball Savant, combines a hitter’s walk and strikeout numbers with a prediction for how they should have faired on balls in play based on launch angle and exit velocity.

Last year, Goldschmidt put up a career-best wRC+, but xwOBA was telling us that some of that was smoke and mirrors: his .367 mark was well shy of his actual wOBA of .419. That 52-point divergence was the fifth-highest overperformance among hitters with at least 500 plate appearances in a single season since the introduction of xwOBA in 2015. Entering his age-35 season and due for some regression, I dismissed the idea of another big year from the first baseman. Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago White Sox really ought to be praying to whatever deity is currently tormenting them with plagues of locusts and pestilence, and thanking her that even more conspicuous travesties against baseball are occurring in St. Louis and Oakland.

A couple weeks ago, Jay Jaffe wrote about the terrible goings-on over in Chicago in general terms. I would’ve titled that piece “And I Looked, and Behold a Pale Hose: and His Name that Sat on Him Was Death, and Hell Followed With Him.” Jay opted for the more direct “The White Sox Are Utterly Terrible,” which they were then and are now.

Their failures this season have been so complete that it’d be unfair to blame any one player or coach, and at any rate that’s not the purpose of this post. That purpose: to examine a player once viewed as a unique talent, for whom things have gone badly off the rails. Michael Kopech is in the rotation full-time — a rarity in his Bright Eyes concept album of a career — but things are not going well. Read the rest of this entry »

Players the caliber of Juan Soto are rarely available via trade, so when the Padres acquired him via trade last summer from the drowning Nationals, it made a huge splash on the level of dropping a Sherman tank into your neighborhood swimming hole. But rather than continue his previous level of superstardom, he struggled to meet expectations in San Diego. His .236/.388/.390 line was still enough for a solid wRC+ of 130, but relative to his normal level of excellence, it’s hard to call that line anything but a disappointment.

Soto’s start in 2023, though, pales even next to his post-trade performance last year. April 17 may be the nadir of his career in San Diego: the Padres were shut out for the second game in a row, and he put up his fifth consecutive hitless game, leaving him with a triple-slash of .164/.346/.361. For the calendar year ending on that day, he was hitting .230/.391/.435 and had compiled 3.5 WAR — good enough for mere mortals, but not entities made of sterner stuff.

Around this time, Harold Reynolds talked a bit on MLB Network about Soto’s swing and the changes he was making. While I’ve criticized Reynolds plenty for his general analysis when it crosses into the jurisdiction of analytics, I bookmarked this video at the time, as the analysis rang true to me. He believed that Soto’s tinkering would pay dividends, and whether it’s a coincidence or not, he’s looked a lot more like the Soto we love over the last month. In 23 games since then and through Sunday’s action, he hit .321/.447/.571 and amassed 1.2 WAR, the kind of MVP-level production we’ve expected to see from him in mustard and brown and largely have not. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony DeSclafani put up a clunker last Monday. He gave up five runs and 10 hits over seven innings — to the Nationals of all teams — and the Giants lost 5-1. That’s nothing out of the ordinary; good pitchers have bad outings all the time. DeSclafani has been solid in San Francisco, but he’s more above average than elite. Giving up five runs is hardly an earth-shattering outcome.

Would you find that start more interesting if I told you that all five runs came in the first inning? Probably – that’s a lot of runs to give up in one inning followed by six clean sheets. On the other hand, that’s baseball: sometimes you’re the steamroller, and sometimes the other team has your number for 15 minutes.

Afterwards, though, Maria Guardado’s game story had an interesting detail:

“After the rough start, DeSclafani convened with pitching coach Andrew Bailey in the dugout and learned that he wasn’t getting his optimal shapes on his slider and his two-seamer. He made a mechanical adjustment between innings, tweaking the way he took the ball out of his glove…”

For 100 years, that wouldn’t have been a particularly interesting quote. That’s just the kind of thing that pitchers and pitching coaches say after bad outings. “Oh, I/he was doing this thing wrong, as you can see from the runs. But then we changed that thing, as you can see from the lack of runs afterwards.” But these days, we can go to the tape. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season isn’t off to the best start for last year’s AL Cy Young finalists. Reigning winner Justin Verlander missed the first five weeks with a shoulder strain and now faces the unenviable task of rescuing an ailing Mets rotation. Runner-up Dylan Cease has had his moments but an equal number of surprisingly poor outings. Finally, third-place finisher Alek Manoah is struggling most of all. His ERA has doubled, his WAR is in the negatives, and his 1.28 K/BB ranks last among qualified major league pitchers.

Manoah’s slow start has been difficult to watch. Last season, at just 24 years old, he established himself as the ace of the Blue Jays’ staff, securing his first All-Star selection and earning the nod for Game One of the Wild Card Series. Six months later, he was awarded the Opening Day start, making him the youngest Opening Day starter in the American League. The analytics crowd (myself included) might have argued Kevin Gausman was the true no. 1 in Toronto, but the Blue Jays clearly chose Manoah, and it wasn’t hard to understand why: Read the rest of this entry »