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.

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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 »

On Thursday night, Drew Rasmussen baffled the Yankees, holding them to just two hits in seven scoreless innings and only getting to a three-ball count once; he didn’t walk anybody while striking out seven. Within 24 hours, however, the Rays all but announced that the 27-year-old righty’s season was in jeopardy, placing Rasmussen on the 60-day injured list with a flexor strain and putting yet another damper on the team’s hot start.

Indeed, it was just about a month ago that the Rays lost another starting pitcher. Jeffrey Springs had allowed just one run in 16 innings over three starts while striking out 24 before he was sidelined by what was initially identified as ulnar neuritis and then diagnosed as a flexor strain, though it turned out he needed Tommy John surgery as well, knocking him out for the remainder of the 2023 season. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re approaching the quarter mark of the regular season and there’s still a large group of teams that had high expectations heading into the season and have largely disappointed so far. A few of the surprise teams have continued to play well too, but we’re getting to the point where clubs are ready to really evaluate how their roster is shaping up for the summer.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

For the first time this season, the Rays looked somewhat beatable. They lost a three-game series to the Orioles in Baltimore in which both teams scored six total runs, then battled the Yankees to a series split in New York over the weekend. But those losses last week pale in comparison to the new injury woes they’re facing. After losing Jeffrey Springs earlier this year, Drew Rasmussen has joined him on the 60-day injured list with an ominous elbow injury. Then, on Sunday, Yandy Díaz was removed from the game after suffering a groin injury running the bases. Losing your best hitter is never a good thing, but at least Tampa Bay has the depth to cover for Díaz, and Tyler Glasnow is slowly making his way through his rehab process to fill a hole in the rotation. All those wins the Rays have banked to start the season will definitely come in handy if they end up having trouble overcoming the losses of these key players. Read the rest of this entry »

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