As we know, baseball is a bit of an oddball relative to other ball-centric sports for several reasons. Prominent among them, the defense controls the ball at the start of each play, whereas in basketball, football, soccer, and hockey, to be on offense is to be the team with the ball. There exists a mindset difference between playing offense and playing defense, or rather between controlling the ball versus not controlling the ball. One is proactive, the other reactive. As players develop they, whether consciously or not, sort themselves into positional groups partially based on their preferred mindset (alongside their natural skills and physical attributes). Some need the comfort of control, while others thrive on guessing their opponents’ next move.

Pitchers and catchers fall in the proactive category, selecting pitch types and locations to best baffle hitters. Position players react both at the plate and in the field. On the basepaths, the roles reverse. Runners make the active decision to advance, leaving pitchers and catchers to react. It’s an abnormal experience for everyone involved.

Season four of Stranger Things hit Netflix on May 27, 2022; around Opening Day of the 2023 major league season, you finally got “Running Up That Hill” by Kate Bush out of your head. (If you don’t watch Stranger Things, just know that the song features prominently throughout the show’s most recent season.) And as the new season dawned, baserunners went wild on the basepaths and all the chatter about running wormed “Running Up That Hill” right back into your brain. Much in the way the show revived a song from the 1980s, changes to MLB’s rules regulating base sizes and pitcher disengagements revived ‘80s-esque stolen base rates. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the three Taylor Wards, the truth and multiple untruths about Elly De La Cruz’s twin brother, the dominance of 20-year-old Eury Pérez and the Marlins’ usage dilemma, Luis Arraez’s plate predictions, MVP odds, and underestimation as a prospect, the Mets’ struggles and Buck Showalter’s morbid mind, the Orioles’ prospect cornucopia, the debut of part-time knuckleballer Matt Waldron, the Angels’ odd series loss and infield trades, how Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani are like Woody and Buzz from Toy Story, why the anti-shift rules are increasing strikeouts, whether it’s bad for baseball that Rob Manfred acknowledged regret about his handling of the sign-stealing scandal, and the latest sign of the sports-betting apocalypse, plus a Future Blast from 2025.

Audio intro: Ian Phillips, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Harold Walker, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ward scoreboard image
Link to Ward/Wade wiki
Link to tweet about Elly’s brother
Link to photo of Elly’s brother
Link to misinfo about Elly’s brother
Link to Elly’s “fastest man” quote
Link to Sam on Hamilton’s speed
Link to Ben Clemens on Pérez
Link to best 9-start starts
Link to clip of Schumaker
Link to player predictions wiki
Link to 2019 Twins top prospects
Link to Ben on HUaL
Link to Showalter quote
Link to rigor mortis quote
Link to Cohen tweet
Link to playoff odds
Link to tweet about Orioles prospects
Link to Jay on Waldron
Link to Waldron GIF
Link to Jannis on EW
Link to Ben on the knuckleball
Link to Langs tweet
Link to Dan S. on Angels trades
Link to Escobar citizenship
Link to episode on Escobar and Fogo
Link to Rob on the shift ban
Link to Lewie on the shift ban
Link to Manfred’s Time interview
Link to the WSJ on Shams
Link to Awful Announcing on Shams
Link to WaPo on gambling/sports media
Link to stretching article
Link to other stretching article
Link to Rick Wilber’s website
Link to Sam on single-game WAR

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2:00	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! I’m back from my annual foray to Cape Cod and at my usual battle station for the Tuesday chat.

2:01	Jay Jaffe: I just published a piece on Jordan Walker’s latest hitting streak and what’s changed (and hasn’t) since his return from Triple-A. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jordan-walker-tries-to-get-off-the-ground/

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Yesterday, I took a look at the debut of the Padres’ Matt Waldron, the first pitcher to throw a knuckleball in a major league game since Mickey Jannis in 2021 https://blogs.fangraphs.com/matt-waldron-brought-the-knuckleball-back-…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Current listening: Sparks, since I’m seeing them at the Beacon Theater tonight.

2:02	Jay Jaffe: And now, on with the show

Read the rest of this entry »

Say this for Jordan Walker: He knows how to put together a hitting streak. The 21-year-old rookie has only played in 39 major league games, and in that brief amount of time has recorded two streaks — a career-opening 12-gamer and now a 15-gamer — that together account for more than two-thirds of that run. His bat has suddenly become a bright spot in an otherwise frustrating season for the Cardinals.

Indeed, the reigning NL Central champions remain a hot mess despite winning five of their last seven games and salvaging a split in the London Series against the Cubs after being spanked 9–1 in the opener. The Cardinals have nonetheless been worse in June (7–13) than May (15–13), producing their lowest monthly rate of scoring runs (4.05 per game) along with their highest rate of runs allowed (4.88 per game), and falling from five games out of first place to 8.5 back. That’s hardly been Walker’s fault, though.

Recall that Walker, who ranked 12th on our 2023 Top 100 Prospects list, hit his way onto the roster in spring training, bypassing Triple-A Memphis, and opened the season as the regular right fielder, a situation that was somewhat surprising given the team’s apparent outfield depth. The move guaranteed that Tyler O’Neill, Dylan Carlson, and Lars Nootbaar would all get less playing time than expected — not the worst thing in the world given the subpar performances of the first two last year. The presence of fellow rookie Alec Burleson only added to the crunch. Yet Walker turned heads by collecting hits in each of his first 12 games, batting .319/.360/.489.

Once the hitting streak ended, however, Walker didn’t get a very long leash as the league adjusted. He went just 5-for-26 over his next eight games, four of which featured multiple strikeouts. Meanwhile, his poor jumps and bad throwing decisions served to remind that he was still a work in progress on defense as well; a converted third baseman, he had just 51 previous professional games in the outfield, including in last year’s Arizona Fall League. Still, it felt odd when, on April 26, the Cardinals optioned him to Memphis, with club president John Mozeliak deciding that the outfield of the 9–15 team was suddenly too crowded. “[G]uys just aren’t getting into rhythm, [with their] expected playing time,” he told reporters, adding that he and manager Oli Marmol envisioned less playing time for the rookie in the near future and figured it made little sense for him to idle on the bench. More understandable was the team’s desire for Walker to work on his approach and hit the ball in the air more often to take advantage of his 70-grade raw power. Read the rest of this entry »

Roch Cholowsky is one of the top high school shortstop prospects in the 2023 draft class, and one of the few potential first-rounders to do the full battery of drills at last week’s MLB Draft Combine. Attending the combine was unusually convenient for Cholowsky, who went to high school in Chandler, Arizona, less than half an hour from Chase Field.

It’s a very, very good place for a young ballplayer to grow up. In the suburbs east of Phoenix you’ll find six teams’ spring training complexes, plus Arizona State. This part of the world has no shortage of high-quality baseball infrastructure, and is crawling with scouts on the lookout for the next Gold Glove shortstop.

“Moving here was the best decision my parents ever made,” Cholowsky says. Read the rest of this entry »

Isaac Coffey is rapidly emerging as a prospect to watch in the Red Sox system. Drafted in the 10th round last summer out of Oral Roberts University, the 23-year-old right-hander logged a 2.83 ERA with 86 strikeouts in 60.1 innings at High-A Greenville before being promoted to Double-A Portland a week ago. His profile is unique. Our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen has described Coffey as having “a funky, drop-and-drive, low-slot delivery (but his arm action is super short, not typical of low-slot guys) that creates big lateral divergence between his fastball and slider.”

Coffey discussed his four-pitch arsenal and his atypical arm slot prior to a recent game at Portland’s Hadlock Field.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with the self scouting report. What is your arsenal?

Isaac Coffey: “I’ve got a four-seam fastball. A lot of people think it’s a sinker or a two-seam, but with the release height and my slot — I spin it between 2:15 and 2:30 on a clock, with 100% spin efficiency — it tends to look like it’s rising, even though it has more run than ride. It plays up in the zone because it’s coming from that lower slot. It averages around 89 [mph], topping out at 91, but my command of it is pretty good. I can place it on both sides of the plate and use it whenever I need to.

“My changeup is a four-seam, basically a circle change. I spin it really good, and it’s got 100% spin efficiency, too. I spin it at like three o’clock to 3:15, and that creates a lot of run. It’s basically straight sideways but sometimes with a little negative drop. It’s always been my best off-speed pitch.

“I also have a slider and a cutter, both of which I developed this offseason. The cutter is just an offset four-seam that I try to throw hard. It gets a little bit of arm-side run, but compared to the fastball… it probably has perceived cut, but not actual cut on the Trackman numbers. I’m getting more comfortable with that and have been using it more and more each outing.

“My slider is also getting better as the season goes on. It’s got that nine o’clock sideways spin. The command is getting a lot better, so I believe I can use it in a lot of counts right now.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re like me, this year’s bumper crop of pitching prospect debuts has overwhelmed you. I write about baseball for a living, and it still gets to be too much for me sometimes. Mason Miller, Bryce Miller, Taj Bradley, Bobby Miller, Grayson Rodriguez, Andrew Abbott, Michael Grove… you could almost make an entire starting rotation just out of Millers. Some of these debuts have been spectacular. Some have been lackluster. Some are works in progress. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s hype.

That leads me to Eury Pérez, our top pitching prospect and perhaps the most anticipated debut of the year. It’s easy to equate all debuts, or at least to think of them as quite similar until a pitcher does something to set himself apart. Don’t fall for that trap, though. I’m here to tell you: Pérez is amazing, and it’s time to start paying attention to him if you’ve been missing out.

One thing is almost universally true about the heralded pitching debuts this year: these guys have stuff coming out their ears. I don’t mean that in an ‘ew gross earwax’ way, either: they’re tooled up like you wouldn’t believe. I think that’s just the way the world works now. Teams are better than ever before at applying objective measurements to individual pitches. In the past, a guy toiling in Hi-A with so-so numbers wasn’t going to the bigs regardless of how much vertical break he imparted. Now, if you’re throwing a fastball that looks at home in the majors, your team knows right away. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. 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 »

The Angels did some bargain shopping over the weekend, adding veteran infielders Eduardo Escobar and Mike Moustakas to the roster from the Mets and Rockies, respectively. Escobar, who has triple-slashed a .254/.305/.432 line this year and was a part-timer in New York after the team turned to rookie Brett Baty as the starter at third base, was acquired for two pitching prospects, Coleman Crow and Landon Marceaux. Moustakas has performed adequately as a role player for the Rockies this year, splitting time between first and third and pinch-hitting, and fetched minor league pitcher Connor Van Scoyoc in return.

Assuming the Angels aren’t simply quickly acquiring third basemen from 2018 as part of some mad scavenger hunt, the urgency here reflects their desperate need for infielders. In most seasons, the preseason plan to have Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani and precisely nothing else go wrong with the other 24 players has gang aft a-gley by this point of the season, like most of the best laid plans of mice and men, despite Disney selling the Angels to Arte Moreno 20 years ago. Nobody writes a paean to a team with a .537 winning percentage, but this ordinary level of respectability, if the first half ended today, would represent the franchise’s best first-half winning percentage since the 2015 season. At 42–37, Los Angeheim stands just a game out for the last wild card spot, so now is pretty important.

“Now” is also a bit of a problem when it comes to the roster. While this may be the season the Angels finally write the proof to the hypothesis “.500 Team Plus Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout = Playoffs,” parts of the roster have crumbled in recent weeks. And while the lineup has scored 5.3 runs per game in June, more than 20% of that total came in Saturday night’s 25–1 humiliation of the Rockies; the Angels are at a decidedly meh 4.4 runs per game in recent weeks otherwise. The infield increasingly looks like a rickety structure that could collapse with a firm gust of wind. Jared Walsh, who looked in 2021 as if he could hold down the fort at his peak for three or four years, struggled in 2022 with thoracic outlet syndrome, and his return this year was poor enough that he was sent down to Triple-A Salt Lake. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether there is a luddite rebellion, a scouting counter-revolution, or some other attempt at rolling back the technological advances the game has seen in recent years, last week I detailed why it makes sense for pitchers to adjust to new technology right now. Sure, hurlers could wait for a tech nullification or, in its absence, a new kind of tech to level the playing field, but as things stand, the scales are tipping.

Throughout the pitch-tracking era, hurlers have stood to benefit more than hitters from analytics thanks to highly customizable pitching plans. In recent years, motion-capture systems have helped optimize pitchers’ mechanics in addition to their repertoires. But this year, a significant number of teams have unearthed another use of limb-tracking software: in-game pitch tipping. Essentially, machine learning identifies subtle differences in muscle activation in real-time, typically due to different grips across pitch types, while the pitcher is still holding the ball in his glove. After a quick relay system, that information reaches the field, and the batter can then look to the dugout or a base coach for some indication of what’s coming.

To counteract this, I suggested pitchers mix up their wrist action and finger pressure right before release; by the time the KinaTrax systems pick up what’s going on, it’ll be too late. Sadly, I don’t have access to metrics like breadth of wrist action and finger pressure relative to grip, so I decided to come up with my own way of identifying pitchers who are already doing what I would recommend. I theorized that spin axis could be a proxy for grip, since the point about which a thrown baseball spins is heavily reliant on how the pitcher holds it. The direction and magnitude of movement is also closely related to spin axis, but there isn’t a one-to-one correspondence, so I hypothesized that pitchers with wide variability in movement despite minimal spin axis variability could be adding some extra mustard after separation. Read the rest of this entry »