Billy Wagner was the club’s closer when Craig Kimbrel joined the Atlanta Braves in 2010. Thirty-nine years old by season’s end, Wagner logged the last 37 of his 422 career saves, and he was as dominant as ever while doing so. Over 69-and-a-third innings, the left-hander fanned 104 batters while allowing just 38 hits.
Kimbrel, who was just 21 years old when he debuted that May, was every bit as overpowering. In 21 appearances comprising 20-and-two-thirds innings, the rookie right-hander fanned 40 batters while allowing just nine hits. Along the way, he recorded the first of what is now 395 saves.
I’ve had a Hall of Fame vote for three years, and in each of them I’ve put a checkmark next to Wagner’s name. This coming winter, I plan to do so again in what will be his penultimate year on the ballot (assuming he doesn’t get voted in; Wagner received 68% of support in his last go-round).
Kimbrel will soon celebrate his 35th birthday, and while the end of his career is fast approaching, he’s still pitching. Will he likewise be getting my vote once his name appears on the ballot? And what about Kenley Jansen? Still going strong at age 35, he’s also got 395 saves, tying him with Kimbrel for seventh on the all-time list, directly behind Wagner.
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about an NPB matchup between Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Roki Sasaki, those aces’ current talent levels and MLB futures, how velocity has climbed in NPB compared to MLB, and how stealing bases seems to be the one thing Shohei Ohtani (and, for that matter, Mike Trout) can’t do. Then (18:52) they follow up on earlier conversations about Cast Away, playing baseball on top of a tall building, and a pitcher who throws an unhittable pitch, discuss partial runs (26:53), a strange MLB survey question (37:10), whether Rob Manfred is suddenly based (44:34), Jim Bowden’s pro-ownership stance (55:17), and why teams aren’t stealing third base more often (1:06:45), followed by Stat Blasts (1:12:43) about the most first major league hits in one game, teams with the most players who had career years, the biggest years for prominent retirements at each position, and mascot clothing, plus a reaction to an assault on Rockies mascot Dinger (1:42:04), a Past Blast (1:48:04) from 1994, concerns about ESPN micing up Martín Maldonado during a game (1:50:28), and a few follow-ups (1:54:47).
Orlando Arcia getting the nod for the starting shortstop job in Atlanta raised some eyebrows this spring. After all, he had looked more like a utility infielder in recent years than a viable starting shortstop, and it felt a bit like that ship had long since sailed. The present and future was Vaughn Grissom, our top Braves prospect last year after the graduations of Spencer Strider and Michael Harris II. Grissom didn’t exactly struggle in his debut last fall, whomping pitchers to the tune of a .293/.353/.440 line, a triple-slash that would be viable for a first baseman, let alone a guy who can handle short. Yet it was Arcia who ended up with the job in the spring. It didn’t even seem like the typical service time shenanigans, such as the Cubs swearing that Kris Bryant needed a couple weeks to learn to be a better player than Mike Olt; Grissom already had nearly a third of a year of service time, which would have made it a bit arduous to maintain that façade.
Arcia didn’t disappoint in early play: In 13 games, he hit .330/.400/.511 and looked fairly comfortable playing short regularly for the first time in a few years. Unfortunately, a Hunter Greene fastball had other plans for the position; his upper-90s heat hit Arcia’s wrist during an at-bat, knocking him out of Wednesday’s game against Cincinnati, replaced by Ehire Adrianza. Initial x-rays didn’t reveal a fracture, but an MRI and CT scan on Thursday showed a microfracture, sending him to the injured list. This appears to be a minor injury, and it appears as if Arcia will only miss a couple weeks of play. Cookies don’t crumble in identical ways, but Nick Castellanos suffered this injury in 2021 and only missed a couple of weeks.
If there were service time issues involved, the Braves could have very easily plugged in Adrianza or Braden Shewmake for a couple of weeks and continued to let Grissom work on his defense in the minors (he was so-so at best in the majors last year with the glove). But finding time at short for Grissom, who by all reports took his demotion with humility, was still the upside play. Just as Arcia didn’t disappoint early on, he performed very well for Triple-A Gwinnett, with a 1.044 OPS in 10 games. Read the rest of this entry »
When the Braves won the World Series in 2021, Ronald Acuña Jr. was a bystander, as a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee knocked him out for the second half of the season and the entire postseason. He returned to action near the end of April last year, but while he was the Braves’ second-most valuable outfielder — which wasn’t saying much due to the slumps and calamities that befell the team’s other fly chasers — his performance was far short of the high standard he’d set since debuting in 2018. With a strong start to his 2023 season, Acuña is showing signs of recovering his pre-injury form, though his performance in a couple of areas does raise concerns.
After hitting a sizzling .283/.394/.596 (157 wRC+) in 82 games before tearing his ACL in 2021, Acuna dipped to .266/.351/.413 (114 wRC+) in 119 games last year. It wasn’t a bad performance; his wRC+ ranked among the top 30 of all outfielders, and his 2.1 WAR prorates to about 2.6 per 650 PA. On a team where all of the other outfielders besides rookie Michael Harris II — namely Travis Demeritte, Adam Duvall, Robbie Grossman, Guillermo Heredia, and Eddie Rosario — netted -1.1 WAR, Acuña’s contribution wasn’t an unwelcome one, helping the team win 101 games. Yet his season was well shy of the elite level that he set for himself pre-injury, with a 140 career wRC+ and 6.0 WAR per 650 PA. After all, this is a player whom Dan Szymborski had once projected as the most likely to supplant Mike Trout as the game’s best in terms of WAR.
Acuña missed his chance for that, but he’s still just 25 years old, and through the first two weeks of the season, he’s hitting .370/.452/.537 through 62 plate appearances. Already he has three three-hit games and four two-hit games under his belt, and he’s helped the Braves jump out to a 9-4 record even while dealing with numerous injuries to their rotation and lineup. Read the rest of this entry »
After I wrote about Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran last month, consider this the next installment of my highly unrelated, only-for-the-joke “Duran Duran” series; today we take an entirely separate look at 25-year-old Twins closer and velocity king Jhoan Duran. This Duran was one of baseball’s best relievers as a rookie in 2022; this year, he returned to the Twins’ bullpen with a lot less to prove after his impressive rookie campaign. Nevertheless, he has made some significant tweaks to his already devastating arsenal, and he’s bringing more heat in his sophomore season than ever before.
Duran arrived on the scene in Minnesota last year at a rather uncertain time in his prospect journey. After registering on our Top 100 prospect lists as a high-velocity starter in 2020 and 2021, a forearm strain (and a global pandemic) limited the right-hander to all of five appearances across the river with Triple-A St. Paul in the last two years. The uncertainty around his health obscured his future outlook and called his potential as a starter into question. But he did enough in just seven Spring Training innings last season to show he was healthy and earn one of the final spots in the Twins’ bullpen, then made the absolute most of his first big league opportunity. In 57 relief outings, he allowed just 14 runs and limited hitters to a .251 wOBA, .187 xBA, .269 xSLG, and .232 xWOBA, all of which were in the top 10% of the league. His 34.7% whiff percentage was in the 94th percentile, and his 33.5% strikeout rate was in the 96th. Thanks in part to the trust he quickly earned from Twins manager Rocco Baldelli, he finished second among big league relievers with a 4.56 WPA. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another installment of the five things that most caught my eye in baseball over the past week. As I mentioned last time and will no doubt continue to mention long into the future, this column was inspired by Zach Lowe’s excellent weekly NBA column. To quickly recap, the idea here is that there are constantly tons of little, delightful things going on in baseball. They can’t all have a column of their own, but that doesn’t make them any less pleasing – or irksome. The following isn’t an exhaustive list; it’s merely a few things that I think you’ll enjoy.
1. One Pitch Knockouts
I discovered a new category of walk-off this week, and I can’t believe I’ve never recognized it before. Let’s set the stage: the Twins and White Sox took a 3-3 game into the bottom of the 10th inning. The White Sox had failed to score in the top of the inning, which put them in a dire situation. Willi Castro started the bottom of the 10th on second base, 180 feet away from ending the game. Jesse Scholtens, hardly Chicago’s best reliever, took the mound. Merely living to fight another inning felt like a long shot.
As it turns out, the Twins didn’t need a whole inning. They needed exactly one pitch:
The official game log had this to say: “Michael A. Taylor singles on a bunt groundball to third baseman Hanser Alberto. Willi Castro scores. Throwing error by third baseman Hanser Alberto.” A more succinct description: “Michael A. Taylor bunts, chaos ensues.”
That was a great spot to bunt, the best possible result, and also a downright hilarious way to end a 10-inning game. Baseball is all about the slow build. Sure, home runs are a quick jolt of offense, but most rallies feature hits, walks, and errors building on each other to a triumphant conclusion. Instead, this time the slow build was all about what happened between innings. Players jogged to their positions. Scholtens threw warmup pitches. Castro ran out to second base. Both broadcasts explained the finer points of extra-innings strategy. It was all supposed to be a buildup to an exciting duel, with high-stakes batter/pitcher confrontations stretched out over multiple at-bats and plenty of pitches. Instead, it ended right away, and with a bunt, and a baseball that hit Taylor in the head (he was fine):
Would I want every game to end on a bunt? Of course not. I wouldn’t want every extra innings game to end on the first pitch, either. But there’s something delightful about the inversion of form here that I want more of. Not with a bang, but not with a whimper either. The zombie runner might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it makes for some delightfully whimsical endings. The Twins didn’t care, though; they mobbed Taylor past first base. He looked appropriately sheepish, but hey, a win is a win:
2. How the Mets Roll
Baseball is a fair sport in the long run, but the long run can take a while to show up. There’s no rule that says your hard contact has to get rewarded; you can hit five screaming line drives in a row and have each one find a fielder’s glove. I’m not a major league hitter, but I imagine that one of the hardest parts of their job is keeping an even demeanor even when the game feels like it’s stacked against you.
Of course, that’s not the only way things can go. Sometimes you feel jinxed, and sometimes you’re the New York Mets this past Monday. In the bottom of the seventh inning, the Mets were nursing a two-run lead against the dangerous Padres when Mark Canha led off with a double. This is a bunt-friendly column, so you know what happened next: Luis Guillorme tried to bunt Canha over to third for a good shot at an insurance run. What you might not have guessed is that Guillorme bunted the ball perfectly:
“You couldn’t roll it out there any better” is an overused announcer trope. That implies that it would be easy to roll it out there. I’ve played bocce ball enough times to know that rolling the ball that far and with that slim of a margin for error is tremendously difficult. This ball had to walk a fine line to stay fair, and it juuuuuust got there:
Two batters later, things got sillier. Tomás Nido cued one off the end of his bat, and, well, you’ll just have to see this one:
I’m just gonna say it: you couldn’t roll it out there any better. It sat on the chalk! Poor Yu Darvish just shook his head ruefully; what other option did he have? Seriously, you need to see that one again:
Every base hit is a line drive in the next day’s box score, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to get a gift every once in a while. If you’re not convinced of how good that feels, just take a look at Nido and Tommy Pham in the aftermath:
Bonus Mets content: the broadcast remains as delightful as ever. Tune in for a random afternoon game, and you’re liable to hear sentences that have never previously been conceived of. “That was a snappy Tom – put that in your Bloody Mary,” said Keith Hernandez this Wednesday. He was talking about a David Robertson curveball, for the record.
3. Alek Manoah’s Non-Competitive Pitch Problem
If more pitchers were like Alek Manoah, baseball would be a lot more fun to watch. He works deep into starts, wears his emotions on his sleeve, and challenges hitters rather than nibbling. He went at least six innings in 25 of his 31 starts last year, a welcome throwback in a world increasingly populated by five-and-dive starters and one-inning reliever parades.
This year, Manoah hasn’t found his form. His strikeout and walk rates are both 15.9% — that’s far too many walks against not nearly enough strikeouts. He’s already had starts of 3.1 and 4.1 innings, each shorter than any start he made last year. He’s lost a little velocity, but that’s not the biggest problem here. No, the thing that’s most vexing Manoah is a troubling increase in non-competitive pitches.
Manoah’s game is built on efficiency, and part of that is not wasting pitches. Baseball Savant has a handy “waste” zone – it refers to pitches thrown so far away from the strike zone that they hardly ever draw swings (roughly 6% in each of the past five years). Every year, only about 9% of pitches fall into that non-competitive bucket. Last year, only 8.3% of Manoah’s pitches ended up in the “waste” zone. Pitchers almost never intend to throw it there; those are just the pitches where their mechanics betray them, and they either yank the ball or have it fall off their hands weirdly.
This year, Manoah’s mechanics have been betraying him a lot. In his second start of the season, he threw 16 waste pitches out of 98 total, a 16.3% mark. On Tuesday, he threw another 15 (16% of his 94 pitches). His fastball velocity was down in both starts, too: he bottomed out below 88 mph, and he’s averaging roughly 1 mph less this year than last.
In graphical form, it’s just as ugly. Here’s a good Manoah start from last year:
Here’s this Tuesday’s start:
It doesn’t take a data scientist to spot the problem. Manoah couldn’t land his slider, and he left a bundle of sinkers above the zone too. The AL East is going to be a grindhouse this year. The Rays have already pulled out to a sizable lead. If Toronto is going to chase them down, their ace needs to start repeating his delivery and stop giving batters free pitches.
4. Blind Tags and Ghost Tags
2023 is not a good year for fielders who like tagging out runners. The bases are bigger, which means it’s harder to find runners. Pickoff throws are limited, which means runners are getting better leads, and the pitch clock only exacerbates that problem. The end result is that a chance to tag a runner out, whether on a stolen base attempt or not, presents itself far less often than a year ago.
What’s a fielder to do? If you’re Brandon Crawford, you just get better at tagging. The Royals are aggressive on the basepaths, which is a mixed blessing: it means more chances to tag someone out but a lower likelihood of succeeding. A lower likelihood isn’t the same as no likelihood, however. When MJ Melendez tried to advance on a fly ball to center, Crawford wasn’t having it:
That’s just perfect. He had no time to execute a standard spin-and-find. He knew where Melendez was likely to be, and he could hear him; that would have to be enough. You need a firm grasp of your position to execute a tag like this:
And just for fun, one more angle of it:
Of course, not everyone has eyes in the back of their head. That doesn’t stop infielders from getting their tags in, though. Take this beauty, pointed out by a reader last week. Francisco Lindor did some tagging (and acting) without even having the ball to prevent Christian Yelich from getting a free base:
Tagging a guy after he’s safe in the hopes that he’ll come off the bag for an instant is no fun. Doing it without the ball so that he gets paranoid about getting tagged out and don’t advance, while the ball kicks around the outfield? Sheer genius.
You don’t have to be a Gold Glove shortstop to get in on the tagging party, either. Brendan Donovan is more notable for his positional versatility than his defensive value; he’s slightly below average at a wide array of defensive positions. That measures his range, sure hands, and arm, though. His imaginary tagging? It’s off the charts:
You can’t see it from that angle, but Nolan Gorman’s errant throw got all the way to the wall in left field. Yonathan Daza was sure he knew where the ball was, though: in Donovan’s glove. He jammed his finger slightly on the play, which might have helped distract him, but that canny fake tag saved a base either way.
Maybe I’m grading on too much of a curve, but I’m more impressed by Donovan’s wherewithal than by Lindor’s. I expect Lindor to make genius plays I hadn’t thought of and to look smooth while doing so. I picture Lindor mulling over his grocery list while he’s in the field; he seems to have everything under control to the point where he has time to think about other things. Donovan is more of a max-effort type. But in the world of effective fake tags, they’re both number one in my book.
5. Ezequiel Tovar’s Balletic Defense Ezequiel Tovar’s transition to the major leagues is still a work in progress. He’s batting .209/.227/.302 so far, and didn’t take his first walk of the season until Wednesday. The power he intermittently showed in the minors has mostly disappeared. He swings too much. The road to positive offensive value looks tenuous.
The Rockies will likely give him time to develop that offense, though, because Tovar is a breathtaking defender. Here, watch him not turn a double play and still make it look like art:
You could hang that toe drag in the Louvre. The snap throw afterwards is audacious. You need to see this in slow motion to truly appreciate it:
Want him to range deep into the hole and come up with one? I can’t guarantee the accuracy of the throw, but I can say for certain that it’ll look pretty:
When he’s charging the ball, he sets his feet instinctively and fires with a stable platform from positions where most players couldn’t:
Tovar is hardly a finished product. In a thus-far minuscule sample, both DRS and OAA think he’s below-average defensively. As I already mentioned, his offense has a long way to go. But if you’re looking for some of the prettiest infield defense in baseball, don’t overlook Colorado. Tovar has the skills to be a highlight reel defender for years to come.
That brings us to the end of another installment of the five things that most caught my eye this week. Our sport is full of tiny, delightful, maddening moments like these, which is a big part of why I love it so much. Until next time, I hope you have as much fun watching baseball as the Rays do playing it:
For half of Thursday’s game against Boston, it seemed like the good times had finally stopped rolling for the Tampa Bay Rays. The hitherto unhittable Jeffrey Springs left the game with ulnar neuritis—nerve irritation in his elbow, but it’s scarier when you say it like the name of the chancellor of a minor Star Trek world. Corey Kluber had held Tampa Bay’s vaunted offense to just one run through four innings.
Then the Rays burst out for seven runs as if out of nowhere. The highlight of the inning was probably Manuel Margot’s pinch-hit RBI bunt. Bunting for a hit with two outs and the bases loaded is the kind of thing you do when a mystical hooded figure grants you the power of telekinesis and you want to see if it’s real or you’re being pranked. That’s just how things are going for Tampa Bay right now.
But the biggest hit of the inning, according to WPA, was Brandon Lowe’s seeing-eye single three batters prior, which tied the game with two outs. If the Rays are actually going to continue on as the best team in baseball, Lowe is one of their most important players. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an evaluation of the prospects in the Minnesota Twins farm system who readers should consider “imminent big leaguers,” players who might reasonably be expected to play in the majors at some point this year. This includes all prospects on the 40-man roster as well as those who have already established themselves in the upper levels of the minors but aren’t yet rostered. I tend to be more inclusive with pitchers and players at premium positions since their timelines are usually the ones accelerated by injuries and scarcity. Any Top 100 prospects, regardless of their ETA, are also included on this list. Reports, tool grades, and scouting information for all of the prospects below can also be found on The Board.
This is not a top-to-bottom evaluation of the Twins farm system. I like to include what’s happening in minor league and extended spring training in my reports as much as possible, since scouting high concentrations of players in Arizona and Florida allows me to incorporate real-time, first-person information into the org lists. However, this approach has led to some situations where outdated analysis (or no analysis at all) was all that existed for players who had already debuted in the majors. Skimming the imminent big leaguers off the top of a farm system will allow this time-sensitive information to make its way onto the site more quickly, better preparing readers for the upcoming season, helping fantasy players as they draft, and building site literature on relevant prospects to facilitate transaction analysis in the event that trades or injuries foist these players into major league roles. There will still be a Twins prospect list that includes Emmanuel Rodriguez, Marco Raya and all of the other prospects in the system who appear to be at least another season away. As such, today’s list includes no ordinal rankings. Readers are instead encouraged to focus on the players’ Future Value (FV) grades. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the hot start by Jarred Kelenic and when to believe in a breakout, Jo Adell and the mystery of quadruple-A players, the odds of no Marlin hitting for the cycle until Luis Arraez did it this week, the Rays’ record-tying 13th straight win, new reports about new rules, and more. Then (51:12) they answer listener emails about the best urban, non-ballpark setting for baseball, the MLB player they would most want to be stranded with on a desert island (with a digression on Matt Strahm and ballpark beer sales), a pitcher with one unhittable pitch per game, and a black-box outfield, plus a Past Blast (1:26:19) from 1993.
In case you were worried that Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge somehow forgot how to be excellent at baseball since the end of last season, fear not. The 2021 and ’22 American League Most Valuable Players are off to strong starts this season, highlighted by a shared distinction: both have gotten on base in every game thus far, extending lengthy streaks that have carried over from last season.
Admittedly, on-base streaks aren’t as sexy as hitting streaks. Nobody rhapsodizes about them or scrutinizes their mathematical unlikelihood the way they do Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak from 1941. Comparatively few people — professionals as well as fans — could tell you who holds the record for consecutive games getting on base. The answer is Ted Williams in 84 straight games from July 1 through September 27 in 1949, which makes perfect sense given that the Splendid Splinter is the career on-base percentage leader (.482). DiMaggio is a distant second at 74 games, with his more famous streak occupying games 2–57 of the longer one. Williams also owns the third-longest streak at 72 games bridging 1941 (the year he hit .406) and ’42, but as for the fourth-longest one — and the longest of the post-1960 expansion era — it belongs to Orlando Cabrera, he of the career .317 OBP and 83 wRC+. Cabrera reached base in 63 straight games from April 25 through July 6 in 2006. Go figure. Read the rest of this entry »
Sponsor Us on Patreon
Facebook Group
Twitter Account
EW Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
iTunes Feed
Get Our Merch!
