After a week off to recharge my batteries — and watch other sports, gasp — it’s time for another installment of five things that caught my eye in baseball this week. Honestly, this list is almost superfluous at this time of year. The standings are so jammed together that half the games in baseball have playoff implications. Teams are getting hot at the right time or collapsing down the stretch in equal measure. Still, you can’t watch everything, so here are some delightful moments you might have missed.

1. Legends, in the Fall
It’s been a rough year for Adam Wainwright. He has put up by far the worst season of his career — a 7.40 ERA says all you really need to know about it — and the Cardinals have collapsed from the perpetual contention he enjoyed for the vast majority of his career. They’ve seemingly played more meaningless games this year than in Wainwright’s entire previous time with the club. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s starting. The playoffs are coming, and the baseball is getting more intense. Bats will flip. Tempers will flare. Players will curse even more than they do already. That’s great. Everybody loves playoff baseball. But that also makes this a good time to appreciate baseball’s tender side. I would like to draw your attention to two plays that happened on Tuesday. Both were plays at the plate, and in both, the catcher and the baserunner crashed into each other. And then, in both, immediately after crashing into each other, the catcher and the runner checked to make sure that the other was ok. Our topic for the day is not sensual baseball, but rather sensitive baseball.

It’s not just that I love these moments, it’s that they fulfill a need. When two players collide, there is something in me that sees it as an opportunity for kindness. I find myself hoping that they’ll check in on each other, that they’ll let their humanity shine through the adrenaline and desire and competitiveness. And when the two players do in fact take the time to check on each other, it makes me feel good. In the middle of the game, I am willing more kindness into the world. I’m not sure why. That’s certainly not the main reason I care about baseball, but it’s there. Read the rest of this entry »

The rookies took the spotlight this past Saturday in Baltimore, as the Orioles battled the Rays and clinched their first playoff berth since 2016 via an 8-0 victory. Leading the way on the offensive side was 22-year-old Gunnar Henderson, who led off the first inning with a first-pitch single off Tyler Glasnow and came around to score the game’s first run, then added a two-run homer in the second and an RBI single in the fourth, helping to stake rookie starter Grayson Rodriguez to a 5-0 lead. The 23-year-old righty turned in the best start of his brief big league career, spinning eight shutout innings while striking out seven and allowing just five baserunners. A day later, when the Orioles beat the Rays in 11 innings to reclaim the AL East lead, a trio of rookies — Shintaro Fujinami, Yennier Cano, and DL Hall — combined to allow just one hit and one unearned run over the final three frames.

Earlier this month, colleague Chris Gilligan highlighted the contributions of this year’s rookie class. With just under four weeks to go in the regular season at that point, rookie pitchers and position players had combined to produce more WAR than all but three other classes since the turn of the millennium. Collectively they’re now second only to the Class of 2015 (more on which below), and since the publication of that piece, four teams besides the Orioles, all heavy with rookie contributions, have made headway in the playoff races. The Dodgers clinched the NL West for the 10th time in 11 years on Saturday, while the Mariners and Diamondbacks are clinging to Wild Card spots, and the Reds are in the thick of the NL race as well. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Dan Szymborski: It’s a chat!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I don’t have ZiPS open, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s dropped a little bit

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Verlander matched his projections, but remember, he wasn’t at 50% to win 300 games

12:04

Dan Szymborski: He kinda needs to beat his win projections by a bit

Read the rest of this entry »

They say everything in baseball happens in cycles. Actually, I’m not sure if they say that, but it certainly sounds like a real quote. And that’s fortunate for me, because today I’d like to talk about another thing that happens in cycles: Tommy Kahnle being a valuable reliever. Years after it seemed like that might never happen again, he’s back on the Yankees and pitching well, to the tune of a 2.66 ERA and 3.97 FIP across 40.2 innings of work, that despite a four-walk disaster of an outing on Wednesday night.

The last time Kahnle was good and healthy was also with the Yankees, in 2019. Before that, you’d have to go back to 2017 (split between the White Sox and Yankees). He was hurt and ineffective in 2018, then only pitched a combined 13.2 innings from 2020 to ’22 due to injury. But now here he is, back at it, though you might not know it thanks to the Yankees’ general desultoriness (probably not a word, but my spellcheck didn’t flag it, so let’s roll with it). Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like the Rays have been trying to ditch Tropicana Field since they got there, and apparently it’s finally going to happen. The Royals are likewise pursuing plans to build a replacement for Kauffman Stadium, though the club announced Wednesday that the planned reveal of a new ballpark site was being postponed for the time being.

Both clubs want to replace their aging, arguably obsolete concrete bowls with something more modern — more glitzy. The unspoken promise is that the Royals and Rays — two small-market teams that ranked 25th and 27th in payroll this season, respectively — would turn their new taxpayer-funded playgrounds into an economic engine that would not only boost community welfare but also allow the team to compete economically with the Yankees, Dodgers, and so forth.

We all know this is bunk. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball players who eschew the typical conventions of major league success hold a special place in my heart. As much as we sit in awe of those gifted with the imposing stature of an Aaron Judge or a Giancarlo Stanton, there’s something particularly appealing about the guys who seemingly have to fight to compete in the same league and manage to find a way to do so. One of the wonders of a sport like baseball is that there are myriad ways to contribute – as fans, it’s fun to marvel at those who get creative.

On a Cincinnati Reds roster full of pleasant surprises, TJ Friedl doesn’t stand out so much as he blends in. At 28 years old, he’s one of the oldest regulars in an exceptionally young lineup, this despite being in his first full season in the big leagues. Depending on how you set the plate appearance threshold, he’s not the Reds’ best hitter by any individual metric, nor is he the fastest runner or the flashiest defender – there’s an ultra-athletic 21-year-old phenom with the league’s fastest sprint speed and strongest infield arm that takes those distinctions. But by making his presence felt at the plate, on the bases, and in the field day in and day out, Friedl has managed to be the most productive player by WAR on a team that sits one game out of a playoff spot on September 21. That’s a generous way to frame his 3.4-WAR season, but it’s also an accurate one – Friedl has been a versatile everyday contributor, and there’s a case to be made that he’s been the Reds’ most important player in what has been a pretty important year for the franchise. Read the rest of this entry »

Johan Oviedo has a fastball problem. According to Baseball Savant, the Pittsburgh right-hander’s four-seamer has been worth -9.1 runs this season, making it the 26th-least valuable four-seamer and 49th-least valuable pitch in all of baseball. That’s what happens when a pitch has an 18.1% whiff rate and a 47% hard-hit rate. Luckily, Oviedo’s slider and curveball have been worth a combined 16 runs. That makes his breaking stuff the ninth-most valuable in all of baseball.

If you find yourself screaming at your computer that Oviedo should probably throw his curveball and slider more, guess who agrees with you? Johan Oviedo. Across six starts in April, Oviedo threw his breaking balls 63.5% of the time. Only one player, Hunter Brown, ran a higher breaking ball rate in April while throwing half as many pitches as Oviedo did. But now that you’ve stopped screaming at your computer, I need to tell you that Johan Oviedo disagrees with you too.

Oviedo’s breaking ball percentage has been falling for most of the season, and it’s settled in the low 40s. That’s right, it’s time to scream again. Why has Oviedo gone back to leading with his worst pitch instead of his best pitches? Read the rest of this entry »

Tanner Scott isn’t just what you get when you put James McAvoy under a UV lamp.

Okay, now I have to pretend this entire article was more than a flimsy pretext to make that joke. Here goes.

Scott has been one of the best relief pitchers in baseball this season, and an unlikely linchpin to Miami’s persistent postseason challenge. The headline numbers look pretty good for Scott: 9-5 with nine saves, a 2.44 ERA, a 2.32 FIP (second among relievers behind Félix Bautista and Matt Brash), 2.4 WAR (second to Bautista) and a 32.7% strikeout rate. But because of where Scott plays, his performance means even more than what it looks like. Read the rest of this entry »