The calendar just flipped over to June, and somehow we have yet to write even one article about the best position player in all of baseball this season. Not that it’s a surprise; nothing about the best position player in all of baseball is a surprise.

If you Google “Freddie Freeman” and “killer,” in just the first page of results, you’ll find references to Freeman as a Nats killer, a Braves killer, a Mets killer, a Phillies killer, and a Cubs killer. (If you don’t use the quotation marks, you’ll get references to Freeman as a Mets killer and a Nats killer, plus a bunch of headlines about an actual murderer.) But here’s the thing: if you look at Freeman’s performance against every team in baseball and rank them by wOBA, only one of those five teams is even in the top 12. It feels personal no matter who you root for, but Freeman is just an everybody killer. It’s a conundrum straight out of Catch-22.

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly.
“No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried.
“Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked.
“They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.”
“And what difference does that make?”

(The Braves are the one team that’s actually in the top 12; they’re number four. Freeman has a .361 average and a 206 wRC+ against them, and for obvious reasons he may actually want to kill them.) Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Steer is emerging as a solid big league hitter. One of three prospects acquired by the Cincinnati Reds from the Minnesota Twins at last August’s trade deadline in exchange for Tyler Mahle — Christian Encarnacion-Strand and Steve Hajjar were the others — Steer is slashing .289/.356/.498 with a 124 wRC+ over 225 plate appearances. One year after homering 23 times between two minor league levels, and twice more after a September call-up, he’s gone deep eight times in 2023.

Eric Longenhagen has been bullish on his bat. Back in January, our lead prospect analyst wrote that the 25-year-old corner infielder has “a well-rounded hit/patience/power toolkit,” adding that he is “a good hitter who will stabilize an infield spot in Cincinnati for the next half decade or so.” Longenhagen ranked the 2019 third round pick out of the University of Oregon no. 2 in Cincinnati’s system; he was no. 47 on the preseason Top 100.

Steer sat down to talk hitting prior to Tuesday’s game at Fenway Park. Read the rest of this entry »

May was a successful month for the Tigers, a franchise which in recent years has been lacking in happily remembered calendar pages. Detroit’s .577 winning percentage in May (15–11) is its best full month since a .615 mark (16–10) all the way back in July 2016. And while it would be a stretch to say that everything has been coming up bengal, given that the team’s run differential is still slightly in the negative for the month, the bleakness of the AL Central has allowed the Tigers to come within a game of the division lead. Even Spencer Torkelson, whose bat disappeared in 2022, has been playing better baseball, putting up a 119 wRC+ in May. Unfortunately, fate wasn’t even kind enough to give Detroit the whole month; a couple of days before the calendar flip, injuries to Eduardo Rodriguez and Riley Greene have ended May on a decidedly sour note.

These Tigers certainly aren’t strangers to injury. Every team faces injuries sooner or later, but Detroit managed to win in May despite an entire rotation’s worth of promising pitchers — Tarik Skubal, Matt Manning, Spencer Turnbull, Casey Mize, and Beau Brieske — out with injuries. The contributions of Rodriguez and Greene had a lot to do with that. The former’s hot April start continued in May with a 2.03 ERA/2.61 FIP over five outings; the latter hit a star-level .365/.435/.573 for the month. That came crashing down on Tuesday with two bits of very unwelcome news. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Olson is striking out a lot. Exactly 30% of the time, to be precise. His swinging strike rate has never been higher. He’s only posted a lower contact rate once, in his disastrous 2020 campaign. Obviously, then, you know how he’s doing this year: incredibly well. His 140 wRC+ is the second-best mark of his career. Clearly, something interesting is going on, so let’s take a look at what it might be.

Honestly, the strikeouts are nothing new for Olson. His career 24.1% strikeout rate isn’t ideal for a top-tier hitter, particularly one with limited defensive value. It puts a lot of pressure on the rest of his game. You can succeed while striking out a lot, but you have to do a lot of other things well to strike out a quarter of the time and be a great hitter.

Throughout his career, Olson has mostly done that. Take his 2019 season, when he struck out 25.2% of the time. He hit for a ton of power – even playing in the cavernous Coliseum, his ISO was in the top 15 in the majors – and walked enough to post a reasonable OBP. But you can see the downside easily. Consider 2022, for example. Olson again struck out roughly a quarter of the time – 24.3% – and walked a similar amount. He again posted a top-15 ISO; a lower number, to be sure, because 2022 had far fewer homers than 2019. But he ran a .274 BABIP, and that along with the fact that he was playing in a better offensive environment but putting up similar numbers meant he was only 20% above average rather than 35% above average.

Seen next to each other, these two seasons explain the chief worry with Olson. Without much change in his underlying skills, he was only 20% above average offensively last year:

That’s still a nice player, but a first baseman with that kind of batting line is hardly an All-Star. It was the 13th-best batting line for a first baseman in the majors, hardly better than his replacement in Oakland, Seth Brown. That’s the kind of tightrope that a player with Olson’s skill set is always walking; a slight dip in power or BABIP can be the difference between average and excellent. Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Judge is at it again. On Tuesday night in Seattle, the reigning AL MVP and home run king clubbed a towering solo shot off Darren McCaughan to aid the Yankees’ 10–2 win over the Mariners and to continue his latest rampage. It was his fourth homer in three days, his 12th in his past 16 games, and his AL-leading 18th overall. With that, he’s matched his total through the end of May last year, doing so in 46 games, one fewer than in 2022, though the Yankees have played 57 games, leaving him still behind the full-season pace he set en route to an AL-record 62 homers.

Even with this binge, Judge doesn’t lead the majors in homers. Hell, he doesn’t even lead New York City in homers. That honor belongs to Pete Alonso, who’s hit 20. Though he hasn’t homered since Saturday against the Rockies, the Mets first baseman has hit 14 since May 9, the day Judge came off the injured list after missing 10 games due to a minor hip problem. Here’s Saturday’s homer, which came at the expense of Chase Anderson:

Now that we’ve enjoyed some dingers, it’s only fair to mention that this article isn’t really about either of the Empire State’s sluggers so much as it is the conditions under which they’re positioning themselves for runs at 50-homer seasons — again. Recall that Judge set a rookie record with 52 in 2017, only to be topped by Alonso with 53 two years later. Balls aren’t flying out of the yard at the pace they did in either of those seasons, which happen to be the two highest full seasons on record; in 2017, teams bashed 1.26 homers per game, and in 2019, they upped that rate to a stratospheric 1.39 per game. This year, teams are averaging 1.15 homers per game, the seventh-highest rate on record (or sixth-highest, if you exclude the pandemic-shortened 2020 season). You have to carry the calculations out to a third decimal to place it properly:

Read the rest of this entry »

You know what’s important? Pitches. Almost all of the big stuff that happens on a baseball diamond starts with the pitcher pitching. Even Babe Ruth never once hit a home run without somebody throwing a pitch first.

Now that we’re more than a quarter of the way through the 2023 season, let’s take a look at the pitches. Specifically, we’re going to take a look at long-term trends, and talk about the ways in which this year has (or hasn’t) followed them. As such, I need you to prepare yourself for a whole lot of line graphs. In fact, just to drive home how many line graphs are in this article, here’s a bar graph:

Last week we ran 26 regular articles, in addition to chats, podcasts, prospect lists, and power rankings. We’re pretty busy. There were fewer line graphs in those 26 articles than there are in the next couple thousand words.

You know what? Seeing as the only bar graph in the past week is the one you just saw, maybe we should also give a quick update to our little guy.

Much better. Read the rest of this entry »

Owning a baseball team isn’t work in any meaningful sense. If it were, John J. Fisher would be out of a job by now. Fisher’s Athletics are on pace to have the worst single-season record of any AL or NL team since 1899. It’s not even June yet and they’re 24 1/2 games out of first place and 18 games out of third. Their 4-23 record in divisional play has floated every other team in the AL West over .500. Only one qualified starter, Jordan Lyles, has an ERA worse than Oakland’s team ERA. The baseball stinks, and ironically, A’s fans are seeing more of it anyone else. There is no rest for the weary.

The story of professional baseball since the 2010s has been that of a divorce between competitive and financial incentives. Winning does not beget profit; quite the opposite in some cases. But even as a commercial enterprise, the Athletics have been an astonishing failure. Their attendance is the worst in the league by far, with some midweek games against uninspiring opponents drawing as few as 2,000 paying customers. After a blowout win in Oakland over the weekend, the Astros’ social media team tweeted “10 runs in front of tens of fans” in reference to the pitiable attendance at the Coliseum.

There’s a long tradition of fans (or operatives, in this case) of big-market teams mocking their counterparts who cheer for less successful clubs by tweeting pictures of empty seats. It predates the idiom “poverty franchise,” but carries the same sentiment. Look at this worthless team of losers and the uncommitted dilettantes who can’t be bothered to cheer them on. Surely our greater commitment will be rewarded by the baseball gods, they say.

That brand of banter is increasingly viewed as impolite, and not just because it wasn’t long ago that the Astros lost 100 games a year with no one in the stands to witness their ineptitude. It’s because more and more, owners like Fisher are making clear that unwavering allegiance is folly. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Miami Marlins. 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 »

2:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to the post-Memorial Day edition of my chat. I had a weekend of solo parenting that was filled with activity, including taking my 6 1/2 year old daughter to a Yankees-Padres game on Friday night, but didn’t see much baseball otherwise until last night when I had Bobby Miller on one device and Bryce Miller on the other.

2:03

Jay Jaffe: anyway… no article from me today due to travel. ON Friday I checked in on Trea Turner’s struggles https://blogs.fangraphs.com/trea-turners-slide-has-not-been-smooth/ and the day before that on Carlos Correa’s foot https://blogs.fangraphs.com/carlos-correas-rebound-from-a-slow-start-h… Surprisingly, the latter has avoided the IL for now

2:04	Jay Jaffe: I’m impressed so far. I mean, who wouldn’t be given his .269/.327/.558 start through 113 PA?

2:04	Jay Jaffe: He’s +4.9 runs in framing, too. Didn’t see that coming

2:05	Jay Jaffe: He graded out as a 60 FV prospect, which is All-Star caliber. I haven’t seen anything to suggest he won’t be one though I don’t expect him to maintain a 142 wRC+

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a big year for the MLB rulebook. After decades of tiny incremental changes, the league made three huge ones in 2023. They instituted a pitch timer, changed the size of the bases, and restricted defensive positioning for the first time in modern history. But how have these new rules changed how the game looks on the field? I broke down each one to find out.

Games Are Shorter

The biggest change to the game this year was the introduction of a pitch timer, and it’s had a huge impact on game length. Per Baseball Reference, the average nine-inning game has lasted two hours and 37 minutes this year, down from three hours and three minutes last year. You have to go back to 1985 to find a shorter average game length.

Despite that drastic change, the amount of action in a game hasn’t changed much. Plate appearances per game are roughly unchanged: there are 75.6 this year, quite close to the 76.4 average in the 21st century. Pitcher per plate appearance are stable: 3.9 this year, 3.9 for the last 10 years on average.

The difference is all pace. Per Statcast, pitchers are taking three fewer seconds to throw with the bases empty and 4.5 fewer seconds to throw with a runner on base. The bases-empty change is welcome but only gets us back to the numbers that prevailed 15 years ago or so. The change with runners on base is far more important; we’ve likely never seen a faster pace when pitchers are holding runners, though the data only goes back to 2010. Read the rest of this entry »