It wasn’t quite up to the level of Shohei Ohtani versus Mike Trout with the 2023 World Baseball Classic championship on the line, but the final plate appearance of Tuesday night’s All-Star Game did feature a memorable matchup. On the mound trying to secure a 3–2 victory — the National League’s first since 2012 — was Craig Kimbrel, he of the 408 career saves. Working to bring home the tying run from second base (or at least keep the line moving) was José Ramírez, already playing in his fifth All-Star Game at age 30. Ramírez fell into an 0–2 hole by taking a fastball and then chasing a curveball in the dirt but battled back to even the count before Kimbrel struck him out with a high fastball.

Someday we may talk about that matchup as one between two future Hall of Famers. Kimbrel has had his ups and downs in recent years, but he’s been dominant enough to earn a spot on an All-Star squad for the second year out of three and the ninth time overall. Earlier this year, he became the eighth pitcher to collect 400 saves, and he’s overtaken Kenley Jansen (who also recently reached 400) in the Reliever JAWS rankings. As for Ramírez, he’s hitting .289/.364/.506 (132 wRC+) and ranking among the AL’s top 10 in WAR for the sixth time in seven seasons (3.4 fWAR, 3.3 bWAR). While he’s only 30 years old, if all goes well during this season’s second half, he’ll reach an important milestone that strongly suggests future election to the Hall.

Thus far in his 11-year career, Ramirez has accumulated 43.7 WAR (I’m sticking with bWAR throughout the rest of this article unless otherwise indicated), which is impressive but not itself remarkable. Of more importance is that he already has tallied 38.4 WAR in his best seven seasons — his peak score (aka WAR7) for the purposes of calculating his JAWS. One of those seasons is this one:

Via Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, Ramirez is forecast to produce another 2.4 WAR this year, pushing his seven-year peak score to 40.8. While that’s still 2.3 WAR shy of the Hall standard for third basemen (43.1), he has at least one other season that shouldn’t be too hard to improve upon; indeed, his preseason three-year ZiPS projection forecasts him to produce 5.6 WAR in 2024 (which would take him to 43.3) and 4.9 WAR in ’25 (inching him to 43.4).

Even without looking that far ahead, the 40-WAR peak score is significant. For a position player, it’s a strong indicator of future election to the Hall:

At every position, I’ve counted the total number of players with a peak WAR of at least 40.0; the number of Hall of Famers meeting that criterion; and the number of such players who are not yet eligible, either because they’re active, too recently retired to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot, or on the permanently ineligible list. The last of those classifications applies to Pete Rose (whom JAWS classifies as a left fielder) and Shoeless Joe Jackson (right field). For catchers, I’ve used a 32.0-WAR threshold instead of 40.0, as their values are constrained by the limits of playing time and pre-framing measures.

As you can see, nearly three-quarters of the eligible players with at least 40.0 WAR in their seven best seasons are enshrined, a higher percentage than even I would have guessed before I dug through the numbers. That percentage would be even higher if I were also to remove the players whose PED-related allegations and suspensions have effectively blocked their elections, but let’s not dwell upon them today.

Currently, eight active position players have peak scores of at least 40.0, with two more besides Ramírez on the verge: Jose Altuve (39.8) and Aaron Judge (39.6). The former’s injuries will likely prevent him from reaching the mark this year (more on which below), but the latter has already produced one of his seven best seasons (he’s appeared in only parts of eight, including his -0.3-WAR cup of coffee from 2016) and needs just 0.4 WAR once he returns from his toe injury.

With that, it’s time to launch my more-or-less annual Hall of Fame progress report. This may not seem like an obvious time to check in on such players, but the July logjam on the baseball calendar includes the Hall’s induction weekend (July 21–24) as well as the draft, the All-Star Game and its high-profile auxiliary events (the Futures Game and the Home Run Derby), and the run-up to the August 1 trade deadline. It’s a time that I get a lot of questions about active players vying for future elections, and in the interest of providing a one-stop shop — er, in three parts, so let’s call it a department store — here we are.

For this exercise, unless otherwise indicated, I will be referencing bWAR for season and career totals, my JAWS metric, and the ZiPS rest-of-season projections, since one of the goals here is to give an idea of where these players will stand at the end of the season, having banked a full complement of WAR instead of just 80-some games worth; these future candidates are already dealing with suppressed WAR totals from the 60-game 2020 season — which hardly makes them the first to experience such scheduling limitations and career interruptions due to wars and strikes. Unlike last year, I’ll cover pitching in one installment; we’ll return to Kimbrel. Note that I am by no means predicting that every player here will make it to Cooperstown or even suggesting that all are worthy; in some cases I’m particularly pessimistic, but these are the names that get tossed around. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite kinds of baseball trade is the one that sends major league talent both ways, between teams ostensibly interested in being competitive, each giving from surpluses to meet immediate needs. It’s certainly the safer option for a front office just to take the passive route and stick with the guys you’ve got, but I appreciate the boldness of swapping a player who’s poised to contribute to your club for one you think might give you more, solve some piece of the positional puzzle, or be able to be a more significant part of your plans down the road.

Such was the case for the Marlins and Twins in January when Luis Arraez (who seems poised to defend his title) was dealt to Miami in exchange for Pablo López and prospects Jose Salas and Byron Chourio. This wasn’t a straight big leaguer-for-big leaguer swap, but both teams were trading for the present. López, 26 at the time, had been the Marlins’ second most productive starter in 2022 and a stalwart of their rotation for the better part of five seasons; the 25-year-old Arraez was coming off a batting title and had been one of the game’s truly elite contact hitters over four seasons of his own. The Twins needed pitching, the Marlins an offensive jolt, and a deal was struck.

If it weren’t a fun enough swap to begin with, it got better when López and Arraez represented their new clubs at the All-Star Game, with Arraez staying true to form with a 2-for-2 night on the winning NL side and López throwing a scoreless ninth inning for the AL. In doing so, the duo became the first pair of players to be dealt for one another and make the next season’s All-Star Game since Josh Hamilton and Edinson Vólquez, who were swapped by the Reds and Rangers in 2007 and emerged as All-Stars the following summer. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, the sweeper took baseball by storm. Fast forward to this season, and 4.2% of all offerings through the first half have been sweepers, according to Statcast, nearly twice as many as last season. But I have my issues with MLB’s pitch classification system, and it’s been well documented that under their sweeper umbrella there are multiple versions of the pitch; the Yankees’ staff alone threw several different variations last season. Plus, if the number of different names for the pitch (whirly, rising slider, etc.) is any indication, other teams have their own iterations, too. Qualms with MLB’s system aside, if we want to look for the next sweeper, it’s a given that MLB won’t have a classification for it yet anyways.

Why should we look for the next sweeper? The pitch was extremely effective last year, saving pitchers 0.56 runs per 100 tosses. Even this season, as usage has nearly doubled, the sweeper is still saving pitchers 0.18 runs per 100 tosses. But in order to look for the next one, we first have to ask: what makes all sweepers… sweepers? MLB relies on grip and self-reported pitch identifications for their classifications. In the absence of those, we can use velocity, spin rate, spin axis (in three dimensions), and movement (in two) to identify a new pitch.

Even though some teams might throw multiple versions of a pitch, I still think that our best bet to find a new pitch type is by honing in on individual teams. As with the sweeper and its early adopters, teams that discover an effective new pitch will want to teach it to everyone they can, uniformity of pitching looks be damned. In other words, if a team has multiple different pitchers throwing a specific pitch, they must like it so much that their affinity for it outweighs the cost of having pitchers that don’t contrast (which seems to reduce effectiveness). Read the rest of this entry »

Dane Dunning is excelling in Texas. Now in his third season with the Texas Rangers after debuting with the Chicago White Sox in 2020, the 28-year-old right-hander is 8–2 with a 2.84 ERA over 92 innings. And though he’s fanned just 59 batters, that suits him just fine. It’s not that he doesn’t like strikeouts; he very much does. It’s just that he lacks the power profile of your prototypical modern-day ace. Epitomizing the term “crafty righty,” he effectively limits damage by mixing and matching with one of baseball’s most expansive repertoires.

Dunning discussed his atypical approach, and the arsenal that goes along with it, when the Rangers visited Fenway Park prior to the All-Star break.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with your repertoire. How many pitches do you throw?

Dane Dunning: “Sinker, four-seam, cutter, changeup, slider, curveball. So six. I guess you could say that I’m a jack of all trades, master of none.”

Laurila: How long have you had such a diverse repertoire?

Dunning: “Well, the four-seam is kind of new this year. I’ve thrown it on certain occasions, probably in my last four, five outings. The cutter I started focusing on last year, and this year it’s kind of come into its own. The sinker and slider I’ve had my entire life. The curveball has kind of been my entire life. I’ve always thrown a curveball, but it’s been like, ‘Let’s throw the curveball, let’s not throw the curveball.’ It’s sort of gone back and forth. I brought it back this season, because last year I was throwing two different sliders and they kept blending together. I had to get rid of that.” Read the rest of this entry »

I write to you, dear readers, during the interregnum between the All-Star Game and the second half of the season. Soon enough, the focus of every baseball writer in North America will be on the trade deadline, and after that, the stretch run before the playoffs. The season is basically over already; goodness, how the time flies.

Having spent most of the past month concentrating on the draft and the NCAA tournament, I’m not quite ready to let go of that fun midseason diversion. So I’ll spend that interregnum the way I spent the rest of the All-Star break: working the draft query tool on Baseball Reference. Today, we’re going to talk about shortstops.

In Wednesday’s column on first-round catchers, I discussed at some length the logic behind spending early picks on up-the-middle prospects. If the player hits and stays at a premium position, that’s great. If he can only contribute on one side of the ball, that’s still frequently a useful big leaguer. There’s just so much more room for developmental error for shortstops and center fielders than there is for first basemen. And it seems MLB teams agree; in the first round of this past week’s draft, 14 shortstops went off the board, an all-time record. Read the rest of this entry »

Before this season, Nick Madrigal had spent just one inning at third base. It was in a showcase game; he was a high schooler. Madrigal played a fair bit of shortstop at Oregon State, but he has always primarily been a second baseman. Then in December, the Cubs signed Dansby Swanson, bumping Nico Hoerner over to second and Madrigal into a utility role.

Madrigal took the change in stride. He started a long toss regimen to improve his arm strength, and said all the right things to the press:

Bench coach Andy Green even flew out to Arizona to spend a week helping him get up to speed at the hot corner. All of that work seems to have paid off. So far this season, Madrigal has spent 53 innings at second and 303.2 at third. As a third baseman, DRS and OAA both have him at +4, DRP has him at +1.1, and UZR has him at -0.1. Again, that’s after exactly playing exactly one inning at the position when he was a teenager.

It looks like Madrigal’s regular playing time at third is coming to an end, though. Patrick Wisdom is returning from the IL, and Madrigal just started his own IL stint due to a right hamstring strain. It’s a disheartening development for many reasons: Because he needed season-ending surgery on that same hamstring in 2021; because it makes his spot on the Cubs’ roster even more precarious; because he was on pace to have the most productive season of his young career; and because he does something really fun when he plays third base. I’ve been struggling with how to put it into words, so before I make my attempt, let’s see if you can spot it for yourself.

I don’t have a good sense of whether or not you’ll notice what I want you to notice. Maybe you saw it right away. Maybe you’re a Cubs fan and you already noticed it earlier this year. Or maybe it’s the kind of thing that you don’t notice until someone points it out, and then you can never not notice it. To make it a little easier, I combined two frames from that clip: I took the moment when Madrigal fielded the ball, then I added the moment when he threw it over to first.

Those two Nick Madrigals are in very, very different places. The first one is fielding the ball in a normal position roughly 15 feet behind the bag. Somehow the second one is way over on the right, about to make his throw with a foot on the infield grass. That’s a whole lot of infield to traverse right in the middle of a routine groundout. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t want to be rude, but here’s a fact of life: I pay less attention to the Nationals than the average team in Major League Baseball. It’s not because I have a grudge against them or anything; I went to college in Virginia and have a ton of family in the D.C. area, so I know an absolute ton of Nats fans. They’re just not that interesting at the moment, and there’s a lot of baseball to watch, so someone has to slide down the priority queue.

When I have paid attention to the Nationals, though, I’ve liked what I’ve seen. I thought they made some smart signings this offseason. They’ve done a good job of giving plenty of playing time to interesting players. Lane Thomas might never have found a regular home if the Nats hadn’t come calling, Joey Meneses is being given every chance to play out of a season-starting slump, and Hunter Harvey looks like a nice bullpen arm for the trade deadline.

In my chat this week, someone mentioned that the Tigers would be in the thick of the AL Central race if they’d merely held onto Jeimer Candelario and Isaac Paredes. And that drove a realization for me: Candelario looks good again. Is he the real deal? Can some contending team plug him in at third base and have an All-Star–level contributor? Let’s find out. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite picks in the first round of this year’s draft was the 14th overall selection, when Virginia catcher Kyle Teel fell into Boston’s lap and the Red Sox gobbled him right up, thank you very much. The New Jersey native has backstopped the Cavaliers to two trips to Omaha in three seasons of college ball. He’s a winner, he’s a grinder, and WEEI callers are going to fall in love with this kid within about 30 minutes of his big league debut. “This is the leadahship the Sawx have needed since Pedroia, Murph!” and so on.

All that would be perilous enough to national mental hygiene on its own, but Teel is also really good. He’s going to stick behind the plate. He’s also going to hit — maybe not 20-homer power, but a ton of doubles and line drives that rattle around in the nooks and crannies of Fenway Park’s unique outfield. I’m surprised he fell into the teens, but great work by Boston for stopping the slide when he got to them.

Teel was one of three catchers taken in the first round on Sunday. A pair of high schoolers, Blake Mitchell and Ralphy Velazquez, went eighth to Kansas City and 23rd to Cleveland, respectively. (Teel to the Royals as heir presumptive to Salvador Perez was a popular prediction in the days before the draft, but it was not to be.) Both Mitchell and Velazquez (20th and 45th on the pre-draft Board) are bat-first prospects. Neither is a lock to stay behind the plate, but both can hit the ball a long way when they make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Semien isn’t on pace to match his career-best 2019 and 2021 numbers, but he remains a productive hitter. Two months shy of his 33rd birthday and in his second season with the Texas Rangers, the venerable middle infielder is slashing .271/.338/.438 with 11 home runs and a 115 wRC+. A key cog in the lineup for a first place club, Semien batted leadoff for the American League in last night’s All-Star Game.

Semien sat down to talk hitting during the Rangers’ recent visit to Fenway Park.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with your formative years in the game. How did you learn to hit?

Marcus Semien: “As a kid, I watched major league baseball. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area as a Giants fan — my dad is a Giants fan — and we always had baseball on. From there, I was imitating Barry Bonds’ swing, Jeff Kent’s swing — all those guys I used to watch as a kid. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Meg’s experiences at the Futures Game, the draft, and the Home Run Derby, Derby highlights, the Derby on TV vs. in person, Elly De La Cruz’s mad dash, and the Yankees switching hitting coaches, plus a Future Blast (49:12) from 2031. Then (54:25) Ben talks to FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen about the draft and other topics, including the strength of the draft pool, the Pirates picking a pitcher (Paul Skenes) first, the effect of the top two picks being LSU players, the mostly predictable top of the draft, the draft’s two-way prospects and the potential for more two-way players, the wisdom of drafting for need, the teams that had the most commendable and perplexing drafts, the Marlins demoting Eury Pérez, the Rockies’ sparsely populated draft room, how visual machine learning and artificial intelligence are affecting scouting, and more.

Audio intro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild theme”
Audio interstitial: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild theme”
Audio outro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild theme”

Link to article on Rutschman
Link to 1960 Derby article
Link to 1990 Derby retrospective
Link to Derby homer totals
Link to tweet about Derby spectating
Link to more on Derby spectating
Link to Elly’s steals
Link to tweets about Elly/Carew/Faber
Link to Elly’s Baseball Savant page
Link to MLBTR on the Casey hiring
Link to Jon Heyman on Casey
Link to Lawson quote
Link to Rick Wilber’s website
Link to MLB draft tracker
Link to Eric’s last mock
Link to Eric’s Day 1 recap
Link to CBS on draft winners/losers
Link to USA Today draft takeaways
Link to Baumann on Waldrep
Link to Ben on pitching prospects
Link to Schifman on pitcher workloads
Link to MLBTR on Pérez
Link to Joe Sheehan on Pérez
Link to Ben on draft rooms
Link to Kyle’s Rockies tweet
Link to KG on draft rooms
Link to Tommy John spreadsheet
Link to WSJ on scouting and AI
Link to The Athletic on tech spending
Link to BA on college offense
Link to Stanton’s long homer
Link to Stanton’s short homer

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