Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Taylor Walls fulfilling a preseason podcast prediction by being ejected after tapping his helmet following a questionable call (and the many notifications Ben and Meg received from EW listeners), Luke Weaver’s stretching injury, the Rockies’ purported improvement, the decline of the closer as bullpen protagonist, a miraculous softball-delivery dirt clod, an unfortunate instance of replay review, the LSU Shreveport Pilots’ undefeated college season, Jac Caglianone’s call-up, Corbin Burnes’s bum elbow, Mookie Betts’s improved defense, the death of Japanese baseball legend Shigeo Nagashima, and more.

Audio intro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ted O., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Walls story
Link to Reddit comments
Link to @EWStats ruling
Link to Walls and Trump
Link to Walls and DeSantis
Link to Revere ride info
Link to Weaver stretching story
Link to Dan S. on Weaver
Link to carrots myth
Link to Rockies quotes
Link to Rockies 10-day offense
Link to Rockies 10-day pitching
Link to Denver Post story
Link to The Athletic on Kenley
Link to Ben on saves
Link to Ben on SP protagonists
Link to softball clip
Link to softball story
Link to Ben on Capps
Link to Springer clip
Link to Springer story
Link to Dave on slides 1
Link to Dave on slides 2
Link to Shreveport story
Link to Wake Forest story
Link to Hill Triple-A game
Link to MLBTR on Burnes
Link to CBS on Mookie
Link to Ohtani Nagashima post
Link to Nagashima obit
Link to Whiting quote
Link to Nagashima NPB Stats page
Link to Oh NPB Stats page

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Give a Gift Subscription
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com
 EW Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Spotify Feed
 Facebook Group
 Bluesky Account
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Tireless reporter Jeff Passan of ESPN reported late Monday night that the hamstring pain that caused Yankees closer Luke Weaver to be held out of Sunday night’s game against the Dodgers would land him on the IL, for as long as 4-6 weeks, with a more specific timetable to be presented at a later time. The extent of Weaver’s injury was previously unknown, as he was still in the trainer’s room well after the final pitch, through the end of postgame media access.

Weaver has been nearly flawless all season — allowing just three runs in 25 2/3 innings across his 24 appearances, though two of those runs have come in his last three games — and in late April, he took over as the team’s closer for Devin Williams, who was removed from the role after his atrocious start. While Weaver’s microscopic 1.05 ERA probably isn’t for real, given his more “normal” 3.04 FIP, even the latter number makes him one of the most important members of the New York relief corps, and losing him for a significant amount of time is a blow. Weaver represents one of the most successful rotation-to-bullpen conversions in recent memory, going from a struggling journeyman starter, who was released and then later claimed on waivers in 2023, to being a candidate for his first All-Star appearance this July. Since his transitioning to the bullpen, which also came with a reinvention of his delivery that featured a minimalist windup, Weaver has put up a 2.46 ERA and a 3.26 FIP over 109 2/3 innings. He also gave up just one hit across his four World Series appearances last October.

While this can hardly be considered good news, the impact of the bad news is mitigated by a couple of factors. First, Weaver’s injury comes at a time when the Yankees have a 5 1/2-game lead in the AL East. That’s certainly not an insurmountable lead, but it’s a comfortable one at this point of the season. Back in April, our preseason projections had the Yankees with only a 31% chance of winning the division, and ZiPS was even less confident, at 24%. As of Tuesday morning, these divisional probabilities are at 89% and 86%, respectively. The ZiPS number factors in Weaver’s injury, projecting him to miss a full six weeks as the worst-case scenario, in order to illustrate this point: The Yankees only get a 0.8% percentage bump if he happens to miss the minimum amount of time before he can come off the IL, meaning they’re in fairly strong shape either way. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Astros awoke on May 7, they were 17-18 and had just slipped into fourth place in the AL West. They had recently placed Yordan Alvarez — who had struggled mightily to that point — on the injured list with what had been diagnosed as a muscle strain in his right hand. First baseman Christian Walker, their big free agent addition, was scuffling along below replacement level, and both new left fielder Jose Altuve and the group that replaced him at second base were playing every bit as badly. Meanwhile, their already-thin rotation had been further compromised by the loss of Spencer Arrighetti. But even while receiving more bad news on Alvarez, and losing two more starters — Ronel Blanco and Hayden Wesneski — to Tommy John surgery, the Astros have turned things around, winning 15 of 24 and briefly sneaking into first place in the AL West.

At this writing, the Astros are now 32-27, and have trimmed the Mariners’ division lead from four games to half a game:

By comparison, the Mariners started 21-14, but have gone 11-12 since. Since May 6, the Astros have won four series (against the Reds, Royals, Mariners, and A’s), lost one (Rays), and split two (Rangers and Rays). They took three out of four from the Mariners at home from May 22-25, capped by Walker’s walk-off two-run homer off Casey Legumina on May 25. That was one of three walk-off victories during that span; Isaac Paredes‘ solo homer off the Royals’ John Schreiber on May 13 and Yainer Diaz’s solo homer off the Rays’ Garrett Cleavinger on May 30 were the others. The latter shot lifted the Astros’ record to 31-26, allowing them to sneak past the Mariners and into first place, but since then, Seattle beat Minnesota in each of its next two games while Houston split a pair with Tampa Bay, restoring the Mariners to first place by the barest of margins:

Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my Tuesday afternoon chat. Please bear with me a moment while I get my lunch order squared away…

12:03

Jay Jaffe: OK that’s done — fried chicken sandwich on the way…

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I took a look at the Alexis Díaz trade (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/dodgers-hope-to-fix-alexis-diaz-and-bolste…), the latest in a long line of fix-it attempts by the Dodgers, who now have an astounding 15 pitchers on the injured list.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Speaking of which, last night’s Mets-Dodgers game was a thriller that kept me up way too late. A Lindor leadoff homer! An Ohtani answer homer with a great call by Gary Cohen, and a game-tying sac fly in the 9th! And yet another Tanner Scott meltdown that decided the game.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: I’ve got a piece on the Astros’ recent surge and slew of injuries that should go up shortly. And now, on with the show

Read the rest of this entry »

Just over a year ago, the Brewers made the best kind of baseball history: weird baseball history. On May 31, 2024, they hosted the White Sox in Milwaukee, shellacking them 12-5. That part wasn’t weird. It’s hard to imagine anything less weird than the 2024 White Sox losing a baseball game (unless it’s the 2025 Rockies losing a baseball game). The weird part was how the Brewers beat the White Sox. They put up 23 hits, and 16 of those hits came on groundballs. That’s the most groundball base hits ever recorded since the pitch tracking era began in 2008. Would you like to see them all? Of course you would.

That’s what a record looks like. Groundball after groundball finding the various nooks and crannies that made the 2024 White Sox defense so similar to an English muffin. We’ve been waiting until this game’s anniversary to write about it. According to Baseball Savant, since 2008, only one other team has surpassed 12 groundball base hits in a single game. The White Sox tallied 15 against the Tigers on September 14, 2017. And that’s it. That’s the only team that came within three groundball hits of Milwaukee. First, let’s talk about how the Brewers pulled off this feat of worm-burning ingenuity.

As with any record, a fair bit of luck was involved. Balls took crazy hops off the mound and the first base bag. The Brewers hit a perfectly placed chopper and sent a ball hugging the third base line on a check swing. They wouldn’t have broken the record if any one of those balls had bounced another way. But as the saying goes, luck is the residue of design, and there was plenty of design involved here too. Read the rest of this entry »

The Diamondbacks did things the “right way,” to the extent that the right way means anything. After making the World Series unexpectedly in 2023, they went into the offseason with an exciting group of hitters and an unsettled rotation, so they opened the vault and signed two of the top-10 free agents that year — Eduardo Rodriguez and Jordan Montgomery — both starting pitchers. When those two flamed out in 2024 but the hitters kept producing, they went back to the well and signed Corbin Burnes, another marquee option. They refused to include top starting prospects in trades. They already had Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly in the fold. This is how you build a top rotation.

Er, well, this is a way that you can build a top rotation, but this particular iteration hasn’t panned out. In Phoenix, things are falling apart on the mound. Let’s look through Arizona’s problem rotation spots (read: everyone other than Kelly) and see if we can find a solution for each before it’s too late for the team’s 2025 season.

Corbin Burnes

The Problem: Injury
Burnes got off to a slow start in the desert, but like the weather in his new place of work, he was heating up as the year wore on. His cutter isn’t quite the devastating weapon it was during his 2021 Cy Young season, but it’s still a menace. He’s still one of the best in the business when it comes to spinning breaking balls. A well-located Burnes curveball is an absolute masterpiece, a pitch that will make you question the very basics of physics and reality.

In Burnes’ most recent four starts, he’s gone nuclear: 31% strikeout rate, 2.19 ERA, 2.67 FIP. He’d also been stacking up volume: Three of his past five starts lasted seven innings. But the most recent start ended prematurely in the fifth inning, when Burnes felt sharp tightness in his elbow, saw his velocity drop, and left the game. Burnes said after the game that he didn’t know the severity of the injury, telling reporters, “I’ve never had anything like it before, so I really have nothing to compare it to.”
Read the rest of this entry »

The calendar has flipped to June, and the teams that are fighting for their place in the playoff picture are starting to get serious about addressing the flaws on their rosters.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

This year, Josh Bell returned to Washington with a new goal in mind. “What this team needs is slug,” he told reporters during a Zoom call when he signed back in January. He explained that although he’d always prided himself on making contact and avoiding strikeouts – Bell’s career strikeout rate is 14% below the league average and his slugging percentage is 5% above it – he was finally ready to make use of his 6’3” frame and trade contact for power:

That’s kind of in my DNA, but understanding MVPs the last few years, they hit 40-plus homers and they might strike out 150-plus times, but that doesn’t get talked about. The slug is the most important thing. That’s where WAR is. That’s what wins games… I have a big frame, and I should probably hit more than 19 home runs a season. Hopefully, a year from now I can be looking back on a season where I had 40-plus and break my own records for slug in a season. That’s the goal.

Bell came into the season with a more upright stance, a slightly higher leg kick, and a new mission. “I feel like I’m not afraid to strikeout more if it means less groundballs,” he said in February. “I know when I’m at my best, I don’t hit the ball on the ground. I strike out a little bit more. So if I can take one and get rid of the other, then I’ll be in a good place and the average should stay the same or go up. Time will tell.”

I bring all this up because Bell has seen a huge change in his batted balls this season, but it’s very definitely not the change he hoped to see. So far this season, he’s running a .173 ISO, a bit down from his career mark, but more or less in line with what he’s done for the last several years. His hard-hit rate and exit velocity are nearly identical to last season’s marks. So in terms of both results and raw contact quality, he’s not more powerful, but he’s not less powerful either. The experiment may have failed, but it didn’t blow up the laboratory. Read the rest of this entry »

When I first started writing this piece, it began something like this: The results had yet to come for Oneil Cruz. But after a week of hitting lasers all over the park, Cruz’s wRC+ is up to 126, the highest mark of his career outside of his brief 2021 call-up. The 6-foot-7 outfielder’s titanic bat speed and explosiveness ignite stretches of truly incredible performance. His current hot streak and season-long numbers are a glimpse into what he can do with his talent, and they stand in contract with last season, when he had a 110 wRC+ and posted underwhelming numbers in the lower third of the strike zone for such a long limbed and powerful guy.

Back in January, I examined Cruz’s greatest strength: his ability to pound pitches at the top of the zone. Players with such long levers aren’t normally as productive at the top of the zone as Cruz was last season. His .496 xwOBA ranked third in all of baseball! If you left a pitch up there against him, you were vulnerable to some real pain. But being locked in in one part of the zone often means making sacrifices in another. It’s difficult to be versatile enough to command both the upper and lower thirds, and Cruz only ran a measly league average xwOBA in the bottom third (.319). That’s odd, though, because these are the types of pitches you’d expect somebody with his stature to drop their barrel under the ball with ease. When I wrote my January piece, one obvious conclusion was that if Cruz could preserve his upper-third excellence while doing more damage in a part of the zone that should mesh well with his physical abilities, then his batted ball profile would be fully unlocked. It’s still early, but Cruz’s .367 xwOBA in the lower third so far this season is a big improvement. Read the rest of this entry »