I like to think I’m pretty tuned in to what’s going on in baseball each day. I check the news and the standings regularly, and my morning wouldn’t be complete without a quick scan of the leaderboards in all the major statistical categories. That being so, it’s rare that I’ll be caught off guard by a player’s ERA, or batting average, or WAR. That doesn’t mean it never happens, though, and when it does, I often feel compelled to share my surprise.

With that introduction as a clue, would you care to guess who leads the Rays in home runs? You know, the Rays who have more homers than any team in the American League. The Rays who rank second in baseball in runs scored and first in wRC+. The Rays who do all that despite playing in one of the least hitter-friendly home ballparks in the game. Yeah, those Rays.

It’s not All-Star first baseman Yandy Díaz or rookie sensation Luke Raley. It’s not Wander Franco, or Isaac Paredes, or anyone with the last name Lowe.

I’ll give you another hint: Two players are actually tied for the team lead in long balls, and one of them isn’t so hard to guess. Randy Arozarena hit his 16th homer of the season on Sunday, pulling even with the mystery player for first place, and only kind of ruining the guessing game I had planned. Then again, the title and featured image already gave it away, so it’s time I pull back the facade of this rhetorical device. No team in the American League has more home runs than the Rays, and no one on the Rays has more home runs than Jose Siri. Read the rest of this entry »

Last season, Shohei Ohtani had one of the greatest seasons in history that did not result in taking home an MVP trophy. His misfortune in 2022 was running into one of the best offensive campaigns that anyone living can remember, with Aaron Judge putting up a 207 wRC+ and 11.5 WAR without any known pitching skills to utilize. Most writers still don’t vote entirely or even primarily based on WAR-type metrics, so Judge setting a new American League single-season home run record, with 62, was also quite helpful. Fast forward to 2023, and Judge’s toe injury has basically ended any chance of him repeating his MVP feat, but Ohtani has been doing his best to ensure that even a healthy Judge would have had trouble doing so.

Ohtani’s never been a shabby hitter, with a .265/.364/.554 line, 146 wRC+, and 80 homers over the last two seasons. Those are star-level numbers, but not historic ones. This year is another matter entirely. He’s cranked his offense into overdrive and now stands at .306/.390/.670 with 31 homers as the Angels have played past the halfway point of the 2023 season. Over at Sports Illustrated, Emma Baccellieri made a solid argument that Ohtani’s June may have been the best month by an individual in major league history. He has crushed 10 homers in his last 16 games and now leads all of baseball in round-trippers, three more than Atlanta’s Matt Olson.

With a few exceptions — he’s not stealing 131 bases, and Chief Wilson can rest comfortably with his 36 triples — achievements of the past aren’t safe from Ohtani’s onslaught. And with the recent surge in his power numbers, he is now on a real approach pattern to eclipsing Judge’s AL home run record. This mark has been in Yankees pinstripes in one form or another since 1920, when Babe Ruth broke his own record that was earned wearing a Red Sox uniform.

So will Ohtani pass Judge? Well, I’ve got a projection system, and it would be a crime to not ask it. Read the rest of this entry »

From the time he signed a one-year deal with the Royals in late January, it appeared highly likely that Aroldis Chapman’s stay in Kansas City wouldn’t be long. Either he would continue last season’s slide into irrelevance and get his walking papers once the team decided he was more trouble than he was worth, or he would pitch well enough to make himself a viable midseason trade candidate. He ended up pitching his way into the latter route; on Friday, he was dealt to the Rangers in exchange for two young players, 25-year-old lefty Cole Ragans and 17-year-old outfielder Roni Cabrera.

The 35-year-old Chapman was an All-Star as recently as 2021 with the Yankees, but his career, which had survived a 2016 suspension for violating the league’s domestic violence policy, began accelerating downhill with increasing speed in June of that season. In a nine-game span, from June 10 through July 4, he allowed 15 runs and walked nine in 5.2 innings, blowing three saves. He struggled with his release point and missed time due to elbow inflammation but more or less maintained his hold on the closer spot for the rest of the season, though he finished with a 3.99 FIP (then a career worst) and a 3.36 ERA (his worst mark since 2011). He lost the closer job for good in mid-May of last season, when he went on the injured list for Achilles tendinitis, incurred the team’s wrath by missing three weeks due to a tattoo-induced infection in his leg (one that introduced the phrase “veritable moat of pus” into the lexicon), finished with ugly career-worst numbers (4.46 ERA, 4.57 FIP, -0.2 WAR), and burned his final bridge in the Bronx by skipping a mandatory workout before the Division Series.

Particularly when coupled with his 2021 troubles and past history, that drama no doubt cooled the market for Chapman. During the winter, seven relievers netted deals with average annual values of at least $9 million, including non-closers such as Rafael Montero and Robert Suarez and post-prime closers such as David Robertson and Craig Kimbrel; more than a dozen received multiyear deals. Chapman, though, could only secure a guarantee of $3.75 million over a single season. He did get some incentives in the deal: $312,500 for reaching thresholds of 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, and 55 games, and another $312,500 for reaching thresholds of 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, and 40 games finished. The Rangers will be responsible for those bonuses, as well as about $1.875 million in remaining salary. Read the rest of this entry »

Content warning: This story contains details of domestic abuse.

Professional sports are enthralling for the action they produce on the playing field. Highlights of home runs, slam dunks, and touchdowns can create lifelong relationships between fans and the sports they enjoy. Yet it’s necessary to remember that sports are situated within the world around them, and often mirror wider trends within it.

It’s easy to think of baseball players as little figures on a screen who appear at 7:00 every night, run around for a few hours while being televised live, and blink out of existence until the next evening when network cameras are back on. It seems that the closer we get to perfectly measuring a player’s value on the diamond, the more we detach the dots on the television from real people who, like us, have lives even after the camera operators go home for the night. People with hobbies, homes, and families, people who matter to other real people besides the fans on the other side of the screen with emotions, bragging rights, or even money staked to what the little humanoid figures do. Every baseball player possesses the same traits that make those watching at home human, and with that unfortunately comes the capacity to cause indescribable harm to others. Read the rest of this entry »

As Chris Gilligan wrote last week, it seems like we’re primed for an exciting and drama-filled second half of the season. There are plenty of teams still vying for a postseason berth, and the trade deadline is right around the corner as we head into the All-Star break.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

Eight is the Braves’ number this year. Not only are they sending eight players to the All-Star game in Seattle next week, but they’re also in the midst of their third eight-game winning streak this season. Incredibly, they lost just four times during the month of June and have now overtaken the Rays for the best record in baseball. They’ve weathered all those injuries to their starting rotation by simply pounding across run after run; since the beginning of June, they’ve scored nearly seven runs per game. They’ll head into the midseason break with a road trip that takes them through Cleveland and then to Tampa Bay to face the team they just passed in the overall standings. Read the rest of this entry »

RosterResource’s MiLB Power Rankings were first developed in 2015 and have been displayed on the team depth charts ever since. Given that those depth charts feature a section called “Minor Leaguers You Should Know,” it was important that I come up with a formula that would allow me to identify the players having the best statistical seasons, with age and level integral factors.

Having the rankings visible on the depth charts has been a helpful feature, but I have often been asked by readers for a link to a non-existent leaderboard. If you’ve asked me about it, I’m sure I said something to the effect of, “We don’t have one right now. It’s at the top of my wish list. Hopefully in the near future.”

Well, I’m happy to announce that the day has finally arrived. RosterResource’s MiLB Power Rankings Leaderboard is here. And, thanks to Sean Dolinar and Keaton Arneson, it is spectacular.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Kansas City Royals. 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 »

Jazz Chisholm and Jean Segura caught my attention while they were playing catch prior to a recent Miami Marlins road game at Fenway Park. Unlike their teammates, the duo was trading tosses underhand, windmilling their throws like fastpitch softball pitchers. Moreover, they looked good doing it. Their motions were smooth and easy, their deliveries firm and accurate. Having never seen professional baseball players do this, I was very much intrigued.

Standing nearby was Jennifer Brann. Now an analyst with the Marlins, Brann had excelled on the mound at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maryland prior to being hired by Miami two years ago. I asked her if she had seen them do so previously.

“I’ve seen Segura mess around a little bit, but I’d never seen Jazz pitch underhand like that,” Brann told me. “It was cool to watch. They knew what they were doing, especially Segura; he threw a rise ball and a changeup. But Jazz looked pretty good, too.”

The following day, I made it a point to approach both players in the clubhouse to find out if they had any softball experience. It turns out that they did.

“My grandma was a professional [fastpitch] softball player,” said Chisholm, who grew up in Nassau. “She played for the Bahamas National Team. That’s what really got me into baseball — I learned a lot of my baseball skills from softball — and she played until she was 60, too. She was just superhuman.”

Chisholm played fastpitch growing up, in part because the sport is played in Bahamian high schools, while baseball is not. (He did play Little League baseball.). Having attended a K-12, he began competing against upperclassmen as a sixth grader, both as a shortstop and a pitcher. Chisholm subsequently moved to the United States at age 12, thus ending his competitive softball days, Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley attempt to create a hierarchy of highlights, then (21:36) mark the midpoint of the regular season by reviewing the most salient storylines of the first half, the teams and players who’ve most underperformed or overperformed their preseason projections, and what they’re most looking forward to in the second half, plus a follow-up (1:12:25) on the evolution of official scoring and a Future Blast (1:23:00) from 2026.

Audio intro: The Gagnés, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ramírez steal
Link to Vierling slide
Link to Naylor throw
Link to Ben Clemens on those plays
Link to Sam on HR highlights
Link to preseason player projections
Link to projected-wins changes
Link to Chris Gilligan on the second half
Link to Paine on payroll and wins
Link to FG playoff odds
Link to FG combined WAR leaderboard
Link to under/overperformers sheet
Link to Ben on Ohtani
Link to Robert Orr on Acuña
Link to story on Carroll’s shoulder
Link to All-Star starters
Link to Kimbrel violations
Link to violations leaderboard
Link to MLB.com on first-half highlights
Link to Leitch on first-half surprises
Link to 2012 scoring appeals process
Link to scoring changes website
Link to listener emails database
Link to Rick Wilber’s website
Link to MLBTR on the Chapman trade
Link to info on new uniforms

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It’s tough not to pick on the Cardinals these days. Last season, they won 93 games and took the NL Central title with a team that combined strong offense, exceptional defense — long a St. Louis tradition — and good pitching; it was their 15th straight season above .500 and fourth in a row reaching the postseason. This year, however, they’ve spent time as the NL’s worst team, and while they’re now merely the third-worst, at 33-46 they’re going nowhere and impressing nobody.

A big and perhaps undersold part of the Cardinals’ problem is the collapse of their vaunted defense, which has often featured five players — first baseman Paul Goldschmidt, third baseman Nolan Arenado, outfielder Tyler O’Neill, and multiposition regulars Brendan Donovan and Tommy Edman — who won Gold Gloves in either 2021 or ’22. Manager Oli Marmol has been tasked with shoehorning hot-hitting youngsters Nolan Gorman and Jordan Walker into the lineup at comparatively unfamiliar positions, as both are blocked by Arenado at third base, their primary position in the minors, and between injuries and offensive issues, lately Edman has been patrolling center field instead of the middle infield. Backing a pitching staff that doesn’t miss enough bats — their 21.1% strikeout rate is the majors’ fifth-worst — it’s all collapsed into an unhappy mess.

Given that context it’s less than surprising that the Cardinals show up as one of the majors’ worst defensive teams using the methodology I rolled out on Thursday to illustrate the best. For that exercise, I sought to find a consensus from among several major defensive metrics, namely Defensive Runs Saved, Ultimate Zone Rating, and Statcast’s Runs Prevented (which I’m calling Runs Above Average because their site and ours use the abbreviation RAA) as well as our catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as on our stat pages), and Statcast’s catching metrics for framing, blocking, and throwing (which I’ve combine into the abbreviation CRAA). Each of those has different methodologies, and they produce varying spreads in runs from top to bottom that owe something to what they don’t measure as well as how much regression is built into their systems. Pitchers don’t have UZRs or RAAs, for example, and the catching numbers are set off in their own categories rather than included in UZR and RAA. I’ve accounted for the varying spreads, which range from 86 runs in DRS (from 42 to -44) to 25.6 runs in FRM (from 13.8 to -11.8), by using standard deviation scores (z-scores), which measure how many standard deviations each team is from the league average in each category. Read the rest of this entry »