Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Joe Maddon’s mohawk, the latest details about Mike Trout’s (and Tommy Pham’s and Joc Pederson’s) legendary fantasy football league, a rash of hidden-ball-trick attempts, the “old guy’s still got it” resurgences of Nelson Cruz and Joey Votto, how big a deal Aaron Judge’s potentially historic home-run pace should be, the two-way dominance and unsurpassed hard-hitting of the Yankees (including Matt Carpenter’s hot start with the team), the AL East hogging half of the AL’s prospective playoff berths, the excellence of José Ramírez, Tommy Edman’s breakout, Ben’s new peeve about a certain type of homer, the latest extremes in position-player pitching, Walker Buehler’s injury and the NL West race, the longest-ever collective winning and losing streaks by a division, the NL East race, the winning ways of the Braves and Ronald Acuña Jr., and the history of the “base hit,” plus a Past Blast from 1862.

Audio intro: Francis Lung, “Bad Hair Day”
Audio outro: Vanessa Peters, “A Good Judge”

Link to Maddon mohawk report
Link to 2008 mohawk story
Link to Gonzalez firing story
Link to Randolph firing story
Link to clip of Trout on ESPN
Link to Votto’s May 2 tweet
Link to Dan Szymborski on Votto
Link to story on Votto’s hot streak
Link to FG on-pace leaderboard
Link to expected HR leaderboard
Link to Stanton’s 120 mph homer
Link to Ben on Stanton in 2017
Link to list of hardest-hit balls
Link to Rosenthal on rebuilding Carpenter
Link to Ohtani HR off the wall
Link to Stark on position-player pitchers
Link to story on Higashioka’s homer
Link to Mike Fast on the slowest pitch
Link to Jay Jaffe on Buehler
Link to Richard Hershberger’s Strike Four
Link to 1862 story source

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Hunter Greene started the 2022 season off with a bang. An audible one, if you were sitting near home plate: Greene topped out at 102.6 mph in his second start of the year, averaged nearly 101 mph on his fastball, and generally looked like an entirely new type of pitcher, a starter with closer velocity.

A funny thing has happened since, though. That fastball didn’t play out quite how you’d expect. After those initial two starts, Greene lost a bit of zip on the pitch, and hitters stopped missing it. He drew 21 swings and misses in his first two major league outings; it took him another six starts to match that total. After walking just two hitters in those first two starts, he walked eight in his next two. It was time for an adjustment.

Consider that adjustment made. In his last seven starts, Greene looks like a top-flight major league starter again. He’s striking out a third of the batters he faces, walking less than 10%, and pitching to a 3.20 ERA (and 3.47 FIP) beginning with his May 10 start against Milwaukee. He’s going deeper into starts. And after the Brewers tormented him for five home runs on May 5, he’s allowed only five in these last seven starts over nearly 40 innings of work. How has the starter with the fastest fastball in the game done it? Exactly how you’d expect – by de-emphasizing his fastball and leaning on his best pitch, an upper-80s slider. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how good we are at what we do, mistakes are inevitable. They happen. That doesn’t make them any less embarrassing, of course, but such a reminder helps us to get over our mishaps. And though I’m no major leaguer, I assume hitters and pitchers alike need the occasional self-therapy session. Baseball is a taxing and capricious endeavor – one week you’re striking out batter after batter, the next you’re getting shelled. It takes quite a bit of mental fortitude.

Saturday, Kevin Gausman didn’t have the best start. It wasn’t a disaster by any means – he went six innings and gave up a single run – but with three walks and just four strikeouts, it paled in comparison to his typical dominance. Not only that, two of those walks were issued to Javier Báez. If you’re reading this, you know how unlikely that is. No qualified pitcher in baseball induces a higher rate of swings against pitches outside the zone than Gausman. No qualified hitter in baseball swings at pitches outside the zone more often than Báez. Based on the numbers, it seems like a foregone conclusion: Báez would struggle, while Gausman would triumph. Read the rest of this entry »

Win streaks and losing streaks across baseball have resulted in some major movement in the power rankings this week.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by IP share) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has Statcast’s OAA/RAA available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. 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.

I considered putting the Yankees in their own tier at the top of these rankings this week; that’s how well they’ve been playing recently. They absolutely crushed the Cubs during a three-game weekend series, launching 11 home runs and outscoring Chicago, 28–5. Matt Carpenter has collected eight hits since joining the Yanks in late May, and six of them have been home runs, including two on Sunday. Oh, and their pitching staff has been one of the best in the majors, too. They’re firing on all cylinders at just the right time; their schedule gets tough over the next two weeks, with a pair of series against the Rays, a series in Toronto, and a four-game set against the Astros.

After handling the White Sox earlier in the week, the Dodgers traveled to San Francisco over the weekend and scored just four runs in a three-game sweep at the hands of their division rival. To make matters worse, Walker Buehler left his start on Friday after just four innings with elbow discomfort. The next day, the Dodgers announced that he’ll be shut down for two months with a flexor strain. Clayton Kershaw returned from his own Injured List stint over the weekend, and Andrew Heaney is on the mend and should be activated sometime this week. Still, with the Padres and Giants breathing down their necks in the NL West, the Dodgers’ margin for error just got a lot thinner without Buehler in the rotation for a while.

The Mets wrapped up a long West Coast road trip with a series win against the Angels over the weekend. That gave them a 5–5 record during the trip, a perfectly acceptable outcome based on the tough opponents and travel they faced. Since Max Scherzer went down with his oblique injury in mid-May, New York has gone 15–8 and maintained a strong grip on the NL East. The Braves’ recent hot streak may cause some concern, but the Mets have proven they’re a good enough team even without their two best pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

Faced with a middling rotation on a middling roster, the Angels took a risk this winter when they made Noah Syndergaard their big free-agent pitcher signing over any of the marquee names available. Syndergaard was once one of those dazzling names, but injuries haven taken away three of his most recent seasons (most of 2017, all of 2020, and all but two innings in 2021) and, eventually, the final gear of a fastball and sinker that both tangled with triple digits on the radar gun. It’s difficult for a one-year deal to end too badly, but at $21 million for 2022, the Angels clearly thought of this as more than a pillow contract or a lottery ticket. So has it worked? Sort of.

To get one thing out of the way: Syndergaard is not the pitcher he once was. As Jay Jaffe wrote earlier this month, he’s lost about four miles per hour on his fastball, forcing him to reconfigure his pitch mix. He’s not exactly Jered Weaver or Zack Greinke, let alone Frank Schwindel throwing 35-mph rainbows to the Yankees, but throwing 93 or 94 mph is quite different than throwing 99 or 100. That said, he’s still gotten decent results, at least in bottom-line numbers, and his ERA stands at 3.69, with his FIP barely behind at 3.81. His strikeout rate has plummeted to just 15.4%, or 5.83 K/9, numbers that barely match up to his 26.4% and 9.74 through 2019. But the lack of strikeouts is partially mitigated by the fact that his control remains excellent, and he’s still effective at preventing hitters from making good contact.

Pitchers have been successful with meager strikeout rates, even in today’s game. However, it leaves little margin for error, and when pitchers like Kirk Rueter or Chien-Ming Wang finally hit a bump, they didn’t just get a flat; the wheels fell completely off. Even with more reason to hope for his health than before the season and after some perfectly respectable performances, ZiPS is actually less confident about Syndergaard’s future than before:

While we can be a little more confident now about playing time, we should also be less bullish about the chances of Syndergaard recapturing his pre-injury form. Even with more innings now projected than at the start of 2022, ZiPS has knocked his rest-of-career mean projection from 19.1 WAR to 13.7. Every game of a decidedly mortal Syndergaard takes us a little farther from the thunder god. Read the rest of this entry »

For as much slack as Tyler Anderson and Tony Gonsolin have been picking up in the Dodgers rotation lately, the news that Walker Buehler will miss a large chunk of the remainder of the season is a gut punch. The 27-year-old righty departed Friday night’s start against the Giants with elbow discomfort — his second early exit in a row — and after undergoing an MRI on Saturday was diagnosed with a flexor tendon strain. He will be shut down completely for six to eight weeks before restarting a throwing program, all but guaranteeing that he won’t see major league activity again until September.

Buehler struck out the side in the third inning on Friday night, but via MLB.com’s Juan Toribio, he “noticed something was bothering him after throwing a breaking ball” during the frame. While he made it through that inning and the fourth, his discomfort increased. Said manager Dave Roberts afterwards, “Certain discomforts you can manage through, where this one tonight, clearly he felt that any more could potentially be damaging.”

Coming off the best season of his career, Buehler had not pitched well lately, though he said on Friday that he didn’t believe the injury was linked to his previous woes. His overall 4.02 ERA (100 ERA-) is the highest of his career excluding his cup-of-coffee 2017 stint, and a full run per nine above his career mark, while his 3.83 FIP (96 FIP-) is only his second time above 3.16; he was at 4.36 in 2020, a season during which he made just eight starts due to recurrent blisters on his right index and middle fingers. Read the rest of this entry »

Ezequiel Tovar came into the season ranked as the No. 4 prospect in the Colorado Rockies system. Despite being just 20 years old, he might finish it in the big leagues. In 229 plate appearances with the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats, Tovar is slashing .317/.393/.579 with a 165 wRC+. Moreover, he has a dozen home runs and has swiped 16 bases in 17 attempts.

His calling card is his glove. Described by our own Eric Longenhagen as “a no-doubt shortstop with balletic defensive footwork and a well-calibrated internal clock.” Tovar had received similar rave reviews from MLB scouts in the Arizona Fall League. And that was before he blossomed with the bat.

I asked Yard Goats manager Chris Denorfia about the offensive strides that have elevated Tovar’s profile.

“Coming into this year, I was told that there was some chase on down-and-away sliders,” said Denorfia, who played 10 big-league seasons. “But I haven’t seen what everybody was talking about. Somewhere between the Fall League and this spring, he’s made this developmental jump. Something clicked to where he’s recognizing situations where pitchers are going to try to get him to chase. Whether you call it slowing the game down, or just having enough reps, he’s made that adjustment. It was probably the one thing that was holding him back, which is kind of weird to say, because he was only 19 last year.”

The discipline is reflected in the numbers. Despite being one the youngest players in his league, Tovar possesses a 9.6 walk-rate and a 22.3% K-rate. When you add his improved pop to the equation, it’s easy to see why speculation of a call-up — premature that it may be — has begun to grow legs. Read the rest of this entry »