Two major bits of unpleasant injury-related news hit the headlines on Tuesday afternoon. First, the Blue Jays announced that Hyun Jin Ryu, a key cog in the rotation, would undergo elbow surgery that would result in him missing the rest of the entire 2022 season. Over in the NL West, a scheduled CT scan revealed that Fernando Tatis Jr. had not seen enough healing in his wrist to allow him to start swinging a bat. Both of these injuries are of the type that could impact the divisional races.

For both Ryu and the Jays, his sore elbow is a major hit. Jay Jaffe has already touched on the impact to Toronto’s rotation from the loss of Ryu. In his case, there were clear signs of something being not quite right leading up to his initial trip to the shelf. Per Jay:

This is already Ryu’s second trip to the injured list this season. After lasting just 7.1 innings over his first two starts and allowing a total of 11 runs, he landed on the IL on April 17 with what was described as forearm inflammation. Upon returning to the Blue Jays on May 14, he fared somewhat better, yielding just six runs (five earned) in 19.2 innings over four starts, but his average four-seam fastball velocity decreased by about one mile per hour from outing to outing, from a high of 90.3 mph on May 14 to a low of 87.6 on June 1 — a troubling trend.

Back then, the timetable was reported to be at least multiple weeks. Full Tommy John surgery would obviously end Ryu’s 2022 campaign, but we’re far enough into the season that even repair of a partially torn UCL wouldn’t allow him to return in the fall. If he should require the full surgery, his 2023 season would definitely be in peril, with only a late-season return being feasible. He’s a free agent after the 2023 season, too, so there’s a very real possibility that he’s played his last game in a Jays uniform.

I wouldn’t characterize it as good news, but Ryu’s previous Tommy John surgery was a long time ago, undergone in 2004 when he was still in high school, meaning he got most of a professional career out of his first surgery before a possible revision procedure. Unfortunately, in one study, less than half of pitchers needing a second procedure returned to pitch at least 10 games. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Bradish has a promising future in Baltimore. The 25-year-old rookie right-hander has a 6.86 ERA and a 6.06 FIP over his first 42 big league innings, but he’s also got plus stuff and improving command. Acquired from the Angels in the December 2019 Dylan Bundy deal — Los Angeles had taken him in the fourth round of the previous year’s draft out of New Mexico State University — Bradish came into the current campaign ranked seventh on our Orioles Top Prospects list.

Bradish discussed his developmental path, and the M.O. he takes with him to the mound, when Baltimore visited Fenway Park in late May.

———

David Laurila: What do you know about pitching now that you didn’t when you entered pro ball?

Kyle Bradish: “A lot of it is the analytics, which we didn’t have to the same extent when I was in college. I’m getting adjusted to that, learning about things like spin efficiency and all that stuff.”

Laurila: How much of it is impacting what you’re doing on the mound? Read the rest of this entry »

Dakota Hudson shouldn’t be this good. It’s hard to analyze baseball, and pitchers are good for all sorts of difficult-to-comprehend reasons, but look at his numbers. It shouldn’t work. His career strikeout rate is a lackluster 17.2%. He walks more than 10% of the batters he faces. Either of those numbers would be alarming; both together is a recipe for trouble.

Naturally, Hudson is off to another roaring start. His 3.29 ERA is actually worse than his career mark, and it’s still 17% better than league average in this low-scoring year. He’s outperforming every available peripheral by miles – just like he always has. Three-hundred-and-fifteen innings into his major league career, his stat line will make you question what you know about ERA estimators. His FIP is a so-so 4.56. It’s not some home run rate fluke, either; his xFIP is exactly the same. SIERA clocks him at 4.96. xERA, the Statcast version of an ERA estimator, is right in line with everything else at 4.55. And yeah… his career ERA is 3.17. So let’s investigate what the heck is going on. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about what it means to be humbled, whether Joe Maddon’s mohawk could have caught on and caused a Shohawk had he not been fired, another point about Aaron Judge’s potentially historic home-run pace, a Byron Buxton fun fact, whether Buxton or Luis Arraez is a more entertaining hitter, Ozzie Albies’ fluky foot fracture, and a smart baserunning play by the Cardinals’ Nolan Gorman. Then (37:10) they answer listener emails about Pete Alonso ads for extended car warranties, Alejandro Kirk and the Blue Jays’ catching corps, line drives up the middle, whether the World Series winner is more likely to come out of either the AL East or NL West or the rest of baseball, and how splits by out count work, followed (1:16:19) by pedantic questions about swinging bunts, “contact hitting,” bloop hits, the baseball “diamond,” and “back-to-back-to-back” home runs, a Stat Blast (1:34:22) about power hitters who haven’t homered in consecutive plate appearances or at-bats, and a Past Blast (1:40:18) from 1863.

Audio intro: Willie Nelson, “Hard to Be Humble”
Audio outro: Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, “Humble Me”

Link to Buxton fun fact article
Link to Albies injury video
Link to story about Albies foot fracture
Link to Jay Jaffe on Atlanta’s streak
Link to hamate-fracture study
Link to second hamate-fracture study
Link to later hamate-fracture study
Link to video of Cardinals play
Link to article on The Only Nolan
Link to first Alonso ad
Link to second Alonso ad
Link to info on Alonso accident
Link to Kershaw ad
Link to article on 30 Rock joke rate
Link to leaders in balls hit toward pitcher
Link to leaders in straightaway liners
Link to yearly BA on balls hit toward pitchers
Link to yearly BA on straightaway grounders
Link to 2022 catcher WAR leaders
Link to 2022 team catcher WAR
Link to Effectively Wild t-shirts
Link to Giants shirts
Link to Pham’s response
Link to Stathead
Link to new Stathead feature explainer
Link to Stat Blast results list
Link to article on Grace’s first slam
Link to Richard Hershberger’s Strike Four
Link to 1863 story source
Link to Jeff Fogle on getaway days
Link to Bill James on getaway days

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Until he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee last July 10, Ronald Acuña Jr. was building a case to win the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award. His season-ending injury forced an already scuffling Braves team to scramble for replacements, but thanks in large part to an outfield reconfigured by a flurry of July trades, the team overcame the devastating blow and won its first World Series in 26 years. With Acuña still recovering from his injury, the Braves got off to a sluggish start this year, but since the calendar flipped to June, they’ve reeled off a 12-game winning streak, the longest in the majors so far. The run has more than cut the division deficit in half and pushed them into a playoff position, and while their 24-year-old superstar right fielder has led the way, he’s hardly doing it alone.

The 2022 season did not begin well for the defending champions, who posted losing records in both April (10–12) and May (13–15). Those struggles enabled the Mets to build a 10.5-game NL East lead through the end of May, the third-largest in the history of division play (since 1969). Through those first two months, the Braves were outscored by 16 runs, scoring 4.14 per game and allowing 4.46. Their offense hit just .235/.304/.405, but under the adverse conditions that hitters faced early in the year, that was still good for a 97 wRC+. Their hitters did strike out a major league-high 26.2% of the time, but a .292 BABIP (five points above the average for the first two months) and 62 homers (fifth in the majors) helped to offset their contact woes.

The offense was particularly dragged down by the production of their outfielders, who collectively hit just .194/.255/.330 with a 30.6% strikeout rate and a 63 wRC+ over those first two months; from among those numbers, only their slugging percentage wasn’t the majors’ worst (it was 27th). I’ve covered the ongoing saga of Atlanta’s outfield multiple times; the play of July acquisitions Adam Duvall, Joc Pederson, Eddie Rosario, and Jorge Soler was the key to last year’s turnaround and postseason run once Acuña went down. Duvall and Rosario, the pair that the Braves retained, were among the early-2022 laggards; the latter, who underwent laser surgery on his right eye to correct blurred vision, has been out of the picture since April 24.

Acuña, who did not make his season debut until April 28, the Braves’ 20th game of the season, started in right field just 11 times in April and May, serving as the team’s designated hitter another 10 times. Initially and quite understandably, he showed a bit of rust with the bat, striking out 11 times in his first 28 plate appearances, but he began turning things around with a 5-for-11 showing against the Brewers that included two homers (off Eric Lauer and Corbin Burnes) and a double as the Braves took two out of three at home on May 6–8. He’s more or less stayed hot ever since, and over the past few weeks has played almost exclusively in right field, only spotting at DH.

During the winning streak, Acuña has hit .349/.431/.674 (200 wRC+) with four homers, with three in a two-game span on June 5 (off the Rockies’ Robert Stephenson) and June 7 (two off Cole Irvin, including one that led off the home half of the first inning). On Saturday against the Pirates in Atlanta, he hit another leadoff homer, this one off Zach Thompson, and later raced home from first base on a bloop single into right field by Dansby Swanson, scoring standing up:

The leadoff homer was the 25th of Acuña’s major league career, which began in 2018; since that season only George Springer has more (32), with Pederson and Mookie Betts (both with 21) the only other players with at least 20. Read the rest of this entry »

This season, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin will have periodic minor league roundup post that run during the week. You can read previous installments of our prospect notes here.

Before we get to this post’s analysis, some housekeeping. I’m continuing to trudge through the last few team lists, and hope readers will understand that part of why this has taken so long is because a) we lost multiple writers to teams during the process and b) it takes a lot for me to compromise my vision for the depth and quality of my work. I’m on pace to finish just before the draft while also updating and expanding the draft prospect list so that draftees can quickly be added to their club’s pro list right after they’re picked. I realize that continuing this way during future cycles would leave valuable and relevant info unpublished for too long, and that I need to make changes. For instance, I don’t have a Cardinals list out yet while guys like Andre Pallante, Brendan Donovan and Juan Yepez are all playing big league roles. I’ve had well-formed thoughts on that group of guys since they were part of last year’s Arizona Fall League, and need to find a way to shorten the lag between when I’m taking those notes and when they’re turned into actionable info on the site, especially when it comes to short-term big leaguers.

My approach for in-season updates (which have already underway — duh, you are reading this post) will again be to group teams based on the geographic location of their spring training facility (for example, teams with East Valley facilities in Arizona are already being updated) and drill down deepest on contending clubs (within that East Valley cluster, the Giants) as they’re more likely to part with prospects ahead of the trade deadline. There will still be à la carte updates where I see a player and add them, or where someone’s performance prompts me to source info from scouting and front office contacts and brings about a change in their evaluation or valuation. Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Walsh is a studious hitter. He’s also a productive hitter in the middle of the Los Angeles Angels lineup. In just over 1,000 big league plate appearances, the 28-year-old first baseman has 50 home runs to go along with a .269/.325/.499 slash line and a 122 wRC+. This past Saturday, Walsh went deep for the 11th time on the season while hitting for the ninth cycle in franchise history.

A two-way player at the University of Georgia who has also taken the mound in pro ball — including five times for the Angels in 2019 — Walsh lasted until the 39th round of the 2015 draft. To say he’s gone on to exceed most expectations with the bat would be an understatement.

Walsh discussed his watch-and-learn approach to hitting when the Angels visited Fenway Park last month.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with your M.O. as a hitter. What are you looking to do when you’re in the box?

Jared Walsh: “In my perfect world, I’m a line drive into left-center and a line drive into right-center kind of hitter.”

Laurila: Is that an approach you’ve always had, or have you evolved over time? Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I was listening to one of my favorite non-baseball podcasts when baseball unexpectedly cropped up. Well, the theory of skin in the game cropped up. The idea, espoused by many people but notably by Nassim Taleb, is that actors perform better when they get rewarded for a good outcome and punished for a bad outcome. Want a better doctor? Fine them if they misdiagnose a patient, but give them a bonus for prescribing the correct treatment. Better money manager? Force them to invest all their own money alongside their client. You get the idea.

Anyway, one example of skin not being in the game is a sports team playing out the string. For most teams at most times, sports is a very skin-in-the-game-intensive field. If you hit well, you get paid more. If you don’t, you might get sent to the minors. If your team wins, they make the playoffs. If the team doesn’t win, no postseason. The incentives are straightforward.

At the end of a long season, however, it might not feel that way. If you’re 50-100 in late September, the rewards of a good game aren’t that high, and the cost of a bad game is quite low. If you’re 15 games out in the race, being 16 games out won’t suddenly bring out the detractors. You can think of these teams as having no skin in the game; the result of one game won’t change anything for them. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »