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If Tarik Skubal locates his fastball up in the zone, opposing hitters are probably cooked. Nearly half the time they swing, they come up empty. If they manage to put it in play, they’re unlikely to do much damage — of the six hits he’s allowed on elevated heaters, five have been singles. That lone extra-base hit? An absolute tank! A 429-foot home run, off a perfectly executed 98-mph heater on the first pitch of the game, courtesy of one Zach Neto, who is currently making a case for low-level stardom.

After a rough rookie campaign in 2023, Neto broke out in his sophomore effort, posting 3.5 WAR by playing a competent shortshop and clubbing enough home runs (23) to cover up his mediocre on-base ability. Even after missing the first few weeks of this season with a bum shoulder, the 24-year-old has managed to take another step forward in 2025: His 139 wRC+ ranks second among all shortstops with at least 150 plate appearances.

That improved line is fueled by a power surge. In just 37 games, he’s homered nine times and hit 10 doubles. The barrel rate has literally doubled, jumping from an 8.4% rate last year to 16.8%. As a result, his .589 expected slugging (xSLG) ranks eighth in baseball, just below big-time sluggers like Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Kyle Schwarber.

Those three guys are hard swingers, perennially topping the bat speed leaderboards. But Neto doesn’t fit that profile. He stands at a slender 5-foot-11; even with a slight uptick in bat speed year-over-year, his 71.7-mph average swing speed falls below the big league average. The Angels shortstop isn’t posting elite power numbers because he’s swinging the bat hard. It’s because he’s maxing out the aggression in his approach, selling out for power and mostly succeeding. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago, Hannah Keyser of The Bandwagon asked Kodai Senga about his reverse splits when it comes to times through the order. His .347 wOBA allowed the first time through the lineup drops to .275 the second time through it, and then sinks to .205 the third time through. However, his total batters faced sits at just 90 for each of the first two times through the order and 48 for the third time through. That’s a small enough sample that it’s difficult to say how much of the credit goes to Senga and how much is naturally occurring variation.

Either way it doesn’t matter much to Senga, who cares more about process than results, “Quite honestly, I don’t feel like I’m very good at any point during the game this year,” he told Keyser through his interpreter. Harsh words for a pitcher with an ERA- of 37. He does acknowledge that he makes adjustments throughout the game to get a better feel for his pitches and tweaks his strategy based on how each pitch is looking in a given start, which offers some explanation for the improved outcomes as the game goes on. But according to Senga, all of his pitches feel off this year, as he remains in the process of re-establishing his mechanics following the shoulder and calf injuries that sidelined him for nearly all of last year.

Senga’s self-evaluation reminds us that folks performing at the elite level of their fields don’t get there by letting good enough be good enough, but rather by insisting that nothing is ever good enough. To the layperson, it’s baffling to hear that Senga feels he’s pitching worse, despite posting better results than in 2023, his first MLB season, and the last in which he was fully healthy. Add on that he somehow manages to gain effectiveness throughout his starts despite a certain level of displeasure with all of his pitches, and it couldn’t be any clearer that regardless of what you read in Us Weekly, the stars are not actually just like us. Read the rest of this entry »

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Hello, and welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Memorial Day marks the point at which we’re a third of the way through the season, a great time to take stock of how preseason story lines have fared in the light of the regular season day. The Orioles might be bad. The Phillies and Tigers might be great. The Rockies might be the worst team of all time. Aaron Judge might be an alien. We’ve learned a lot so far – but none of those things affect the day-to-day experience of watching baseball. That’s what I like about it so much – you can turn on a random game, completely ignore any of those overarching narratives, and still see something delightful. So this week, let’s celebrate the little things that don’t necessarily win games but do consistently bring a smile to my face. With my customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for his basketball column that inspired this one, let’s dive in.

1. Determination
I’ve always been fascinated by Nick Allen, who blends elite shortstop defense with a completely powerless approach to offense. That combination got him traded to the Braves this winter to play a utility infielder role, but he outplayed Orlando Arcia in spring training to claim the starting job, and he’s been running with it. Not on offense – his 68 wRC+ is both mortifying and a career high – but on defense, he’s never been better.

Allen’s defense is many things, but most importantly to me, it’s kinetic. He doesn’t give up on plays. He’s always moving. He’ll throw from any platform, any arm angle, jump or twist or slide to get more force behind it. He’s graceful around second base, but it’s a nervous kind of grace, a ballet dancer after four shots of espresso. And if something gets in his way, he’ll just run through it:

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Joe Ryan has developed into one of the better pitchers in the American League. So far this season, the 28-year-old Minnesota Twins right-hander has a 5-2 record to go with a 2.57 ERA, a 3.19 FIP, and a 29.8% strikeout rate over 63 innings. Moreover, he’s been rock solid since debuting with the AL Central club in September 2021. His career ledger includes a 3.76 ERA and a 3.77 FIP over 533 1/3 frames, with all but one of his 95 appearances coming as a starter. The lone exception was working five innings as a bulk reliever in the resumption of a suspended game earlier this month.

His prospect profile wasn’t particularly high. Drafted 210th overall by the Tampa Bay Rays out of California State Stanislaus in 2018, Ryan proceeded to pitch well in the minors, but he was largely overshadowed. When our 2020 Tampa Bay Top Prospects list was published in March of that year, Eric Longenhagen wrote that the Rays possessed “one of the, if not the, best farm systems in baseball.” He ranked Ryan 13th in the organization and assigned him a 45+ FV. The Rays subsequently sent Ryan to the Twins in their July 2021 trade for Nelson Cruz.

What did Ryan’s 2020 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out I shared some of what our lead prospect analyst wrote and asked Ryan to respond to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Stowers used to be part of that Baltimore Orioles position player prospect fire hose, but it’s OK if you forgot about him. Said fire hose has turned to a dribble as the Orioles’ fortunes have reversed. You also might have gotten him confused with Colton Cowser, which might be why the Orioles felt like they could trade him to Miami last summer for Trevor Rogers. (The other prospect in that trade, Connor Norby, has the same similar-name-mixup thing going with Coby Mayo. This town ain’t big enough for the two of us, etc.)

And if you still had your eye on Stowers after all that, you were probably put off when he hit .186/.262/.295 in 50 games for the Marlins after the trade. A better team, with a deeper talent pool, might’ve removed a 27-year-old outfielder with that batting line from its major league roster. But in Miami it’s more like a talent splash pad, so Stowers remains.

So much the better, because after 52 games, the former Stanford slugger is hitting .291/.362/.508. He has the same wRC+ as the much-celebrated Pete Crow-Armstrong, a higher wRC+ than Fernando Tatis Jr., Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and Bobby Witt Jr., three second-generation big leaguers with more than $1 billion in contracts among them. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Rockies’ historic series losing streak and their rest-of-season projections, an Orioles fan’s decision to get the name of Trevor Rogers tattooed on his butt, a Patrick Corbin innings-eating update, draft prospect Jace LaViolette’s dedication to staying in the lineup, the late-career struggles of Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, and Max Scherzer, the Yankees’ shame about their rings commemorating their 2024 pennant, and more.

Audio intro: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Rockies stat
Link to Opta interview
Link to Kamka tweet
Link to BaseRuns standings
Link to FG playoff odds
Link to ESPN SoS
Link to Baltimore Banner article
Link to Rogers tweet
Link to Kjerstad tweet
Link to best Orioles starts
Link to Rangers IP leaders
Link to LaViolette article 1
Link to LaViolette article 2
Link to LaViolette article 3
Link to LaViolette homers
Link to Kershaw article 1
Link to Kershaw article 2
Link to Yankees rings article

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As one-half of the majors’ most productive catching tandem, Carson Kelly doesn’t have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, but like the Dodgers’ Will Smith, he’s been incredibly productive so far, particularly with runners in scoring position. Unlike Smith, he doesn’t have a lengthy track record of success; in parts of 10 major league seasons with five teams, Kelly has not only never made an All-Star team, he’s only played 100 games in a season twice, and finished with a 100 wRC+ or better just twice. But thanks to some changes to his swing mechanics over the past couple of seasons, he’s in the midst of a breakout campaign for the NL Central-leading Cubs.

The 30-year-old Kelly is hitting .290/.412/.589 with nine homers and a 179 wRC+ in 131 plate appearances. He’s started 28 of the Cubs’ 56 games behind the plate, while Miguel Amaya started 25 before landing on the injured list this past weekend due to an oblique strain, an injury that interrupted a promising start to the 26-year-old backstop’s season. Though Kelly homered after replacing Amaya in Saturday’s loss to the Reds, he was limited to a single late-inning cameo over the next three days due to an unspecified illness before returning to the lineup on Wednesday night. Instead of recalling 21-year-old prospect Moisés Ballesteros, who spent five games DHing for the Cubs earlier this month but whose defense needs more refinement, the Cubs brought up Reese McGuire from Triple-A Iowa to replace Amaya on the roster; he started all three games while Kelly was ailing, homering twice in his season debut against the Reds. All told, the trio of Cubs catchers has been great offensively:

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No team has been caught stealing more than the Royals this year. As hard as it might be to believe, their 20 thwarted stolen base attempts are the most in the league. Their 70.1% stolen base success rate ranks 27th, as do their -2.1 weighted stolen base runs (wSB). This stands in stark contrast to what many think of as the Royals’ brand of baseball. After all, you’d have to go back to 2017 to find a full season in which the Royals didn’t rank among the top five AL teams in wSB, and all the way back to 2010 to find the last time their wSB was below league average. Thanks to players like Whit Merrifield, Jarrod Dyson, Adalberto Mondesi, Alcides Escobar and, most recently, Bobby Witt Jr., the Royals of the 2010s and 2020s developed a reputation as the most larcenous team in the league. From 2011-24, no team stole more bases, and no team racked up more wSB.

Kansas City’s stolen base supremacy hasn’t been limited to one side of the ball, either. From 2011-24, only two teams allowed fewer stolen bases than the Royals, and none caught would-be basestealers at a higher rate. According to the stolen base component of DRS (rSB), their catchers were twice as productive as any other team’s backstops in that period, while their pitchers were 12 runs better than the next-best team (the Diamondbacks) and more than three times as valuable as the next-best AL club (the Orioles). The Statcast numbers tell a similar story, although they only go back to 2016. From 2016-24, Kansas City catchers ranked second in both catcher and pitcher stealing runs. No other team placed within the top five in both metrics. So, you could make a pretty convincing case that preventing stolen bases is even more essential to the Royals’ brand of baseball than stealing bases, especially with the way things have gone in 2025. Their baserunners might be struggling to swipe bags like they did in the past, but their defense has taken control of the running game like never before. Read the rest of this entry »