If you were only looking at the top-line numbers that Roki Sasaki has posted through 10 starts — a 4.59 ERA and a 5.04 FIP in 51 innings — you could be forgiven for thinking that the 24-year-old righty had made little progress since last year’s abbreviated rookie season. At times, it has seemed as though he might be better off ironing out his mechanics and approach in Triple-A or in the bullpen, where he found some success last fall after missing four and a half months with a shoulder impingement. While Sasaki’s early-season starts brought to mind last year’s struggles, a little over a month ago he made a change to his repertoire, adding a second offspeed pitch to his mix. Since then, he’s pitched more effectively thanks not only to the new offering, but also to better command and velocity.

Sasaki’s improvement has come at a particularly opportune time for the Dodgers, as they’re once again carrying on without either Tyler Glasnow or Blake Snell. Glasnow left his May 6 start after just one inning due to back spasms and still hasn’t been cleared to throw off a mound yet, while Snell didn’t make his season debut until May 9 due to shoulder soreness, then lasted just three innings before discomfort in his elbow forced him from his start. He was diagnosed with loose bodies in the elbow and underwent surgery using the same NanoNeedle Scope 2.0 procedure that Dr. Neal ElAttrache had just used on Tarik Skubal. The new version of the surgery is aimed at accelerating recovery time, but Snell has been moved to the 60-day injured list nonetheless, and can’t return until early July. Increasingly, it appears Glasnow won’t be back before July either.

Sasaki’s new pitch is a splitter, but it’s not the same splitter he threw last season, and it’s not entirely new; it bears more resemblance to the one he threw in NPB with the Chiba Lotte Marines and in the 2023 World Baseball Classic for Team Japan than it does to its immediate predecessor. Statcast has redefined the offspeed pitch he threw last year as a forkball and is tracking the two pitches separately. Sasaki throws his splitter about five miles an hour faster than his forkball, and relatively speaking, it gets a bit more rise and a lot more arm-side run. Since introducing the new pitch — which I’ll get into more below — he’s lasted at least five innings in all six of his starts, something he’d done in just four out of eight starts last year and one out of his first four this year. Read the rest of this entry »

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth 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 we 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 »

Not sure if PokéBallpark is the game for you? Follow me! I’m about to play the demo, and I hereby grant you permission to roam the land with me!

Our character has just woken up as an amorphous blob. It’s unclear who or where we are. First, we’re given a device for storing all of our PokéBallKnowledge, it’s called a FanGraph. Our FanGraph reveals that we are a versatile creature who inhabits the world of baseball.

Our character (whom I’ve named RedAsh, I hope you’re cool with that) has a transformation ability that enables it to quickly pick up moves from other PokéBallers and take on the role of GM, player, or coach as needed. And it will be needed because the baseball world is looking dire. PokéBallers are nowhere to be found. Once lively stadiums are now deserted ruins. The only sign of life is the flickering screen of a videoboard in the distance. Read the rest of this entry »

Emboldened by my success in predicting breakout seasons for Liam Hicks and Xavier Edwards, I’ve decided to rebrand myself as the world’s greatest booster of short Marlins guys.

I’ve been a Max Meyer fan since long before he became a Marlin. I love undersized hard-throwing college right-handers. I love plus athletes from unfashionable Midwestern schools. I love guys with a breaking ball and an edge. Meyer was a freshman on the 2018 Minnesota team that gave the eventual national champion, a totally loaded Oregon State club, everything it could handle. (I’ve mentioned the 2018 Corvallis Super Regional previously, as the center fielder on that Minnesota team grew up to be Sketchy Ben from Love Is Blind.)

By 2020, Meyer was the no. 3 overall pick and top college pitcher in his draft class. Not that I expect any of you to remember my thoughts on draft prospects from six years ago, but here’s what I wrote on draft night: “Meyer isn’t the best player in this draft, but he’s my favorite.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure whether it’s called the Effectively Wild rule or not, but I learned a fun rule of thumb from that podcast: Statistical samples are only stable after Mike Trout leads the league in WAR. Until then, it’s still too early. This rule made more sense a decade ago, when Trout was the clear best player in the sport, but the sentiment applies today. When Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Bobby Witt Jr. are near the top of the leaderboard, it’s probably been long enough to believe the statistics. If they aren’t, it’s too early.

Ohtani and Witt are indeed atop the combined WAR leaderboards, but Judge isn’t even in the top 30. And the rest of the names are kind of strange, too, particularly if you limit yourself to the hitter’s leaderboard and leave Ohtani’s singular two-way nature behind. Oh, there’s a Dodger in the top five, but it’s Andy Pages. There’s a Yankee, but it’s Ben Rice. Two rookies are in the top 10, and they’re both behind Xavier Edwards. It’s an odd leaderboard, no matter how you look at it, and it got me wondering two things. First, is that Mike Trout rule generally true? And second, what does it say about 2026 if so?

I settled on one thing first: no two-way players. That might annoy the Ohtani fans out there, but I had two good reasons. One, he’s been around for a while now, so it’s not like this is some special consideration that only applies to 2026. Second, pulling all these numbers is hard work. I didn’t want to handle corner cases in every year, so I stuck with the pure hitting leaderboard. Given that I wanted to look at the whole 21st century and see how often hitters stay atop the heap from one year to (early in) the next, I opted for a simple definition and only looked at hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

Corbin Carroll is the best left-on-left hitter in baseball right now.

It’s been a tremendous year for Carroll, however you want to split up the data. He has a 152 wRC+. He has 2.6 WAR. It’s looking like his best-ever season — a perfect follow-up to his best-ever season last year.

That Carroll appears to be taking another step forward in 2026 isn’t quite newsworthy. But the way he’s doing it certainly is:

Carroll is all of a sudden crushing lefties. He was just average against them the first few years of his career. Last year, he was fairly good in left-on-left matchups, though that improvement seems to stem more from his overall growth at the plate rather than a specific step forward against lefties. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds went 10-17 during the month of May, dropping from first in the NL Central to last, making this a terrible time for them to lose their most important player. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what happened on Monday, when shortstop Elly De La Cruz landed on the injured list for the first time in his career after straining his hamstring on Sunday. Now in his fourth big league season, De La Cruz was hitting .280/.346/.509 with 12 homers and a 134 wRC+ in 58 games, and looked to be on his way to making his third consecutive All-Star team. His 2.7 WAR was enough to lead all National League shortstops and rank second in the majors at the position, behind Bobby Witt Jr.. Minor league infielder Edwin Arroyo was called up from Triple-A Louisville to take De La Cruz’s place on the roster.

While it’s never good news to see your superstar miss time, the silver lining is this is not a season-risking injury. After limping while running the bases on a fifth-inning single on Sunday against the Braves, De La Cruz immediately came out of the game and underwent an MRI the next day. Manager Terry Francona described the results as “kind of between a Grade 1 and a Grade 2” strain. For those without the weirdly specific knowledge of muscle strain terminology, Grade 1 typically refers to a mild strain and Grade 2, a partial tear. So this is more than just a “Rub some dirt on it and get back in the game” thing, but less than a “Crap, do we have to look up Jose Iglesias’ phone number?” diagnosis. The initial prognosis is that De La Cruz will be out for two-to-four weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

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