Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Brandon Woodruff and the minor medical miracle of players returning from significant injuries to be big leaguers again, the likelihood of players becoming or repeating as all-stars, Clayton Kershaw as an honorary all-star, the end (for now) of the Pete Alonso Home Run Derby era and the Derby’s new blood, the Nationals firing their POBO and manager a week before picking first in the draft, new Statcast catcher-stance data, and the Blue Jays unseating the Yankees in the AL East, plus (1:29:38) postscript updates.

Audio intro: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Effectively Wild Theme (Pedantic)”
Audio outro: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Woodruff’s return
Link to Neil’s new ASG research
Link to Neil’s old ASG research
Link to Alonso news
Link to Derby participants
Link to Smith Rule 5 story
Link to Kershaw selection
Link to Rizzo text
Link to Nats WAR leaders
Link to Nats prospect list
Link to FG on the Nats
Link to catcher stance data
Link to Petriello on stances
Link to Trueblood on stances
Link to Trueblood on throwing
Link to Swanson on EW
Link to FG on the Yankees
Link to BaseRuns standings
Link to Kay kerfuffle 1
Link to Kay kerfuffle 2
Link to playoff odds changes
Link to team pitching clutch
Link to team pitching clutch
Link to batter tOPS+ w/RISP
Link to batter tOPS+ w/high lev
Link to pitcher tOPS+ w/RISP
Link to pitcher tOPS+ w/high lev
Link to Kaline book
Link to Scherzer on effort
Link to Opta Pirates stat
Link to Langs Pirates stat
Link to Stark on shutouts
Link to Mains on scoring
Link to EW YouTube playlist

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A bunch of interesting matchups with playoff implications dot the schedule this week. A hot streak heading into the All-Star break could be all that a fringe contender needs to decide to make a big push at the trade deadline later this month.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula.

All power rankings stats, including team records, are updated through Sunday’s games. The rest of the information below is current as of Tuesday morning.

…

Defying expectations, the Astros continue to put together win after win. Their list of players on the IL is currently longer than that of the Dodgers, but they completed a pretty comprehensive sweep of Los Angeles last weekend. Houston hasn’t lost a series since May 21 and has the best record in baseball by a pretty wide margin in that span. Meanwhile, the Dodgers were handed their first series loss since June 8. They have to be relieved that Max Muncy’s knee injury, which he suffered on Thursday, turned out to be much less serious than it initially looked. On the pitching side, Tyler Glasnow will likely be activated from the IL to start Wednesday’s game, giving the rotation some reinforcements at a critical juncture.

The Blue Jays! A nine-game winning streak has thrust the Jays into first place in the AL East, and they did it by sweeping the Yankees in a huge four-game series in Toronto, which included a joyous victory on Canada Day. The Jays followed that up with a weekend sweep of the Angels and yet another win Monday against the White Sox, extending their division lead to 3 1/2 games. With two more to play against Chicago and then a three-game set against the Athletics over the weekend, Toronto has a favorable schedule lined up before the All-Star break. If the Blue Jays manage to hang onto the AL East lead, they will start the second half of the season in first place for the first time since 2016.

The Tigers swept the Guardians last weekend to extend their record against divisional foes to 18-9. The rest of the AL Central has all sorts of problems right now, but Detroit’s ability to beat up its rivals is a big reason why it leads the division by a whopping 14 games.

The Cubs produced plenty of fireworks during their series win over the Cardinals last weekend; Chicago hit 11 home runs during the three-game set, producing two blowout victories on Friday and Sunday. Michael Busch hit four of them — three alone on Independence Day — and added 13 hits last week. After seeing the Brewers and Cardinals creep closer in the NL Central the last few weeks, the Cubs have jumped back out to a 3 1/2-game lead.

The Rays have now lost three straight series; they dropped two of three at home against the A’s to begin last week, followed by two walk-off losses in their three-game set against the Twins over the weekend. The big culprit has been the bullpen, which was responsible for all four losses last week. Across their last 10 games dating back to June 27, Tampa Bay relievers have a 7.96 ERA, the second-worst mark in the majors during that span. The Rays have a tough slate of games heading into the All-Star break: They lost the first game of their three-game series in Detroit on Monday, and then they finish off the first half with four games in Boston.

After a pretty rough patch to finish the month of June, the Mets got back on track with series wins over the Brewers and Yankees last week. Brandon Nimmo blasted a pair of grand slams and added a solo shot for good measure. New York is also expected to activate Kodai Senga and Sean Manaea from the IL during the final series of the first half, against the Royals in Kansas City, which should alleviate some of the team’s recent pitching issues.

As for Milwaukee, the Brewers finally activated Brandon Woodruff off the IL after multiple setbacks during his rehab this year; he was excellent in his first major league start since 2023, allowing just a single run across six innings against the Marlins while striking out eight. The Brew Crew started off this week with an impressive win over the Dodgers on Monday.

The Mariners held the Pirates scoreless across three games this weekend. It was the first time in franchise history that Seattle has shut out an opponent for an entire series. Over the last two weeks, Mariners starters have a 2.44 ERA, second best in baseball. It took George Kirby a little while to shake off the rust after missing the first eight weeks of the season with a shoulder injury, but he’s allowed just two runs across his last three starts; in seven starts since the beginning of June, he has a 2.68 ERA and a 2.74 FIP. On the offensive side of things, Randy Arozarena blasted six home runs last week, and Cal Raleigh collected his seventh multi-homer game of the season — the most in baseball — on Friday, extending his league-leading home run total to 35. Though Seattle remains 6 1/2 games behind the Astros in the AL West, it is two games up on the Red Sox for the final Wild Card spot. Only a game separates the Mariners and the Yankees, who hold the top Wild Card position; the two teams begin a three-game series in the Bronx on Tuesday.

Speaking of the Yankees, they just endured a nightmare of a week. Not only did they get swept in their four-game series with the Blue Jays, who knocked them out of first place, but they also dropped their weekend series against the Mets. If that wasn’t bad enough, Clarke Schmidt suffered a torn UCL and will likely need Tommy John surgery. While the offense that slumped for much of June has started to come around, the bullpen allowed a whopping 28 runs in 24 innings last week. This week’s series against the Mariners suddenly has some pretty major Wild Card implications, and then the first-place Cubs come to town to wrap up the first half.

The Giants and Padres entered play Monday tied for the final NL Wild Card spot, but their situations could change by the time this week is over. Both teams have a pretty difficult stretch of games ahead of the All-Star break, with each of them set to host the Phillies. San Francisco won the first game of its series against Philadelphia on Monday to pull a game ahead in the standings, as San Diego lost the opener of its four-game set against the Diamondbacks. After the Phillies leave town to play the Padres, the Giants will welcome the Dodgers for three games over the weekend. Meanwhile, despite losing both series last week, the Cardinals begin their final homestand of the first half trailing the Giants by just 1 1/2 games, and they have the bottom two teams in the NL East, the Nationals and Braves, on tap this week. Like St. Louis, the Reds also dropped their two series last week and have a fairly soft schedule coming up at home, against the Marlins and Rockies. After Monday’s loss to Miami, Cincinnati is 3 1/2 games behind San Francisco. Even Arizona, which is not in this tier, is within five games of the Giants. There isn’t much separating these five teams, so even if the standings flip some this week, the battle for that last Wild Card spot should last all the way through the summer.

Let’s play good news/bad news with a quartet of players from the Rangers and Angels. Good news: Since going 4-for-4 with a home run on May 30, Marcus Semien has posted a 167 wRC+, raising his season line all the way up to 91. Bad news: The Rangers demoted Josh Jung to Triple-A last week after he slumped to a 19 wRC+ in June. Good news: Jo Adell smashed 11 home runs in June and currently has a 129 wRC+ on the season. Bad news: Mike Trout is posting his lowest slugging percentage (.444) since his 2011 cup of coffee. We can caveat the Trout bad news some because his underlying batted ball metrics look pretty good, and despite his relative woes, he’s still running a 120 wRC+. On Monday, the Angels eked out a walk-off victory in the first game of a four-game set against the Rangers.

Regression has come hard for the Guardians. On June 1, they were 31-26 and held the second Wild Card spot, though their run differential was -18. Since then, they have the worst record in the AL, a stretch that included a 10-game losing streak that was finally snapped on Monday. Even after the losing streak, Cleveland’s actual record is three wins ahead of its run differential and four wins ahead of where BaseRuns thinks the team should be. There could be more room to fall this summer.

The Pirates are coming off an absolute yo-yo of a week. They did not allow a run in their three-game sweep of the Cardinals, and then they didn’t score a run when they were swept in three games by the Mariners. It was the first time in major league history that a team won three straight shutouts and then lost three straight shutouts. Pittsburgh had actually been playing pretty well ahead of that series in Seattle; the Bucs had scored 30 runs in their sweep of the Mets two weekends ago and scored 13 against the Cardinals. The Pirates finally scored again — three times, in fact — in their series opener against the Royals on Monday, but they allowed Kansas City to score nine runs.

Injuries to the Braves pitching staff have continued to pile up: Last week, Spencer Schwellenbach hit the IL with a fractured elbow. Making matters worse, a few key contributors have been stuck in season-long slumps: Ozzie Albies has been a shell of himself this season, entering Tuesday with a 72 wRC+, and Michael Harris II has been even worse, at 48. If fans want a silver lining, Atlanta activated Jurickson Profar off the restricted list on Wednesday after his 80-game PED suspension, and he hit home runs in his first two games back.

On May 31, the Nationals were 28-30 and looked like they could be making a sneaky run for the final NL Wild Card spot. They’ve gone 9-23 since then, and after their miserable June and rough start to July, they fired manager Dave Martinez and president of baseball operations Mike Rizzo on Sunday night. It’s a massive change for the organization — Rizzo was promoted to GM ahead of the 2009 season, and Martinez had been in his position since 2018, and both navigated the franchise to its only World Series championship in 2019 — and it also throws a bit of chaos into the near future. Washington holds the first overall pick in this year’s draft, exactly one week after the firing, and the trade deadline is less than a month away. That’s a lot for interim general manager Mike DeBartolo to tackle.

I owe George Springer an apology. Back in March, I wrote an article with a very simple premise: If Springer got off to a terrible start, the Blue Jays needed to be ready to sit him down. He was godawful at the beginning of spring training, he’d been a below-average player for two seasons in a row, and ZiPS saw him as the seventh-best outfielder on the team. Not the seventh-best defensive outfielder; ZiPS projected that Springer would put up 2.2 WAR per 600 plate appearances, a bounce-back campaign, but still worse than the projections of six other Blue Jays outfielders. I wasn’t saying he was washed or anything, but I was concerned that Springer might deliver more of the same, and that the Blue Jays would keep running him out there even though they had better options available. I needn’t have worried.

“I feel great, actually,” Springer told MLB.com’s Keegan Matheson while he was putting up those abysmal spring training numbers. “For me, it’s about the process. It’s not about the results. I want to make sure that I’m swinging at the right pitches and getting my swing off. Yeah, obviously everyone would like to see the ball hit the grass, but for me specifically, I’m working on the mechanical side of it.” Then the season started, and Springer went out and backed those words up. He’s having a renaissance. A couple months shy of his 36th birthday, he already has 1.8 WAR, and his 143 wRC+ is the best mark he’s put up since he was a fresh-faced 30-year-old Astro in 2020. He’s on pace for his highest home run total since 2019, and he’s running a career-best 12.4% walk rate. So Springer is walking more and hitting for more power, and because of a .303 BABIP, his best since 2016, he’s also running his best batting average in years. How is he doing all this? Read the rest of this entry »

Starting pitchers prepare for games in three-stage fashion. A few days after taking the mound, they throw a bullpen session under the watchful eye of the pitching coach, typically with a Trackman recording each throw. At the start of every series, there is a pitchers’ meeting with all arms present, as well as the catchers and pitching coaches. On the day of a start, the pitcher will go over that day’s game plan with the catchers and coaches.

And then there are the talks pitchers have among themselves. While informal, they can likewise play a meaningful role in preparedness. Every time a hurler takes the hill, he brings with him knowledge gleaned from his peers. That was a big part of what I was interested in when I approached three starters — Lucas Giolito, Kevin Gausman, and Ryan Pepiot — to learn how they get ready for an outing from an information perspective.

Here are excerpts from my conversations with the pitchers:

———

PRE-SERIES AND PRE-START MEETINGS

Giolito: “You go over a lot of things in the pre-series meeting. You go over guys who like to run — stealing bases and things like that — and you obviously go over the hitters. Considering that you have a bunch of dudes in the room that have wildly different stuff and attack plans, that’s more surface level. You’re not going down the line and saying, ‘This is how we’re going to attack this guy,’ because we’re all different. That’s for when you have your pre-start meeting.

“In the pre-start meeting — that’s with the coaching staff and the catchers — we go over each hitter, talking about strengths, weaknesses, and attack plans. The attack plans are based on the individual pitcher’s stuff.” Read the rest of this entry »

On last Monday’s episode of the Rates and Barrels podcast, Derek VanRiper raised a curious contradiction. “[Riley Greene is] first percentile in squared-up percentage, but 97th percentile in barrel rate, which — I’m sure there’s an explanation, I don’t know what it is just yet.” In response, Eno Sarris asked, “How can he barrel it without squaring it up?” It was a great question. In colloquial use, a squared-up ball is synonymous with a barreled ball. So what’s going on here, exactly?

The first thing to know: A squared-up ball is not necessarily a well-hit ball, as Davy Andrews highlighted when these stats were first made public last June. To understand why, one must first become acquainted with the Statcast definition of squared up. The MLB glossary entry for squared-up rate defines it thusly: “A swing’s squared-up rate tells us how much of the highest possible exit velocity available (based on the physics related to the swing speed and pitch speed) a batter was able to obtain – it is, at its simplest, how much exit velocity did you get as a share of how much exit velocity was possible based on your swing speed and the speed of the pitch.” If a hitter generates 80% of their possible exit velocity on a given swing and the ball is put in play, the batted ball is considered squared up.

We might quibble over the simplicity of that definition. In any case, as Davy showed, squared-up balls can be hit at super low speeds — if all it means is that a hitter channelled 80% of the potential exit velocity, then 80% of a half-swing is not very much exit velocity.

It’s also possible to do damage without making frequent flush contact; Greene shows us how. As Ben Clemens wrote just a couple of weeks ago, Greene is posting yet another excellent offensive campaign despite one of the higher strikeout rates among qualified hitters. He’s doing it unconventionally, swinging a ton in early counts to maximize damage. He’s also unconventional in another sense: He barrels the ball a ton while hardly ever squaring it up.

Part of the explanation for how this works is tied to the nature of swinging hard. When the bat speed statistics first dropped, it immediately became clear that there is a strong negative relationship between bat speed and the ability to square the ball up, at least by the Statcast definition. Click over to the bat tracking leaderboard, and the first thing you’ll see is this image, which shows the negative correlation between these two variables:

That’s no surprise. By the Statcast definition of a squared-up ball, slow swingers will always come out on top, because swinging slower allows for greater barrel accuracy. But it’s not all bad news for hard swingers. They also tend to produce the most valuable type of batted ball: a barrel.

Naturally, bat speed is correlated — positively — with barrel rate. A barrel, by the Statcast definition, is any type of batted ball where the expected batting average is at least .500 and the expected slugging percentage is at least 1.500. Barrels tend to be clustered in a pretty narrow exit velocity/launch angle range, somewhere north of 100 mph in terms of exit velocity and between 15 and 40 degrees or so of launch angle:

As the scatterplot below shows, the relationship between bat speed and barrel rate is extremely tight:

Greene’s average bat speed — 75.2 mph — is in the 91st percentile, so on some level, a high barrel rate and a low squared-up rate is to be expected. Even so, the spread between these two metrics is striking. His barrel rate is higher than his squared-up rate! Only one other hitter has a lower squared-up-minus-barrel rate — Aaron Judge. And that gives a hint into how, exactly, Greene is pulling this off.

Judge racks up an obscene number of barrels. Already, he’s mashed 60 this year, good for a 25.9% barrel rate. Like Greene, his squared-up rate is low — not as low, but comfortably a standard deviation below the mean. But also like Greene, Judge is amazing at converting his squared-up balls into barrels.

Nobody comes particularly close to Judge in this metric. Nearly 40% of his squared-up balls are converted into barrels, by far the highest rate in the league. (The league average is 13.6%.) As you might have guessed, Greene also excels here, ranking fifth among all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances:

So that’s the first part of this equation. Greene might not square the ball up that often, but when he does, it’s frequently crushed. The other part of the equation? Greene hits a ton of foul balls.

Greene’s 315 foul balls rank fifth among all hitters. When Greene makes contact with the ball, it goes foul 56% of the time. That mark ranks 11th out of all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances; besides Cal Raleigh, nobody else in Greene’s squared-up-to-barrel cohort fouls off nearly as many balls:

All of those foul balls — in addition to his seventh percentile whiff rate — contribute to the squared-up percentage denominator, sinking Greene’s squared-up rate to the very bottom of qualified hitters. Importantly, foul balls are not part of the barrel rate denominator. The barrel rate that shows up on the Savant player page popsicles is a measure of barrels per batted ball event. A bunch of foul balls do nothing to affect a hitter’s barrel rate, but they’ll go a long way toward tanking a squared-up rate.

It isn’t necessarily intuitive to think that a hitter could be so good at barreling the ball and so bad at squaring it up. But breaking it down in this fashion, I think it starts to clarify this ostensible conundrum. Barrels are hard to come by. Even Judge, the barrel GOAT, hits one just over a quarter of the time he puts a ball in play. To be a barrel king like Judge or Greene, you don’t need to crush that many baseballs, at least on an absolute basis. But you better make sure that when the ball is in play, it gets smushed.

More than anything, I think these two data points paint a compelling picture of the modern hitter. Greene, perhaps more than any other hitter, goes for broke, almost like the anti-Luis Arraez. His swing tilt is the steepest in the sport. He mishits a bunch of pitches. He whiffs a ton. But when he connects, he does damage. And even though those damage events are relatively infrequent, they’re valuable enough to make him one of the better hitters in baseball.

Last night, exactly one week before they’re slated to make the first overall pick in the 2025 draft, the Nationals fired president of baseball operations Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez. After ESPN’s Jeff Passan broke the news, the team announced assistant general manager Mike DeBartolo will serve as interim GM. Bench coach Miguel Cairo was named interim manager this afternoon.

Rumors that Rizzo and Martinez might finally be on the hot seat had made the rounds over the past several weeks, but the timing is less than ideal. According to Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, the last time a team fired its GM before the trade deadline was when the Twins got rid of Terry Ryan on July 18, 2016. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale provided an explanation, reporting that both Rizzo and Martinez had contract options for 2026, with mid-July deadlines for those decisions. Even for a franchise that just fired its POBO and manager, it’s a bad look to let money dictate the timing of the decision when so much is at stake. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s never a good time to lose a starting pitcher, but doing so when you’ve lost six of your last seven games and have relinquished first place in your division is an especially unwelcome happenstance. This is what the New York Yankees are currently experiencing, as Clarke Schmidt, who was placed on the injured list due to forearm tightness after an early exit from his Thursday start, will likely undergo Tommy John surgery. With a 3.32 ERA, 3.90 FIP, and 1.2 WAR in 14 starts, Schmidt appeared to be headed towards his best season in the majors, but short of a miracle, he’ll now be out until well into the 2026 season at least. Coming just as the offense appeared to be recovering from its June swoon, the Yankees’ trade deadline to-do list may have just gotten a bit longer.

Six weeks ago, the Yankees were in a strong, though not insurmountable, position at the top of the AL East. No fan should start making travel plans based on a seven-game divisional lead in late May, but it’s about as strong a position as a team can hope to have in a good division. In his May 28 start, Schmidt threw six shutout innings en route to a 1-0 victory over the Angels, giving the Yankees that a seven-game lead (their seasonal high-water mark) and a 35-20 overall record. Since then, the Yankees have gone 14-21, losing 11 games in the standings relative to the current first-place team, the Blue Jays.

The disappearance of the offense was a big part of the Yankees’ slump, at least until the last week or so. On the whole, the offense dropped to a .718 OPS in June after posting an .812 OPS through the end of May, a mark that was second only to the Dodgers. Half of the team’s plate appearances in June were made by players with a wRC+ under 90 for the month, including key early-season performers Paul Goldschmidt and Ben Rice, as well as a returning Giancarlo Stanton. The pitching remained solid despite the team’s 13-14 month, with the rotation combining for a 3.19 ERA and a slightly less exciting 3.79 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Since 2021, Ke’Bryan Hayes is the leader in OAA among all infielders. As one of the best defenders in the sport, his floor is very high. Even with his career 87 wRC+, he has still been worth about 3 WAR per 162 games. If he could be a consistently average offensive player, he’d be one of the most valuable players at his position. This is a story we all know. With his name swirling in trade rumors, you have to imagine other teams are thinking about the possibility more so now than in the past. His issues stem from his suboptimal swing path, and if he’s traded, that will be what his new hitting coach tries to fix.

In the last calendar year (459 plate appearances), Hayes has a 60 wRC+. That is bad! But despite those struggles, it’s not like he is completely lacking offensive ability. His bat speed is only a little below average. His strikeout and whiff rates are better than league average over the past three seasons. He hits the ball hard more often than not, and he chases at about an average rate. Those are all things you could work with if you’re trying to manufacture a league average hitter. But if you’re doing all this and your path is rarely working in an ideal direction, you’ll always have limitations on what you do when you actually make contact. Read the rest of this entry »