Yesterday, I dove into the wonderful world of Nick Pivetta’s middle-middle magic. It’s pretty crazy to think about. Pitches down the middle shouldn’t lead to a huge batch of called strikeouts, and yet opposing hitters can’t help themselves when Pivetta is on the mound. This two-strike dominance is fueling Pivetta’s best season as a professional. Obviously it is – all those free strikeouts can’t be bad.

When I see such an unexpected and excellent tactic, my mind naturally goes to the exact opposite of it. If Pivetta is getting ahead by doing this, surely some hitter must be getting victimized by having it done to them. If there are standouts in acquiring called strikeouts, surely there are players particularly susceptible to them. So let’s look at the list of the hitters with the most called strikeouts on middle-middle pitches, hereafter “meatball punchouts” with a hat tip to editor Matt Martell:

Wait, what? These are mostly good hitters! The anti-Pivetta being Gavin Lux is one thing – Lux is having a solid but not spectacular season. But Shohei Ohtani? Elly De La Cruz? The hitters who are worst at the thing Pivetta is best at are mostly great. Let’s look at it a different way:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about torpedo bats (remember them?), Cody Bellinger’s good year and confounding career, recent comments by Craig Counsell and Aaron Boone, the impending call-up of Bubba Chandler and the recent arrival of Owen Caissie, the weirdest things about being a pro baseball player, a zombie-runner-induced ending to a pitcher’s duel, and Alien: Earth as a baseball show.

Audio intro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
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Here’s Nick Pivetta’s signature pitch:

Or maybe it’s this one, complete with a skip-off:

OK, the man just likes skipping:

You might wonder why all of his signature pitches are tossed down the middle for called strikeouts. That’s because Pivetta is the league leader in a statistic I didn’t know I loved until I looked it up: called strikeouts on pitches right down the pipe. He’s the 2025 leader. He’s the leader over the past five years, in fact. Keep your reality-distorting sweepers and letter-high four-seamers; Pivetta gets the job done more simply.

This feels like an impossible skill to cultivate. You hear all the time about pitchers going into a lab somewhere and adding velocity or spin. New pitches? They’re a dime a dozen these days. A starter who hasn’t added a sweeper and cutter sticks out like a sore thumb now that technology and training make it easier than ever to branch out. Every year, the sliders get slidier, the curveballs get curvier, and the fastballs get faster. Meanwhile, Pivetta throws 94-mph “heaters” down the middle for strike three. How?? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Kenley Jansen did his best to make life harder for his former team. Pitching for the Angels against the Dodgers in Anaheim, the 37-year-old closer secured the final three outs in a 7-4 victory on Monday, August 11. He gave up the go-ahead run in the ninth inning of a tied game on Tuesday by allowing a breathtaking solo homer to Shohei Ohtani, but the Angels came back, tying the score in the bottom of the ninth and winning in the 10th. On Wednesday, Jansen secured a sweep for the Angels by retiring Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Will Smith in order. The loss knocked the Dodgers out of first place for the first time since August 27.

That the Dodgers have retaken the top spot doesn’t detract from what’s been a banner season for Jansen. Pitching for the sub-.500 Angels — his third team in four years since departing the Dodgers in free agency — he’s posted a 2.68 ERA, his lowest mark since 2021. While his 24.6% strikeout rate is a career low and his 4.01 FIP is just off a career high, he’s notched 23 saves in 24 attempts and is now fourth all-time at 470, eight saves shy of Lee Smith’s 478, which stood as the major league record from late 1997 until Trevor Hoffman surpassed it in late 2006. Smith and Hoffman are now in the Hall of Fame, and Jansen has solidified his position as the next reliever due for serious consideration for Cooperstown. Not only does he have a legitimate shot at becoming the third pitcher to reach 500 saves following Hoffman (who finished with 601) and Mariano Rivera (603), but he’s closing in on 2025 enshrinee Billy Wagner’s no. 6 ranking in Reliever JAWS (R-JAWS).

Admittedly, relief pitching is a strange place to start my annual Hall of Fame progress series, but for reasons that will soon become apparent, opening this rundown with the starting pitchers made less sense, and when I began writing this roundup, Jansen’s jump in JAWS surprised me as much as that of any player. At the end of 2023, Jansen was tied for 14th with Craig Kimbrel, but he climbed to 10th by the end of ’24 and is now seventh, closing in on Wagner. So we’re beginning here; in this batch, I’ll get to the starters and catchers as well. Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics are through Monday, August 18. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan India was highly regarded when our 2019 Cincinnati Reds Top Prospects list was published in December 2018. Drafted fifth overall out of the University of Florida earlier that summer, India was ranked fourth in the system, with Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel assigning him a 50 FV. Two months later, the reigning SEC Player of the Year came in at no. 75 in our Top 100.

He’s gone on to have a solid career. India made his major league debut on Opening Day 2021, proceeded to win Rookie of the Year honors, and he has since been a lineup mainstay in both Cincinnati and Kansas City. This past November, the Reds traded India to the Royals, along with Joey Wiemer, in exchange for Brady Singer. Assuming more of a super-utility role with his new team, India’s performance has taken a considerable step back. After putting up 2.9 WAR last year, he’s batting .237/.324/.352 with eight home runs, an 89 wRC+, and -0.3 WAR, though he’s been much better since the start of August (113 wRC+). Over four-plus big league seasons, India has 71 home run, a 104 wRC+, and 7.9 WAR.

What did his December 2018 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 former prospect-analyst duo wrote and asked India to respond to it.

———

“India was a well-known prep prospect in South Florida, but the combination of a solid, but not spectacular, tool set and seven-figure asking price sent him to Florida.”

“That would have been 2015, 10 years ago,” replied India, who spent his prep years at American Heritage School in Delray Beach. “I wasn’t mentally ready, I guess. I wanted to go to college, learn how to be on my own, learn how to be a man. So, it was really about personal development. There was no baseball involved. It was more that I wanted to grow up and enjoy college. Live life.”

“His first two years were about as expected; India got regular at-bats but didn’t have any performative breakthroughs. In his draft year, India lost bad weight and added some strength, made some offensive adjustments, and exploded, torching the best conference in the country.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Tucker needs to learn how to manage expectations better. He’s having a good season on paper: .261/.374/.447 with 18 home runs. He has a 131 wRC+, more walks than strikeouts, and 25 stolen bases in 27 attempts. His WAR, 3.9, is a tenth behind Kyle Schwarber, who’s getting MVP chatter, and two tenths ahead of Juan Soto.

But right now, the Cubs star is really going through it, and nobody is happy.

Tucker is 2-for-25 in his past seven games and just 8-for-54 in August. He hasn’t hit a home run in 31 days, and most incredibly, his last extra-base hit of any kind came in July. Tucker is taking it about as well as you’d expect; on Sunday, he didn’t run out a groundball to first base, and on Monday he slammed his helmet into the ground in frustration after flying out to end the eighth inning of a 7-0 loss to Milwaukee. Both incidents drew boos from the Wrigley Field fans. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the sound of a batter not getting hit by a pitch? I ask because as hit-by-pitch rates climbed over the years (and kept climbing), we writers have made lots of noise about them. In 2007, Steve Treder published an article called “The HBP Explosion (That Almost Nobody Seems to Have Noticed)” in The Hardball Times. After that, everybody noticed. We’ve seen articles about rising hit-by-pitch rates here at FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, the Baseball Research Journal, MLB.com, The Athletic, SportsNet, FiveThirtyEight, the Wall Street Journal — even the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine. The venerable Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus has been writing about it (and writing about it and writing about) ever since he was the promising Rob Mains of the FanGraphs Community Blog. Tom Verducci wrote about the “hit-by-pitch epidemic” for Sports Illustrated in 2021, then wrote a different article with a nearly identical title just two months ago. There’s good reason for all this noise, and in order to show it to you, I’ll reproduce the graph Devan Fink made when he wrote about this topic in 2018:

Hit-by-pitches have been rising since the early 1980s, and despite a decline in the 1970s, you could argue that they’ve been rising ever since World War II. Devan’s graph ends in 2018, but the numbers kept on going up — for a while, anyway. Here’s a graph that shows the HBP rate in recent years. After a couple decades of sounding the HBP alarm, it’s time for us to unring that bell (which I assume, without having looked it up, is an easy thing to do):

Congratulations everybody, we’ve done it! We’ve ended the epidemic. The HBP rate has fallen in four of the last five seasons. It’s safe to leave your home again. You can enter a public space without fear that you’ll be bombarded with stray baseballs. Rob Mains can finally take a vacation. Tom Verducci can finally take a deep breath. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the commissioner’s power to dictate conversations about baseball, realignment possibilities, whether league distinctions still matter, how much they have to banter about, Victor Robles’s bat throw and suspension, the latest Tommy Pham flare-up, a Ketel Marte controversy, the Brewers, the Blue Jays, and what teams’ styles of play represent, a two-pitch inning, the promotion of Samuel Basallo and the Orioles’ future at catcher, Zack Wheeler’s injury and the Phillies’ unaccustomed uncertainty with Wheeler and Aaron Nola, Bryan Woo’s six-inning streak, Kyle Tucker’s slump, Ceddanne Rafaela’s positional splits, three Seymours, and Cody Ponce’s KBO dominance.

Audio intro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”

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The Boston Red Sox addressed their hole at first base over the weekend, coming to terms with free agent Nathaniel Lowe, formerly of the Washington Nationals. Lowe has struggled in 2025, hitting .216/.292/.373 for an 86 wRC+ and -0.8 WAR, his worst showing as a professional.

I don’t think that anyone — not even a member of Lowe’s family — would object too strongly to the declaration that Lowe has had an abysmal season. Lowe has never actually been a star, but with a .274/.359/.432 four-year run from 2021 to 2024, averaging 2.7 WAR per season, he had at least established himself in that Serviceable B+ First Baseman category. The end of Lowe’s time in Texas came quickly, and after a Silver Slugger in 2022, a Gold Glove and a World Series ring in 2023, and another solid offensive campaign in 2024, he found himself tradable for pitching help (lefty Robert Garcia) after the team acquired Jake Burger for reasons that still confound me. The Nats were making noise about being competitive in 2025, and there was a reasonable expectation that Lowe would improve the position without requiring a major long-term commitment. Read the rest of this entry »

At the All-Star break, Michael Harris II was heading for his worst season as a professional. His solid defensive skills couldn’t make up for his woeful 47 wRC+, a .210/.234/.317 batting line that had neither on-base skills nor power. Between a league-low walk rate and only six homers, Harris had “accumulated” -0.8 WAR, a shockingly low number for the Braves standout. Only two Rockies, Brenton Doyle and Michael Toglia, had worse numbers.

Since the All-Star break, Michael Harris II has been one of the best hitters in baseball. In a mere 30 games, he’s racked up 2.2 WAR thanks almost entirely to his offensive prowess. He’s hitting a bruising .398/.413/.732, good for a 217 wRC+. That power outage? Forgotten. Harris has more home runs since the break (nine) than before it. Only two players in baseball – Nick Kurtz and Shea Langeliers – have a better wRC+ over that time span, or more WAR.

It can be hard to hold two opposing ideas in your head, particularly when those two ideas are “Michael Harris can’t hit” and “Michael Harris is one of the best hitters in baseball.” One purposefully silly way of saying it: Harris has accumulated 158% of his 2025 WAR in the second half of the season. Another wild thing about this ridiculous tear: Between when I filed this piece on Monday afternoon and when it was published on Tuesday, Harris went 4-for-4 with a home run and gained 16 points of wRC+ and 0.3 WAR. For the rest of this article, the numbers I use are updated through the end of play on Sunday.

It’s unquestionably true that almost anything can happen for 100 plate appearances, but this is stretching the limits of “almost anything.” You don’t run a 200 wRC+ for a month on accident. You don’t run a 47 wRC+ for half a season on accident either. I had to investigate. Read the rest of this entry »