Despite all the injuries the Mets are dealing with — including losing two key regulars to hamstring injuries in the same inning on Sunday and then two more players the next day — they still lead the NL East with a 20-17 record while the Braves lag behind and languish below .500 at 20-23. The latter’s hopes for a fourth straight division title have taken a significant hit over the past several days with their own losses of two starting pitchers. Mike Soroka, who had yet to appear for the team this year, underwent exploratory surgery on his inflamed right Achilles tendon on Monday, while Huascar Ynoa was diagnosed with a fracture in his right hand sustained when he punched a dugout bench in frustration on Sunday, thus interrupting a breakout season. Both will be out until at least the All-Star break, and quite possibly longer than that.

For Soroka, this is just the latest disappointment in a frustrating series of events that began last August 3. Three starts into the follow-up of a stellar rookie season in which he made the NL All-Star team and placed second in the NL Rookie of the Year voting, he tore his right Achilles, sidelining him for the remainder of the 2020 campaign. The Braves hoped that he would be available to join their rotation by mid-April, but after making just one Grapefruit League appearance and several in simulated games at the team’s alternate site, he was shut down due to shoulder discomfort and wasn’t cleared to resume throwing until late April.

After experiencing renewed discomfort in his surgically repaired Achilles during his recent workouts, Soroka had an MRI, and when that proved inconclusive, he underwent an exploratory procedure and clean-up by Dr. Robert Anderson, the surgeon who performed his initial repair. Via The Athletic’s David O’Brien, Anderson will reevaluate the pitcher in two-to-four weeks, “to determine if anything else needs to be done and when he might be able to resume his rehab schedule.” Read the rest of this entry »

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Why is it so easy to fill in the pool that the Washington Nationals own? That’s right — it has no depth. The Nats have relied on a stars-and-scrubs approach for years, hoping that their stellar headliners can offset some of the clunkers at the bottom of the roster. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but the central motivation behind their roster has been strikingly consistent in recent years.

In 2021, some of the stars aren’t shining as brightly as the team hoped. Juan Soto has missed three weeks with injury and is off to a slow, power-sapped start. Stephen Strasburg made only two starts before landing on the Injured List. Patrick Corbin has been disastrous. Offseason acquisitions Josh Bell and Kyle Schwarber, who were supposed to stabilize the lineup, are off to slow starts, Bell in particular. It’s not a great year for the boom/bust roster-building philosophy.

In a great stroke of irony, however, the Nats have found a solid bat that could lengthen their lineup and give Soto and Trea Turner some help. There are just two problems: they have nowhere to play him, and he still has some tinkering to do. Yadiel Hernandez looks like the kind of hitter that good teams need, an above-average bat summoned from the minors. Due to the team’s roster construction, he’s been banished to the bench. Should a spot open up, however, he might be the exact thing the team has been missing.
Read the rest of this entry »

This season, two sidearm relievers – the Rays’ Ryan Thompson and the Giants’ Tyler Rogers – are leaving hitters dumbstruck with their unusual pitching styles. Besides releasing the ball near their shoe tops, though, Thompson and Rogers have another thing in common.

Both pitchers wear jersey numbers far above what most baseball players would consider traditional. Thompson, who proudly wears No. 81, rocks a number that would fit in better with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers than the Rays. Meanwhile, Rogers has been the best pitcher out of the San Francisco bullpen with No. 71 on his back, and says that he likely would have ditched it had he not been so fortunate on the mound.

Thompson and Rogers discussed the process behind getting their numbers, how important they are to them now, and all of the strange experiences that have come from boldly wearing a number that so many others will not. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about scheduling their days around Shohei Ohtani and the latest examples of Ohtani excitement, Tony La Russa and unwritten rules vs. fun and the White Sox clubhouse, and Spencer Turnbull and no-hitter overload (before Corey Kluber’s no-no on Wednesday), then answer listener emails about whether Ohtani is the world’s best athlete, resting or playing Ohtani during All-Star week, whether not making the playoffs is too frequent a talking point when it comes to Ohtani and Mike Trout, whether the union could file a grievance over unwritten rules, flopping vs. framing and the possibility of punishing framing, and the median number of plate appearances in an MLB hitter’s career, plus a Stat Blast about Kyle Seager and the players who’ve participated in the most career no-nos.

Audio intro: Weezer, "1 More Hit"
Audio outro: Buzzcocks, "Why Can’t I Touch It?"

Link to other athletes on Ohtani
Link to Mike Petriello on Ohtani
Link to Brendan Gawlowski on La Russa
Link to Levi Weaver on Woodward
Link to Justin Choi on Turnbull
Link to Sheryl Ring on framing and cheating
Link to Stat Blast no-hitter data
Link to Bull Durham punch scene
Link to midseason managerial changes

 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Take a gander at the list of the most effective relievers in the majors thus far and you get a mix of known quantities and pop-up guys. That’s the nature of the beast. When evaluating relievers, we deal with small samples and given the talent of any major league pitcher, many have the ability to place atop a leaderboard over a short span of time.

Readers of this website are almost certainly aware of strikeout artists Aroldis Chapman, Josh Hader, James Karinchak, Craig Kimbrel, and Edwin Díaz. We also see familiar faces Ryan Pressly, Blake Treinen, Taylor Rogers, Mark Melancon, and Will Smith. César Valdez shows up here and is especially notable given his velocity, changeup usage and journey, which has included stops across MLB organizations, Taiwan, and Mexico. Matt Barnes is having a resurgent season. Giovanny Gallegos has been incredibly effective since he arrived in New York after he was part of the trade that sent Luke Voit to the Yankees. But today I want to focus on Emmanuel Clase. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The date is May 11, 2018. Kendall Graveman, a 27-year-old right-hander in the back of the Athletics’ rotation, is languishing through a bad season, and the lineup in front of him is as difficult as any he’s faced: the Yankees. Now in his fourth season with Oakland, expectations for him aren’t terribly high: He has an ERA- of 101 and FIP- of 107 over 407 innings across the past three seasons; he’s missed significant time with shoulder and oblique injuries; and he’s struck out under six batters per nine for his career. But he isn’t even living up to that standard anymore. His first six starts of 2018 have resulted in a grotesque 8.89 ERA, and there is a new ailment growing undeniable in his throwing arm.

Despite all of that, though, his Yankees start is going pretty well. His offense has spotted him a four-run lead, and with two out and a base open for Aaron Judge in the fifth, all he has to do is make sure he doesn’t throw him anything he can hit. He goes to his sinker, his go-to offering, and wills it to run off the plate inside. The pitch refuses.

Graveman would go on to escape with the win by the skin of his teeth. In six innings, he allows four runs, strikes out four, walks two, and gives up two homers. It might be his best start of the season. It’s also the last time he pitches in the majors for 808 days.

The date is now May 7, 2021, nearly three years after that Yankees start. Graveman is wearing a Mariners uniform and pitching in the ninth inning with a one-run lead and the tying run behind him at second base. He’s facing the Rangers, who are decidedly not the Yankees. But the guy at the plate, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, is no joke. Graveman throws a sinker, his go-to offering, and wills it to run off the plate inside. The pitch obeys.

Wait. Did that say 99?

Yep, sure did. Two pitches later, he throws Kiner-Falefa another sinker, and gets another whiff.

The next hitter, Charlie Culberson, suffers a similar fate. He also swings through two pitches in the at-bat; both of them are sliders, and the last one touches 90.

Read the rest of this entry »

The injury bug is biting all too often these days, and this week, it has taken a chunk out of Mike Trout’s season. Off to one of the best starts of his career, the 29-year-old center fielder strained his right calf in Monday night’s game, an injury that will sideline him for six to eight weeks — potentially the longest outage of his career — greatly reducing both the chances that the Angels will make the playoffs and that Trout will claim his fourth MVP award.

As if we needed more proof that the universe is a random and uncaring place, Trout suffered the injury doing something that turned out to be entirely routine and inconsequential: running the bases on a two-out popup by Jared Walsh. The play took place at the end of the first inning of the Angels’ game against Cleveland, after Trout had walked and taken second base on a wild pitch. You can see from the overhead video that by the time he reached third base, he was visibly limping:

Trout left the game, underwent an MRI on Tuesday, and was diagnosed with a Grade 2 calf strain. “I thought I got hit by a line drive,” he told reporters in describing his injury. “And then I got to the bag and then I said, ‘Man, something’s not right.’ And then I felt a pop and then I went down to the tunnel, made sure it wasn’t my Achilles, so I mean, I guess if there’s any positive coming out of it, it’s that it wasn’t my Achilles because that’s what scared me when it first happened. It was just a freak thing.” Read the rest of this entry »