Eric A Longenhagen: Hey from the shade at Scottsdale Stadium as the Zags and Dons stretch for this morning’s elimination game. I’m here to see Karsten Sweum and Mikey Bell, among others. Sorry my attention will be divided but it’s conference tourney time and we’ve all just gotta do what we’ve gotta.
12:45
liljebbie10: One other question, with Esmerlyn Valdez coming up today, what are you thoughts on him? What is his upside for the Pirates?
12:46
Eric A Longenhagen: I updated his tool grades and report on The Board and on his player page. Here is a brief version:
12:48
Eric A Longenhagen: Selectivity, power, less pull ability than last year, really late on a lot of heaters so far. Bad defense. 45. Nice piece, 5-thru-7 hole bat with OBP and power. I don’t believe in the year over year improvement in his K% and still think he’s a 40 contact hitter and barely playable on defense, so not a true “everyday” guy, but still a contributing piece.
12:48
Surplus Valuez = Profits = Stolen Wages: Happy Friday. When yous were doing the Cubs list, was there any feedback that Juan Cabada may end up in the OF? Or is there high confidence for the IF?
12:49
Eric A Longenhagen: Second base but not great there.
Geoff Blum faced 841 different pitchers over the course of 14 big league seasons, and while he doesn’t remember them all, many come to mind easily. That was proven when he recently became the sixth player-turned-broadcast-analyst to take part in our Challenging Career Quiz series. Did the erstwhile infielder maybe take a few liberties and look a few things up before we sat down for the exercise? He admitted as much, but as was the case with David Cone, Mark Grant, Mark Gubicza, Jeff Montgomery, and Dan Petry — links to those pieces can be found on their player pages — right and wrong answers are largely a secondary consideration. Entertaining anecdotes are the primary objective, and Blum followed suit by providing plenty of them.
I began by asking Blum — the first position player to be featured in this series — which pitcher he stood in the batter’s box against the most times.
“I was going to say Carlos Zambrano, but you gave me some time to look it up and I did cheat a little bit,” Blum replied with a laugh. “I knew it was going to be somebody in the NL Central, and we faced the Cubs a lot, so I figured it was going to be either Zambrano or Ryan Dempster. I also faced Dempster a bunch when he was with Florida and I was with Montreal, so I’m not surprised that he is the answer.”
Blum faced the right-handed Dempster 58 times — 18 more than Zambrano — going 15-for-53 with five walks. What does he remember about the current MLB Network analyst? Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week in Baseball. In keeping with the increasingly lenient definition of “this week” that I’ve been using of late, we’ve got stuff from all throughout May in this column. May is a great time to watch baseball. (It’s always a great time to watch baseball, but May is particularly good.) The weather is heating up. Ballparks are swelling with the start of summer crowds. Tarps are coming off. So please join me on a trip through the league, from fun teams to watch to nifty little plays. And as always, thanks to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the inspiration.
1. The Go-Go Nats
Nationals fans have endured seven years in the wilderness since the team’s 2019 title. Washington’s season-high win total in that span was 71 (2023 and 2024). This year’s team is finally playing around .500 ball, though our projections think the Nats will end up right around that 71-win high-water mark again. (We have them down for 74 at the moment.) But while the winning hasn’t quite come back yet, the fun has.
This year, the Nationals are dominating on offense. They’re leading the majors in scoring by a mile, averaging an enormous 5.49 runs per game. They’ve hit the most doubles in baseball – in fact, they have the most extra-base hits in baseball. They’re top 10 in on-base percentage, top five in slugging, and top five in stolen bases. They’re first in overall baserunning value. They’re third in BaseRuns-projected scoring. This isn’t smoke and mirrors. Read the rest of this entry »
Franklin Arias Photo: Alex Martin/Greenville News/ USA Today Network via Imagn Images
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our 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 »
On April 28, with the Phillies off to a 9-19 start — tied with the Mets for the worst in the majors — president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski fired manager Rob Thomson and named bench coach Don Mattingly as interim manager. Since then, the team has been red-hot, going 16-6 and (briefly) climbing above .500 for the first time since April 7. While they aren’t yet in a playoff position, the Phillies’ season has at least gotten a much-needed reset. Cristopher Sánchez and Kyle Schwarber appear to be on their way to especially productive campaigns, and Zack Wheeler has made a strong return from surgery to alleviate thoracic outlet syndrome.
After winning the NL East in back-to-back seasons and making the playoffs four times in a row, at the outset of 2026, the Phillies appeared to have a pretty good shot at returning to October baseball, with a 24.4% chance of winning the division and a 68.8% chance of reaching the postseason according to our Playoff Odds. That said, they did have significant concerns, particularly with regards to their starting pitching and their remade outfield. Their rotation placed third in our preseason Positional Power Rankings, which seemed overly optimistic given not only the question marks regarding Wheeler but also the departure of Ranger Suarez for Boston, the ugly 6.01 ERA Aaron Nola put up last year, and the arrival of top pitching prospect Andrew Painter despite a subpar 2025 season at Triple-A. The remade outfield, with Justin Crawford taking over in center, Brandon Marsh settling in left in place of Max Kepler, and Adolis García replacing Nick Castellanos in right, offered a chance to improve upon last year’s subpar showing, but it was hardly a guarantee, particularly given that García had been non-tendered by the Rangers.
Under Thomson, the Phillies won just two of their first nine series, taking two out of three games from the Nationals at home and the Rockies in Colorado during the season’s first two weeks but losing series to the Rangers, Diamondbacks, Cubs (twice) and Braves (twice) — with a 10-game losing streak spanning parts of their home-and-home series against the last two teams — before Dombrowski swung the axe. It was a surprising move given the Phillies’ success under Thomson, who himself took over for the fired Joe Girardi in June 2022, guided the team to its first pennant in 13 years, and won at a .580 clip while making the playoffs in every subsequent season. Read the rest of this entry »
Hunter Feduccia is striving to establish himself behind the dish in Tampa Bay. Acquired by the Rays from the Los Angeles Dodgers as part of a four-player swap at last summer’s deadline, the 28-year-old former LSU Tiger is currently sharing time with Nick Fortes as the left-handed side of a platoon. His pedigree is that of a mid-level prospect. A 12th-round pick in 2018, Feduccia has been described by Eric Longenhagen as “a fairly well-rounded defensive catcher,” but also as a “bat-first backup catcher who struggles to control the run game.”
His offensive numbers in limited major league action are nothing to write home about. Feduccia has just a 63 wRC+ over 184 plate appearances, although his stroke has been showing signs of promise. So far this season, the Lake Forest, Louisiana native is slashing .278/.365/.370 with a 111 wRC+ in 62 trips to the plate. Moreover, he went yard for the first time Thursday afternoon in Tampa Bay’s 5-3 win over the Baltimore Orioles.
But it’s not his bat that I wanted to talk about when I sat down with him prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. What I was interested in were certain nuances of his position, particularly when runners are attempting to pilfer bags. While Feduccia remains a below-average thrower, he’s put a lot of effort into trying to improve that part of his game over the years and has a strong understanding of the components that go into it. I began by asking him how catchers are trained to throw. Read the rest of this entry »
When a meteor* slams into Earth’s atmosphere, it’s moving so fast that it compresses the air in front of it. That compression superheats the air to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the extreme heat in turn melts the outside of the meteor. The outer layers of rock glow brilliantly as they disintegrate, leaving a trail of plasma in the meteor’s wake. By the time the flying object has descended to around 30 miles above the surface, air resistance slows it to a more reasonable speed, though still hypersonic. At that elevation, the meteor is in what’s known as “dark flight” – without the plasma trail, the remaining hunk of rock is impossible for the human eye to pick up at that speed and distance. This explains why it’s so difficult to hit Chase Burns’s fastball.
*It’s technically a meteoroid until it encounters Earth’s atmosphere, and then the rock plus the trail of plasma is a meteor until the plasma burns out, at which point it becomes a meteorite. You’re welcome, pedants.
Last year was a rough time for the best pitchers of the early 2020s. Zac Gallen cost himself untold tens of millions of dollars with a brutal walk year. Aaron Nola got hurt, and even when he was available, he was little more effective than a batting practice machine. Spencer Strider made 23 starts, but nearly doubled his FIP from his 20-win campaign in 2023.
Sandy Alcantara, like Strider, was coming back from a torn UCL that wiped out his 2024 season, he also had a rough go of it. Alcantara’s ERA was over 7.00 at midseason, leaving the Marlins unable to cash in on their former Cy Young winner at the trade deadline. Even with a strong stretch run, Alcantara ended 2025 with a 5.36 ERA, and an xERA and FIP in the mid-4.00s. Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Szymborski
