Reid Detmers has saved his career — again.

Detmers, if you weren’t aware, is a top 10 starting pitcher to this point in 2026. He has accrued 2.0 WAR, which is slightly more than Chris Sale, Max Fried, and Jesús Luzardo. If it weren’t for Cristopher Sánchez, Detmers might have a case as the best lefty starter in baseball right now. He’s also been the Angels’ best pitcher, even a step ahead of José Soriano, who burst onto the national stage with a red-hot April before cooling in recent weeks. Detmers has kept plugging away, quietly — surprisingly — excelling in the background.

If you’d told me in 2022 that Detmers would be a top 10 starter in baseball by 2026, I would have said, “Sure, that sounds reasonable.” That was his first “full” season in the majors, and he posted a 3.79 FIP with fine peripherals. Yes, he got sent down for about a month in the summer to work on some things, but it was a solid rookie season overall. He even showcased his ceiling with a no hitter that May.

It’s what happened in the seasons that followed that makes this one of the most unexpected early performances of the year. Detmers didn’t improve in 2023. He struck out more batters, which is good, but he developed a pesky command issue that resulted in more walks and home runs. And things got worse in 2024. He again boosted his strikeout rate, and he again gave up more walks and home runs than he had the year before. By June, the Angels had seen enough and sent him down to Triple-A. They recalled him in September for five final starts, and when he returned? Even more strikeouts, even more walks, and even more homers. Read the rest of this entry »

Daulton Varsho is a tinkerer. In each of his seasons with the Blue Jays, either SportsNet’s Arden Zwelling, SportsNet’s Shi Davidi, or both have written an article detailing a swing change – except in 2024, when Zwelling noted that for once, Varsho was going to finally try (gasp!) not tinkering with his swing.

Despite all the adjustments, Varsho remained the same kind of hitter. He had a super steep swing that was seemingly tailor made for today’s lift-and-pull focused game. He whiffed a lot and didn’t hit the ball particularly hard, but when he did square it up, he ripped it into the right field bleachers. That’s a recipe for a lot of variance – the lows involve scads of strikeouts and the highs involve heaps of homers – so it wasn’t surprising that his first three seasons with the Blue Jays saw one average season at the plate, one below-average season, and one above-average season. Although injuries limited him to just 71 games in 2025, Varsho put up a career-best 123 wRC+ and slugged 20 homers. Over a full season, that’s a 46-homer pace! If ever there was a time to stand pat, this was it, right? Right!? Read the rest of this entry »

Dylan Dodd throws a sinker that doesn’t sink. Nor does it have much horizontal movement. For all intents and purposes, it isn’t a sinker at all. Despite it being classified as such, the pitch is functionally a four-seamer delivered with a two-seam grip.

Labels aside, it works just fine. The 27-year-old southpaw has thrown his signature offering 87 times (59.6% usage) this season to the tune of a .158 batting average allowed and a 26.3% strikeout rate while making seven appearances out of the Atlanta Braves bullpen. Limited to 10 2/3 big league innings due to an earlier stint on the IL for thoracic spine inflammation, Dodd has fanned a dozen batters, allowed seven hits, and issued just one free pass.

I learned about his atypical “sinker” when the Braves visited Fenway Park late last month. All I knew prior to our conversation was that Dodd’s player page showed him having transitioned away from a four-seamer, and that doing so was yielding good results. Interested in the reason behind the switch — ditto the process behind it — I began by asking him if what I’d seen was accurate. Read the rest of this entry »

Reasonable people can disagree on who the best draft prospect of the 21st century is. I think there’s a pretty good case for Adley Rutschman: A switch-hitter with patience and power, a plus defender at a premium position, a College World Series champion who’d been tested repeatedly against the toughest amateur competition in the world and come out on top routinely.

I get why you’d want the tantalizing upside of Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, or Mark Prior, but to me no other prospect combined a big league starter-level floor with the ceiling of a superstar the way Rutschman did. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the duality of Jo Adell’s defense (after the FARTBAT low that followed his triple-robbery high), Spencer Arrighetti and MLB’s monthly player honors as the last bastion of old-school-stat-based awards, whether a team with a losing record could make the playoffs this season, Paul Goldschmidt’s pleasing platoon role, how much credit the Brewers deserve for Kyle Harrison’s success, Louis Varland’s value, the Tigers’ rapid plummet out of contention, the twilights of Nick Castellanos’s and Andrew McCutchen’s careers, and (1:15:01) whether the CBA negotiations merit horse race-style coverage.

Audio intro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme 2”

Link to Adell’s FARTBAT
Link to Adell quote
Link to Adell’s three robberies
Link to dramatic robbery photo
Link to EW robbery discussion
Link to Adell’s 2020 FARTBAT
Link to Canseco FARTBAT
Link to May’s Pitchers of the Month
Link to Pereda nut shot
Link to Pennywise quote
Link to Desk Set wiki
Link to Player of the Month Award wiki
Link to past PotM winners
Link to THT article on the award
Link to pitcher WAR leaders in May
Link to Sportico on the unbalanced leagues
Link to MLB.com on the lower October bar
Link to Jay on the Tigers
Link to Skubal rehab update
Link to Rosenthal on Skubal
Link to lowest-win playoff teams
Link to Curt on Harrison
Link to Location+ leaders
Link to Brewers WAR leaders
Link to reliever WAR leaders
Link to four-seamer velo leaders
Link to MLBTR on McCutchen
Link to MLBTR on Castellanos
Link to Clemens on the opening offers
Link to Drellich on Meyer/Caplin quotes
Link to Drellich on Manfred quotes
Link to The Athletic on open books
Link to story on Sánchez’s streak

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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 »

Read the rest of this entry »

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 »