“It’s been a journey,” Lukes said of his path, which began when Cleveland selected him in the seventh round of the 2015 draft out of Cal State Sacramento. “Five games into my career — this was in short-season ball — I broke my hamate and was out for the rest of the year. The next year, I started in Low-A, and halfway through I got traded to Tampa Bay at the deadline. I stayed with the Rays until my minor-league contract was up, then signed here [in November 2021].

“It was getting to the point where it was almost time to think about hanging it up,” continued Lukes, whom the Blue Jays placed on the IL with a hamstring strain prior to yesterday’s game. “But then, in 2023, they put me on the 40-man roster. Pretty much as long I had that 40-man ticket, I was going to keep running with it.”

The now-31-year-old outfielder didn’t feel that he had stalled out developmentally when he pondered calling it a career — “I always felt that I could play in the big leagues” — but he did recognize that there is more to life than baseball. Lukes and his wife had a child in 2021, and as he explained. “Family changes things.” While his financial situation had improved somewhat thanks to minor-league free agency, he was “going to play the 2022 season, and after that, probably just be a dad.”

“You weren’t getting rich,” I said to Lukes in our spring training conversation. “No,” he replied. “I was getting poor. My wife was working at the time, which helped… actually, it didn’t just help, it kept us running. At the lower levels, I was bringing home six thousand dollars a year after taxes, so I was making a thousand dollars a month. The most I ever made on a minor-league contract was $15,000. You can’t really do too much with that.”

Asked what he would be doing if not for baseball, Lukes told me that he studied criminal justice in college and “would already be a cop” had he not been drafted. As for once his playing days are over, law enforcement is no longer an aspiration. Moreover, he has “No Plan B” post-baseball. That is something he can concern himself at a later time. For now, it’s about getting back to the World Series.

That his career already includes being part of a team that played in the Fall Classic — the Blue Jays, of course, fell excruciatingly short of a title last October — is something I asked Lukes about. Did that experience change his life in any way?

“Being able to say that you’ve played in the World Series is great,” replied Lukes. “The bonuses were pretty good too, but more than that, what we got to feel being in those games is something that none of us will ever forget.”

The postseason bonus money was probably more than his yearly salaries in the minors…

“Oh, yeah,” Lukes acknowledged. “Easily more.”

———

RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS

Spencer Horwitz is 10 for 10 against Nick Martinez.

Rogers Hornsby went 9 for 13 against Lefty York.

Rudy York went 9 for 14 against Emerson Dickman.

Chris Speier went 7 for 10 against Jim York.

Stan Spence went 16 for 31 against Nels Potter.

———

Brandon Sproat’s repertoire runs six deep. Ordered by present-season usage, the 25-year-old Milwaukee Brewers right-hander throws a sinker, a cutter, a curveball, sweeper, a four-seamer, and a changeup. Which of those offerings is the most interesting in terms of characteristics, development story, or whatever else?

“I don’t know,” Sproat told me earlier this month. “I’m just trying to put them to good use. Right now, it’s mainly the sinker and the four-seam, how we’re mixing them in. We’re looking to throw them 60 percent, 40 percent. But most interesting in terms of development… I think all of them are a work in progress. There isn’t a certain one where I need to be working on it more than others. I work on every single one of them every day.

“The one pitch I’ve added is the sweeper, two years ago,” added the 2023 second-rounder, who made his MLB debut with the New York Mets last September before being dealt to Milwaukee over the offseason. “That’s about it. Nothing else has really changed since coming into pro ball. I’ve been told my sinker is good, and that my curveball is good, but I don’t really deep-dive into the analytics of it. I just go out there and try to get outs.”

Sproat has made five appearances on the season and has a 6.45 ERA and a 6.02 FIP over 22-and-a-third innings. His sinker/four-seamer split has been less utilized than planned. He has thrown the former at a 29.6% clip (to a .250 BA and .250 SLG), the latter (.375 BA, .625 SLG) at just 9.7%.

———

When I talked to him last August, Casey Mize told me that the “bigger” slider he’d added to his arsenal wasn’t a sweeper, as it only had about eight inches of horizontal movement. Developed at Driveline in the 2024-2025 offseason, and meant to complement his gyro slider, it was promising, yet in want of enhancement. As Mize put it, “[Increasing] the horizontal is probably the biggest thing on the docket.”

Catching up to the Detroit Tigers right-hander last weekend, I learned that the pitch is still a work in progress, and mostly residing in his back pocket.

“I’m still throwing the short slider — I haven’t changed that — but the bigger slider, I changed the grip on this past offseason,” Mize explained. “I went back to Driveline and worked with them, and felt like I had it pretty dialed in, but it hasn’t translated into the season, so I’m not throwing it a ton. When I do, it’s a little too depth-y. It’s going left, but it’s more like a slurve. Sometimes I’m even like nine horizontal and negative-ten vert. It’s almost like a curveball at times. I’m definitely not throwing a sweeper.”

Classified as a slurve, and thrown just 17 times in the current campaign, it hasn’t really been needed. Through five starts, Mize has a 2.51 ERA, a 2.98 FIP, and a career-best 27.4% strikeout rate over 28-and-two-thirds innings.

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A quiz:

Nolan Ryan threw seven no-hitters, the most in MLB history, while Sandy Koufax held a team hitless four times. Two pitchers have tossed three no-hitters in the modern era (since 1901). Who are they?

Bonus question: Which pitcher threw one no-hitter in the 1890s, and two more in the 1900s?

The answer can be found below.

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NEWS NOTES

Ellie Rodriguez, a catcher who played for five teams across the 1968-1975 seasons, has died at age 79 (per ESPN Deportes). A native of Puerto Rico who in 1969 was the first player to represent the Kansas City Royals in the All-Star game, Rodriguez — then a California Angel — was behind the plate when Nolan Ryan no-hit the Baltimore Orioles on June 1.

Chuck Nieson, a right-hander whose big-league career comprised a pair of appearances for the Minnesota Twins in 1964, died earlier this month at age 83. He just missed three-true-outcomes perfection. Pitching on back-to-back days against the Boston Red Sox, Nieson went F-8, K, BB, K in his first outing, and HR, K,K, K in his second outing. Niesen also just missed the record for most strikeouts to conclude a career. Per Stathead’s Katie Sharp, four pitchers fanned the final four batters they faced in the majors: Buddy Boshers, Maikel Cleto, Trevor Rosenthal, and Billy Wagner.

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The answer to the quiz is Bob Feller (no-hitters in 1940, 1946, and 1951) and Justin Verlander (2007, 2011, 2019). Cy Young is the answer to the bonus question. He turned the trick in 1897, 1904, and 1908.

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Identical twins were umpiring behind the plate in a pair of recent New York Yankees games. Tyler Jones was calling balls and strikes at Yankee Stadium a week ago yesterday, while Austin Jones was doing so at Fenway Park this past Tuesday. They are the fourth set of brothers, and the first set of twins, to umpire in MLB.

The Yankees didn’t employ the same catcher in the respective games — J.C. Escarra caught one, Austin Wells the other — depriving me of an opportunity to ask, “Did you think the same guy was behind you both times?”

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A random obscure former player snapshot:

Tom Poquette was a solid contributor on Kansas City Royals teams that won three straight AL West titles (1976-1978), only to lose to the New York Yankees in the ALCS. A left-handed-hitting outfielder from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Poquette put up his best numbers in the first of those campaigns, slashing .302/.361/.430 with 18 doubles, 10 triples, two home runs, and a 131 wRC+. On June 15 of that year, he went 5-for-6 with 10 total bases in a 21-7 win over the Detroit Tigers.

His overall numbers are modest. Playing for three teams across the 1973-1982 seasons — he also suited up for Boston Red Sox and Texas Rangers — Poquette posted a 91 wRC+ and 2.8 WAR, logging just 329 hits along the way. He later served as a minor-league manager and hitting coach in the Royals system.

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FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Ryosuke Ohtsu is 3-0 with a 1.29 ERA over four starts comprising 28 innings for NPB’s Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks. The 27-year-old right-hander has fanned 25 batters and issued just one walk. He went 6-2, 1.92 over a dozen appearances a year ago.

José Quijada has made 10 scoreless relief appearances for the Tokyo Yakult Swallows and has earned a save in all of them. The 30-year-old southpaw pitched for the Miami Marlins in 2019, and the Los Angeles Angels from 2020-2025.

Caleb Boushley is 4-1 with a 1.93 ERA over five starts comprising 28 innings for the KBO’s KT Wiz. The 32-year-old right-hander appeared in 25 games for the Texas Rangers last season.

Hyun Jin Ryu has made four starts and is 2-1 with a 2.96 ERA over 24-and-a-third innings for the KBO’s Hanwha Eagles.The 39-year-old left-hander has gone 201-121 as a professional, including 78-48 in MLB with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays.

Jordan Balazovic has made four starts and is 2-0 with a 1.71 ERA over 21 innings for the CPBL’s Uni-President 7-Eleven Lions. The 27-year-old Mississauga, Ontario native — a member of Team Canada in the WBC — pitched for the Minnesota Twins in 2023. This is his first season in Taiwan.

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Hao-Yu Lee was 20 years old and had recently finished a High-A season when he led Sunday Notes on September 24, 2023. A few short years later, he has a handful of big-league hits under his belt. Playing in his third game with the Detroit Tigers this past Monday, the Taiwan native singled twice in a game at Fenway.

“He was super thrilled to get his first,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said afterward. “There is only one first. There have been a couple of games where he has been really wanting to do it, and I’m glad he did it here. And he got a second one, as well. Young guys start to settle in when they get their first, and hopefully he can feel like a big-leaguer.”

The now-23-year-old infielder was clearly pleased to have notched his first knocks, saying through an interpreter that he he was “very happy [to have] finally done it.” Asked what he planned to do with the baseball, he said that he plans to keep it, as it is “one thing that will happen once in a lifetime.”

I asked Hao-Yu what his expectations were when we’d spoken prior to a West Michigan Whitecaps game three years ago. Was he expecting to reach MLB, or was he simply hoping and dreaming that it would happen?

“It’s always been my goal to make the big leagues,” replied Hao-Yu, who was originally in the Philadelphia Phillies system and came to the Tigers via trade midway through the 2023 season. “At the beginning, when I first signed, I gave myself five years to reach the bigs, and this actually my fifth year.”

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FARM NOTES

Franklin Arias is slashing .420/.492/.920 with seven home runs and a 224 wRC+ in 59 plate appearances for the Double-A Portland Sea Dogs. The 20-year-old Venezuelan-born shortstop in the Boston Red Sox system is No. 14 in our Top 100.

Murf Gray is slashing .348/.425/.565 with three home runs and a 173 wRC+ in 81 plate appearances for the Low-A Bradenton Marauders. The 22-year-old third baseman was selected in the second round of last year’s draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates out of Cal State Fresno.

Taitn Gray is slashing .317/.429/.500 with two home runs and a 147 wRC+ in 77 plate appearances for the Low-A Charleston RiverDogs. The 18-year-old switch-hitting first baseman was taken in the third round of last year’s draft by the Tampa Bay Rays out of a Grimes, Iowa high school.

Caden Bodine went 4-for-4 with a triple and a home run on Thursday as the RiverDogs edged the Kannapolis Cannon Ballers 10-9. Drafted 30th overall last year by the Baltimore Orioles out of Coastal Carolina, the 22-year-old, switch-hitting catcher was acquired by the Rays as part of December’s Shane Baz deal. Bodine is slashing .408/.457/.662 with three homers and a 189 wRC+ in 83 plate appearances.

Also on Thursday, the Great Lakes Loons (High-A, Dodgers) rallied with nine runs in the ninth inning to beat the Beloit Sky Carp (Marlins) 13-9. Nico Perez, a 21-year-old shortstop who is slashing .328/.421/.469 with a 137 wRC+ over 76 plate appearances, hit a grand slam in the decisive frame.

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Jackson Wolf believes in the power of positive thinking. I learned as much when I talked to the 27-year-old left-hander in the San Diego Padres organization during spring training.

“How does what you do in your personal life affect how you control yourself on the field?,” said Wolf, beginning his thoughtful observation in question form. “I would say that a lot of people’s demeanor outside the field can really affect their mentality once they take the mound. Being easygoing, and a positive person, carries over to the mound in positive ways. You’re constantly thinking positive thoughts and telling yourself you can. I think that is only going to bring yourself success, whatever it is you do.”

Wolf, whose lone MLB appearance came with the Padres in 2023, is currently taking the mound for the Triple-A El Paso Chihuahuas. He was featured here at FanGraphs in September 2022.

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LINKS YOU’LL LIKE

The best fastballs on the farm? MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis, Sam Dykstra, and Jonathan Mayo teamed up to choose one from each of the 30 organizations.

Texas’s Evan Carter hit an inside-the-park home run two pitches after a successful ABS challenge turned a walk into a still-in-progress plate appearance. MLB.com’s Kennedi Landry has the story.

Cam Schlittler is proving that his rookie breakout with the Yankees wasn’t a fluke. Julian McWilliams wrote about it at CBS Sports.

Pitcher List’s Jack Foley wrote about Seattle’s Emerson Hancock.

Richard Deitsch wrote about broadcaster extraordinaire Jason Benetti for Sports Business Journal.

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RANDOM FACTS AND STATS

Los Angeles Dodgers batters have combined for a .357 OBP, highest among MLB clubs. New York Mets batters have combined for a .292 OBP, lowest among MLB clubs.

San Francisco Giants batters have combined to hit 18 home runs, tied for the fewest in the majors, and steal eight bases, the fewest in the majors. The team’s 91 runs scored is tied for the fewest in the majors.

Yordan Alvarez has a .464 OBP, the highest among qualified hitters. Cedric Mullins has a .209 OBP, lowest among qualified hitters.

Ernie Clement has 12 doubles and no home runs. Munetaka Murakami has 11 home runs and no doubles.

In 1971, New York Yankees outfielder Bobby Murcer finished seventh in AL MVP voting after slashing .331/.427/.543 with a 176 wRC+ and 6.5 WAR. Kansas City Royals shortstop Freddie Patek finished sixth in AL MVP voting after slashing .267/.323/.371 with a 97 wRC+ and 3.2 WAR.

Red Ruffing had a record of 39-96 pitching for the Red Sox, and a record of 231-124 pitching for the Yankees. The right-hander batted .269 with five home runs and a 73 wRC+ with Boston, and .270 with 31 home runs and an 84 wRC+ with New York.

On today’s date in 1995, Dante Bichette hit a three-run homer in the bottom of the 14th inning to give the Colorado Rockies an 11-9 win over the New York Mets. Larry Walker had earlier sent the game into extras with a two-out, run-scoring double in the ninth.

Frank McCormick hit a walk-off home run, and Bucky Walters went 13 innings for the win, as the Cincinnati Reds beat the St. Louis Cardinals 1-0 on today’s date in 1944. Walker, whose 160 wins are fourth-most in Reds franchise history, finished the season with a record of 23-8. In 1939, the right-hander had gone 27-11 and captured NL MVP honors.

Players born on today’s date include Granny Hamner, an infielder who played almost exclusively for the Philadelphia Phillies in a career that spanned the 1944-1962 seasons. Twelfth in Phillies franchise history with 1,501 games played, Hamner was the first player to start the All-Star game at two positions, doing so at shortstop in 1952, and second base in 1954. His ledger also includes seven pitching appearances, with a knuckleball notable among his offerings.

Also born on today’s date was Olaf Henriksen, a reserve outfielder who saw action in 321 games for the Boston Red Sox from 1911-1917. The only native of Denmark in MLB history, Henriksen was part of three World Series-winning squads, and he contributed a hit that made the first of those titles possible. In the winner-take-all finale of the 1912 Fall Classic, Henriksen had a seventh-inning, game-tying, pinch-hit double off of Christy Mathewson.

Source

A question popped into my head as I edited Ryan Blake’s column on the Nationals Friday morning. In the piece, shortly after noting that James Wood ranked third in the majors with a 170 wRC+, Ryan mentioned that Wood’s teammate, CJ Abrams, was sixth with a mark of 168. Upon reading this, I pulled up our leaderboards to see if the Nationals were the only team to have two players in the top 10. Turns out that, yes, they are. I thought about that for all of two seconds before something else caught my eye. Just below Abrams on the list was Mike Trout, who also had a 168 wRC+. This prompted me to wonder: Can Trout return to form? Can he both stay healthy and produce this year?

I’m hardly the only one who spent the bulk of the 2020s dreaming on a fully healthy season from Trout, just as I’m not alone in having abandoned that hope as the injuries piled up. But after watching him blast home run after home run last week from the Yankee Stadium pressbox, I felt the pull of the past encroach upon the present, and perhaps against my better judgment, I started dreaming again. He sure looked as healthy as ever as his broad body barreled up baseballs and roamed center field. The best way to describe the way Trout moves — really, the way he has always moved — is that he lumbers and boulders; for all of his natural athleticism and breathtaking blend of speed and strength, he does not glide gracefully. I put that dream of a Trout renaissance on ice when the Angels left town, only for it to come back a week later. This time, though, I considered whether, at 34, he still has one more MVP season in him. He entered this weekend slashing .239/.417/.557 with eight home runs, and has posted 1.2 WAR in 25 games. He’s walking more than he’s striking out, and he’s already stolen four bases. His BABIP is a mere .228, 111 points below his career mark, so we should expect his batting average to see some positive regression. (Even if we know batting average isn’t all that indicative of player performance, it still matters for MVP voters.) His .483 xwOBA is second in the majors and 62 points above his wOBA. His defense has been below average so far, but if Trout keeps hitting like this, his glove won’t matter much for his MVP case. The narrative would certainly be in his favor.

I just answered two of my own questions from Friday in this mailbag, so I guess it’s time to get to yours. What if the Astros blow it all up? How might the Pirates benefit from a Houston fire sale? Why don’t teams develop bench players to be knuckleballers? What the heck was Austin Warren doing in the game with the bases loaded in the Mets’ 12th straight loss? We answer all these questions and more in this week’s mailbag. Plus, Jay Jaffe remembers Garret Anderson. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.

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Hi there,

Matt

There are a few ways to answer your question, Matt. But before I do, I should mention that I do not think the Pirates are going to trade for Correa and King, even though I would really, really love to see it happen. Correa makes too much money for the Pirates to be interested in taking on his contract, and I don’t think he’s good enough at this stage in his career for them to give up the prospect capital it would take to get the Astros to eat the bulk of his salary. Even if Pittsburgh were comfortable adding more than $30 million to its payroll in each of the next two seasons after this one — and that doesn’t include the vesting options that could net him another $70 million for four more years — I think the franchise would be much better off allocating its financial resources elsewhere.

Having said that, I like where your head is at here. The Astros may very well blow it up, but I think that trading with the Pirates would be a smart way to sell this year without committing to a long rebuild. Both teams would be trading from a position of strength. Pittsburgh has plenty of young, talented pitchers who would greatly improve Houston’s outlook in the short-term future, if not this year; meanwhile, the Astros have a surplus of quality infielders and the Pirates have a major hole at third base. If the Pirates didn’t play their home games at PNC Park, I would recommend that they trade for the more-affordable Isaac Paredes, but Paredes’ lift-and-pull production would be greatly diminished in Pittsburgh. (Statcast estimates that he would have 59 career home runs playing his games at PNC Park, rather than his actual total of 94.) So, financial commitment notwithstanding, Correa remains the better fit.

I asked Dan Szymborski to run ZiPS to see how many games the Pirates would win with both Correa and King in the fold. For comparison, let’s begin with the actual ZiPS projected NL Central standings entering play Friday:

And here are the ZiPS projected NL Central standings if the Pirates were to acquire both Correa and King ahead of Friday’s game:

You’ll notice that the combo of Correa and King wouldn’t really make much of a difference for the Pirates, and any impact they would have would be less than the three additional wins projected above. Remember, these are the projections if the Pirates acquired Correa and King right now, not three months from now in the weeks leading up to the trade deadline, when a major trade would be more likely to occur.

When I asked about these results, Dan reminded me that the Pirates would not be getting peak Correa from a few years ago, but the injury-prone, power-sapped veteran of today. Dan also said, “King is just a good reliever,” meaning the impact of acquiring him would be minimal, at least as far as the projections are concerned.

Another thing to consider: ZiPS is much lower on the Pirates than the FanGraphs projections are. Entering play Friday, our Playoff Odds give the Pirates a 25.9% shot to win the NL Central and a 55.7% chance to reach the postseason, with a projected win total of 84.7. Based on those odds, adding three wins — either by acquiring Correa and King, or through other moves — could prove to be consequential in the playoff race.

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Hey!

Thanks, and long live the knuckleball!
JD

Ben Clemens: I love knuckleballs. I’m convinced that every baseball fan does. So it gives me no joy to tell you that I don’t think this plan would work. But let’s get into the specifics of why, because going through all the details is always a worthwhile exercise. First, we’d have to consider how good these knuckleballers would be. Laurila’s article is a great place to start. Jake Rogers said he throws a knuckleball that he learned as a kid, and Colt Keith mentioned that Rogers has the best knuckleball on the team, though he too has dabbled with the pitch.

Rogers has thrown one knuckleball this year in a game He threw five last year. He’s one of 10 position players to throw a knuckleball in the last four years, comprising 94 knucklers total. Those pitches have been awful! Opponents almost never swing and miss against them. When they put the ball in play, they’re hitting .391 with a .522 slugging percentage. More than half of their batted balls are hit 95 mph or harder. The results are the equivalent of an ERA in the high 8.00s or low 9.00s. If you expand the sample to the entire Statcast era, the result hardly changes; few whiffs, plenty of hard contact, an expected ERA that would get a pitcher DFA’d in a heartbeat.

Actual pitchers who throw knuckleballs – Matt Waldron and Adrian Morejon are the only two to hit double digits in the last four years – throw far superior knuckleballs. They have more velocity (like, 15-20 mph more velocity), better movement, and better location. They produce far better results; half the hard-hit rate of position player knuckleballs, more or less, and double the whiff rate, too. Hitters throwing knuckleballs have gotten shelled; the few knuckleballers good enough to do it as a primary job have been perfectly reasonable.

No one’s using a position player with a true talent 8.50 ERA as a situational pitcher. But let’s assume, for the sake of this question, that these guys could train themselves up to a near-Waldron level. That’s uncharitable to Waldron, obviously – he’s a full-time pitcher who has worked his whole life at throwing knuckleballs, not a catcher tossing the ball around on his off day. But whatever, we’re looking for fun, not realism. Assume a team could train three or four position players to be Matt Waldron equivalents on the mound. How would they use those skills?

There are rules around when teams can deploy position players on the mound. To deploy a position player as a pitcher, one of three conditions must be satisfied: a game in extra innings, an eight-run deficit, or a double-digit lead in the ninth inning. Those aren’t particularly interesting options for deploying a replacement-level reliever, though. The score-based ones cover the ways that teams already use position players on the mound. It doesn’t really matter how good your knuckleball is if you’re up by a dozen or down by nine. And extra innings are high-leverage spots; with the game on the line, teams want to use their best relievers, at least so long as those guys are still available.

There’s a workaround for this situation, naturally – the so-called Shohei Ohtani Rule. Teams can designate players as two-way if they meet some playing time minimums. Specifically, the player must have a season, either one of the past two completed seasons or the current one, where they pitch 20 major league innings and also start at least 20 major league games as a position player or DH, accumulating three or more plate appearances in each of those games.

Twenty innings is a lot of innings pitched. Given that you can only get a position player into the game as a pitcher under very specific circumstances, you’d basically have to lean on that guy whenever it’s permitted. By my math, the Tigers only pitched 33 such innings last year. That math might be off slightly – it was back of the envelope, basically – but the point is that it’s really hard to find 20 innings to qualify your position player as a two-way player in the first place.

The only way to make this happen would be to designate the player as a pitcher, using up one of the 13 allowable pitcher slots on a roster, and then just have them hit anyway until they accrued the necessary 20 starts in the field and 20 innings pitched. That’s an awful plan, really, because it specifically limits pitcher flexibility in pursuit of a marginal boost to pitcher utility in the future. Try selling the Tigers on playing down a pitcher for three months so that they can eventually mix in the odd Jake Rogers knuckleball in key spots, and you’d get laughed out of the room.

So to answer your question, no, this plan wouldn’t work. But I wish it could. All we need is a radically different training paradigm that makes position players so good at throwing knuckleballs that we want to use them, plus a bunch of rules changes. Something to hope for, I suppose.

__

Dearest FanGraphs Crew,

Thanks and keep up the great work.
SDS

Michael Baumann: Matt gave me this question because he thought I’d like the opportunity to needle the Mets and their fans, and frankly, I’m insulted by the implication. Not only am I a professional, I’m of the opinion that what unites Mets fans and Phillies fans is greater than what divides us. We’re not so different, you and I.

In fact, in a world not too different from our own, I would be a Mets fan myself. I, like most American men of a certain age, was introduced to baseball by my father, who grew up a Mets fan. If I ever have kids, I am going to straitjacket them into all-sport Philadelphia fandom, but my father was of a more liberal mind. He was only a casual fan, and the Phillies made the World Series the year I discovered baseball, so he let me choose my own path. It’s the greatest kindness he ever did me.

OK, that’s a bit of a needle toward Mets fans.

I’ll answer your Austin Warren question anyway, both because it’s a simple stat query and because I’m genuinely interested in the answer to this fascinating bit of esoterica. Taking all pitchers in the AL and NL since 1901, and setting minimums of five career wins and 20 career innings, we get a population of 4,799 individual pitchers.

All-time greats clock in at around 15 innings per win; among the 17 pitchers on the list with at least 300 career wins, the average is 14.81 innings per win.

The lowest ratio of all time, given those minimums, belongs to Caleb Baragar, who won seven games in just 45 1/3 innings pitched across two seasons for the Giants, a ratio of 6.48 innings per win. (Speaking of esoterica: I actually covered Baragar’s college career when he was at Indiana University. Lots of tall pitchers on those Indiana teams.)

It will surprise no one to learn that the 32 pitchers with 10 or fewer innings per win skew heavily toward relievers and recent or active pitchers. Given the minimums I set, Warren is 12th all-time, with a ratio of 8.52 innings per win.

Lists of active players and relievers aren’t fun, so let’s goose the minimums again, to double-digit wins and 100 or more innings.

Shout out Eddie Yuhas of the 1952-53 St. Louis Cardinals. I had totally heard of him before now. Yuhas went 12-2 with six saves out of the bullpen as a rookie, but had his sophomore campaign truncated to just one inning, as he suffered an arm injury that ended his career. Yuhas’ Wikipedia page features a fun fact: He, Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams are the only three players to receive MVP votes in every year of their big league career but one.

That’s an obscure fact, I wonder what the citation is…oh, it’s Effectively Wild episode 1035. Of course it is. Let’s increase the minimum innings threshold to 500 and see if we can get some more interesting names.

Hey, a Smoky Joe Wood sighting! That’s about as fun a name as you’ll find. For a career of any reasonable length, the minimum innings-to-wins ratio seems to be about 12. Under very specific circumstances (very good middle relievers, 21st century starting pitchers who don’t throw huge volume and only play for very good teams), it’s possible to sneak under.

But in between 12 and 13 innings per win, you’ll start to find guys who had low ratios because they were just really good: Christy Mathewson, Gerrit Cole, Clayton Kershaw, Pedro Martínez, Andy Pettitte, Babe Ruth. Mordecai Brown is at 13.00; Stephen Strasburg is 13.01.

Now, for the question about the stretch. One thing I love about baseball is how it has so many inane rules, you can watch hundreds or thousands of games and still not quite clock everything that’s going on. Like, I’m not 100% certain that I could accurately describe the balk rule if my life depended on it.

I went back and watched the clip in question; it’s actually Ron Darling who says Warren has to declare that he’s pitching from the stretch with the bases loaded. We don’t see the whole exchange, but Warren holds his glove up to his ear when addressing the first base umpire, so the umpire might’ve been the one who initiated the conversation, not the pitcher.

The rule that governs pitcher deliveries is 5.07(a). Rule 5.07(a)(1) establishes the Windup Position, in which the pitcher’s back foot must be in contact with the rubber, and both hands in front of his body. The front foot can be placed wherever the pitcher likes, and move in any direction of his choosing. Rule 5.07(a)(2) establishes the Set Position, which is back foot on the rubber, front foot out ahead of the rubber, both hands in front of the body. This is what we know colloquially as pitching from the stretch, though the rule defines “the stretch” as an example of “any natural preliminary motion” that takes place before the pitcher comes set.

Far be it for me to gainsay Ron Darling, who, in addition to being one of the best color commentators in the game, has 2,360 1/3 more innings in the majors than I do. But I think he misspoke. I’ll quote from the rulebook comment under 5.07(a)(2):

“With a runner or runners on base, a pitcher will be presumed to be pitching from the Set Position if he stands with his pivot foot in contact with and parallel to the pitcher’s plate, and his other foot in front of the pitcher’s plate, unless he notifies the umpire that he will be pitching from the Windup Position under such circumstances prior to the beginning of an at-bat.”

Warren’s delivery is extremely compact. I thought he was going to pitch from the stretch, not just because Darling said he was pitching from the stretch, but because he came to the Set Position on the rubber.

Here’s Warren pitching from the stretch last week against the Dodgers, with a runner on second: a legitimate stolen base opportunity.

Now watch him earlier in that inning with the bases empty.

Same starting position, substantially the same windup and delivery, but there’s a little step back. Here’s Warren’s first pitch from Tuesday night.

He does the little step, as you can see. Not only is he legally allowed to make that step, it makes tactical sense, since with the bases loaded the runners aren’t going to try to steal. If Warren’s full-windup delivery started with his feet in a different posture, he wouldn’t have to declare anything, but because his motion starts at the set position, he has to warn the umpire he’s going to keep using that motion when there are runners on base — otherwise he can be called for a balk.

So there you go, Rule 5.07(a)(2): Make sure you talk to the umpire.

__

Hey mailbag team,

dr. plantwrench

Jay Jaffe: Anderson had a long, distinguished career that looms large in Angels history. A Southern California native who helped the franchise win its only World Series to date, in 2002, he maintained a strong relationship with the organization in retirement and bonded with much of the current team. Though Mike Trout may surpass him eventually, until then Anderson owns the franchise records for games (2,013), plate appearances (8,408), hits (2,368), doubles (489), runs (1,024) and RBI (1,292) from his 15-season run with the team (1994–2008) before moving on to the Braves and Dodgers, spending one year with each.

Drafted by the Angels in the fourth round in 1990 out of John F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, California, Anderson debuted in the majors on July 27, 1994, beginning a five-game cup of coffee shortly before the players’ strike. In his first game, he went 2-for-4 with a pair of singles off the A’s Ron Darling. The next year, he hit .321/.352/.505 (121 OPS+) with 16 home runs in 106 games and narrowly missed winning AL Rookie of the Year honors. Both he and Twins outfielder Marty Cordova received 13 first-place votes, but Cordova — who hit .277/.352/.486 with 24 homers and 20 steals that season — had the edge in points, 105-99. Aside from a solid 1996 season, it was mostly downhill for Cordova’s career from there, while Anderson proved to have much more staying power.

Despite his strong rookie season, it wasn’t until Anderson’s late 20s and early 30s that he emerged as a star. He was at the top of his game in 2002, hitting .306/.332/.539 with a league-leading 56 doubles to go with his 29 homers and 123 RBI, making his first All-Star team, and helping the Angels to a Wild Card berth and a World Series title. His third-inning bases-loaded double off Livan Hernandez accounted for the margin of victory in the Angels’ 4-1 win over the Giants in Game 7 of the World Series.

For better or for worse, what I remember most about Anderson (beyond watching him struggle on a dysfunctional 2010 Dodgers team) is his unwitting role as a lightning rod in old school/new school debates over value between traditionalists and statheads. Thanks to his great bat-to-ball skills, he had a knack for hitting for high averages, topping .300 six times, and he was considered “clutch” for his high RBI totals (four times with at least 100). Bill James and his acolytes at Baseball Prospectus and beyond did a lot to show that those achievement weren’t as valuable as they were traditionally considered to be, particularly in high-offense environments and eras, pointing out instead that high on-base percentages were a key driver of success. Thus, Anderson’s unremarkable OBPs and his aversion to talking a walk stood in stark contrast to the Angels’ top rivals of the day, the Moneyball-vintage A’s. He walked in just 4.7% of his plate appearances for his career, and reached 30 bases on balls in a season only five times (two with exactly 30). His .324 career OBP was 15 points below the park-adjusted league average for his time, so his overall .293/.324/.461 slash line, compiled in a very high-offense era, equates to just a 102 OPS+. Most of that was as a left fielder, and so he was quite often a drag on a team’s offense. When you combine that with his defense (+24 runs overall including TotalZone, but -28 from 2003 onward based on Defensive Runs Saved), he had limited value: 23.9 fWAR and 25.7 bWAR. He’s 94th in JAWS (24.2) based on the latter, tied with Carlos González, a former batting champion who made three All-Star teams and won three Gold Gloves while playing in over 800 fewer games.

Anderson’s WAR is comparatively paltry, to use your words. Indeed, it makes him stick out among the loftier company in which his counting stats and high batting averages place him. Even without knowing the exact WAR figure, I thought about this immediately when I stumbled over these lines in Tom Verducci’s warm tribute to Anderson at SI.com: “He is one of only 15 outfielders with 2,500 hits, 500 doubles and a .293 career batting average. All the others are in the Hall of Fame except PED scofflaws Barry Bonds and Manny Ramirez.” Those arbitrary cutoffs in counting stats across vastly different playing environments make for a junk-drawer collection rather than a coherent comparison. Draw up a WAR table of the outfielders meeting those criteria (I get 18, not 15) and you’ll find that Anderson’s 25.7 bWAR — the version I’m going to stick with for the rest of this answer — is 18.0 behind the second-lowest total, that of Al Oliver, and 137.1 behind Bonds. That’s not even in the same ballpark.

To get to your question regarding low-WAR players who loom large in franchise histories, one who immediately came to mind for me — perhaps not surprisingly given the roots of my fandom — as being so important in a team’s historical context is the Dodgers’ Steve Garvey. Stripping away the public persona stuff ranging from his apple pie image to his well-publicized divorce and paternity suits, and instead just sticking to the numbers, Garvey was a player who excelled in the same areas as Anderson. He hit .300 seven times, drove in 100 or more runs five times, topped 30 home runs once and 20 homers five additional times (compared one 30-homer season and four others with at least 20 for Anderson). Garvey hit .294/.329/.446, but in a pitchers’ park and in a lower-offense era, that was good for a pretty solid 117 OPS+, and he was much more decorated, making 10 All-Star teams and winning four Gold Gloves and an MVP award. Garvey left his mark in Dodgers history for all of that, as well as his play on four pennant winners and one championship team, but he totaled just 38.1 WAR and 33.4 JAWS (52nd among first basemen), more than Anderson but certainly not enough to merit his endless recycling as a Hall of Fame candidate.

Another Anderson-like player who comes to mind is Michael Young, who leads the Rangers in games played (1,803), as well as plate appearances (8,047), hits (2,230), runs (1,085), and doubles (415). A seven-time All-Star who hit .300 seven times (winning a batting title in 2005), Young slashed .300/.346/.441 for his career (2000–2013) while helping the Rangers to four playoff appearances and the first two pennants in franchise history. But in a high-offense environment, that snazzy slash line was good for just a 104 OPS+, and by the metrics, his defense was brutal (-152 fielding runs above average), so he totaled just 24.7 WAR. Still, he was considered important enough to the Rangers that they retired his no. 10 jersey in 2019.

I also thought of two Hall of Famers who aren’t done any favors by WAR or JAWS, but who carved such sizable niches in the history of their respective franchises that their numbers are retired. The Cardinals’ Lou Brock held the single-season and career stolen base records before Rickey Henderson came along, and reached 3,000 hits. He was an entertaining-as-hell player who starred in three World Series, but he totaled just 45.3 WAR and 38.6 JAWS, with the latter the second-lowest mark of any AL/NL left fielder in the Hall. Recently deceased Pirates legend Bill Mazeroski, who ended the 1960 World Series with one of the most famous (and unlikely) home runs of all time, was a defensive whiz but not much of a hitter. That homer obviously stands out in Pirates lore, and he wouldn’t be in Cooperstown without it, but he totaled just 36.3 WAR and 31.3 JAWS, the latter of which ranks last among enshrined second basemen.

Outside the Hall, Ryan Zimmerman holds franchise leads in games played, plate appearances, hits, and home runs, whether or not you include the Nationals’ previous existence in Montreal and the contributions of future Hall of Famers who departed for greener pastures (Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, Vladimir Guerrero, Tim Raines, Larry Walker). The Royals’ Salvador Perez won’t catch George Brett for the franchise lead in most categories besides home runs (and games caught, of course), but thanks to his 16-year tenure and his role on the 2014–15 teams, he deservedly holds a special spot in team history. He could even wind up in the Hall despite my strong reservations and his low WAR and JAWS (35.7 and 30.1 without framing, respectively, and much lower in a framing-inclusive version). Former Royal Frank White, who put up Mazeroski-like numbers while playing alongside Brett on those 1970s and ’80s playoff teams (including the 1985 championship club) that legitimized the franchise, surely belongs in this category, as well.

Doubtless there are others who might fit this bill, too. Their WAR totals may be nothing to write home about, and they may or may not be in Cooperstown, but those are hardly the only yardsticks by which they should be measured. They left their marks on their franchises and in the hearts of fans. Anderson certainly did.

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about whether JR Ritchie should want to keep the ball that was hit for a homer on his first major league pitch, José Soriano’s season-starting hot streak, and the Yankees’ new alternate uniforms, plus follow-ups on accidental challenges, player pecks on the cheek, jersey numbers, and Nolan McLean’s apology, and a mini-Blast about the Rockies’ historically hot start (compared to last year). Then (50:36) they take a break from interviewing octagenarian former players to interview a youthful, quadragenarian former player: former All-Star Brad Lidge. An infamous manager once proclaimed, “The closer is the closer because he’s the closer.” But what if the closer becomes an archaeologist? Ben and Meg talk to Lidge at length about his post-playing pivot to archaeology: what drew him to the field, how he’s pursued a second profession (and how it differs from his first one), ancient Etruscans, misconceptions about archaeology, what he could learn from excavating a ballpark, discovering dice (note: not a gambling ad), discussing his career reinvention at cocktail parties, the pleasures and procedures of communing with the past, archaeology’s moneyball, and much more, followed by his thoughts on fellow fastball-slider artist Mason Miller.

Audio intro: PJ Harding, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to The Only Rule closer line
Link to line’s EW wiki entry
Link to Lidge’s SABR bio
Link to postseason saves leaders
Link to best post-’88 RP seasons
Link to Pujols homer
Link to 2008 WS victory
Link to Episode 2323
Link to Wood’s HR
Link to Ritchie game story
Link to Yankees jerseys report 1
Link to Yankees jerseys report 2
Link to Yankees jerseys report 3
Link to jersey number history
Link to Gilbert “catch”
Link to Gilbert “catch” rules
Link to Vargas “accidental” challenge
Link to Gonzales “accidental” challenge
Link to Martin-Davis smooch
Link to Soriano’s six-start stretches
Link to Soriano’s 2025 stretch
Link to Soriano’s 2026 stretch
Link to exit velo responsibility
Link to Soriano article 1
Link to Betteridge’s law 1
Link to Soriano article 2
Link to follow-up McLean report
Link to fastest team improvements data
Link to 2018 archaeoLidgey article
Link to 2026 archaeoLidgey article
Link to Lidge Explorers Club
Link to Poggio Civitate wiki
Link to Under the Tuscan Sun wiki
Link to Etruscan civilization wiki
Link to Roman Empire meme
Link to Lidge’s publications
Link to Lidge’s dice paper
Link to North American dice article 1
Link to North American dice article 2
Link to Ben on Detectorists

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First, here are some important updates we’ve already announced over the past month, in case you missed them:

• We added three new tools to the FanGraphs Lab, rolling out the Paired Pitches tool, the Power Rankings Board, and the Baseball Simulator.
• We also added Home Field Advantage to the Baseball Simulator.
• Lastly, we added ABS strike zone, arm angle, and spin rate related stats to our player pages and leaderboards.

We’ve worked hard to get our tools updated for the new strike zone and the ABS challenge system. In addition to the new plate discipline metrics added to player page season stats and leaderboards, those stats were also added to the game logs and spark graphs cards. To see how successful players have been when they make ABS challenges, we added an ABS Challenges leaderboard.

We also made a significant update to the FanGraphs mobile app, which can be download here: App Store (iOS) or Play Store (Android).

• We’ve added the full Major League Leaderboards to the app, including your custom reports. The custom report features are the same on the app as they are on the website. You have to be a FanGraphs Member to have more than 10 player or custom stat columns:
  
• You can also set the default for all leaderboards in the app to show you the left edge of the data grid or the right edge. We put some of the most important stats on the right side and default sort data grids by the right column on the website, so we are giving users the option to change this. This can be found under More >> App Settings:
  
• We also updated the RosterResource Closer Depth Charts in the app to reflect the updates on the site:
  

Speaking of RosterResource, the Closer Depth Charts now have more stats:

• The Results section has most of the stats that were previously there, and we’ve added SwStr%, K%, BB%, Shutdowns, and Meltdowns.
• The Arsenal section has individual pitch metrics, including Stuff+.
• We also added the number of pitches thrown and innings pitched over the last six days for each pitcher.
• There’s now a tooltip that has game-level information including innings pitched, total batters faced, innings appeared in, and leverage when the pitcher entered game.

We also made a small Member update. You are now able to download or copy a .png image of many of our graphs and charts, so you no longer have to screenshot them:

If you have questions, please leave them in the comments below, and if you have any suggestions for site features, be sure to let us know. And lastly, a thank you to our Members! Membership is the best way to ensure that we are able to continue to grow and improve the site, and support our staff. We couldn’t do any of this without you.

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The Washington Nationals are starting out strong, but not strong enough.

They weren’t supposed to be good in 2026. They weren’t good last year, or the year before, or the year before, or the — they haven’t been good since they won the World Series in 2019. Our preseason positional power rankings had them 29th by overall projected WAR. Justin Klugh led the Nationals essay in the 2026 Baseball Prospectus annual with the story of an enema given to George Washington just before his death. And no, the parallel was not a particularly happy one.

Indeed, the Nationals have not been good. They’re 11-15 with a -18 run differential and a bottom-five WAR. They’re not yet last in the NL East because of whatever is going on in New York and Philadelphia. But our projections assume they’ll find their way there eventually.

Still, it’s the way they’ve gotten to “not good” that’s been frustrating, entertaining, and perhaps even a bit encouraging. Let’s start with a plot:

Through 26 games, the Nationals have scored 30 runs in the first inning. That’s the most in the majors by quite a bit. They’re drawing walks, hitting for power, and working deep counts early. It’s not just the first. The Nationals as a team have a 110 wRC+ and .334 xwOBA — fifth and sixth in the majors, respectively. The Braves are the only team to have scored more runs.

Of course, the Braves only leapt ahead because they the outscored the Nationals 28-23 this week. Yes, seven runs per game is what the Nationals allowed in their latest series, and that isn’t out of the ordinary. They’ve given up 162 runs so far this year, or 6.23 per game, or way more than any other team in baseball. Their pitchers are dead last in the majors with -1.9 WAR, with a bad rotation and a worse bullpen.

It’s a team of extremes. Let’s start with the happy ones.

The ‘W’ Is for Wood & Co.

How are the Nationals scoring all those runs in the first inning?

Their leadoff hitter is James Wood. He hit his 10th home run of the season Thursday in the first inning on the first pitch. (It also happened to be the first pitch of JR Ritchie’s career.)

Wood has a 170 wRC+, third best in the majors. This is simply the best he’s ever played in his young career, which is saying something. He’s doing it all: Swinging hard, squaring up the ball, and finding the barrel more than anybody else (29.5%). His .638 xwOBA on contact is second best in baseball behind… Luke Raley, apparently.

Where that contact goes is interesting, too.

Wood is, once again, running one of the lowest pull rates in the majors, opting to smack the ball up the middle or go the other way. But where he used to beat the ball into the ground too much, he’s now launching and running the third-best ISO in the majors (.353).

For some batters, hitting fly balls the other way is a bit of a red flag. Anything that doesn’t reach the fence is generally run down by a rangy, well-positioned outfielder. That’s one reason many sluggers these days try to get out in front and aim for the shallowest part of the park. But Wood is plenty strong to shoot the gap in left-center, or even muscle one over the fence straightaway. Most of his home runs this year have looked like this:

Crucially, Wood has elevated his contact without adding more popups. The tradeoff for all those grounders in the past was that he rarely made auto-outs in the air, allowing him to run impressively high BABIPs. In 2026, Wood is getting the launch necessary to unlock his power potential, while still missing low to be competitive on most balls in play. It’s essentially the same contact profile — it’s just better right now.

The same could be said for his approach. Wood remains one of the choosiest batters in baseball, with a minuscule swing rate and a strong eye. He still whiffs a ton, and he still has a giant hole on pitches low and away, as Davy Andrews outlined last year. But rather than improving on these weaknesses, Wood has simply made his strengths even stronger. Pitchers can only attack him in one tiny part of the zone, and if they miss, he’ll either punish them immediately or force them to throw it again under the same threat.

Wood’s nascent step forward isn’t the most surprising development for the Nationals. CJ Abrams is not far behind him, with a 168 wRC+ that ranks sixth in the majors.

Abrams is the polar opposite of Wood in many ways, despite each coming over in the Juan Soto trade. He swings at everything in or out of the zone, and he generally hits the ball in the air and to the pull side, not always with oomph. It’s an approach that’s returned a passing grade at the plate the last two seasons (106 and 107 wRC+), but he’s seemed to leave a bit on the table.

Ben Clemens wrote last year about Abrams’ lack of discipline, pointing out that he wasn’t displaying enough power to justify such a loose conception of the strike zone. And Abrams this year is chasing more than ever, with a 36.8% chase rate compared to 32.6% last year. He’s also whiffing on 29.3% of swings — a career high.

When he isn’t whiffing, though, he’s making much better contact:

The word on Abrams’ approach got out over the offseason. Pitchers this year are throwing him tons of pitches out of the zone, and he’s seeing way more breaking balls — another weakness from 2025. He seems to have anticipated this adjustment and beat them to the punch. Yes, he’s still chasing and whiffing at many of those breaking balls, but his hard-hit rate against them has jumped from 32.6% last year to 58.1% this season.

For instance, here’s a sweeper that he sat on and crushed to right for a home run:

Despite the extreme approach, Abrams has actually doubled his walk rate. No, he’s not working counts any better, and he’s actually found himself in fewer three-ball counts thus far. But when he does get to a three-ball count, he has nearly halved his chase rate. Last year, he chased 49.3% of the pitches he saw out of the zone with three balls. This year, he’s chased just 23.2% of them. It’s a compromise, of sorts.

The foundation is a bit wobbly, he’s done this before, and his defense is still suspect. But even so, this is good to see. Despite more than 2,000 plate appearances in the majors, Abrams is still only 25 years old.

The other encouraging sign for the Washington offense is Daylen Lile, who’s picked up right where he left off last year, as a sort of free-swinging, soft-contact, all-fields slasher, leveraging ideal launch angles to plop singles all over the field. It certainly helps that he’s one of the fastest players in the league. This is what Lile looks like at his best, scorching a one-hopper through the infield and hustling into second while a panicked outfield scrambles for the ball:

The rest of the Nats order has been just OK, and that’s been enough. Joey Wiemer began the year by reaching base in his first 10 plate appearances; his wRC+ is an even 100 since. Jorbit Vivas has been interesting, as a slower, slappier, fringier version of Lile. Curtis Mead, Jacob Young, and Brady House have each done a thing or two. I don’t expect the Nationals to ultimately lead the league in runs, but this start is an early win for the youngest lineup in baseball.

The ‘W’ Is for Whoa, That’s Bad

Then there’s the pitching. It’s simply been the worst. Their starters rank 30th with -0.2 WAR, and their relievers rank 30th with -1.7 WAR.

Now, I don’t really want to write about this. It’s not fun, and it’s not news. The Nationals pitching was supposed to be bad. This offseason, they traded their best starter, MacKenzie Gore, to the Rangers, and they traded their best reliever, Jose Ferrer, to the Mariners. It was never going to go well. We rated their starting pitchers 28th in the preseason, and we rated their bullpen not just the worst in the majors, but the worst group at any position.

Still, the extent of their badness has been unfortunate. As Matt Martell recently pointed out, Nationals pitchers posted the least WAR through a team’s first 12 games since at least 1974, which is as far back as our game-by-game team-WAR data goes. They’ve improved to merely bad since then, but having watched a lot of Nationals baseball this year, I can tell you that 6.23 runs per game feels correct.

Here’s where the “runs by inning” chart returns. If you scroll back to that plot, you’ll notice the Nationals are actually giving up an average number of runs in the first inning, as well as in the eighth and ninth. That relationship becomes somewhat obvious in this next group of splits:

Nationals starters have been fine on their first pass through the order. It’s in the middle innings when the lineup turns over that it all falls apart. This is where the problems begin. Nats starters are averaging fewer than five innings per game, meaning their low-leverage arms are being asked to cover several innings at a time. Not even the best bullpens can survive such a workload. It’s been a group effort, in other words.

There’s no way to spin Washington’s pitching to this point as anything other than a disaster. But I’ll try anyway. Cade Cavalli, for instance, struck out 10 against a strong Braves lineup Thursday and has a 2.82 FIP through six starts. His big knuckle-curve is missing tons of bats, and if he can ever find the strike zone more consistently, he could be a big deal for this team. I’m also intrigued by Foster Griffin’s kitchen-sink approach. He seems to keep opponents off balance and has turned in a few nice starts, even if the softer stuff makes him prone to ambush homers (especially on the second turn). And, if the Nationals can ever get the ball to Gus Varland in leverage, that top-rail fastball is a lot of fun to watch.

There’s also a few “good process” things going on here. I’m willing to buy the stuff bump we’re seeing from Jake Irvin and think he’ll improve. I’m encouraged by the swingman-rebirth of Mitchell Parker — the stuff looks much better. Plus, I’m curious to see DJ Herz, Jarlin Susana, and Josiah Gray whenever their health allows it. Now, was it “good process” to trade Gore and Ferrer? Eh, I don’t know. Those deals look poorly timed if Washington continues to feature a top-10 lineup. Then again, maybe that’s not realistic, and it certainly wasn’t at the time those trades were made.

So far in 2026, the Nationals have caught my interest in a way I wasn’t expecting. There seems to be real, positive momentum building at the major league level, even if their contention window is as far out as… however long it takes to build an entire pitching staff. They have a handful of young, team-controlled, potentially star-level batters. And they have an interesting collection of prospects and supplementary players. (For more on that, check out our 2026 Washington Nationals Top 41 Prospects list, which was published earlier today.) The Nationals are a work in progress. But hey, it’s progress, nonetheless.

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The Philadelphia Phillies have released right-handed pitcher Taijuan Walker, and it’s not hard to understand why. The Phillies, two-time defending NL East champs and one of the preseason favorites for the National League pennant, are down two engines and spiraling rapidly toward an uncontrolled crash landing. They need to dump everything that’s not bolted down, and unfortunately for Walker, that’s him.

The 33-year-old right-hander took the loss in two of the Phillies’ eight consecutive defeats, and if his 9.13 ERA is due to regress with better sequencing and luck, it wasn’t going to regress by much. Walker’s xERA is 7.04 and his FIP is 7.82. In 22 2/3 innings, he has struck out 17 batters while allowing 36 hits (including eight home runs) and 11 walks.

On the heels of his final outing in Phillies colors, Jayson Stark posted a statistical coincidence that’s so damning, it almost feels unkind to notice: Opponents have hit .353/.417/.657 against Walker this season. In 1941, the year of his record 56-game hitting streak, Joe DiMaggio hit .357/.440/.643.

Walker’s four-year, $72 million contract will go down as a loss for the Phillies, though not a historically bad one. After all, this is the franchise that gave the infamous five-year, $125 million extension to decline-phase Ryan Howard, and signed Danny Tartabull to a one-year, $2.3 million contract (a lot of scratch for this team in 1997), only to watch him break his toe and hop off into retirement three games into the season.

Over three years and change in Philadelphia, Walker threw 402 2/3 innings, many of them not that bad. He compiled 1.2 WAR over that time, thanks mostly to a pretty good 2023 campaign in which he won 15 games and threw 172 2/3 innings, both career highs. He was also useful, if not spectacular, in 2025. He suffered no career- or life-altering injuries, made the playoffs every year, and — it bears repeating — made $72 million.

It tells the whole story that my reaction to his tenure is one of overwhelming pity or sympathy for the man himself. Getting stinking rich playing for a really good team does not necessarily look like a lot of fun.

When Walker signed with the Phillies during the 2022 Winter Meetings, he was coming off a career year with the Mets, but even at the time no one expected him to be much more than a luxury player. The Phillies had just won the pennant behind an excellent front three of Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, and Ranger Suarez — the rotation was already a strength.

But it was top-heavy. Zach Eflin had just moved to the bullpen due to injury, and was on his way out of town as a free agent. In the playoffs, the Phillies had gone by the seat of their collective pants with the no. 4 spot in the rotation: Bailey Falter and an empty carapace in the general shape of Noah Syndergaard.

All they needed was a set-and-forget no. 4 starter, someone to throw five or six forgettable innings 30 times a year. At $18 million a year, I don’t think anyone ever realistically viewed Walker as a bargain signing, but in 2023 he did the job.

The thing is, that kind of pitcher isn’t as valuable in the playoffs, and over 2023, the Phillies had an unexpected bumper crop of pitching development successes. Cristopher Sánchez established himself for the first time as a big league-quality starter; Matt Strahm went from innings-eater to high-leverage weapon; and the emergence of Orion Kerkering and the resurrection of Jeff Hoffman gave the Phillies the bullpen depth to play matchups for an entire postseason game, which they did in Atlanta in Game 1 of the NLDS.

The Phillies didn’t need a no. 4 starter in their two-game Wild Card series sweep of Miami, or in the NLDS, where an extra off day between Games 1 and 2 allowed them to bring back Suarez on full rest for Game 4. And when Game 4 of the NLCS rolled around, Sánchez got the start, not Walker. He’d done his job, and despite being healthy and effective all year, did not throw a pitch in the playoffs.

Walker would never be that effective again, and even if he had, the Phillies kept finding pitchers to jump the line to the rotation. Sánchez took yet another leap and became Philadelphia’s most indispensable starter. There were tantalizing sparks from Spencer Turnbull, Mick Abel, and Tyler Phillips in 2024 and 2025. Jesús Luzardo arrived in 2025 and gave the Phillies no. 2 starter-level performance out of the no. 4 spot in the rotation, and top pitching prospect Andrew Painter finally made his long-awaited debut this spring.

Now, with Wheeler coming back from thoracic outlet decompression this weekend, the rotation lines up as follows: Sánchez, Wheeler, Luzardo, Nola, Painter. There’s no room for a guy with a 9.13 ERA. Even if there were, the Phillies have reached a point where it’s probably time to see if Alan Rangel or Bryse Wilson can give them an ERA under 7.00 for a change.

Releasing Walker is a blindingly obvious move for a team that can no longer afford to be sentimental. He’s gotten his shot, and whatever empathy one might feel for him, he just has not been good enough. That’s life in showbiz.

Even so, it’s a bit jarring to see the Phillies just straight-up cut Walker loose in April. They don’t do this kind of thing very often.

It’s hard to argue with the record of the Phillies’ front office. Under Dave Dombrowski and either Sam Fuld or Preston Mattingly, the Phillies have made the playoffs four times in five seasons and won two division titles and a pennant. If Sam Alito hadn’t shown up during the 2022 World Series and harshed the vibes, we might be talking about this as the best run in franchise history.

I do, however, have a consistent gripe with this front office. The near-total lack of production from the farm system — especially on the hitter development side — has forced Dombrowski and his lieutenants to lean on free agents to plug holes in the lineup. The Phillies have enough money to make that plan work, and when possible, they shop at the very top of the market, which is where the value is.

The most dangerous sector of the free agent market is the second tier. For every bargain, there are five ticking time bombs. My gripe is not that the Phillies frequently shop here — that’s where they got not only Wheeler (who was an Andy MacPhail-Matt Klentak signing, but the point stands), but also Kyle Schwarber. Those two are among the best free agent signings in franchise history. If they get burned by Walker, or Nick Castellanos, or Max Kepler and Adolis García, fine.

My gripe is that Dombrowski has an unhealthily high tolerance for throwing good money after bad. It took at least a year too long to remove Castellanos from the middle of the lineup, for instance, let alone cut him loose. Whit Merrifield got half a season to prove he couldn’t hit .200.

It’s different with Walker. He was so bad in 2024 that his contract went from underwater to completely sunk in the blink of an eye. The Phillies were never going to get back any of the money he was due in 2025 or 2026 in trade, let alone a prospect or a useful player. So they might as well keep him; maybe he wouldn’t live up to the deal he signed, but surely he’d be just as good as any minimum-salary street free agent they’d replace him with.

That turned out to be the case in 2025, but not now. Maybe this is a sign of a newfound urgency for a Phillies team that’s been relentlessly, and perhaps unproductively, calm over the past three years. Or maybe Walker finally just ran out of chances.

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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 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.

Other Prospects of Note

Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.

Fringe Upper-Level Hitters
Phillip Glasser, 2B
Andrew Pinckney, OF
Yohandy Morales, 1B
Sam Petersen, CF
Cayden Wallace, 3B

Glasser, 26, is a pesky, pitch-spoiling grinder who makes a ton of slappy opposite-field contact. He isn’t an especially good or versatile defender, and it’s tough to call him an everyday keystone fit since he doesn’t hit for any power, but his at-bat quality is sensational. Pinckney and Morales are two big-framed hitters at Rochester whose lever length makes them incredibly vulnerable to fastballs, which they’ve both posted a sub-70% contact rate against since the start of 2025. Petersen is a speedy center fielder who swings hard for a smaller guy, but the former Iowa Hawkeye has a mere 70% contact rate against fastballs since the start of 2025. Wallace, 24, was once a Royals second-rounder who was later traded as part of a package for Hunter Harvey. After a few vanilla seasons, he is off to a raucous start in Harrisburg, where he first saw meaningful playing time in 2023. Out of this group, he might be the most likely to wear a big league uniform because he can play a mix of second and third base.

Depth Arms
Tyler Stuart, RHP
Eddy Yean, RHP
Seth Shuman, RHP
Marquis Grissom Jr., RHP
Julian Tonghini, RHP

Stuart, 26, is a 6-foot-9 righty who looked like a backend starter in 2023 and 2024. Unfortunately, his stuff and control backed up last year and he had TJ at the end of the summer, which will keep him out until 2027. Yean throws hard (95-99 in the early going of 2026), but his fastball plays down due to its shape and his command. His slider and changeup are both good enough that he shouldn’t have to rely so much on his fastball, but he will need to command those better to root into a big league role. Shuman, a 2019 sixth-rounder out of Georgia Southern, is a strike-throwing Triple-A righty without a plus pitch. Grissom has a plus changeup that he has to rely on to get by because the rest of his pitches and his control are below average. He’s currently at Double-A Harrisburg. Tonghini was a senior sign reliever out of Arizona last year. He has a vertical attack combo platter, with a 94-mph fastball and a mid-80s curveball.

(Mostly) Big-Framed Outfielders
Leandro Pineda, OF
Cristhian Vaquero, OF
Victor Hurtado, OF
Juan Duran, OF
Elijah Green, OF

Aside from Duran, this group is composed of physical outfield prospects who have one damning offensive flaw. Pineda is a projectable 6-foot-3 23-year-old with average lefty power. Depending on how his body develops into his mid-to-late 20s, it’s possible he could wield plus power at peak and have a window of big league relevance. Vaquero and Hurtado are former big bonus prospects from the international market who have struggled so far in pro ball. Both have classically projectable baseball bodies and are good athletes, but Vaquero strikes out a ton, while Hurtado’s bat speed is way below what was advertised when he signed. Duran signed for $1 million in January. He’s a stocky outfield prospect with good present power for his age, but very little projection remaining. Green is a former fifth overall pick who has K’d too much to be a serious prospect. His continued inclusion on this list serves as a chance to wonder with excitement whether the 22-year-old, whose father was a two-time Pro Bowl tight end, might someday elect to play football, a sport I also care about and would love to see Green to succeed in.

I Like the Cut of Your Jib
Jose Sanchez, RHP
Pablo Aldonis, LHP
Luke Young, RHP
Jared Beck, LHP

These are pitching prospects with good deliveries and frames. Sanchez, 20, had a 7.64 ERA in the DSL last year, but his ideal, 6-foot-3 build and mechanical looseness are both exciting. The way he drives down the mound creates seven feet of extension and uphill fastball angle that could make that an impact pitch if he starts throwing harder. Aldonis is a 24-year-old lefty with a lovely delivery and a sneaky low-90s fastball. His slider quality is a good bit beneath what is typical for a lefty bullpen specialist, but if that pitch improves, he’ll be in the 40-man mix. Young doesn’t have sexy stuff and he’s only K’d 18% of opponents in the mid-minors as a reliever, but he has a prototypical pitcher’s build at a limber 6-foot-3, he can spin the baseball, and his delivery is fairly athletic. He’s the sort of pitcher who I’d classify as a high-priority minor league free agent because of these characteristics, just to see if a change of scenery unlocks another gear of stuff. Beck is a seven-foot lefty out of Division-II Saint Leo University in Florida who was originally an Oriole and signed a minor league deal with Washington during the offseason. He has good stuff, including a plus breaking ball, but he has walked a batter per inning for basically his entire career. It stands to reason it would take a guy this big longer to dial in his feel for release.

System Overview

The outgoing regime left Paul Toboni and Co. a relatively full cupboard, as this system has above-average impact (both in terms of 50-grade players and 40+ or better guys) and overall depth. It is, however, a very volatile system. Even when we include young big leaguers and guys like Dylan Crews (who I’m still on) and Brady House who have graduated but have yet to establish themselves, there are lots of players with risky profiles occupying those tops spots. Harry Ford might struggle to hit the same way Crews and House have. Travis Sykora, Jarlin Susana and Alejandro Rosario are hurt. Ronny Cruz and Gavin Fien have sketchy slider recognition. Landon Harmon and Miguel Sime Jr. are teenage pitchers… You get the idea.

So while this system is exciting, there is probably going to be attrition in these ranks, and the demos these players come from suggest the hit rate on this group may be lower than the baseline for a typical system with this kind of depth. That said, the impact of the players who do hit from this group will be meaningful. If things click for Harmon, he’s going to be awesome, not just some backend starter. I think that boom or bust dynamic applies to a lot of these guys. This pattern was a hallmark of the Mike Rizzo era.

The Nationals’ baby-faced brain trust brought together people from many different recently successful orgs. Toboni, 36, was hired as POBO after ascending from area scout to assistant GM across seven years in Boston spanning the Dombrowski, Bloom, and Breslow eras. Toboni comes from scouting, with some later-tenure player development responsibilities that coincided with Breslow’s arrival. Though significant changes were made to the org’s scouting and development staff, Toboni retained interim GM Mike DeBartolo (who people seemed to like working with while he ran things post-Rizzo) and brought in a host of young folks from all over the map to build out the guts of an org that was generally seen as less innovative and tech/data-savvy than most other ballclubs. New general manager Anirudh Kilambi came through the Rays R&D department and then was hired by Philadelphia the year after Dombrowski arrived. Assistant GM Justin Horowitz comes from Pittsburgh’s amateur scouting department, while amateur scouting director Desmond McGowan did data science for the Mets (and before that Yankees) with a focus on the draft.

The new regime has already brought long overdue infrastructure and technology investment and a greater emphasis on the use of data to the org, but it will be a while before we really understand this group’s scouting and developmental tendencies. That said, there are some early indicators, with an increased number of hitting and pitching coaches throughout the system, including two Driveline alums, hitting competitions to engage the crowded Fredericksburg infield, and the invocation of Boston’s player development system as “table stakes.” We’ll likely get a better sense of Toboni and Co. as they navigate the margins of their roster early this year, while the draft and trade deadline will help illuminate their scouting approach.

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The chosen home field advantage will then be applied to whatever simulation you run. But how do we calculate home field advantage in this simulated environment? Let’s go over it.

You’re probably familiar with home field advantage being expressed in terms of winning percentage. From 2000-2010, the home team’s winning percentage hovered around 54%. In the next decade, it declined to around 53%. In recent years, it has fallen to the 52-53% range. Since our simulation works at a plate appearance-level, however, we couldn’t look at game outcomes to measure home field advantage. Instead, we used PA-level data to infer how much playing at home affects the rate of each outcome in our simulator.

We took data from 2022-2025, the universal DH era, and used it to fit three different models of home field advantage. First, we simply compared the rate of each outcome achieved at home and on the road, without considering batter identity. Next, we fitted a logistic regression that considered batter identity plus a categorical home/away variable. Finally, we fitted another logistic regression that used batter identity, pitcher identity, and home/away. The three models produced similar values, within a margin of error, which gives us confidence that the methodology is sound.

In our sample, home field advantage appears to act chiefly on strikeouts, walks, and home runs. Home batters strike out less frequently, (unintentionally) walk more frequently, and hit home runs more frequently. They also hit doubles more frequently, though that effect size was meaningfully smaller. We found no statistically significant variation in hit-by-pitch, single, triple, or “in play, out” rates, though it’s worth noting that for triples in particular, the sample size was too small for much precision.

We use the home field advantage factors that we calculated in the above step to modify the baseball simulation engine. We make these modifications in odds ratio space by taking the initially calculated probabilities of each outcome, decomposing them into odds ratios, modifying them by the home field factor, and then re-casting them back into probabilities. This method accounts for varying effect sizes based on expected matchup outcomes. Luis Arraez doesn’t get the same raw boost in home runs as Aaron Judge, in other words.

We tested this method of accounting for home field advantage by having identical teams face off against each other, both with and without the home field modifiers. Home team winning percentages averaged between 52% and 52.5%, exactly what we expected given the relationship between the observed change in individual outcome frequencies and actual winning percentage. In other words, we feel that our model is well-calibrated on real-world data in recent years.

By default, we split our calculated home field adjustments in half and then assign a bonus to home batter outcomes and a penalty to away batter outcomes. If you’d like to run your own version of home field, though, you can change the calibration scalar away from that default 0.5 weighting:

Moving that slider will linearly increase or decrease the home and away modifiers added to the simulation. You can also use your own custom weights for each event type, though frankly you shouldn’t need to; we just thought it was pretty cool that you can, so we left the feature in. As a word of warning, moving these sliders by a large amount can produce nonsensical results; if your multipliers mean that the home team hits 50% more singles than the away team on average, the simulated game won’t look much like baseball.

The rest of the simulation is unchanged; you can see a description of its current features here. As before, this is still very much a beta product. If you see any issues or have any feature requests, just let us know, either in the comments here or by using the Lab’s feedback button.

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2:03	Jason Martinez: Welcome to the RosterResource Live chat! As always, a lot of cool stuff happening around the league. Of course Abrams and Wood are making JR Ritchie’s MLB debut difficult. Here we go …

2:05

Jon Becker: It’s always a good problem to have when you have seven legit starting options in Cole, Rodón, Fried, Schlittler, Warren, Weathers, Gil. I put them in rough order of how secure they should feel with a rotation spot (assuming health), and really the top four are locks to stay. Warren’s been great and Weathers has been more up-and-down but the stuff is undeniable. Optioning Gil is the most obvious move for one spot, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do with six SP options. Skip/piggyback Schlittler sometimes to manage innings? Put Weathers in the pen when there are days off and going with six SP for a stretch doesn’t really make sense?

2:08

Jason Martinez: For the most notable stuff, it’s up-to-the-minute. If there’s a late-inning situation that’s up in the air (most teams), I’ll update during the games if usage or results necessitate a change. At the latest, I’ll make changes as I review the box scores at the end of the day. For “Relievers on the Rise”, some are obvious. Lots of hype and they’re not allowing any runs over 3+ appearances. And I usually will leave the ROTR tag on a pitcher until the next time they’ve allowed a run. Now that we’re a few weeks into the season, I can view a leaderboard’s last 14 days and pick out some under the radar guys.

2:11

Jon Becker: Not impossible, but pretty improbable. Konnor Griffin was the most aggressive promotion to the majors (as far as age is concerned) since Juan Soto, and Made would be even more aggressive considering he’s yet to touch Triple-A. If they want to shake it up I have to imagine Cooper Pratt is ahead of Made in line since he just signed that extension (though he’s been awful in AAA, albeit in just 15 games), and Jett Williams is in Triple-A (and also struggling) too.

2:14

Jason Martinez: Ferguson hasn’t even started a rehab assignment so I don’t think he’s anywhere close to returning. No one really lighting it up down in AAA. More than anything, they need a multi-inning guy so I can see them bringing up one of the starters (Franco, Petty, Aguiar) for a bit to fill the long relief role. Antone will be a great story once he gets back. He’s only pitching 1-inning stints right now, however, and they also can’t option him to the minors once they call him up (out of options). So I don’t think that’s happening in the near future.

2:18

Jon Becker: Our rest of season playing time projections that Jason mostly runs (you can find these on the player pages or RosterResource pages or Depth Chart pages) project DeLuca for 340 more PA, Cortes 189, Taveras 173, Lockridge 120. That’s a lot for DeLuca but the Rays have really liked him whenever he’s been healthy since they got him in that trade, and they’re so aggressive with platooning he’ll soak up as many PA against LHP as they can get him, plus some RHP. Cortes should still play fairly often against RHP when Rooker is back but the OF is crowded, same with Taveras when O’Neill is back. Lockridge gets pretty far down the depth chart with a healthy Chourio and Yelich.

2:21

Jason Martinez: False. I think they wait until the 2nd half. Rumfield and Johnston have been good. I think they’ll get a look at Blaine Crim before long as a right-handed hitting option. Rockies recently said (I think it was DePodesta) that they want Condon to get more comfortable in the OF. He’s made 8 starts in RF after not playing there at all last season. With Doyle and Beck both struggling, that might be his clearest path.

2:23

Jon Becker: Two if not three starting OF getting injured, I guess? Alcántara’s got to be ahead of him in line if there’s significant PA available, and ahead of Alcántara in line is Shaw. It’s cool to see Ramírez crushing it in his first taste of Triple-A but  I’d want to see a little larger of a sample before strongly considering a call-up.

2:25	Jason Martinez: By the way, Ramirez is No. 1 overall on the RosterResource MiLB Power Rankings. And he was already there before his 8-RBI game yesterday. https://www.fangraphs.com/roster-resource/minor-league-power-rankings?…

2:26

Jason Martinez: Depending on when Verlander comes back, maybe they can for 1-2 turns in the rotation with 6 starters. But Montero is a very valuable SP6 and he can’t be that without starting games on a regular basis. As long as everyone is healthy, I’d expect him to continue starting in AAA until much later in the season when they can use him to strengthen the ‘pen. He’ll be out of options after 2026 so the Tigers will take advantage of that when necessary.

2:29

Jon Becker: The rule is that a player burns an option year if he spends at least 20 days in the minors over the course of the season; the days can be non-consecutive. He’s already been down for 20 by my count so he’ll be out of options next year no matter what, and I doubt he lasts too long on the MLB roster anyway.

2:33

Jason Martinez: He’s had some huge months as a major leaguer so  I think they’re giving him some time to figure it out. He could post a .900 OPS in May and it wouldn’t be a surprise. But because he also ended last year in a slump (.140 BA in final 66 PAs), the chances of a demotion have increased since he hasn’t been productive since last August. It would be a major shake-up so I think they want to be sure before doing something big like swapping Wallner for Emmanuel Rodriguez.

2:35

Jon Becker: He got hit in the hand/wrist area two starts ago and then was awful in his next start (eight walks!) but it’s not like they would have let him pitch if his pitching hand was that compromised. If I recall correctly, it was pretty cold in The Bronx during that start and while I don’t want to chalk it up entirely to the weather, it’s certainly a factor. I’m on medium alert for now but it’s worth monitoring.

2:38

Jason Martinez: I’d go SDP, ATL (with a healthy Iglesias), and then CIN. The psychological impact of having to face Mason Miller in the 9th inning (and Adam/Morejon before him) is why the Padres are so good despite having a decimated rotation and a terrible offense. I don’t completely trust Pagan, but the Reds might have the deepest bullpen in baseball. 7 reliable relievers who can pitch in high leverage.

2:40

Jon Becker: I guess they’d be exactly as fun to watch for a fully rational/unbiased observer/fan, but since nobody like that truly exists, definitely the over-performing team. Winning 84 games and making the playoffs when you’re projected to win 78 is way cooler/less anxiety-inducing for fans of that team than being projected to win the division with 91 wins and sneaking into October with 84.

2:44

Jason Martinez: I read that Giolito has to be called up within 25 days so I’d expect him around mid-May. Canning should be back 1st week of May. Waldron is the odd man out. If everyone is healthy when Giolito is ready, then it’s between Buehler and Marquez. So their next 3-4 starts will be an audition to be the SP5. Padres lineup is desperate for another lefty bat. It’s probably Song. No other internal options. He’s heating up in AAA so that’s a good sign. Castellanos is probably the odd man out very soon.

2:46

Jon Becker: We removed the platoon label from Cruz pretty early on in the season and he’s not giving us any reason to change it back anytime soon. Maybe he crashes back down to earth against them and there’s soft platooning (not starting against the elite lefties) but he’s shown more than enough to start against most of them in perpetuity now. Totally agreed with you that he looks way more comfortable, the swings and even takes are so much more confident.

2:49

Jason Martinez: A lot of $$$ coming off the books and they should be able to sign both Suzuki and Happ if they wanted, but they’ll have to decide what their priorities will be. Rotation would still be in pretty good shape … Steele, Boyd, Cabrera … but they’ll have to add at least 1 starter to the mix. I think a lot will depend on how they view Shaw and whether he is a legit starting RF. So far, so good. But they’ll need the full season to determine whether he should be locked in to that spot in 2027 and beyond. I don’t think they’ll go another season with him as the super-utility guy.

2:51

Jon Becker: Not that they should build a roster to appease the fans, but fans might riot if they take that approach without a Proven Closer and Guys Who Have Been There in the bullpen. Reliever volatility is real but it’s not as if there’s total randomness there, and in their bullpen specifically everyone’s performed roughly as expected. Bednar’s often a slow starter, Cruz isn’t giving up hits but is walking and striking guys out (very typical for him), Hill is rock solid, Doval is his usual maddening self. Headrick has been a really nice arm for them but even he wasn’t really a flier, they’ve liked him a ton since last year. He just was optionable to the minors (and still is) so they took advantage of that.

2:54

Jason Martinez: Not really. Not a lot of patterns when it comes to lineups since they change so often. But for a young and unproven player who is only getting starts vs LHP, that’s clearly their audition for more starts vs RHP. Jeremiah Jackson crushing LHP probably helped him get everyday at-bats but it’s more because of injuries. Austin Martin is crushing LHP but he’s still not playing much vs RHP. But I’m sure it could help his cause at some point.

2:56

Jon Becker: Pagán earned the role as their closer last year and is getting paid like it without doing much of anything to show that he shouldn’t have the job. If I remember correctly, five of his six runs allowed were in one game, a non-save opportunity. If I’m Francona I love having guys like Ashcraft and Santillan to come in with runners on base, and Ashcraft has the 4+ out ability I wouldn’t want to lose if he’s the closer.

3:00

Jason Martinez: Speaking of top pitching prospects, JR Ritchie gave up solo homers to Wood and Abrams and nothing else thru 6 innings. And is now in line for the Win in his MLB debut. Maybe he sticks, although Strider’s close to a return so he might be headed back to AAA until the path is clearer. Snelling has done what he needs to do. Janson Junk threw 5 shutout innings yesterday but that might not be enough to hold off Snelling much longer. They gave Paddack $4MM (a lot of $$$ for the Marlins) so they’re not going to DFA him this quickly. My guess is Snelling is up in May and Junk will be back in the ‘pen to make room. Aside from Snelling, I’d guess that Riley Cornelio (Nationals) could be next to get the call.

3:02

Jon Becker: I grew up in Deerfield so VERY familiar with both of these places. Enjoy them both but Tony’s has a special place in my heart because I’d often go there to grab a sandwich when I had the last period of the day free senior year of high school and then I’d go back for baseball games. Not sure what suburb you’re in right now but my favorites when I’m back up there are Josh’s and Grill House in Northbrook, The Peanut Gallery in Lake Forest, and Walker Bros. if you’re in the mood for breakfasty food. And now I’M hungry (despite having had lunch already).

3:05

Jason Martinez: I don’t even think the Brewers know yet. They gave Cooper Pratt the contract extension, which is a big deal, and he’s only played SS in AAA. Jesus Made played 2B and 3B last season but he’s only played SS in 2026. The answer to your question is going to become clearer once we start seeing those 2 play a different position on at least a semi-regular basis. But as long as they aren’t, we can assume that Turang is staying at 2B and any change in 2026 will involve SS and/or 3B.

3:07	Jason Martinez: That will do it for today. Thank you for joining us! We’ll be back next Thursday.

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