N2: So strange to read a couple of times in 1925 articles about a pitcher Hubbell who was referred to just that way. It wasn’t Carl, but the unrelated Bill, who was in his seventh and final season. Carl not debuting until 1928, they had no idea what was around the corner.

I was surprised to see Carl only pitched for 16 seasons. I think of him as a career and a peak great. He was already 25 years old when he debuted.

Bill was a super-finesse pitcher and in the last of his seven seasons in 1925. His high in wins was 10. He allowed a career .320 average, which topped out at .395 in 258 at-bats against in 1923 (remembering that composite .421 average, apparently his true calling would have been as a 2026 position-player pitcher). Bill pitched mostly for the Phillies in the ‘20s, and they did play at Baker Bowl. He had an E.R.A. 0.70 worse at home, but this doesn’t explain the batting average — he allowed .319 on the road.

N3: I want to return to the essay that emerged yesterday from finding OBP/SLG comparisons for 2025/2026 Trout. A couple of players who came up with multiple seasons1 were Adam Eaton and Carlos Santana. Being forced to make sense of that was a good reminder of why, despite the categorical opposition to batting average that generally exists, I often include it in much that I do.

To review, here were the average OBP and SLGs2 for the players in their flagged seasons

Trout: .367 OBP, .431 SLG

Eaton: .363 OBP, .429 SLG

Santana: .365 OBP, .424 SLG

But their average batting average looked like this.

Trout .236

Eaton: .283

Santana: .242

Because there is a big difference in the batting average of Trout and Eaton, this means that the same OBP and SLG for them necessarily means something entirely different for them in the sub-categories, and that no one could think of them as similar, even if the person would rate them similarly based on their OBP and SLG.

Pro-rating Trout’s 2026 numbers to the end of the seaso, here are the other averages in the big sub-categories3 of home runs and walks for OBP and SLG for Mike and Adam.

Trout: 25 HR, 95 BB, 135 G

Eaton: 14 HR, 62 BB, 154 G

You see what I mean. But Santana, with an average just 6 points better than Trout, works much better as a comp.

Santana: 23 HR, 102 BB, 148 G

So, if you anchor with batting average, the same OBP and SLG means that incremental OBP performance (i.e., BB + HBP) and incremental power will also be the same. But without doing that, there’s no process. It falls apart.

A good framework is to think of statistical modeling. If you want to isolate OBP beyond BA, or SLG beyond BA, you have to include BA in your model. Otherwise, in looking at OBP and SLG, you are getting a conflation.

N4: Every time he tries to lay that “the more pitchers are used, the more likely there will be a bad inning” theory on us, John Smoltz needs to be confronted with cases of “bullpen game” shutouts, like the one Arizona pulled off on Wednesday.

Actually, occasioned by rain, Atlanta had something of a “bullpen game” shutout too, Wednesday. Four relievers came in for Grant Holmes after the 3rd inning.

N5: Jose Altuve’s current career batting average: .29994.

With the rounding there, it seems to be responding with a .333 kind of logic, where a hit next time will bump him 8 hundred-thousandths to .30002, and an out next time will drop him to .29990.

N6: The Nationals have this relief pitcher, Max Kranick, who I probably wouldn’t notice except that he’s an ex-Met. Coming back from elbow surgery, he’s been blowing up in the box scores, now owning a 9.33 E.R.A. in 17 outings.

In trying to understand what had possessed the Nationals to persevere this far with him, I was trying to figure out to what extent he owned his season stats to a few bad innings, and to what extent he has been as hapless as my impression. Ten of his 19 earned runs allowed do stem from two outings, one of the outings coming yesterday. But he’s given up an earned run nine different times and has never put together a streak of more than three scoreless outings.

That last is what I wanted to focus on, what I wanted to get some context for. There are 17 pitchers this year who have 20 or more saves, and I decided to find their longest scoreless streak (scoreless streak of earned runs).

In trying to get the context, first, with a median E.R.A. of 2.36, they’ve been stars beyond saves. With an E.R.A. of 3.50 or worse4 are Paul Sewald, Andres Munoz, Emilio Pagan, Riley O’Brien and Yoendrys Gomez.

Streak ranks are obviously dependent on total games. Pagan (37 games) and Hader (38 G) stand out for being low. Everyone else has from 47-62.

In terms of the their longest streak, the pitchers are all a good ways from Kranick. In fact, aside from Sewald and Gomez, they are all in double-digits. As he was released by Arizona just over three weeks ago, Sewald is easy to identify as an imposter closer (in terms of his 2026 form). So, while acknowledging the vagaries of streaks, this might be a framing of performance that gives us some perspective. The list:

(1) David Bednar 21

(2) Josh Hader 19 (current)

(3) Louis Varland 18

(4) Aroldis Chapman 17

(5) Trevor Megill 15

(5) Raisel Iglesias 15

(7) Jhoan Duran 14

(8) Mason Miller 13

(8) Bryan Baker 135

(8) Riley O’Brien 13

(8) Andres Munoz 13

(12) Cade Smith 12

(12) Tanner Scott 12

(14) Emilio Pagan 11

(15) Jacob Latz 10

(16) Yoendrys Gomez 9

(16) Paul Sewald 9

N7: I’m sure there is Roman Anthony fever with him 9 for 18 with a 1.415 OPS since his return.

N8: And Wilyer Abreu now leads MLB with 34 doubles. Given Fenway and the team history, we need a big doubles hitter on the Red Sox, and Abreu could be that guy. He had 33 in just 399 AB in 2024, too.

I think I did this before, but his doubles break down 42 at home for his career, 48 on the road. Interesting.

N9: We can find more dramatic examples, but Andrew Painter is one of those guys who throws hard but affords his fastball only a complementary role. He just crossed 100 innings with his outing yesterday. Among the 116 pitchers with 100 innings, he ranks 23rd in fastball velocity (96.3 according to Sports Info Solutions) but ranks 85th in fastball use (41.8%). The overall MLB number is 47.7% fastball use.

Early in the season, it was not this way. Painter threw 51.0% fastballs through his first seven games. Then, for his May 13 start, he made an abrupt change (62 pitches, 21 fastballs). From that start through his demotion to the minor leagues over a month later, he threw just 35.4% fastballs. Painter, though, had a a 7.24 E.R.A. in the second period, a 6.89 E.R.A. in the first period, .

Emerging from the minors, it was changeup in out, split-finger out. He has continued to lean on slider and Co., though, with just 39.1% fastballs. But now the results are coming — a 3.15 E.R.A. in 7 games.

Something else that must be mentioned. We used to talk of “cut fastballs,” not just “cutters,” and some cutters really are dressed-up fastballs, or honorary fastballs. Serve some of the same purpose. But Painter doesn’t throw a cutter, and his fastball usage isn’t lowered consequently. If you out the cutter guys, he’d show as more of a breaking ball, offspeed pitcher, statistically.

N10: Interesting that between their position players and pitchers, the Marlins are in a four-way tie (with the Phillies, Yankees, and Guardians) for fewest players used. Their appetite for short starts, their different batting orders, their calling of pitches from the dugout — these all mark them as a team that experiments. (They’re the young Marlins — what do they have to lose?) But that has not translated to roster turnover. I suppose it could be a matter of wanting to retain options on players and to not wanting “to start the clock” on guys.

N11: Joey Cantillo and Gavin Williams have taken every start and have the same 3.81 E.R.A. But raise your hand if you think Cantillo is as good a pitcher.

N12: I have been on Chase DeLauter’s high batting average potential since early in the season. He’s now at .294. He’s at .455 now, but I think he could also emerge as a perennial .500 SLG guy.

N13: On August 6, I identified RBI as an area where Freddie Freeman was off his normal standard, but until he hit a home run yesterday, he had gone 47 games without one. He has 16 now, and will have his work cut out for him to continue his nine-season streak of 20+ (throwing out 2020, where he was great everywhere, but compromised by the 60-game schedule). Dude has still been very good, with a .306 average, 32 2B and a 135 OPS+.

N2: The Jays have the second-fewest strikeouts in the league, but Gavin Williams got them 13 times Tuesday. One thing that is probably helping big Gavin up his power game1 is that he is throwing harder. Williams’ average four-seam velocity was 96.6 in both 2024 and 2025. Not until his 14th start this year, on June 8 vs. the Yankees, did he average 98 MPH. After not doing that in his next two starts, he has now reeled off 10 of 12 98+ MPH starts. Against the White Sox on August 8, he got outs on pitches of 100.8 and 100.6 MPH.

It is also clear looking at his whiff rates that an improved fastball is what is in all likelihood driving the increase in his strikeout rate. He got 23.3% whiffs on his four-seamer a year ago and is getting 32.1% now.

N3: The two majority catchers with the most Batting Runs (+18) are Gabriel Moreno and Ryan Jeffers.2 Since coming back from his hamate injury, Jeffers has a .836 OPS. That doesn’t match the .949 performance he gave in 37 games before the injury but still tops any other season he’s had since 2023.

Slugging just .383 in the second half, Dillon Dingler has fallen off, and now stands tied for 5th in Batting Runs for catchers at +11.

Batting Runs does the same with Hunter Goodman and his 36 home runs for the Rockies (+11) as it does for Dingler.

N4: Is this right? The Pirates got Brandon Lowe, Jake Mangum and Mason Montgomery of the 14.1 ks/9 all for Mike Burrows? That oughta buy Ben Cherington some more time.

N5: Trout’s 2026 (.239/.376/.424) and 2025 (.232/.359/.439) slashes are quite similar, and his OPS has only differed by 3 points in the two years. But as he has cut his strikeout percentage from 32.0 to 25.6, perhaps this year sits a bit better on the stomach.

What is Trout now? I was thinking a second-act Andrew McCutchen, but in checking, McCutchen’s slugging percentages were lower.3 If you put 2025 and 2026 together for Trout, he has a .367 OBP and a .432 SLG. In this era, which I defined as post-2012, to find out, I asked Stathead for the players who had generated the most batting-average-title qualifying seasons with an OBP in the .357-.377 range and a SLG in the .420-.444 range.

These kinds of things are always more finicky than you expect, so I only found three players who had multiple seasons. With 3 seasons, I found Adam Eaton (2015, 2016, 2019) and Shin-Soo Choo (2012, 2017, 2018); with 2 seasons, I found Carlos Santana (2012, 2014).

Part of the idea of starting with 2012 was to try to catch the lower batting average seasons that we have today. But maybe I should have restricted by batting average directly, because Eaton really doesn’t fit. He hit 14 or 15 home runs in each of those seasons with an average between .279 and .287. So he was remarkably consistent. But he wasn’t the current Trout.

Shoo works better but probably doesn’t actually work. He hit 16, 21, and 22 home runs in those years, with averages of .261, .264, and .283.

This was a long time ago, when he was 26 and 28, but Santana does work.4 His slashes were

2012: .252/.365/.420.

2014: .231/.365/.427.

He led the AL with 113 walks in 2014.

N6: Maybe it’s being a prisoner of the moment to say I’d rather have Jesus Luzardo for one start right now than Cristopher Sanchez or Zack Wheeler, but I can’t help myself. Over his last 12 starts, Luzardo has a 1.86 E.R.A. and a 32.5 strikeout percentage. The slash against him has been .178/.248/.286. Maybe he’s not performing as the best starting pitcher in the game, but he’s making a case for himself as one of the top five.

I don’t know if the idea was that he could be a Derby horse4 and that prompted the ballplayers’ purchase. But where the typical time between races would be a month, March of Time’s 2-year-old December debut did not set him up for a run to the Derby and instead he was not seen again in a race for a full year.

He won that time and went on to compile a total record of two wins, two seconds, and a third from five starts. But there was another break of 17 months in there, and now we are all the way into 2026 and closer to 2027.

But on Saturday, there was finally an emotional reward for all of the necessary patience brought about by the injury. March of Time made it into a stakes race, the grade II Pat O’Brien Stakes, which was run at Del Mar racetrack near San Diego. He was well-regarded, the co-second choice in the betting, but ran out of the money, finishing 5th of 10. However, he wasn’t beaten that far, just under 4 lengths. Ironically, the winner of the race was none other than one Iron Man Cal.5

I guess Buehler had a share in 2020 Kentucky Derby winner Authentic, but for snooty folks like me, microshare ownership hardly counts. He probably didn’t invest that much or make that much with Authentic, although he made a nice face for the ownership group.

Bregman is the one you see owning a lot of horses. His best horse has been Governor Sam, who came within a length of winning a $1,000,000 race in 2024, and has won $898,000 off a purchase price of $275,000. Bregman has also won stakes races this summer with the fillies To a Flame and Love You Anyway.

As they presumably love themselves more than they love each other, I see no conflict of interest in Bregman and Buehler owning a horse together, but it happens to be a matchup, Bregman vs. Buehler, that hasn’t happened a whole lot. In just three games over three years — 2018, 2020, and then this year. Buehler didn’t pitch in the 2017 World Series against the Astros, but even if he had, they didn’t co-own a horse then, so that wouldn’t have been a problem.

In the meeting this year, Buehler had a brutal outing, giving up 3 home runs and 9 runs in 4 innings. Chicago went on to win 23-3, up 15-2 before the position player. came in. Just walking once in three plate appearances, Bregman didn’t do any of the damage against Buehler.

In the 2018 meeting, Buehler nailed Bregman on the hand with a 98 MPH sinker. That was one of six hit-by-pitches Buehler had in 137 1/3 innings, while Bregman was hit 12 times on the year.

N2: Devers now there at 30 home runs. A new era of Giants baseball.

N3: I wonder what the practical reason is for holding the All-Star Game some 90 games after opening day and not truly at the halfway mark? You know me and symmetry. Is it to keep it clear of the 4th of July?

That’s weird in a sense. Isn’t the All-Star Game supposed to be about pageantry?

N4: I apologize,6 but yes, here it comes. The 2026 position-player-pitching report. I’ll try to at least make it interesting. Hey, warmed up with the even more hopeless subject of horse racing, so I’m ready to go.

Basically, everything has changed, and nothing has changed. In the same way that, for a while, one could credibly say that, despite Trump, our system of government was holding and our freedoms were unimpaired, our system of baseball remains unaffected by the scourge of position-player pitching.

But I happen to have the data from 2024 on hand, when things had already gone entirely too far. And comparing the data for the years, it’s not just an impression — things have gotten a good deal more farcical still.

Batters faced by Position-Player-Pitchers (PPP)7 are at 732 currently, on pace for 860. That’s a 93% increase from the 445 of 2024.

There was some buzz at the time that the newly-popular Eephus pitching counterintuitively worked. That it wasn’t just to save the PPPs’ arms or, God forbid, to do a favor to the hitters while you indifferently performed worse.

This rationalization is now no longer tenable. Here are the splits vs. PPPs for 2026 and 2024.

2026: E.R.A., 11.08; Slash, .421/.477/.708; HR-per-575 AB, 42.0.

2024 E.R.A. 7.84; Slash .337/.413/.546; HR-per-575 AB, 24.0.

But back to my point that qualitatively nothing has changed,8 that the system is holding, that the ratio of real baseball to this baseball is just too great for season stats to be meaningfully affected, etc.

2026 Effects

//E.R.A. with PPP: 4.159

E.R.A. w/o PPP: 4.134

Diff: 0.025//

//BA with PPP: .24366

BA w/o PPP: .24284

Diff: 0.82 points//

//OBP with PPP: .31818

OBP w/o PPP: .31743

Diff: 0.75 points//

//SLG with PPP: .39989

SLG w/o PPP: .39846

Diff: 1.43 points//

Where position-player pitching matters statistically is in the single-game records, mostly on the team side of things. The use of a position-player pitcher is just a little over 1 game in 28.9 But think of those subset of games where teams score double-digit runs. By definition, they are going to contain all of the single-game run records. And a PPP probably comes in at least half of them.10 Then the records for the stats like hits and home runs that support runs naturally come disproportionately from high-run games. And this phenomenon does, I think, filter tend down to individual-player records, too, where they are affected by PPP in a way that the negligible league effect does not reflect.

But the main thing is that, when you see one of these 18-2 scores now, as a fan you are totally bored by it. This is in part a natural consequence of anything that becomes more common. The standard changes, and that’s fine and totally workable. But it’s not like now we are excited when a team scores 21, when we used to be excited when a team scores 13. We’re not excited by any high-scoring team run total now because we rightly assume that a PPP has come in, and that the whole data point doesn’t matter.

N5: Daylen Lile won Player of the Week then did flexed his muscle more with a 2-HR, 4-times-on-base-in-4-PA Monday.

It’s asking a lot, but if he can repeat his phenomenal September of last year, we’ll call him the Julio Rodriguez of the National League. Lile’s .257/.309/.443, 105 OPS+ slash still needs some work. But add in last September’s numbers, and he’ll be up to .277/.328/.492.11

N6: Riley Greene is coming back today, and the Tigers lineup sure looks better with him.

N7: I’m sure smart-alecky Mike Steele will tell me, look whom he was facing, dumb ass, but how Jekyll-and-Hyde has Jacob deGrom become? Seven innings, one hit, no walks on Monday.

N8: He loses the game, but Anthony Kay wins the hit-by-pitch battle Monday, sparing the White Sox, while his counterpart Peter Lambert not only walked 5 but hit Tristan Peters.

That would be a fun thing to compile, wouldn’t it? A pitcher HBP won-loss record? Pitchers could get a win if they hit fewer than their opponent, a loss if they hit more, and a no-decision if they drew.

It kind of breaks down, though, because we know an Eduardo Rodriguez is undefeated this year. There would be a lot of no-decisions in general. I guess that would be the default.

Given that reality, a HBP win for Kay is really something to celebrate.

N9: Munetaka Murakami’s slugging average fell under .500 after Sunday’s game. It had been there since April 18.

His career NPB SLG was .557, with a .472 mark in exactly 500 AB in 2024. He was exactly .500 in 496 AB in the NPB in 2023.

N10: Another Jekyll-and-Hyde is certainly Jackson Holliday (.500 July OBP in 23 G; .226 August OBP in 28 G, etc.). Unfortunately, with him, there’s more Hyde than Jekyll.

N11: I wouldn’t say a walk-donut seven-inning effort from Walbert Urena is quite on the level of Wilt Chamberlain’s going 28-for-32 from the free throw line on 3/2/62, but count me shocked.

N12: Meanwhile, David Bednar’s allowing 3 runs in the 8th with the Yankees down 7-1 is grist for the mill for those who think closers suffer a letdown in low-leverage situations. Bednar had been so good, allowing just 4 runs in 34.1 innings since June coming into the game. With a beautiful split and curve to go along with a fastball he can elevate, he’s not your typical closer and has grown on me.

(1) Rays 45

(2) Brewers 30

(3) Marlins 27

Those heavy Rays fingerprints are betrayed by David Hamilton (Brewers) and Chandler Simpson being tied at the top with 14 bunt hits, while Rays Cedric Mullin (11 bunt hits) and Taylor Walls (9 bunt hits) take up the 3+4 spots in MLB.

To zag a bit from the topic, it’s true that now we have “sprint speed.” Like with statistics generally, this is both great and takes the fun out of things. Steals used to operate as the best thing we had to gauge speed. Maybe it’s only true if you’re old school, but I still think there is a connection where you process what a player’s steals say about his speed faster than if you are given his sprint speed.

Looking at the individual rankings of bunt hits, it struck me that this, too, is a real data piece that is helpful in saying whether someone is fast or not.

You will jump in and say that it’s hopelessly conflated, that it takes in whether you do or don’t have power. Ohtani isn’t going to be doing a lot of bunting. But if you look at the bunt leaders, it’s notable how much overlap there is with the steals leaders. I don’t know how many of them came from earlier in the year, but even PCA has 5 bunt hits.

That makes him one of 21 players this year with 5 or more. Prorating their steals to 625 plate appearances,1 all of them are in double digits in steals this years. The only guys under 20 in prorated steals on this bunt-hit list are Steven Kwan (currently 9 steals), Tristan Peters (currently 7 steals) and Jorge Barrosa and TJ Friedl (currently 5 steals). Median stolen bases per 625 PA on the list is 25.3. Among all batting average qualifiers, just 12% have that steal rate.2

A couple of other notes on the bunt hit leaders. A 35-year-old Brett Butler had 42 bunt hits in 1992.3 Not only in terms of volume, but in terms of age, there is nothing like that now. Among the 21 guys with 5 or more bunt hits, only Mullins (6/30-age 31) and Jake Mangum (6/30-age 30) are 30+. Although Evan Carter (23) and PCA (24) are the only two under 25.

A few lonely practitioners among teams can make a difference, but the bunt doesn’t seem to be on its way to extinction. This total of 21 guys with 5 or more bunt hits surpasses the number for all of 2024 (there were 19 guys). And at the top, Hamilton and Simpson are ahead of what Jacob Young (11 bunt hits) produced.

N2: Your eyes pop out noting the split in the Giants’ new right-handed platoon center fielder Jonah Cox’s batting average (.276) and BAbip (.520).

Cox has struck out 30 times in 64 plate appearances. There is hope because he didn’t do that in the minors (a career 23.4% striking rate).

With his 98th percentile sprint speed, he also had a .378 BAbip there, too. More good news.

Infield hits have played some role in this .520 BAbip, but not the large role I suspected. Of his 16 hits, he has one bunt hit, and two other infield hits. So 18.8% of his hits have been infield. That’s more like Fernando Tatis (23 of 149 infield) or Jose Altuve (23 of 106 infield) than Chandler Simpson (37.2% infield) or Justin Crawford (27.8% infield).

The infield hit contribution is a bit heavier than that with Cox, really, because he has surprisingly hit 3 home runs so far,4 leaving only 13 in-the-park hits. But if he stops hitting home runs, he’ll need to rely on a high BAbip even more.

When we analyze BAbip, among other pieces, we look at exit velocity. On Baseball Reference, that’s a meager 82.3 MPH for Cox. He must have flubbed on some bunt attempts, though, because FanGraphs, taking out the bunts, has him at a much more impressive 92.0. He’s not official yet, but Baseball Savant is in fact penciling in his mark towards the “great” end of the EV scale.

Don’t get me wrong, it will be an upset if he emerges as a regular, but I’m fucking fascinated by Cox, I have to say. In 55 games in the minors this year, buoyed by a .415 average, he stole even more (made it 34 times) than he had in previous seasons, but with a success rate of 79%, down from 85% in his two previous years.

N3: Most two-strike counts run this year:

(1) Pete Crow-Armstrong 355

(2) Zach Neto 353

(3) Kyle Schwarber 351

Thirty-six players have run 300+.5 Of them, only Geraldo Perdomo (70 SO), Isaac Paredes (73 SO) and Alex Bregman (96 SO) do not have 100 strikeouts.

Best BB/SO ratios are disproportionately affected by the best strikeout rates, but we are tapping into some of the league’s best, and with the metric I gave, all three are logically good walkers, too. Perdomo has a 13.0% walk rate; Paredes and Bregman, 10.7%.

N4: The Rays have given up the 7th-most home runs in baseball this year but have allowed the lowest on-base percentage. As we think about strengths and weaknesses (or weaknesses and strengths, as the case may be).

Overall runs allowed, they are 8th.

N5: Through 48 starts, 37 in the #8 spot in the order, it’s been positive returns on Cooper Pratt. He’s looked worth the contract.

.265 average

9.8% walk rate

12 for 14 stealing

4 Defensive Runs Saved

Despite all that speed, he has 8 grounded into double plays. He has a high GB/FB ratio, 1.45. It was 1.46 in 2024 in the minor leagues, 1.11 in 2025, 1.86 before his call-up this year.

Smells of those swing adjustments.

N6: The NFL is nearly here, and NFL “keys to the game” and “key players” are execrable. But it does seem to me that, taking a bit of license, Trea Turner is a key for the Phillies. In Realmuto, they unfortunately have one over-the-hill player. What is going on with Turner since the start of the year, I don’t know. But it’s hard enough to win with one over-the-hill starting position player, let alone two.

Their 77-60 record has them tied with the Cubs. Maybe we can go back to those thematic bowls. With the Cubs, their flaw is that they just cannot keep the ball in the ballpark.

It’s hard to look the other way with Shota Imanaga. He’s bleeding in front of our eyes. As I was watching the Mets, I was surprised by Matt Vasgersian touting him and his good season, in anticipation of the Sunday night game.

N2: Over 2025-2026, the Yankees have an 8 game lead over all American League clubs and are the only team with a .550 or better winning percentage (.574). The Red Sox are second in the makeshift standings; Toronto, 10 back in 3rd.

N3: On the subject of defensive infield miseries, I note that the maddening and underachieving Pirates lead MLB in second base errors, are tied for 4th in shortstop errors, and tied for 5th in 3B errors. It should be noted that we would ideally get a read on how much of this is just tough scoring of Pirates games, perhaps by checking on how many errors have been charged to Pirate opponents.

Overall, the Pirates are tied with the Nationals for most errors. They are a better team than the Nationals and unlike them, did not go into “sell” mode, in fact acquiring something of a deluxe bullpen. But the teams also share strong offense, ranking 5th and 2nd in MLB in R/G.

The Orioles have been leaky at 2B (they are tied for the second-most miscues) and at third (they are tied for the most at the position). While still in the undesirable half, they are better at short, tied for 12th in errors.

Overall, the O’s have made the 7th-most errors.

N4: Bailey Ober had a nice start Saturday (60 game score) but Andrew Morris gave up a home run to Andrew Benintendi in the 6th inning and suffered his fourth loss in the last two weeks. Ober had an interesting dichotomy between his whiffs and strikeouts, with 5 of each. Whiffs typically run about 2:1 to strikeouts. He struck out a quarter of the batters he faced in the game while recording just a 10% whiff rate and just a 5.7% whiff rate on “in the zone” pitches. Three of Bailey’s five ks were looking. Two came on chanegups, one on a slider.

N5: I’m not sure whether Cardinals fans should get excited by their 2022 2nd-round pick Brycen Mautz striking out 8 in 3 relief innings against the Pirates Saturday or they shouldn’t. It was his second lifetime appearance after one in late May. Setting aside the 5 hits and 4 runs Mautz allowed, his strikeout rate this year at Triple-A was decidedly unexciting (9.4-per-9) and his relief work worse than his starting pitcher work, not suggesting that his stuff will play up in a relief role. Mautz recorded all 8 strikeouts Saturday on his curve or slider. But hell, yes, I would get excited anyway.

N6: I’m surprised to see that despite his below-average strikeout rate, Sandy Alcantara has never given up as many hits as innings in a season. In fact, he’s had six seasons of 20+ starts, and the margin between his innings and hits has always been at least 8. The career BAbip against him is just .275, while .294 would have been expected for his years in the Show. Add in what is a HR/9 rate under 1.00, and the slugging average against Alcantara for his career is quite low, .373.

N7: A 38-for-91 August (.418) for Jac Caglianone, with one day to go. This has brought his season’s average to .285. Major narrative points for carrying the Royals during their surge.

N8: Hey, a “notes and essays” without a footnote! Someone will have to note that the streak was broken, and just how many posts it reached.

From the July 17, 1925, Brooklyn Standard Union:

“As the season progresses it becomes more and more evident that a good southpaw can make the Robins play dead and make them like it.1”

The sophistication of this is very modern. The writer claims to quite a degree of perception. This actually is a few levels up from mere awareness of the platoom effect. He is not just saying that left-handers typically don’t hit left-handed pitchers as well or even that a particular left-handed batter doesn’t hit left-handed pitching as well. He is saying that, as a group, the Dodgers (presumably led by the performance of their left-handers2) struggle with left-handed pitching. Without statistics, you’d have to be somewhat observant to know that, but you’d also have to be paying a good deal of attention, and to have absolute faith (or at least great curiosity) about the platoon principle.

N2: Oh how the wind blows. Wrigley Field Batting Park Factors by year:

2021 103

2022 97

2023 108

2024 87

2025 98

2026 103

Certainly something that talent evaluators, let alone award voters, must keep in mind.

N3: Reliever Trent Thornton took the loss on Friday with a rough outing (5 runs allowed), and perhaps the rent came due. He had just a 2.32 E.R.A. entering the outing in 41 games but had struck out just 15.2% of his batters. His 58th percentile velocity would predict better, and allowances in strikeout rate sometimes can be made for a cutter pitcher. But Thornton doesn’t have the GB/FB rate (1.22-1) he should with such a low strikeout rate. And a cutter can be a different property from one pitcher to another, and with Thornton, it actually represents his best whiff rate.

Two typical catchers, Tyler Stephenson and Jose Trevino, went deep against Thornton (Trevino DHing).

N4: Bibee, Williams and Messsick give Cleveland three of MLB’s top 15 in innings.

Going to his game logs, I’m even more surprised Bibee is 6th in innings.

He’s only worked 7+ innings five times; 20 pitchers this year have done it more often.

Bibee’s second and third starts of the year were also games where he didn’t make it through the 5th and only gave up one run. It seems like more innings might have been drawn from him.

His won-loss record (5-14) is not the common case where it is somewhere in the middle and you don’t register it. In those starts where he’s pitched 7+ innings, Bibee is 2-2 with a 1.69 E.R.A. in them. So he’s 3-12 in his other 23 starts.

N5: Michael Wacha now just one walk over his last four starts and 26 2/3 innings. So he’s tracked just with Lugo there.

N6: Travis Bazzana’s last home run was July 20. At least his batting average (.246 to .241) and on-base percentage (.337 to .332) haven’t gone down much since then.

N7: I guess “1-0 Yankees” is a fitting score in a Yankees-Red Sox matchup in 2026. Both teams came into the game with the same excellent +100 run differential, but it had been built entirely their pitching and defense, as their composite 4.47 R/G happens to be the same as the league average.

N8: Yes, Matt Olson’s numbers do represent an interesting case in doubles and home runs where he is not quite as good as those lofty numbers may indicate, but from a justice standpoint, it was the wrong message. There is the case that he is criminally underrated. These are Olson’s Braves. He is their best player. And Freeman started the All-Star game, and we hear more of him with the Dodgers’ ubiquitous presence and his career milestones than we do of Olson. I am an enormous Freeman fan, and he is underrated in his own way. But Olson should have started the All-Star game.

N9: A nice Brewers postseason run might also give the world a chance to know and appreciate Logan Henderson. Cat is scary good.

N10: Jake Bauers 5-for-5 yesterday reaching base. This is one of those fun Cinderella stories to track — particularly, to see if JB can lead the NL in on-base precentage. At .389, he now sits 2nd behind James Woods’ .393. Behind him are Bryce Harper (.384), Shohei Ohtani (.384) and TJ Rumfield (.382, 5-for-5 himself reaching base Thursday).

Juan Soto has a .409 OBP and is set to return to the Mets. Soto needs 143 plate appearances to reach 502 and the Mets have just 27 games left. Even if he plays every game and the team hits well, he’s looking to come up about 15 plate appearances short.3 But given his lead in the number and that it could even grow, the possibility that he could still win the title by imputing failed plate appearances to get him to 502 can’t be discounted.

It sure seems like you’d need to get better than 10-1 to bet on Bauers winning this and to think your money was reasonably well invested.

N11: Joey Ortiz’s better 2026 at the plate than 2025 (a .695 OPS vs. .593) has nothing to do with elevating against left-handers. He does play more against them (35.9% of his 2026 PA) but he has just a .666 OPS against lefties. And this stands up as somewhat real (and odd) as he has struck out 22.1% of the time against lefties, 16.9% against righties.

N12: Evan Carter has spent the last 20 games with his average in the .190s. At least this isn’t the 15-game streak where it ran .168 to .178 for him from late May through Late June.

N13: Brandon Nimmo experiencing a 2-for-36 slump, and yes, Carson Benge now not only leads him by 14 points in OBP, but by 12 points in SLG.

N14: Royce Lewis, 14 for 14 on the year in steals, is evidently healthy, while Byron Buxton (7 for 8) is not.

A player stealing more and better as he ages4 and figures thing out isn’t unusual, but Lewis has interesting speed metrics since 2023. His games played have ranged from 58-106, so we can trust that the yearly data have given a good read on where he’s been. FT./SEC. first below, then time to first (in seconds).

2023: 28.2, 4.35

2024: 26.6, 4.44

2025: 26.8, 4.45

2026: 27.8, 4.33

We won’t soon forget Buxton, but we know there aren’t a whole lot of guys with Walker Jenkins’ kind of career minor league slash (.303/.404/.491), let alone 21-year-olds who have that. Jenkins debuted Friday, curiously put 9th in the order even with the right-hander Luis Castillo starting, and picked up a single and a walk.

N15: Encarnacion-Strand (.829 OPS) has done well for the Orioles in his chance, but now Blaze Alexander is back. With the left-handed Jacob Lopez starting for the A’s Friday, the O’s sat Gunnar Henderson and played both Encarnacion-Strand and Alexander in the infield, thus putting off the inevitable decision that needs to be made a day. I think Encarnacion-Strand is what he is, with limited upside beyond power, and one must not forget that the Orioles acquired him cheap for a reason.

N16: Geraldo Perdomo (4.3 bWAR, .362 OBP) has had a fine year by any measure except unrealistic expectations.

N17: Oh those vicissitudes in the Giants’ lineups. Osleivis Basabe DHed and hit 3rd on Wedneday, played second base and hit 9th on Friday. With his .212/.244/.341 slash, the last seems to make more sense. A true Giant so far — 1 walk, 90 PA!

The Post, as reported by Mollie Walker, tells me that Roger Peckinpaugh in 1915 is the last Yankee shortstop to have errors in six straight games. Earlier this week, in my surprise at having learned that Babe Ruth was a Yankee captain for several months in 1922,1, I retrieved the whole list, and noted Peckinpaugh on there. He was the captain right before Ruth, a new captain necessary because Peckinpaugh was traded to Washington before 1922. Peckinpaugh was captain from 1914-1921, meaning that only Jeter is linked to a longer tenure in that role.

Lombard Jr. has been compared to Jeter2 but having Peckinpaugh’s name invoked is a good reminder that Jeter wasn’t the only Yankee captain shortstop. And there was also Kid Elberfeld (1906-1908) and Rollie Zeider (1913).

My first looks at those guys makes me think their captaincies had some of the forgettable Ruth flavor to them.

Unlike Peckinpaugh, Zeider didn’t just switch teams, he went to the Federal League.

I wonder if his charges used his Baseball Reference nickname, “Bunions”, to his face?

I always have to keep Elberfeld straight from Gleason, the manager of the 1919 White Sox. The two actually formed the double play combo for the 1901 Tigers,3 Gleason playing second, Elberfeld short. In Elberfeld’s only time as an official manager, with the 1908 Highlanders, he went 27-71.4

N2: Who says Aaron Boone is boring? I have no idea what he means, but you have to love his description of Lombard’s errors as “funky errors.” Should that be an official category? Hey, the error system is so subjective to begin with, why not. We could wing it.

N3: I’m getting inured to these high-walk totals from starting pitchers. We went the 20 days from 8/3 to 8/22 without a starter walking 6 in a game, and since then we’ve had Bryce Miller walk 7 on Sunday, Joey Cantillo and Sean Burke walk 7 and 8 respectively on Wednesday, and Jake Irvin walk 7 yesterday

Except for Miller, I wouldn’t say these performances were strictly anomalous. Their BBs/9 for their careers and for 2026:

Miller: 2.4 career, 2.4 2026

Cantillo: 4.2 career, 4.6 2026

Burke: 3.6 career, 3.0 2026

Irvin: 3.3 career, 4.3 2026

Should have left that up there. Don’t know why I didn’t. Not like I don’t have the necessary weirdness guts. But hate to be “wrong,” I guess.

N2: Something that article prompted me to look up and which I didn’t know was that Frankie Frisch was at times a third baseman for the Giants and not a second baseman. Frisch and a past-his-prime pitcher1 were traded to the Cardinals for Rogers Hornsby before 1927, and Frisch only played for the Giants and Cardinals in his 19-year career. With the Giants, he made 616 starts at second, 329 at third, and 41 at short. It was when he got to the Cardinals that he did nothing except moonlight at third.

His association with second base is really strong. When I was growing up in the ‘80s, he was always on those top-5, top-10 all-time lists. I never heard about him at third.

One thing that’s interesting is that Frisch had quite a number of tenures as the third baseman, but with maybe one notable exception, he was never made to play both positions. He didn’t do what a lot of guys today do, in other words. He might play a half season at third, but when he was doing that, he didn’t play any second. Ripken Jr. would have approved of the apparent McGraw theory.

N3: My feeling about Eduardo Rodriguez’s 2026 is opposite from my feeling about Paul Skenes’ 2026. I feel like Rodriguez wasn’t pitching that well and was getting great results, but his confidence grew, and now he is actually pitching well. It’s become self-fulfilling prophecy.

Using the same 3.084 constant factor, his FIPs by month come to:

March/April: 4.80

May: 2.67

June: 4.40

July: 4.44

August: 2.19

The randomness of pitching and FIP itself gains support when you realize that a lot of FIP comes down to home runs. Rodriguez has just given up 1 in his 5 starts this month. So whether he’s really pitching very well and really pitching much better, or whether batters just haven’t happened to hit home runs, even there I’m not so sure.

Last year, he pitched 154 1/3 innings to a 5.02 E.R.A., this year he’s pitched 162 to a 2.50 E.R.A. But so much of what he has done has been the same.

Whiff rate: 20.4% 2025, 19.0% 2026.

SO rate: 20.6% 2025, 18.0% 2026.

BB rate: 8.6% 2025, 7.9% 2026.

FB velocity: 92.0 2025, 92.0 2026.

Ground ball/fly ball rate: 0.90-1 2025, 1.00-1 2026.

A key has been that his BAbip has gone from .333 to .266. 33 points over .300 in 2025, 34 points under .300 in 2026.

His repertoire has also undergone only modest change. He’s thrown a curve 12% this year, and it’s been effective. Next to his four-seamer, going by his run values, it’s his second-best pitch per pitch. It’s mainly a weapon for him versus lefties.

Many left-handers have weapons against lefties just as a stockpile, as they never actually get to face lefties. But because Rodriguez has historically been a changeup/cutter pitcher and has an opposing OPS 18 points worse against lefties, his situation is different. 29% of the batters against him this year have been southpaw.

A fun fact about Rodriguez I came across because HBP is a part of FIP: Rodriguez hasn’t hit a batter this year. In his Arizona career of 366 1/3 innings, he’s only hit 2.

N4: The Angels are actually 8th in MLB in Offensive BAbip, while they are 27th in regular-old batting average. But the BAbip luck was not working for them on Wednesday, when they could manage only 2 hits against in 6 innings against Joey Cantillo as he produced a 1:7 SO:BB ratio. Then they could only get 1 hit in 3 innings against the Cleveland bullpen, although 3 strikeouts were mixed in there.

2024 first-round pick Christian Moore had 3 of the walks. In 86 Pacific Coast League games this year, he had a .431 OBP. His home run power wasn’t much to speak of (11), but sits in the league in walks, in a tie for 8th in doubles, and in a tie for 5th in triples, while 36 players in the league have played more games.

N5: The trend of Jeremy Pena striking out more has continued. For his career, he still possesses just under a 20% strikeout rate, but when I checked in on him on August 6, his outstanding overall 2026 statistics did include 16 strikeouts in his previous 9 games. Since then, Pena’s has continued to do some damage, with 2 home runs and 3 doubles in 62 at-bats. But he’s had just 10 hits total, and with 1 walk and 22 strikeouts.

So that’s a 34.9% strikeout rate. Want to know what his strikeout rate was during the 9-game consecutive strikeout streak that prompted that initial note? 34.8%.

N6: Tyler Rogers spent much of last season with the highest strike rate a pitcher has had since the official beginning of that statistic in 2000, but in the last days, he yielded and finished with a 74.44% that was behind Emmanuel Clase2, 2022 (75.03%). So Rogers stamped himself, like an Aaron Judge with home runs or somebody, as a potential record waiting to happen, and I’ve been delinquent in not checking in on his 2026 strike rate until now.

While he’s at worst having a very good year in the areas that count, he has not approached his 2025 rate. He’s at 70.01%, which is also behind what he did in 2024 (72.36%).

Anyone looking at the increase in his walks from 7 to 20 had to assume this. He has been one of those relief pitchers who’s come in for a lot of intentional walks, though. He has 5, so his walk rate is misleading. His teammate Brendan Little has the same 5 intentional walks and 20 overall.

One would certainly assume from these two examples that Toronto has the most intentional walks, and they do, 31. The Dodgers are second, with 26. Do you think John Schneider and Dave Roberts got their equilibrium off from last postseason and part of them thinks it’s still going on?

N7: Cal Raleigh’s 2025 was to his 2026 rather what Joshua Baez’s debut was/will be to the rest of his 2026? The appearance to the fan is that they were spoiled by their success and formed an unrealistic idea of how often a player could actually expect to hit home runs, and now going all in, they are without the foundation to do anything else.

You might suspect an injury, but Mullins has attempted 27 steals, tied for 19th in MLB.

The XBT statistic really reflects aggression, and a guy who had lost his speed would probably find that out more at first by getting unexpectedly thrown out. But for what it’s worth, Mullins’ sprint speed and home-to-first time show only slight decline. He is running at 27.9 ft./sec. this year, compared to 28.0-28.4 from 2023-2025. In home to first, he is at 4.34, compared to 4.26-4.28 for 2023-2025.

The face validity of the XBT statistic and its association with speed, are generally strongly supported, at least at the bottom, looking at the rankings. Kyle Schwarber is one spot ahead of Mullins. Cal Raleigh is last, followed by Josh Bell. Sal Perez is also in the bottom ten. But then you have Andres Gimenez third-to-last. Gimenez is 19-for-22 stealing this year, and over his career, if he hasn’t been an elite base stealer, he’s what Joe Ryan is in SO/BB ratio to Chris Sale.

Checking his speed metrics makes it clear he is of course no Josh Bell, but they do say that, although he won’t turn 28 until next Friday, he is not nearly as quick as he used to be. He had 86 total bolts2 over 2022-20233 but had 2 total over the last two years. His 2026 sprint speed is the 61st percentile, while Mullins is at the 64th.

N2: Batters have hit at least .280 against Seth Lugo in every month since May. Of late, he’s been making sure they’re hitting it, allowing just 2 walks in 21 2/3 innings over his last 4 starts. He’s also allowed 3.68 fewer home runs than the league rate per at-bat would project, but he’s 1 away from have given up as many 2B+3B (Shane Baz and Kyle Freeland) as anybody. His teammate Wacha is tied for 4th, and this could be partly a Kauffman Stadium thing — his home split makes his 2B and 3B look worse, his road split his overall hits and home runs look worse.4

If you haven’t been living and dying with his every start, he has black type with 27 of them, and a 4.61 E.R.A., 90 ERA+. It’s his worst E.R.A. since 2020.

I wondered how much his career E.R.A. had risen. Answer? Only 0.15, from 3.49 to 3.64.

N3: For the Mets, their current 60-72 sure looks a lot better than something like the 36-53 they had at one point. But because of the kind of season this has been in baseball, they still rank 25th in baseball in wins. They are better in Pythagorean, 20th, but to be arguably worse than mediocre in this season of parity sets them apart in a bad way. With the recovery they’ve made, though, they finally now have a chance at the meat on the bone, a chance to make some headway in the standings although truthfully only about five teams or so are really in range.

If they went 21-9 and got to .500, that of course would be different. But it’s hard to see 21-9 with the names in the bullpen.

N4: I hope Mark Walter enjoyed that Alex Call, Alek Thomas, Hunter Feduccia bottom of the order yesterday. Butt-lucky Dodgers went 5 for 9 with 2 walks there, anyway.5

N5: After taking a pause in his last two starts, Anthony Kay was back at it again last night, hitting Justin Foscue to get him up to 22 for the season.

I would say Kay’s HBP this year have been to me what Josh Naylor’s stolen bases were to me last season and Daylen Lile’s triples were to me last September.

Lile, by the way, is off to a big start for the week. But I am bitter that has 2 singles, 2 doubles, and 2 home runs have not found proper space for any triples.

N6: Simply alarming results for deGrom last night. Just 2 strikeouts to 22 batters alone might have raised some questions. Then he had 5 walks, and only 2 of those in the 6-run first inning.

DeGrom had never had a game before where he had 3 more walks than strikeouts.

The first time he ever had a game with 2 more walks than strikeouts was 5/26/25 against Toronto, when despite just giving up 2 runs, he went 5 1/3 innings and didn’t strike out anybody while walking 2.

He had another of those “-2” games on August 1 of this year. Like yesterday, he pitched three innings and part of a fourth and walked 5,6 but instead of striking out 2, he struck out 3.

I go back to “alarmed.” Remember, this was the all-time SO/BB guy. Now Sale (5.33 to 5.26) has retaken the lead.

N7: Yesterday was actually the second time in less than a week that the Angels refused to behave like the sucky offense they generally are.7 They forced 62 pitches out of Gavin Williams before he could record 5 outs. Then they were back to being the Angels, and eventually went down 8-6 in 10.

The previous departure was when they beat the Astros 18-3 last Thursday, with only 2 of those runs against a position player.

N8: Raffy Devers hit his 28th home run last night. Adames hit 30-even last year, making him the first Giant with 30+ home runs since Bonds in 2004. We do know Devers likes his drama, but it seems he’ll cruise pass 30 and not keep us in suspenese.

2023: 0.46

2024: 0.60

2026: 0.92

A further look finds that his ratio has gone from 0.69 over his first 12 starts of 2026 to 1.22 over his last 11 (the split also reflects an IL stint in between, so he may have really regrouped, and this is probably not an artificial division). His results have also completely transformed: a 4.60 E.R.A. in the first period, a 1.80 in the second. Eliminating home runs has been the key to that (11 in 62 2/3 innings, then 2 in 65), making the batted ball change more interesting.

Other than Mariano Rivera 2004/2005, no one allows a home run rate like Perez’s recent streak over a long period of time, but just how much of the drops he will retain is both unclear and the question of the hour. I suppose keeping that 1.22-1 ratio itself will go a long way, given all of the balls that were hit in the air against him before.

N2: 4 walks in 5 innings for Ranger Suarez Monday, despite 20 of 24 first-pitch strikes.

N3: Hard when you are Angels brass to look your fans in the eyes and say everything is o.k. here when you are pinch-hitting 34-year-old Adam Frazier for 37-year-old Travis d’Arnaud on a team with a .394 winning percentage in late August.

N4: If you are a true believer in the “third time around” effect, you think that hitters do better against starters the third time around not just because they are hitting against a tired pitcher, but because they are benefiting from the earlier exposure to the guy’s repertoire. If you buy this, then, it seems to me, you should pay as much attention to the statistic for hitters as you do with pitchers. If there is such an effect, it seems it would vary from hitter to hitter. Just as some pitchers have stuff they run through faster than others, some hitters figure to take considerable instruction from the early at-bats, some guys very little.

And Baseball Reference, bless them, does provide the data. There are are a higher proportion of “third time around” PA than I would have imagined. So I won’t say that sample size isn’t a problem, but it’s less so than in a lot of other contexts.

Taking Oneil Cruz at random, in his career, he shows a big effect. A .736 OPS the first time around, a .746 the second time, and a .953 the third time.

But again, it’s hard to simply separate learning versus diminished stuff. For in his career, Cruz also shows a .636 OPS versus power pitchers, a .747 versus “avg P/F”1 pitchers, and an .814 versus finesse pitchers. If pitchers are becoming more finesse the third time around, maybe that’s why he hits them better.

The normal power discrepancy is also less steep than Cruz shows. For 2026, a .665 OPS vs. power, a .717 OPS vs. avg. P/F, a .754 OPS vs finesse.

I’m surprised. That is very old school. His type used to do that, be regular members of a major league-affiliated team year after year, while top prospects, like Carlos Delgado, would also do multiple years at AAA. But I thought that was about over.

The International League is a whole lot easier place to put up numbers than the major leagues, but it is true that Sogard’s OBP by year has gone from .356 to .370 to .390 to .393 to .410. This is an admirable player.

One reason we might see a player do better in the majors than the minors is if he is newly platooned in the majors. Sogard is a switch-hitter, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t be much better from one side or the other. The Red Sox have given him 78% of his plate appearances left-handed this year, which is higher than the overall proportion of right-handed pitcher activity1. But Sogard’s career major league OPS of .825 against left-handers is just one thing that strongly suggests the Sox would be very happy to see him face left-handers if they had their druthers, and that a platoon explanation doesn’t work for his elevated big league performance.

N2: Since July, Jonathan Aranda has done little at the plate but hits singles. He’s gone 49 for 186 (so a .263 average), but has a .124 secondary average. He has just 2 HR and 10 BB.

Through June, Aranda had a .290 average and a .345 secondary average.

On the season as a whole, only 26.1% of Aranda’s hits have been for extra bases. The MLB average is 34.7%. That might not sound a great deal lower, but Aranda’s percentage ranks him 122nd of 136 batting average qualifiers.2

It is true that singles are worth something. With one more, Aranda will have 100n the season, and his proportion of singles-per-at bats ranks him 10th among qualifiers.

But you’d rather be his teammates Yandy Diaz (.468 SLG) and Liam Hicks (.445 SLG) than Aranda (.415 SLG). They have a higher rate of singles per at-bat than he does.

Aranda’s power has been particularly lacking against left-handers. Twenty-eight of his 32 hits against them have been singles, and his Isolated Power against lefties is a pitiful .045. The good news is that, over time, very little of that carries over. It is more common to hitting with the platoon differential against one rather than something that distinguishes players. But Aranda’s 28.6% strikeout rate against lefties versus only 21.6% against righties does speak to a healthy true platoon difference (and that does carry over, over time).

N3: The Javier Sanoja doubles train rolls on. He now has 51 in 685 career AB. He also has just a 10.2% career strikeout rate. The Marlins are unafraid to play him against right-handers (that’s 68% of his plate appearances this year), but he still hasn’t quite broken through as the starting third baseman. Obviously, if he continues this .937 OPS of August, they’ll have no choice but to have him in there every day.

N4: The corollary of sub-.500 teams now being in position in the AL for a playoff berth is that only four of the 15 teams are over .500. Such traditionally unplayoff-worthy teams being in position has at least as much to do with an amazing statistical quirk as with an expanded field. I consequently enjoy it, because I am about statistical quirks, and we likely won’t see this again (or even at season’s end, I would bet). This season is an outlier and is not one to work from in terms of what is working and what isn’t with the playoff system.

What is also really weird about it is that you don’t have that one team or two teams that are killing everybody and making them look worse in the standings than they are; the Rays are only on pace to win 96 games.

N5: Ezequiel Duran and Joc Pederson have been pleasant surprises, as was Josh Jung before his injury. Brandon Nimmo, Wyatt Langford and Jake Burger collectively have been just a hair off projections, if that. And yet the Rangers are tied for 28th in runs scored. They just don’t have enough to work with.

That was my initial conclusion, but as they are a better 23rd in team OPS, the sum also hasn’t equaled the parts.

A traditional take on their hitting with runners on base doesn’t explain this at all, as their batting average is 35 points better with me on base than with with the bases empty and their Isolated Power just 6 points lower.

They’ve been woeful with the bases loaded, though: a .213/.232/.266 slash in 112 PA. That .498 OPS is not surprisingly dead last this season. Two of the three teams that have done worse since 2023 were the 121-loss 2024 White Sox and the 112-loss 2023 Athletics.3

Another weak point for the Rangers is a .293 OBP leading off innings. This compares to their .314 OBP overall.

N6: I will spare you from my spleen, but such as the Mariners use of two position-player pitchers in the same game while the Cubs’ Pedro Ramirez hits a grand slam against one of them does truly trouble me….Oh, I guess Carson Kelly got in for the Cubs as well on the mound.

I am helpless. At least writing on an obscure Substack is one level better than screaming to the rafters.

I think he may have hit on something here. From the diagram, everyone can see for themselves whether the challenge was successful or not, so no proclamation is really needed (although I suppose there is a case to be made for informing the blind).1 Conversely, it would not be realistic for fans to have in their heads the number of challenges remaining, so making an announcement about this makes sense.

N2: Following up from yesterday, I had a bit of an epiphany that may mean I understand how fielders are able to rate highly at their position in Defensive Runs Saved in such short order. I think it is about the way the rankings are presented. For good reason, they are always cited within position. But I don’t see recent call-ups rocket to the top in Batting Runs because hitting statistics are generally considered for everybody. The competition is therefore eight times greater with Batting Runs. Then, when we start talking about one league at one position, and this is often the basis on which a player’s preeminence in DRS is related, the competition shrinks again.

It also helps to realize that in a plus/minus statistic, if you are plus in the first place, this by itself means you are in the top half. No real sample is required for that. When we note that George Lombard is 6th among shortstops in Defensive Runs Saved, with 30 teams, there are realistically 50 players he is some sort of competition with. In the plus section, that is reduced to 25 players. Being plus in the first place is half the battle, and his value rank relative to sample size doesn’t seem as unfathomable.

I also want to note that there is no reason Fielding Runs and Batting Runs have to have the same dynamic. There is no reason they have to move at the same rate, have to reflect the same mix of sheer number of games and performance relative to average in those games. Although I would actually tend to think Batting Runs would be more volatile, and a player could separate himself faster, because preventing home runs is not as big a part of defense as hitting them, and prevening home runs doesn’t enter into infield defense at all.

So I suppose home runs has always been a relative strength. And if they’d kept Alonso, they would be quite the downtown team.

N2: I will take my crack at the podium putting the doldrums of the Yankees offense in perspective.

First, at 4.44 runs a game, they have now officially fallen behind the major league average.

Judge’s last game was on May 31, making monthly splits the perfect tool for documenting the collapse.

The Giants are last in baseball with a .305 OBP. The Yankees’ monthly OBPs, starting with June, are .288, .281 and .291.

Their OBP since June 1 is 11 points worse than anyone else (the Braves and Reds).

Yankees Runs/Game by month:

Mar/April 4.94

May 5.43

June 4.23

July 3.72

August 3.33

The biggest problem is they just cannot buy a hit. In batting average, they have ranked 27th in June, 28th in July, and 29th in August.

Overall, since June, they have hit .218. The Reds are 2nd-worst at .220, followed by the Mariners at .225.

Besides batting average, the other main components that go into OPS could be said to be walks and isolated power.

The Yankees are in the bottom six in walks since June, but there is obviously a lot of bunching, as on a monthly basis, they don’t look quite that bad (tied for 19th in June, 25th in July, tied for 19th in August).

The Yankees still rate well in home runs post Judge, tied for 8th. But they do a lot worse in Isolated Power1, and their performance there has been consistent: 15th in June; 15th in July; 12th in August; 15th since June.

The Yankees are 29th in runs since June. They are ahead of the Mariners, who are last in R/G on the season, too.

N3: It does seem like a few points in average average makes a big difference in what players can do at the top end.

The average in 2023 was .2484, compared to the .2436 of this year.

In 2023, we had Arraez at .354, Acuna at .337, Freeman at .331, Diaz at .330 and Seager at .327.

This year, the top three are Arraez at .322, Alvarez at .321 and Nick Gonzalez at .311.

I really didn’t appreciate the shift, and that things were a bit different in 2023. I was very surprised that Acuna and Freeman had posted averages like that, and then surprised again to see that they hadn’t won the batting title. I assume now that .330 means you are cruising to the batting title.

N4: I’m sure the mathematical method is valid, but one thing I’ve never quite gotten about Defensive Runs Saved is how players can zoom to an impressive position in just a few games. It doesn’t seem like your positive differential on offense (your Batting Runs, for instance) can measure up to a total that rates you with the league’s good performers as quickly.

We see this all the time, but just a couple of examples:

Derek Hill has 9 DRS in center, ranking him 4th in MLB. He’s done that in 36 games, 22 game starts, 7 complete games, 191 innings.

George Lombard has only played 15 games, but has 7 DRS, ranking him 6th among shortstops.

N5: Brandon Nimmo hasn’t reached 8% walks from plate appearances in either of the last two years, so it can be hard to remember now. But Nimmo’s OBP stood at .393 through his first six years. And the announcer Gary Cohen used to talk about the Nimmo force field, where the pitchers just could not throw strikes to him.

It seems that something similar is going on with Steven Kwan now. Kwan has 8 walks in his last 4 games, 13 in his last 10.

This will be the first year Kwan has reached a 10% walk rate, by the way. He is at 14.0%, and will be over 10% if he doesn’t draw another walk the rest of the season. He’s been between 7.9 and 9.8 in his other four years.

N6: Four lefty pitchers (Reid Detmers, Noah Cameron, MacKenzie Gore, and Eduardo Rodriguez) threw 5 or 6 innings of shutout ball yesterday. Detmers and Cameron were both also coming off a game in which they hadn’t given up anything. Detmers, Cameron, and Gore are all 27.

N7: The American League leader in walks, Taylor Ward still was looking for his first with the Mariners 9 games through his tenure, but drew 2 on Thursday, and then 2 again yesterday. Six-for-forty without a home run as a Mariner, though, he’s off to a slow start with the team.

Sale has thrown 33% more innings than deGrom, so he has more strikeouts, 2739. In terms of their proficiency, I have hit upon a bit of a comp. For his career, Sale has 11.14 SO/9, deGrom 10.85. DeGrom’s WHIP is a bit better, 0.997 to 1.044, so when you look at strikeouts as a share of batters faced, he narrows the gap to 30.60% to 30.75%.

Sale has given up more hits for some reason, allowing a .219 average to a .211 for deGrom. Walk rate is only in favor of deGrom, 5.74% to 5.78%. In SO/BB ratio,1 Baseball Reference has them 1-2 all-time, in a virtual dead heat (deGrom 5.33, Sale 5.32).

It’s funny, I don’t think of deGrom as a strikeout pitcher. I think of him more as a Seaver, as a great pitcher who also gets strikeouts.

In trying to see how much of this is me and how much reality, deGrom’s spotty activity record does make it difficult. 2017-2019 was his period of high strikeout totals. He struck out 239-269 a year in those years. Those are not special totals and tend to support my opinion.

DeGrom’s strikeout rates in those years were right around his career rate. 2020 and 2021 make you wonder “what might have been,” though. He had 250 strikeouts in 160 innings, or 14.06-per-9. With a 1.63 E.R.A., though, he upped his overall game. So I’m still not sure I would classify him as a strikeout pitcher by type in this phase.

DeGrom has never led his league in SO/9 when he’s pitched 162 innings, a missing credential for a true elite strikeout pitcher. Then again, he’s only pitched 162 innings 5 times,2 and in all of them, he’s been top 5 in the league in SO/9.

As a final try at context, I looked at SO/9 in a starting role only, starting in 2014 (deGrom’s rookie year), 1000 or more innings. He rated 5th.

The top 10:

(1) Chris Sale 11.61

(2) Blake Snell 11.20

(3) Dylan Cease 11.18

(4) Max Scherzer 11.10

(5) Jacob deGrom 10.85

(6) Stephen Strasburg 10.59

(7) Robbie Ray 10.56

(8) Gerrit Cole 10.50

(9) Yu Darvish 10.31

(10) Jack Flaherty 10.30

N2: I don’t know if anyone remembers, but in the early season I was documenting how Bobby Witt never seemed to score despite getting on a base fair amount and stealing often. Through the end of April, he had scored just 10 runs in 31 games.

The phenomenon soon died. Perhaps we have a new trend, as Witt scored 3 runs yesterday, and he scored 4 on Monday. Since returning from his back break on August 4, Witt’s been going great guns, not only with 20 runs in 16 games, but with a gaudy on-base precentage (.328/.431/.541 slash).

Witt’s runs really haven’t tracked with the Royals. They’ve scored 4.5 runs a game and are also an average 9-9 this month. May (3.39 R/G) was their offensive nadir, not March/April (4.06).

Witt has scored 61 runs since May 1, which puts him in a tie for 10th in baseball. Everyone in front of him has at least 33 more plate appearances, and everyone but James Wood has at least 61 more.

84 pitches, 69 strikes (82.1%)

91 pitches, 68 strikes (74.7%)

93 pitches, 69 strikes (74.2)%

93 pitches, 69 strikes (74.2)% (Yes, he did 69 for 93 twice)

103 pitches, 76 strikes (73.8%)

As you can imagine, this translated into few walks, just 1.60-per-9 innings.

Walking 38 in 164 1/3 innings, Urquidy’s control was still very good in 2022. His best game was 64-for-86 (74.4).

Since then, though, he’s been beset by arm trouble, and has even issued some walks when he’s been out there (25 in 63 innings in 2023).

Before the White Sox traded for him, Urquidy was with the Pirates, mostly in Triple-A. His walk rate there certainly looks like the old Urquidy. He had 18 walks over 17 starts and 83 2/3 innings. His E.R.A. was 3.66, while the International League composite is currently 4.91, so he pitched well.

Urquidy has a pitch mix, and doesn’t achieve his high strike rates by just pounding his fastballs, which is sometimes the catch with extremely good strike rates. For his career, he’s thrown 52% fastballs, 19% changeups, 16% sliders and 12% curves.

One of Urquidy’s weaknesses historically was vulnerability to the home run. He had yielded 1.47-per-9 home runs through 2022. You will note that wasn’t far off his walk rate — so that he’d given up 56 home runs and 72 walks. According to Statcast, he didn’t throw any sinkers then, only four-seamers.2 But now he’s added a sinker, and against the Cubs, he threw it almost three times as often as he threw his four-seamer.

N2: The Red Sox figured out Brandon Pfaadt to a degree yesterday, scoring 5 runs with 3 home runs before he left in the 6th. But he did post a pretty 8 ks and no walks. Continuing the Urquidy theme, Pfaadt has only 7 walks in 60 1/3 innings since his recall from the minor leagues. This is doubling down on a strength, as even while often pitching in the past like he has belonged in the minors, he’s had excellent walk rates. He garnered National League black type with just 1.88 walks-per-9 in 2025.

Comparing Pfaadt, 2026, to Trevor Rogers, 2025, doesn’t really work, among other reasons since Rogers had a 2.64 E.R.A., All-Star season in 2021. Postseason success aside, Pfaadt didn’t have anything that impressive on his resume. But for surprising the hell out of me, and for getting results that feel like they must represent a statistically significant difference from his previous form, there’s a comparison.

N3: One thing that I struggle to adjust to is that you can hit 20 home runs these days and be having a really bad hitting season. A fan can watch you day in and day out, it can seem that you just about never do anything, and you still end up with 20+. So right now, for instance, Jarren Duran and Cam Smith have 17 home runs. I was wondering, who are the guys this year who haven’t hit for average or power? I used Stathead to find players who have 250 AB, are hitting under .220, and have less than 1 HR per 50 AB (or less than 10 per 500). From a sample of 240, this was only two players:

Matt Vierling (.207, 1.9 HR%, 266 AB)

Jakob Marsee (.205, 1.7 HR%, 409 AB)

N4: I suppose pitcher control is my theme today. Starting in 2024, Logan Gilbert had gone 73 starts without walking 4 guys, but now he’s done that in two of his last three starts. His strike ratio has also been poor in these starts: 56.8% against Tampa Bay on August 7, 58 for 100 yesterday against Milwaukee.

You might say, o.k., those happen to be the two best teams, record-wise. So maybe they just had a smart strategy,3 and Gilbert wasn’t actually in the zone less?

But his zone percentage in the Tampa Bay start was his second-poorest of the season, and yesterday’s rate against Milwaukee rated 19th of his 25 starts.

Adding to the picture, Gilbert only walked 1 Yankee in 6 innings in the intervening start. But by zone percentage, it was his fifth-worst start of the season.

N5: From the box score, Cade Cavalli was brilliant yesterday in shutting out the Rangers over 6 innings.

A quirk is that the 11 strikeouts he had seem more impressive than the 14 whiffs. And if you check, this has been a season-long trend: Cavalli is at the 81st percentile in K%, the 55th percentile in Whiff%.

He is also one guy where this translates to his looking and swinging strikeouts. He is 4th in MLB with 49 looking strikeouts4, tied for 23rd in swinging strikeouts.

Yesterday, he actually wasn’t super heavy in his looking strikeouts — he had 3. Those 14 whiffs also gave him a 32.6 whiff%, and that was his third-best of the season.

N6: Thinking of Walbert Urena, I do think we could do worse than to create a Pitcher Rookie of the Year. I’m not generally for creating more awards and diluting the honor of those we have, but I do think rookie pitchers aren’t done justice under the current setup. If you gave out that award, I don’t think you’d very often regret it and think you were giving it out to a pitcher who hadn’t had a fine season.

The good on Baz is that he’s done an outstanding job keeping the ball in the ballpark this year, with just 0.68 HR/9. Last year, his rate was almost twice as high, and in 23 starts before 2025, he gave up 1.28 HR/9. Anybody with a rate as good as Baz’s 2026 will face regression-to-the-mean, but as his GB/FB ratio has actually gone the wrong way (1.15-1 entering this year, 0.98 in 2026), sustainability is particularly dubious.

Baz’s much better home run rate has come in the context of a worse strikeout rate. 95.9 average four-seam velocity is good, but last year, he was over a MPH faster at 97.0.1 He is big knuckle curve pitcher, throwing it almost 30% of the time the last two years. His whiff rate on the knuckle curve has kept up, falling by just 1.5% from 31.0% in 2025. But the whiff rate on his four-seamer, in accordance with his dip in velocity, is down from 23.5% to 17.3%.

Baz threw 96.3 MPH Tuesday — not quite the 2025 Baz, despite the big strikeout game.

N2: Some sense in a game started by Keider Montero and Braxton Ashcraft2 combining for only 213 pitches (118 Detroit, 95 Pittsburgh). Montero is now 4th among the 502 PA pacing crowd at 3.61 Pit/PA, and Ashcraft is 8th, and only 0.01 behind.

N3: The only team that has gotten less than a .300 OBP from their leadoff hitters this year is the Giants. Their leadoff spot has produced a .284 OBP.3 Thirteen Giants have started there,4 with Luis Arraez, Willy Adames, Jung Hoo Lee, Heliot Ramos and Casey Schmitt in double-digits in their starts.

The 2024 Royals5 easily surpassed that leadoff OBP, producing just a .270. Maikel Garcia got 101 of the starts. With marks of .351 for 2025, .320 this year, and .320 for his career, he’s not necessarily a low-OBP guy.

N4: Owen Caissie (Marlins) has struck out in 110 of 286 plate appearances, or 38.5%. This is well in front of anybody else who has 200 plate appearances. Fellow rookie Esmerlyn Valdez is next with 35.9, and if you project his rate to 286 plate appearances, it’s more than 7 strikeouts behind Caissie.

It doesn’t seem there was much forecasting Caissie and the serial striking out. Taking his stats at the main minor league level in each year at which he spent time from 2022-2025,6 three of his four rates ran from 27.9% to 28.6%. We seemed to have a bead on him. 2023 signaled more of a problem. He struck out 31.1% that year, but thanks to a .407 BAbip, hit .289.

The last time a major leaguer with 502 PA had a better BAbip than that, it was Rod Carew’s .408 in 1977.7 Sure wish we had the bunt hit count that went into that, or the infield hit count at least, but we don’t (at least not officially).

N5: The Rays 5-run performance Tuesday was accompanied by 13 for 36 hitting, including 4 for 8 with RISP, but all of their hits were singles. They also didn’t draw a walk or attempt a steal. So, in terms of secondary average, they went 0 for 36.8 And MLB secondary average is .272, higher than batting average.

I get how you don’t get any long hits in 5 2/3 innings against Jose Soriano, but no walks? Last time he did that was April 22, and he has issued the 4th-most walks in baseball.

N6: Even with the pitch-count strictures, there really is no reason why we can’t have a no-hitter9, but it’s been over two years since Blake Snell did it against the Reds. I still hate to go to bed before I’ve checked and confirmed the Mets don’t have one in progress.

N7: Here’s something kind of surprising. The Rockies this season have both the highest percentage of strikes against them by foul ball and see the fewest pitches-per-plate appearance of any team. The first is an ipsative category, such that if you have fewer looking strikes, which is a way you can build up pitch count, it looks like you have more foul balls. But, I think with good reason, we still associate foul balls with running up pitch count.

What got me to check on these stats was that Colorado hit 27 foul balls last night against Eric Lauer in 5 innings. Consistent with the season trend, his 87 pitches and 3.95-per-batter faced weren’t egregious.

Jordan has appeared in 19 of the Cardinals subsequent 23 games, starting 15 of them at third base. With a .730 OPS since, his performance, by that holistic measure, has picked up a touch. And “due” has not really applied here with RISP; he’s gone 4 for 15, with 4 singles and 4 RBI.

Jordan1 now has another statistical quirk, though. By his Baseball Reference picture, he’s a full-in-the-face guy, and Baseball America has him almost as slow as they come, a 30-grade runner. Yet he has 4 triples in 158 AB.

That leads St. Louis, twice what anybody else on the team has. This was a triple-challenged team last year, too, when, along with the Mariners, they were the only teams that failed to reach double digits.

Jordan’s 4 sacrifice flies also look high to me, but on the Cardinals, Masyn Winn has 7 and Nathan Church 5.

Ozzie Albies leads MLB this year with 11 sacrifice flies. He makes a certain amount of sense for that bragging right — one reason being that he has a 0.72 GB/FB ratio.2

Curious bugger that I am, I wanted some context on sacrifice fly totals. I started by finding the active player with the highest single-season total on his record. That belongs to Francisco Lindor, who had 15 when the Tribe won the pennant in 2016.

Next is the 13 Vinnie Pasquantino3 had in 2024, the season when he had 97 RBI in just 131 games with just a .446 SLG.

Let’s note that Albies is on pace for 14.3 sacrifice flies.

If we drop the active requirement, and just go back to 2005, Lindor’s season is still the best in the timespan.4

There are four players who have played this year and have at least 70 career sacrifice flies.

(1) Nolan Arenado 83

(2) Andrew McCutchen 76

(3) Manny Machado 71

(4) Freddie Freeman 70

Sac flies have been an official stat since 1954. Of course averages may vary, but as a sheer total, Arenado’s 83 suggests we are hardly in the golden era.5 Eighty-six players have bettered that. The guy right in front of Arenado is Mike Lowell.

The Baltimore guys, Murray (128) and Ripken (127) are 1-2, cementing that link between them. The surprise member of the 120+ club6 is Ruben Sierra. As great as he was, Frank Thomas isn’t a surprise with 121 SFs, but Thomas does stand out with Sierra (8044 AB) for having had only 8199 AB.7 Everyone else with 120+ SFs has at least 10,000 ABs.

Of course, if you go by plate appearances, Sierra can be said to have had 1293 fewer chances than Thomas, and Thomas gets a bit closer in opportunity to the other members of the 120+ club. I don’t know if Frank adjusted his approach and eschewed walks with a runner at 3rd and fewer than 2 outs, but his high sacrifice fly total at least raises the possibility.

Today, a rate of 1 SF per 100 AB can perhaps be considered a high rate. Among active players who have 3000 AB (a group of 102 players), this is 12 players. The leaderboard:

(1) Anthony Rendon 1.31%

(2) Alec Bohm 1.24%

(3) Nolan Arenado 1.15%

(4) Cody Bellinger 1.09%

(5) Eugenio Suarez 1.07%

(6) Kike Hernandez 1.07%

(7) Ozzie Albies 1.05%

(8) Andrew Benintendi 1.05%

(9) Adolis Garcia 1.04%

(10) Rhys Hoskins 1.03%

(11) Gleyber Torres 1.01%

(12) Xander Bogaerts 1.01%

Unless I am sorely mistaken, these guys have benefited from playing on good offensive teams.

They vary in strikeout rate. There is Arenado (14.9%), Rendon (15.5%) and Albies (16.2%), but then Garcia, Suarez and Hoskins — all over 25%.

N2: Michael Lorenzen’s release makes it eminently possible Cristopher Sanchez will lead baseball in hits given up. He is 6 in front of the next guy, Sandy Alcantara.

Sanchez is on pace to give up 204 hits. The 171 he gave up last year placed him a tie for 15th in MLB, and the 182 he gave up in 2024 placed him in a tie for 6th. Over 2024-2026, only Logan Webb has given up more (528) than Sanchez’s 512 hits.

Certainly, however, it is more than incidentally important that only Webb also has thrown more innings, which renders the whole thing perhaps more trivial than trenchant. Sanchez has given up 512 H in 545.1 IP. His rates are 8.4-per-9, and a .245 batting average allowed, which is very close to the league average.

N3: The symmetry in PCA and Ohtani both going 4 for 5 with 2 home runs last night in their usual leadoff spots can be noted. Things always change more than you think they will, and injuries are an unfortunate part of the game, but PCA does seem well on his way to the MVP. I’m tempted to say the guy has done everything, but of course, Ohtani has given that a rare meaning (if not a whole new one).

April: .288 (AB 66)

May: .263 (AB 80)

June: .200 (AB 85)

July: .133 (AB 60)

This month, he’s been pretty good this month, with his average a solid .244, and much better, a .488 slug. That’s only 41 AB.

Taveras’s Defensive Runs Saved are -5. But the good start, plus 69% of his innings in center, has been enough to keep his bWAR (0.5) in positive territory.

N2: It has seemed to me that Matt Olson has been in the “pouring it on stage” of late. Subjectively, it seems like he has emerged as the NL’s best hitter of 2026. But the numbers don’t quite support this.

Take a look at his still very mortal slash (.264/.340/.551).

With 26 Batting Runs, he is only 8th in MLB. The good news is he is just 6 runs behind second-place Willson Contreras. But the sobering news is he has less than half the Batting Runs of Yordan Alvarez.

That slugging average is particularly a letdown when you consider that he is one off the major league lead in both doubles and home runs. It’s hard to search for leadership records with Statcast, but to lead in both doubles and home runs in the live-ball era seems like it would be historic.

One thing that is interesting is that if we switch from analyzing by doubles to analyzing using doubles + triples, Olson drops from tied for 2nd in MLB to tied for 10th. A triple is fundamentally the same kind of hit as a double, and we don’t want to be rewarding guys in the double category for not hitting triples, which Olson hasn’t.1 That is essentially what we are doing.

Olson got off to a big start and has been in play for the dual double and home run titles more or less all year. So what it’s seemed to me is that he has had this big start, and now he’s rebroken and separated himself from the pack. With 7 home runs this month in 14 games, his current work certainly stands scrutiny. But I’ve failed to recognize that, if he wasn’t plodding along in the middle months, he wasn’t quite playing like an MVP, either. Season’s stats should be not be confused for recent performance, and that early start helped him maybe in the way that Fred Trump’s money helped a young Donald Trump. They are always a composite.

On May 3rd, I took a look at Olson in one of my notes. He had at least a share of the NL lead in doubles and home runs at the time. Right now, Olson’s 66 extra-base hits give him the most in MLB by a margin of 5. But since May 3, he is tied for just 7th in MLB in extra-base hits. He has 42. Pete Crow-Armstrong, with 52, and Rafael Devers, with 49, have been the standouts.

Over the 34 games through May 2, Olson’s numbers projected to 62 doubles and 52 home runs.2 His pace since has been 31 doubles, 45 home runs.

N3: The 2B + 3B approach also sheds light on Corbin Carroll3 and reveals that by all rights, we should have someone having a big doubles season. As I wrote, this could be the first ever 162-game season where no one reaches 40, and it is true that this reflects a trend of fewer doubles. Triples by and large don’t count in the scheme of things, and a man who hits them in real numbers is an outlier. We therefore get lazy and use doubles as a proxy. But Carroll not only has those amazing 15 three-baggers, he has 26 doubles, putting him on pace for 34 of them as well. By 2B + 3B, it is Carroll first with 41, then Otto Lopez with 36, then Luis Arraez with 34.

N4: It now seems that Pittsburgh has half of the good relievers in the National League. That was some trading deadline spree.

N5: Power surged in June, with 22.1 HR per 575 AB league wide, so it was important to keep an eye on this. That was up 20.1% from the March/April/May rate. But things have calmed down, particularly this month, when there have been 19.5 HR per 575 AB. The August slash is .241/.317/.395.

N6: The Angels offense has been so bad since the All-Star break, one really doesn’t know where to start in capturing this. Let’s confine ourselves to home runs, where they have 15 in 28 games. That’s a z-score4 of -2.38 for post All-Star Game home runs. Only the Blue Jays, who have 18, are also under 22. I remember the Angels’ fast start in the home run department, and they still rated in a tie for 4th in MLB through April. From May 1 through the All-Star break, they were 23rd. And now the problem has become inescapable.

N7: Heriberto Hernandez is the sneaky Marlins home run leader with 18 in 303 AB. He’s been just passable offensively otherwise, but he does do that. Last year, in 294 plate appearances, at .347, his on-base percentage was 39 points better than it is this year.

Right away, we can eliminate the possibility that Hernandez has the fewest at-bats of any team home run leader. Soto leads the Mets in home runs with 21, and he has 293 at-bats. Soto not only leads the Mets in home runs, but by a margin of 7, with Marcus Semien (!) and Carson Benge second on the team.

N8: With the recent promotion of Michael Toglia, the Reds evidently aren’t worried about repeating type.

Maybe we can rename the team in line with their offensive profile? What thematic team nicknames would you give you various other teams?

I guess another way to do this would be to give the whole team the name of the player who best epitomizes them. In the way that Cleveland used to be the Naps.5 Like, the Reds could be the Suarezes.6

I mean, who wants to be team captain, when you could have the team named after you? Being captain, after all, is a lot of work.

I guess it used to be a package deal. You only got the team named after you if you were captain.

N9: With a .759 OPS, it’s not clearly Bryson Stott’s best season, but that’s been .846 since June 1, including a .396 OBP. Dude is also 23 for 23 in steals on the season.

N10: Among all the positive surprises with the Cardinals, their 3.89 starters’ E.R.A., 9th in MLB, has to be chief among them. That’s been 2.76 since August 1, but the small sample obviously lends itself to extreme numbers, and four teams (Marlins, Blue Jays, Yankees, Braves) are better.

N11: Here’s a blast from the past. Michael Fulmer, the bait that brought the Mets Yoenis Cespedes and the 2016 AL Rookie of the Year, pitched for the Angels in relief yesterday. It was his first big league game since he pitched for the Cubs about 14 months ago.

Fulmer was really good pitching in the minor leagues for Sacramento this year, with just a .284 SLG allowed and a 29% strikeout rate. He ended his time there with 18 of 19 scoreless outings, too. I’m not quite sure why the Giants released him, or what that is really shorthand for. Maybe it’s an oversimplification of the transaction wire.

N12: Koufax, Kershaw, Skubal? One team win in his first three starts certainly isn’t what the Dodgers bargained for, but then again, Koufax and Kershaw also would have been unlikely to sweep any three starts. I retrieved the Dodgers winning percentage in the starts for each of them individually, and that was 65.6% for Koufax, 67.0% for Kershaw. Two for three is perhaps the going rate for a historic pitcher.

N13: Hunter Brown 55, 60, and 57 BB with 29-31 starts a season each of the last three years. He has 40 this year in 13 starts.

That appears even worse to me as the 5.2 BB/9 it is. I’m sure Hunter can do better than that — really everyone can. That he’s sort of getting away with it (3.67 E.R.A.) shows how talented he is.

In terms of flameouts, this one was epic. With the mid-September date of his promotion perhaps reflecting the end of Charlotte’s playoffs, Hazewood joined the Orioles. He pinch ran three times and started one time. Zero for five with four strikeouts at the plate during his cameo, he ended the season still looking for his first major league hit. It would never come.

You look for tragedy in a case like this, or a player who sabotaged himself. Maybe a Wander Franco kind of legal trouble. Hazewood did apparently have his moments,3 but as far as what is known, he basically failed honestly. It really just didn’t happen for him, despite his draft status, his speed, and his minor league hitting.

Not only that, he made only partial penetration into AAA for the rest of his career (Charlotte was AA). He played three more professional seasons and had 229 plate appearances at AAA, 973 at AA and 91 at A.

Trying to take on the mindset of early 1980s player development people is difficult. Who knows what kinds of lessons the Orioles were trying to teach him? But my guess is that Hazewood’s youth actually worked against his getting more opportunities in the short-term. There seemed to be no rush. A thorough approach meant making sure he had acquired the necessary skills, that he had passed every class before he went on to the next level.

As far as what skill was lacking, Malcolm Allen’s SABR Bio puts him in that “Trouble with the Curve” camp.4 If you could get past the fact that he was repeating the level, Hazewood’s 1981 season (.919 OPS) was successful. But in 1982 that plummeted to .716 at the same place.

Again, wasn’t there, haven’t done the research. But I can’t think this was any way to handle a player, at least in hindsight. The Orioles were essentially telling Hazewood he was in the doghouse by keeping him at AA. Was he really hopeless against the curve? Or did he take the Orioles lack of confidence, get down on himself, and make it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

From an analytical standpoint, where we look to understand his failure, to understand why Ripken made it and Hazewood didn’t, also taps that curveball theme — we look to his strikeout rate. While he produced at Charlotte in 1980, he did it striking out 177 times in 142 games.5 In 1980, that wasn’t supposed to happen, right? Bobby Bonds still held the major league record with 189 in a longer schedule. Mathematical analysis of BAbip aside, one’s long-term projection is perhaps different if one is striking out along with everyone else, or is the very worst hitter in the league in strikeouts, as Hazewood was.6

Of course, the strikeouts were a red flag and raised issues of sustainability. But Steve Balboni struck out 162 times in the same league, and Mark Funderburk struck out 150. League strikeouts per 9 innings were 5.5. In the American League that year, they were just 4.6. Some pitcher at-bats in the Southern League7 could potentially partly explain the difference, but the league strikeout rate was more akin to the AL, 1990 (5.7), than the AL 1980.

Hazewood succumbed to cancer in 2013, at the age of 53.

N2: Unlike Kyle Tucker on the hitting side, Logan Webb has had a quiet season, but with a .224/.276/.326 opposing slash, 11 game scores of 60 or better, and a 3.50 E.R.A., this hasn’t been quiet bad. Last year, he was a constant watch because he finished 1st in the NL in strikeouts and 3rd in FIP but could get just fair results, thanks to a .349 BAbip. This year, he’s gone back to his comfortable 7.1 SO/9 but held hitters to just a .267 BAbip.

Taking all of the indices, you have to say this is a hell of a pitcher, even on his 2026 performance. But I do note that his bWAR is only 2.3, 46th-best in baseball.8 What this is at least partly about is that the Giants’ Multi-year Pitching Park Factor is just 94.

N3: The Braves yet to get a walk against the Diamondbacks in two games.

N4: The Saturday hit kings were Alec Bohm (5 knocks) and Jakob Marsee (4), hitting a respective .239 and .212 on the year. So the trend continues.

Moseby had been the #2 pick in the previous year’s draft, behind Bob Horner.1 He was about 10 months older than Ripken, but he posted a .956 OPS, 186 points better. Moseby hit .332, 2nd best in the FSL, and hit 18 home runs, placing him 2nd (if a distant 2nd) to a 22-year-old Steve Balboni. He was a good four or five years from finding his stride as a base stealer, but his overall career numbers make it clear he had superior speed, and he was center fielder. I don’t know if he was his full listed 200 pounds then, but he was 6’3”. His 237 total bases not only led the league, but his SLG was 79 points over second-place Balboni, and they were only two of three players with 200 total bases.

I guess it wouldn’t have been realistic to expect even more raw production from Moseby in his other minor league stops, even if the FSL was about as tough as a league came, but Moseby at least far from struggled in the Pioneer League in 1978 (.304/.416/.502) or in 37 games in the International League in 1980 (.322/.394/.521), if he didn’t surpass his FSL production. From all appearances, this guy was Ken Griffey Jr. before Ken Griffey Jr.

A baseball fan starting in 1985,2 I remember him as the third-billed outfielder in the Bell/Moseby/Barfield outfield, which was considered a special group that everyone should take a step back and appreciate. Today, certainly, more weight would have been placed on Moseby’s defensive value, and he would not have taken a back seat to the other two.3 Perhaps batting over 6000 times and compiling 27.5 bWAR should satisfy everyone, no matter a player’s pedigree. Still, Moseby was no Griffey Jr.

The disappointment and concern would have been acute early on. In his first three seasons, 1980-1982, Moseby played regularly but with averages ranging from .229-.236. That was in a .264 league. He hit 9 home runs each year, although the strike season obviously cost him more.

Moseby broke out in a huge way in 1983.4 At the plate, anyway, he had a career year. It would be his only .300 season. He was one of four American Leaguers with at least 30 doubles, 5 triples, and 15 home runs, with his complete stat-line matching up very nicely with the 1982 AL MVP, Robin Yount (.308/.383/.503 for Yount; .315/.376/.499 for Moseby). He crossed into the base-stealing category (27 for 35) for the first time. His 6.0 bWAR saw him place 8th in the AL. His walk rate, 6.0% over his first three seasons, rose to a respectable at 8.4%.

With a .837 OPS, 1984 saw Moseby cement his stardom.5 He also stole 39 bases from 48 attempts, and registered extra points on the excitement scale with an AL-best 15 triples. For the rest of his career, he would be a more patient hitter, walking 10.5%, and this began in 1984.6

It’s true today, but is even more true with historical players, that we might not know their defensive rating without checking, so this often is the piece in our progression of learning of them that ultimately determines their value, particularly if the player played a key defensive position, as Moseby did. Taken as a whole, his ascribed defensive value is coherent. That he did not get a Gold Glove was not an injustice; Rfield says he was good, not great. He got better in his first few years, peaking with +20 runs in 1984. He stayed in center field until his final season with Detroit, and in the second half of his career, he was below average there (-6.4 on average from 1986-1990).7

Although he had career high in home runs in 1986 (21) and 1987 (27), Moseby fell off a level at the plate after 1984. He still compiled a run of six straight 100 or better OPS+ seasons from ‘83-’88. He never fell farther than his 89 of 1989. He was between the Moseby of 1980-1982 and the one of 1983-1984, in other words.

In 1992, he went to Japan. He evidently missed some time with injury, playing in just 96 of the Yomiuri Giants’ 130 games, but he proved too good for the league when available, hitting .306 with 25 home runs. The OPS for the league was only .731, but the best players posted terrific indices, with Moseby just fourth in the six-team Central League in OPS, and Jack Howell (career MLB .742 OPS and 103 HR, mostly with the Angels) 121 points ahead of him at 1.087. With injuries perhaps following him, Moseby’s 1993 campaign in Japan was much less extensive and much less impressive (37 G, .723 OPS).

As Moseby was wrapping up, Carlos Delgado was revving up, and Moseby’s season at Dunedin reminded me of Delgado’s in 1992. I was still basically a kid, hadn’t been following minor league baseball for long, and I had never seen someone with the hitting statistics Delgado had. He seemed too good to be true. Some 8 months younger than Moseby when they were at Dunedin, Delgado hit 30 home runs and had a .982 OPS. I suppose, so they he could work on his catching, he then had to do almost three more full minor league seasons, but followed with OPSes of .954 (Southern League, 1993), .945 (International League, 1994) and 1.013 (International League, 1995). A veritable minor league hitting machine whose major league performance made any questions of disappointment moot.

N2: Going to take me some time to get used to Rutschman in the Boston box scores. Can’t he keep playing remote for Baltimore?

N3: Pete Alonso at leadoff!

N4: Four straight games of two hits for Ty France, two on the nose each time. He’s played in 97 of San Diego’s 123 games, and if all of those had been as a starter for a good offensive team, he would probably be qualifying for the batting title. But 16 of his appearances have come from off the bench, and he is 37 plate appearances short of where he needs to be. His .298 would place him 6th in the NL, 18 points behind Arraez.

N5: At least The Magician’s strikeouts have been offset by walks. His 23 since the All-Star break are 2nd in MLB. Harper (25) and Schwarber (20) are two of the other four guys with 20.

N6: There must have been some nice betting payoffs yesterday. Quite the mediocre season batting averages, even after their big nights, for the four players who had 4 hits yesterday.

Jeff McNeil .263

Gerardo Perdomo .252

Miguel Vargas .239

Gunnar Henderson .221

N7: Cole Young went 0 for 6 yesterday. It’s only the 26th time it’s happened this year. Although four-strikeout games have occurred exactly six times as often, I think we rightly equate four strikeouts to a more singularly poor offensive performance because getting 6 at-bats in the first place (it’s happened 254 times) is hard to do.

The other point is that 0-for-6 games might tend to be underrepresented based on expected probabilities because at-bats are correlated with team success, and team success is correlated a bit with an individual player success. So the good team game/bad player game pairing is a bit less likely than independent probability would predict.