The worst-case scenario for Hunter Greene’s elbow has come to pass. The ace right-hander had Tommy John surgery on Thursday, ending his 2026 season and almost certainly knocking him out for the entire 2027 season, too. This was Greene’s second elbow procedure this season; a previous arthroscopic surgery to remove loose bodies delayed his seasonal debut until Independence Day. Greene’s 2026 season wraps up with a 6.83 ERA, but a better 3.55 FIP over 27 2/3 innings in five starts. This is a full Tommy John revision — Greene previously had Tommy John surgery in 2019 — and not the internal brace procedure that tends to have a quicker recovery.

Suffice it to say, this is a major blow for both Greene and the Cincinnati Reds. For Greene, it’s the latest (and scariest) injury setback in a professional career that has never seen him throw enough innings to qualify for an ERA title. There comes a point at which one starts to wonder if he has crossed the proverbial Rubicon, the point where teams now can’t realistically tell themselves that they can keep him healthy as a starting pitcher. His fastball-splitter-slider repertoire would almost certainly play nicely in relief, though he’ll be hard-pressed to make the same impact as a closer as he could as a legitimate frontline starter.

For the Reds, a rotation eventually topped with a one-two punch of Greene and Chase Burns, with Andrew Abbott a perfectly reasonable third starter, a low-key free agent as their fourth man, and the best-looking of the in-house options rounding out the quintet, was supposed to be the team’s greatest asset going forward. Losing Greene for a very long time, and quite possibly permanently from the rotation, puts a giant hole in what was the team’s only real source of strength. The bullpen has been lousy, the offense is last in the league in wRC+, and the defense is very average.

There was an alternate timeline in which things worked out differently. A terrible June delivered a major blow to the Reds’ postseason odds, but they still held out at least some hope that if they could immediately start winning again upon Greene’s return, they could go on a wild-card run. As I wrote at the time, the team’s next couple of weeks were absolutely crucial for maintaining their October chances. But the Reds went just 6-8, winning only a single series (against the lowly Rockies), and their playoff probabilities dwindled to teensy fractions of a percent.

Losing Greene for 2026 is a moot point for the Reds right now, but losing him for 2027 basically puts them in a position where, unless they spend aggressively this offseason, they’ll go into the year without any particular team strength, just scattered highlights like Burns and Elly De La Cruz. Projecting Cincinnati’s rotation options for 2027, including Greene if he were healthy, reveals just how much work this team will have to do to fill his void.

Greene wasn’t projected for a ton of innings in 2027 due to his injury history, but 108 1/3 innings of a very good pitcher with high upside is a lot better than zero. And there was always at least a chance that the team would roll high on Greene for a change, and maybe even get in 150-170 innings of work. With that possibility now erased, like a time-diagnostic photograph from Back to the Future, the 2027 rotation looks to be in pretty poor shape.

The impending lockout only complicates things for the Reds. Even in a normal offseason, it’s not likely that the team’s owner, Phil Castellini (father Bob officially stepped down as controlling owner in February), would be aggressive about spending money in the winter on a high-end pitcher. But with Reds ownership widely believed to be hardliners on the salary cap, with the elder Castellini even voting against the very limited player gains that ended the 2022 lockout, it’s hard to believe that this is a team that was going to spend heavily. Last time, there was a flurry of signings in the days right before the players were locked out, but Cincinnati almost definitely won’t be participating all that much if history repeats itself.

So, where does this leave the Reds? In the (obviously) very preliminary 2027 projections, ZiPS sees them as the worst team in the NL Central.

Obviously, there’s a whole offseason for things to change, but as a starting point, this is not a great place for a… let’s say thrifty… team to be in if it plans on being even a wild-card contender. Complicating things is that the farm system, at least by our reckoning, ranks near the bottom of the league, at 25th. That’s down from 21st in the preseason and 18th at the end of last season. If the team can’t add talent via its wallet, it will be hard-pressed to use the farm system to either beef up the roster or acquire high-end major league talent. It’s much harder to simply hoodwink other teams than it used to be; neither Dave Stewart nor Ruben Amaro Jr. is likely to snag a GM job this winter.

This version of the Cincinnati Reds is not yet doomed, but you can see the writing on the wall. They’re basically in the position of a major character on HBO’s The House of the Dragon; they’re still alive and kicking, but you know the final season is coming, and the source material it’s (mostly) based on has them facing their end in just a few months. The loss of Hunter Greene, when combined with the team’s inability to lock up Elly De La Cruz on a long-term extension, means that the looming fire sale is no longer beyond the horizon but on it — and quickly approaching.

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Darrin Jackson is 62 years young and in his 26th season as a broadcast analyst for the Chicago White Sox. Currently paired with Len Kasper in the radio booth, the erstwhile MLB outfielder is equally adept at breaking down plays and sharing entertaining anecdotes. Much for the latter reason, he is a fantastic fit for our Challenging Career Quiz series, which now runs 11 deep and most recently featured Baltimore Orioles legend Jim Palmer.

Jackson’s playing career comes nowhere close to rivaling Palmer’s, although he did have his fair share of success. Suiting up for seven clubs — including both of Chicago’s — over a dozen seasons, Jackson was at his best in San Diego. Across the 1991-1992 campaigns, the right-handed swinger swatted 38 home runs as a Friar while logging a 99 wRC+ and 8.5 WAR. Filling a platoon role for much of his big league tenure, Jackson retired with 676 hits, including 80 round-trippers, over 2,816 plate appearances.

Which pitcher did he face the most times? That proved to be an easy question, as Jackson correctly guessed Tom Glavine with little hesitation. When I informed Jackson that the southpaw was also the pitcher against whom he’d garnered the most hits, he offered an unsurprising recollection of Glavine. As most fans know, the Hall of Famer had a well-earned reputation for getting strikes just off the plate.

“Facing him was never a fun practice, mainly because umpires had their own strike zones back then,” said Jackson, who went 11-for-44 with a pair of home runs and one walk versus Glavine. “He knew how to abuse that strike zone by working away, away, down and away, down and away. He would get you diving across the plate, looking in that zone, and the next thing you knew, he’d be throwing a two-seam fastball on the inside corner to freeze you for strike three. I probably got rung up looking by him more than anyone else I faced, because of that exact way of pitching. It drove me crazy. Even though you said I had a bunch of hits, I never liked facing him. He was just too smart and too good.”

Glavine fanned Jackson 11 times, which ties him with another pitcher for the honor of most strikeouts. Jackson whiffed badly in his attempts to name said hurler. Ramon Martinez punched him out on just three occasions, and John Smoltz did so just four times. The correct answer is Tim Belcher.

“Oh yeah, I hated facing Belcher, too,” Jackson said of the righty against whom he went 8-for-33. “I couldn’t lay off the fastball against Belcher. That clown. It was up, up, up. He was a good pitcher. You’re making me remember all of these nightmares; I’m going to lose some sleep tonight thinking about these guys and how they worked me over. But yeah, I can see why it would be Belcher. When I was with San Diego is when I got most of my at-bats, and he was with the Dodgers.”

Smoltz doesn’t fit into a “most” category for Jackson, but he did merit asking about. The righty surrendered eight hits, including three doubles and a home run, across their 20 matchups. That equated to a 1.100 OPS.

“I have a story about him,” Jackson said. “After I became a broadcaster, we went to Atlanta. I was on the field, and Terry Pendleton, who played third for the Braves while I was still playing, was out there. He had always guarded the line against me, because I pulled everything. I said, ‘Terry, how are you doing man?’ He turns around and starts yelling across the field, ‘Smoltsy! Smoltsy! Throw DJ another slider!’ That’s because I would dive across the plate against Smoltz and take his slider down the left field line. I knew he was going to throw it to me, so I kept looking for it. He kept throwing it and I kept hitting it.”

A free-swinger, Jackson logged just 131 free passes and a 4.7 BB% over his 2,800-plus plate appearances. Not surprisingly, his response when I asked which pitcher walked him the most times was pure gold.

“Nobody,” he said with a laugh. “I never walked. But the most times… I think I hit the Giants pretty well, so maybe it was a Giant. Mike Remlinger?

Nope. As a matter of fact, that qualified as another bad whiff. Jackson went 5-for-7 with two homers versus Remlinger, but drew nary a walk. Subsequent guesses — Bob Ojeda (two) and Sid Fernandez (none) — were also wrong. I let him know that the correct answer is Jim Deshaies, who put him on base four times in that manner.

“No way,” replied Jackson. “We were teammates. I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

I suggested to Jackson that the now-Chicago Cubs broadcast analyst was probably scared of him.

“No, it would have been the opposite,” replied Jackson, who went 2-for-16 versus the left-hander. “He was a guy who threw me high fastballs, and I couldn’t lay off them. I would either pop them up or swing-and-miss, so he’s a guy I’d never think would walk me. Him and Dennis Rasmussen. They were big, tall lefties who threw neck-hight fastballs that I would swing at.”

And then there is Ramon Martinez, who owned him to the tune of 1-for-20. Not only was Jackson able to name the one-time Dodgers ace — and older brother of Pedro Martinez — he was effusive in his praise.

“I couldn’t stand facing him,” said Jackson. “You think Pedro was nasty; Ramon set the tone for him getting to the big leagues, and was just as nasty. He whipped the ball with a three-quarter delivery and would have it running in on my hands, then would throw this slow sweeper that I couldn’t wait back on. He’d work both sides, and I didn’t know which part of the plate to look on. I couldn’t sit on anything, and was always wrong about everything he threw, which included 95 [mph] with a lot of movement. He was a nightmare.”

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I asked him which pitcher he took deep the most times, because the answer is a nine-way tie, and the home run total is two. In what arguably qualifies as yet another bad whiff, the only player he named wasn’t among the group. Jackson went 8-for-21 against Joe Magrane, and while four of those hits went for extra-bases, only one of them left the yard.

Nine pitchers (Glavine, Fernandez, Ojeda, Remlinger, Danny Jackson, Tom Browning, Frank Viola, Bob Patterson, and the only right-hander of the nine, Rick Mahler) present too many memories to cover for one quiz question, so I didn’t ask about the whole group, but I did want something on two of them. Predictably, he delivered.

“Danny Jackson was my first big league home run,” Jackson said of the former Kansas City Royals and Cincinnati Reds (and a handful of other teams) lefty. “I faced him in Cincinnati when I was a rookie, and he kept throwing me these little cutters down and in. I stepped in the bucket, looking for a cutter down and in, and hit one out down the left field line. He stopped throwing that pitch after I took him deep on it. Another guy with nasty stuff, though.”

“Sid Fernandez had a delivery where he pushed the ball,” Jackson said of the erstwhile New York Mets southpaw, whose low vertical approach angle gave him what was then referred to as an invisible fastball. “He would throw a high fastball that stayed on the same plane, and you would always swing underneath it. That’s why he was such a strikeout artist. And then he would throw this big, looping curveball from a arm angle where you wouldn’t expect someone to be able to throw a curveball from. Sid Fernandez had a high strikeout rate even though he only threw 90 mph. There was a reason for that: His delivery was deceptive. He’s another guy I always hated facing. He threw funky nasty.”

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Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

June 5
It’s 3:00 PM, and I throw on yesterday’s highlights while giving Derek Jr. her third meal of the day. This is a bit of a luxury. She’ll soon be big enough to look around and see the TV while I’m feeding her. I should enjoy this opportunity while I can.

Two things stand out in the highlights. First, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Willson Contreras, and Ketel Marte all pulled home runs right down the line, but the three homers could not have been more different.

Contreras’s homer followed a classic archetype. Andrew Kittredge busted him with a fastball in on his hands, so Contreras got quick and short. He pulled his hands in and turned on the ball, launching it 402 feet and into the light standard atop the Green Monster. Marte’s homer looked familiar too, though we’re used to seeing it from left-handed batters, and he was batting righty. Tanner Scott attacked him with a fastball low and in, and Marte dropped his bat head on the ball, sent it over the bullpen, and finished with his hands up high for a walk-off homer. Crow-Armstrong followed a wilder path. He fell behind J.T. Ginn, 0-2, so Ginn tried to finish him off with a slider low and away. It wasn’t a terrible location, but Ginn no doubt hoped that it would get closer to the corner, probably even out of the zone away or low. Crow-Armstrong went out and got the ball, outside corner be damned, and hooked a low liner all the way over the right field fence. There was nothing textbook about it, but somehow the ball left the bat at 110 mph.

My takeaway is that there are a lot of ways to get the same thing done. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot anyway. My wife and I have our own very different ways of feeding, soothing, and putting Derek Jr. to sleep. We even hold her differently. We’ve read a million times that babies thrive on routine, especially when it comes to bedtime, but also, we’re different people whose brains and bodies work differently. I don’t really know how to square all of this.

It must be a while since I’ve watched Alex Vesia pitch, because his delivery is a total surprise to me. I call my dad over to the TV and ask him who Vesia looks like. “It’s a classic delivery,” he says, and when I suggest Sandy Koufax, he throws out Juan Marichal, too.

I figure I can’t be the first person to notice the Vesia-Koufax connection, especially as he plays for the Dodgers. It turns out old friend Eno Sarris (along with Chad Jennings and Dennis Lin) have written all about the way that the extreme rise on Vesia’s fastball is reminiscent of Koufax’s.

June 6
My wife has informed me that she has been deploying a new trick while she’s putting Derek Jr. down for the first nap of the day. If it seems like Derek Jr. needs a little bit of soothing in order to take that final step from tired to actually asleep, she’ll breastfeed her, just for a minute or two. It’s instantly soothing to Derek Jr., and once she’s in a place where my wife thinks she’s relaxed enough not to notice, my wife will ever-so-gently resettle her, unlatching her for just a moment.

But the resettling is subterfuge. When Derek Jr. is latched again, it’s on a pacifier, which my wife has, under cover of the baby’s groggy condition, sneaked into the line of fire at the perfect moment so smoothly that Derek Jr. is none the wiser. It’s a literal bait-and-switch. It’s also the exact move Indiana Jones pulls at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. My wife is very proud of herself, but I can see the bigger picture here. I inform my wife that if I end up getting run down and crushed by a giant boulder, it will be her fault. She seems fine with that, though she does start to refer to this bait-and-switch tactic as “Indiana Jones-ing” the baby.

June 7
The classic “I’m hungry” sign from a newborn is they start to bob their head. At a certain point, they’ll move from that to gnawing on their forearm. At this point Derek Jr.’s forearms are so chunky that she looks like she’s chomping down on a big turkey leg. Also, sometimes she ends up closer to the back of her hand, and it looks for all the world like she’s licking salt off of it before she takes a shot of tequila.

Derek Jr.’s smiling continues apace. She smiles all the time, but something special happened today. I put her down for her second nap of the day, and I followed my usual pattern. Rock her with a pacifier in until she falls asleep, stand up from the rocking chair, bring her over to the bed where the swaddle is laid out, deposit her on top, and swaddle her. She often wakes up during this process and is usually not too happy about it. So I gently swaddle her and calm her, and then pick her up and dance her around the room.

This time, though, when she woke up as I laid her on top of the swaddle, she started out looking displeased for a split-second, but just a split-second, because then she saw my face, and seeing my face caused her to break into a smile. It was the most heartwarming feeling. Just seeing my face makes her smile. That’s one of the most special gifts you can give a person, I’ve always thought. It’s something I really try to do with my wife. I want her to know that just seeing her makes me happy every time she walks into a room, whether it’s with a smile or a compliment or whatever it may be. I’m definitely not perfect at it, especially these days, when we’re often exhausted and at our wits’ end. But this is a good reminder.

June 7
Derek Jr. is doing this new thing where she keeps lifting her legs up in the crib while she’s napping. It’s obviously a sign of discomfort. I can’t get her to fall asleep for her four o’clock nap. She just keeps lifting her tiny legs over and over again, so I try something dumb, knowing full well that it will not work.

It does not work.

June 8
I’m dictating this a bit before three in the morning with Derek Jr. on my lap. She slept very well last night, and I started off my shift with something like four-and-a-half hours of uninterrupted sleep. I probably got another one or two later in the night, which made me feel the best I’ve felt in a long time. I really wanted my wife to have some time to work on her book, so at 5:00 AM, I dived straight into my article for the day. I pitched it to Meg Rowley the night before, but I didn’t hear back from her. It was Sunday night, and I normally try not to bother her with late-night pitches. Her job involves juggling so, so many things, and I would really like to be one of the easy parts of it. It’s not too big a deal anyway; my pitch was a pretty safe one. I felt confident that Meg would be on board, so I started writing and got my work done on the earlier side.

That bought time for me to look after Derek Jr. all afternoon so my wife could get some work done. When Derek Jr. went down for her early nap, I napped in the room with her. I guess I didn’t get as much sleep as I thought during the night, though. I actually slept longer than she did, which definitely had not happened before. When it was time for Derek Jr. to wake up, my wife sneaked in and grabbed her. Somehow I snoozed right through it. I must have slept for close to two hours.

For the last couple weeks, we’ve had Derek Jr. on a bit more of a schedule, and we think it’s really helping her. We feed her four times during the day, spacing her meals out every four hours as best we can. She seems to be taking to it really well, and it has so far allowed her to get 90-minute wake windows during the day and to sleep more or less all through the night. [Note from the achy-headed, bleary-eyed future: This sleeping-through-the-night business was short-lived indeed.] My wife got her own nap in the afternoon, during Derek Jr.’s second nap, and I turned on the TV hoping to catch an early game. Unfortunately, it was Monday, a travel day, so there weren’t any early games. Instead, I caught a few minutes of MLB Now while I hunted around the leaderboards for a topic to write about tomorrow.

I stumbled on Jose Siri’s home run robbery in Tampa last week, during which he seemed to save the ball from landing directly in a basket of chicken tenders, because for some reason, there’s a buffet pushed directly against the back of the left field wall at Tropicana Field. I considered pitching an article in which I’d break it down like the Zapruder film, trying to read the angles and determine whether the ball would’ve actually landed in the chicken tenders, but as it happened last week, I figured too much time has passed and too many people had written about it already. I’m late to the party, but at least the party has chicken tenders.

When MLB Now came back from commercial, Brian Kenny was talking about some comments that Manny Machado made over the weekend. Machado is slumping, and I guess he’s sick of hearing about all the different stats that don’t have anything nice to say about him, so he unleashed a bit of a rant: “I just wish we can get the analytics out of the way. I think there’s too many stats out there. Too many stats, way too many numbers. I don’t even know half of the stuff that goes up there. I look at the board sometimes, and I even ask some of the guys, like, ‘What is WCCVBB, whatever it is? What are these names that are being created?’ I mean, it’s just crazy to even keep up with.”

I considered pitching an article where I purported to answer Machado’s question, to explain what all those wonky acronyms stand for, except that all my acronyms are absurd. xwOBA, I’d explain, stands for Exact Weight of Batter’s Aura; it’s crazy what Statcast can measure these days. I decided against pitching this one. I’d be going for silliness, but I’m sure that Meg would correctly note that it might seem like I’m making fun of Machado, at a time when he’s struggling, no less.

Derek Jr. isn’t having a good night tonight. She was up early with a lot of gas trouble. Once that passed, she was rabidly hungry, so I got the emergency bottle from the fridge. She’s not in love with my normal burping technique tonight, so at one point I just sit her up on my lap and let her take her time burping. She takes that opportunity to gaze up lovingly at the dimmer lamp above us.

She does that all the time now. She’s reached that developmental stage where she loves nothing more than the ceiling fan and the lamp. As if to prove it, after a minute or two of mooning at the lamp, she lets out a big grin. That’s the joke around our house these days: She loves lamp. It’s a joke, of course, because of Steve Carrell’s unexpectedly soulful line reading in Anchorman, but watching her, I realize that she really does love lamp. She loves it. She is entranced. In her face, I can see why humans decided millennia ago that the sun, moon, and stars were gods.

Derek Jr. also spends a lot of time staring at her baby monitor. If she’s in her crib and she’s not sleeping, she’s staring at the camera. She doesn’t love it in the same way she loves lamp or the ceiling fan. It’s more of an object of fascination. It’s extremely high contrast, a carapace of white plastic surrounding the round black gimbal that houses the lens, so it’s the thing that draws her eye when she’s awake in the crib and all the lights are off in her room. The monitor has night vision. It’s basically a trail cam, except it’s not hidden at all, and instead of wildlife, we get to observe our daughter, who feels oddly like she’s observing us too. She never looks away. Her eyes are black saucers in the night vision. It feels like she never blinks, like she’s staring right into our souls.

Tonight, as Derek Jr. worships lamp, I remember Machado’s remarks. This time, I’m struck by something that happens toward the end of the clip. He bring up FIP, specifically in order to denigrate it. He says, “What even is that?” It’s a rhetorical question. But he’s surrounded by a circle of baseball reporters, and they can’t help themselves. Explaining the finer points of baseball is literally their entire job. It’s not a high paying job. It’s one you do because you absolutely love it. These reporters, multiple reporters, are unable to stop themselves from jumping in and telling Machado not only what FIP stands for, but how it works and why. Their explanation, of course, gives Machado another opportunity to bristle; he doesn’t like the idea that you’re trying to separate out an individual’s contribution when the team result is what matters. But I’m so heartened by these reporters. Even in the face of this angry superstar who wants nothing more than to vent, they still can’t help spreading the baseball gospel, bringing the light of knowledge to the darkest, grumpiest corners of the clubhouse. They are lamp.

I’ve been dictating this into my phone as I finished feeding Derek Jr., and she’s calmer now. If, somewhere in here, there’s a non sequitur where I say, “Good job, good job,” in the middle of a sentence, it’s because she let out a big burp and finally slumped into slumber there on my lap. I’m going to give her a couple more minutes of sleeping like this and then try to swaddle her and get her back into the crib. If it works, maybe I’ll be able to squeeze a couple more hours of sleep out of this shift and set us up for another good day tomorrow. Wish me luck.

June 9
We took Derek Jr. to the doctor today, and in the waiting room was another baby with the exact same name as her. Then another mom walked in with a four-year-old. The four-year-old had a different name, but after a minute, her mom tells us that they have a newborn at home who also has the same name as Derek Jr. We picked out the perfect special name, and it turns out that everyone in our neighborhood picked out the exact same perfect, special name.

If you’ve ever read Freakonomics, you know that this isn’t an accident. People want a nice name that feels a little bit special, so they pick an older name that they haven’t heard as much lately. But everyone else does the same thing, so the same names roar back at the same time. Then the name gets really popular, and people stop using it because it seems too trendy, and the cycle starts all over again. Still, my wife is a little bit crushed. The lesson is clear. We should’ve named her Derek Jr. for real. I doubt there are many of those in the waiting room.

Derek Jr. goes down to bed very easily tonight, and I get to watch Paul Skenes close out his night against the Dodgers. He left after six innings with the game tied at two. I switch over to the Orioles game. Only later do I learn that the bullpen lets the Dodgers score 10 runs in the seventh.

June 11
At 2:45 PM, my wife returns home to find me sitting on the couch shirtless, in tears, feeding Derek Jr. a bottle. I could explain the context to you, but I feel like that’s really all you need to know.

I did catch some of the Royals-Rangers game. It was wild and fun. I’d spent the whole morning writing about bunting, and then this game featured several fun bunts. With runners on the corners in the second inning, catcher Elias Díaz dropped a surprise bunt into the no-man’s land just next to the pitcher’s mound. Nobody even picked it up until he’d reached first base for an RBI single.

Evan Carter tried to bunt for a hit in the fourth inning, but just missed deadening it enough. Third baseman Nick Loftin charged it and made a fun running throw to nab him by a step. Personally, I think that’s about the most satisfying thing you can do on a baseball diamond: Charge the ball hard, time it up so you can scoop a perfect hop, sling it over from your glove to your throwing hand, fire it across your body on the run, watch it tail ever so slightly toward your arm side on the way to first, nail the runner just in time, then make a U-turn and jog back to your position like it was no big deal.

In the sixth, Ezequiel Duran tried to sacrifice a runner from second to third, but instead of getting in a good bunting position, he reached awkwardly for the ball, trying to stay in position to break for first and give himself a chance at beating the throw. As a result, he spun the ball off the end of the bat and right back to the pitcher, who nabbed the runner at third for a fielder’s choice.

June 12
Derek Jr.’s hips are just fine. That is the news of the day. She was a breech baby, and breech babies are at a higher risk of developing hip dysplasia, so at two or three months old, they need to get an ultrasound on their hips. Our doctor had told us not to worry; he can usually spot it and he didn’t see it in Derek Jr., but we still had to make the appointment just in case. We took Derek Jr. to the hospital, laid her on an adult-size examination table, and for once, my wife wasn’t the one getting gobs of ultrasound goo applied to her.

Although the sonogram technician had to press her legs into some odd angles for an extended period of time, Derek Jr. made it almost the entire way through without crying. In the end, I think the issue was that all the goop on her legs and belly absorbed into the butcher paper on the examination table and made her feel wet in a thousand places. We didn’t know exactly what the exam would look like, but we figured she’d probably come out of it upset, so we were prepared. My wife fed her in a secluded spot by the waiting room, and all was well. Anyway, Derek Jr.’s hips are just fine. She’s even up for some tummy time after we get home.

I mentioned that Derek Jr. was a breech baby. That came as a surprise, because for the first several months of the pregnancy, every time we went in for an ultrasound, the technicians made a big deal of how she was constantly flipping every which way. They love to see that. It’s a sign that the baby is doing well. But at a certain point, she just stopped changing positions. She stayed with her head tucked right beneath my wife’s ribs on the right side. Babies are often born looking a little smushed up, but because of the way she’d been pressed against my wife’s side, Derek Jr. was only smushed on one side. In the operating room, her right eye took a few minutes longer to open than her left. For the first couple weeks, it made her smile slightly, adorably crooked. It was a hard thing to capture in pictures, but we loved it, and being there for the sonogram brought back the memory of our little lopsided newborn.

June 14
The Knicks won the NBA championship last night. I’ve never been too much of an NBA fan. I grew up outside Washington D.C., so my home team was the Bullets, then the Wizards. The Bullards put together three winning seasons between the day I was born and the day I went off to college, and they were always a mess. It seemed like they were designed in a lab to repel potential fans, so we watched college basketball instead.

I’ve lived in New York for 19 years now, but my allegiance is still to my hometown. Even though I have no particular love for the Wizards, it’s hard to imagine ever identifying myself as a New York sports fan. It would feel like a betrayal. All the same, the city has been swept up in this magical Knicks run, and it’s been extraordinarily fun to watch. But I’ve been watching it from afar. We’re so busy and tired, and the finals take place so late in the night that I’ve only caught a couple quarters of the finals. We haven’t been out at a bar or a watch party to get swept up in the moment. We’ve only read about the crazy celebrations and seen them on social media. One day we’ll get to share with Derek Jr. how cool it is to live in a place like New York City, but right now, we can’t help feeling like we missed something.

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Welcome to the second installment of “Wait, What?!,” a series in which I dive deep on some of the prospects whose performance has most surprised me this season.

He had me at “Italian.”

At the outset of the pandemic, my wife encouraged me to join along as she learned Italian. After months of resistance, I finally caved. The first word I learned was ragazzo, which means “boy.” The plural form (ragazzi) came not long after, at which point I was able to translate the name of the pizza joint I’d often stumbled into at 3 AM back in college. All of 90 seconds into studying, I was hooked. I quickly exhausted a couple of online courses and soon, in a sort of modern day, language-themed pen pal arrangement, I connected with a few Italians online, which improved my language skills dramatically. This will be my last article here before I take a two week trip to Italy to see those friends. As far as I know, I don’t have a hint of Italian heritage, but that hasn’t prevented me from becoming a proud Italophile.

So, when an Angels source sidled up next to me on the backfields a few months ago and started talking excitedly about a Milanese lefty they’d signed out of indy ball, I stopped paying attention before he got to the part about the upper-90s fastball and wipeout slider.

“So he’s really from, like, Italy, Italy? Was he on their WBC team? How’s his English?”

Calmati, Brendan.

Nicolo Pinazzi is a 26-year-old lefty working out of Double-A Rocket City’s bullpen. While the Milan native grew up around the game — his father played in a semi-professional Italian league — Pinazzi never thought seriously about turning pro when he was a kid. As a gift, his family flew him to Arizona for a baseball showcase after he finished high school, which he saw as a fun opportunity to see a new country and play a little ball.

There, Pinazzi quickly realized two things. The first was that the hitters were much better than the guys he’d mowed down in Italy. The second was that he was quite good as well. He discovered that his fastball was sitting in the low-90s and, perhaps not surprisingly, the college and professional offers rolled in almost immediately. At this point, it dawned on Pinazzi that baseball might just change his life. Sorting out the next step was a little tricky — “I didn’t know anything about the schools, a D-III and ASU were basically the same to me,” he said when I spoke to him last month — but he committed to JUCO powerhouse Northwest Florida State and eventually found his way to the Cincinnati Reds organization in August of 2020.

With Cincy, Pinazzi turned into a capable, if wild, pitcher. He was fairly effective on the Arizona complex, and worked in and out of the rotation there for the better part of three years. He reached Low-A for a couple stints in 2023 but was released after walking 26 hitters in 18.1 innings with Daytona.

From there, he bounced around, on the field and off. He made indy ball stops in Gary, Indiana, Kansas City, and Idaho Falls. He had a spell at Tread Athletics, went back home to work out in a gym with his cousins in Italy, and then spent time with Kinetic Pitching Performance. It was in the midst of working out at his cousins’ facility and honing his craft at Kinetic that everything clicked. He found a way to harness his funky delivery and get himself more online to the plate. Alongside, his fastball’s velocity climbed a few ticks, which helped turn his promising breaking ball into an absolute hammer. Pinazzi calls it a cutter — sort of. “I say cutter, but it’s definitely a slider,” he told me. “I say cutter to delude myself, I throw more strikes that way.”

Though he was again a little scattered in 2025 back with Idaho Falls, Pinazzi’s stuff was unmistakably crisp. It attracted the attention of a few scouts and convinced the Angels to take a chance on the lefty with interesting traits but a limited track record.

They’re glad they did. Low-A relievers are very rarely prospects, and the ones who are generally aren’t the oldest guy on the team. But there’s nothing typical about Pinazzi, nor the results he soon generated. In 29.1 innings, he posted a 1.53 ERA with 48 strikeouts. The Angels promoted him to Tri-City earlier this summer, where he again eviscerated the competition: He struck out 29 hitters in 16 innings and didn’t surrender an earned run. He was only there for a couple months before the Angels bumped him again, this time to Rocket City, and he’s off to a good start there as well. If anything, these numbers aren’t doing him justice. Among minor league pitchers with at least 50 innings pitched, Pinazzi’s 0.90 ERA is the very best in baseball. He’s also struck out 39.6% of opponents this year, which ranks fifth in the minors. He’s in pretty good company:

Pinazzi isn’t doing all of this with smoke and mirrors, either: He’s got real stuff. His fastball sits 93-96, and while the shape isn’t special, it’s a sneak attack pitch, not the foundation of his arsenal. He’s a slider, err, cutter monster, and he throws his power breaking ball about 60% of the time. It has plus spin, and long and slurvy break, and he generates a little bit of extra movement by decreasing his extension on the pitch:

He’s also got a curve, which has a similar shape, but is longer and not quite as firm.

Minor league hitters have been overwhelmed. Even with heavy usage, Pinazzi has notched a 46% called and swinging strike rate (which is elite) on his cutter. He can land it in the zone and entice chase, and while he’s not a marksman, Pinazzi’s Gumbyish delivery may just enhance his deception more than it limits his command. And in any case, the 26-year-old has found a way to throw more strikes than he did in his first spin through affiliated ball. The most improbable of farmhands is now a legitimate pitching prospect. Below, you can see how the stuff all grades out:

What’s especially exciting here is that Pinazzi has a chance to blossom into a big leaguer right on the heels of what is arguably Italy’s most exciting baseball moment ever. The Italian national team was a semifinalist in the WBC this past spring, and while the club was mostly composed of Italian Americans (Pinazzi himself was on the squad in 2023, but wanted to focus on his opportunity with the Angels this time around), the team’s performance broke containment half a world away. The team received plenty of domestic media coverage. As just one tiny example, the hosts of a popular Italian soccer podcast opened one episode by bantering about the WBC, and one mused that baseball was his favorite American sport. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni congratulated the squad in a parliamentary speech, and from his vantage point, Pinazzi sees increased interest at the atomic level. He noticed far more baseball conversation on social media and among his friends during this past WBC compared to previous editions. “It’s an odd sport, the rules, how it works. It’s as strange as it is fascinating,” he said. “But it was breaking the barrier a little bit.”

When I asked Pinazzi what would help grow the game further, he had a simple answer: infrastructure. Not only fields, which are understandably hard to find in a fairly densely populated country where baseball isn’t a major sport, but also just in general training facilities. “For me, the offseasons are complicated. I throw indoors at a high school. I’m in Milan, one of the biggest cities and I can’t find [sport-specific] training facilities,” he told me.

Improving that will be a long-term challenge. But if there’s a will, a way tends to follow, and in the meantime, Pinazzi has a chance to help inspire a generation of prospective baseball players. Along with another Angel, Sam Aldegheri, he’s trying to become the second Italian player in the major leagues. Time will tell, but Pinazzi’s chances to do so are starting to look pretty good.

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I might have a thing for guys who throw a lot of different fastballs. Earlier this week, I looked into Drew Rasmussen’s novel approach to pitching: just make the entire arsenal out of fastballs. Rasmussen used to mix four-seamers and cutters, but then he added a sinker and kicked things up a notch. The multi-fastball approach has swept baseball in recent years, in fact, to the point where pitchers with only one option in their toolkit now stand out to me. But I think I’ve seen a new variation. Ben Joyce throws two fastballs, and one of them is an offspeed pitch.

You probably think of Joyce as one of the hardest throwers in baseball, if you think of him at all. He was a standout at Tennessee, showing big league velocity while closing games for the Vols. He threw a pitch 105.5 mph in 2024, still one of the five fastest pitches recorded in the Statcast era. He’s always been a little wild. He reaches back for everything he possibly has. It’s the kind of profile that makes you wonder what he’s going to pair with that absurd fastball.

In 2024, Joyce started experimenting with a splinker, a splitter/sinker hybrid. He turned to that pitch partway through the year after discussing sinker grips with some of the other Angels pitchers, and he spent a lot of that season playing with the different ways he could throw it. It was very much still a work in progress – he changed the shape and velocity of it quite a lot as he learned the grip – but adding something that sat between his fastball and slider was a great success, so much so that Michael Baumann blogged about his two fastballs way back in January 2025. Then Joyce got hurt five games into the year, had shoulder surgery, and missed the rest of the season.

Joyce returned to the majors a week ago, and he’s featuring his sinker — or whatever you’d like to call it — more than ever. He uses it differently than you’d expect for a secondary pitch. He attacks the zone (or tries to — he’s pretty wild) and loves starting counts with it. It doesn’t act like a splitter. It looks more like, well, a sinker:

Sure, that’s a very hard sinker at 98 mph, but it generally looks like a fastball, flying true without much in the way of wiggle. His grip gives the ball a bit of seam-shifted wake, but it’s a fairly normal amount for a sinker, perhaps even a bit less than average. The real key is the movement the pitch doesn’t get.

For the average pitcher generating enough arm speed to throw a sinker in the upper 90s, spin is unavoidable. Sinkers don’t actually “sink”; they’re thrown with grips that produce backspin. The term “sinker” comes from the fact that they appear to sink relative to the trajectory of a four-seam fastball, the “true” flight path that our eyes and brain expect. Cristopher Sánchez gets my vote for the best sinkerballer in the majors today; his sinker gets four inches of vertical break and 18 inches of horizontal, because he does a very good job of limiting the amount of lift and maximizing the amount of fade that his spin imparts on the ball. Joyce throws his sinker at roughly the same velocity, but he creates an inch less vertical movement and four inches less horizontal movement.

Why? It’s a matter of physics. Joyce generates far more arm speed than Sánchez; I know that because only one of the two of them is touching 105. He’s moving his arm with enough force to throw the ball much harder than Sánchez, in other words. The reason he doesn’t when it comes to his sinker is that his grip doesn’t let him. That’s on purpose; by holding the ball in a way that doesn’t transmit force from his arm to the ball as cleanly as his four-seam fastball, he’s creating far less spin. It’s marginally more complicated than that, but generally speaking, he’s sacrificing velocity to get less spin, which in turn means less lift.

One way of thinking about it is just to look at the RPMs. Only one pitcher in baseball, Josh Fleming, throws a sinker with a lower spin rate than Joyce’s offering. Given that spin and velocity are correlated, Joyce’s pitch stands out even more. The closest comparable pitch I can find to Joyce’s fastball is that of his former teammate, José Soriano; his and Joyce’s sinkers produce nearly identical movement at very similar velocities. Amusingly, Soriano helped teach Joyce this grip because he throws a splinker of his own, though his is slower than Joyce’s and basically looks like his sinker (his primary fastball) with a tiny bit taken off.

Don’t get too caught up in the classifications. Regardless of what you call Joyce’s pitch, it moves like a sinker. It looks a lot like the very good sinkers Sánchez and Soriano throw, regardless of how he gets there. But unlike those guys – and unlike anyone else in the game, whether you call what they throw a sinker or a splinker – Joyce can reach back for an extra six or seven miles an hour by simply gripping and ripping his four-seam.

No one else creates that kind of velocity differential between his fastballs. Jhoan Duran, who popularized the term “splinker” with his version of the pitch, throws his about three ticks slower than his primary fastball. Paul Skenes has a similar gap this year; at his best, he approached a five-tick differential. Soriano is somewhere near five miles an hour as well, and Joe Boyle is in the same range in a tiny sample – those are the only guys who I think make sense as comparables. And both Soriano and Boyle are throwing something closer to a regular splitter; they’re in the low 90s, not Joyce’s rarefied air.

Why am I harping on the velocity differential so much? Because the interplay between his two fastballs is letting Joyce treat his four-seamer like a secondary pitch. He’s starting people off with a heavy sinker, then using the same delivery with a different grip to speed up by five or six ticks, with the result that the ball falls 15 inches less on its path home. The only other pitcher in baseball generating that kind of differential is Soriano, and he likes that four-seam/splinker pairing so much that he’s more than doubled his usage of each pitch this year.

For Joyce, the new fastball has been transformational. I can explain the difficulty of attacking hitters with Joyce’s old, sinker-less arsenal with a single plot:

Those are the two pitches Joyce threw in 2023. With a comical 14 mph of separation and massive movement differentials on both axes, they didn’t pair particularly well. To locate a slider anywhere near the middle of the strike zone, Joyce had to start it on a trajectory that wouldn’t make any sense for a fastball. To make matters worse, he doesn’t exactly have surgical command, which made it much easier for pitchers to distinguish what was coming. Ball starts on an upward trajectory? The odds are high that it’s an in-zone slider. He wasn’t fooling anyone because he just wasn’t telling a convincing story of what the pitch might be. That’s fixed now:

With a sinker that lives halfway between his other two offerings, every pitch is giving opposing batters multiple looks. Is that a sinker low or a four-seamer high? Is it a slider off the plate away, or a sinker on the inner third? Given that Joyce’s command is scattershot – he’s effectively wild, in the classic sense – the puzzle is even harder for hitters. Is that a sinker at the ankles or a four-seamer for strike three? Wyatt Langford still isn’t sure:

One more picture to show you what was on Langford’s mind as he challenged a pitch that was completely inside the zone:

Baseball Prospectus publishes arsenal metrics that attempt to quantify the interaction between pitches. By their formulation, Joyce’s sinker has made both his four-seamer and slider harder to identify, because they both look somewhat like the sinker. Joyce hasn’t thrown enough innings this year to have anything approaching a sufficient sample, but he’s never missed more bats, never drawn more chases, and never made batters look more foolish.

Maybe everyone should find some new fastball to add. I have to admit that I was down on Joyce’s outlook when he first hit the majors; I didn’t think that a pitcher could survive on just a fastball, no matter how good that fastball was. And truthfully, he wasn’t that great at first; in his first two seasons, he paired a below-average strikeout rate with an ugly walk rate. But by leaning into what he does best – throwing fastballs – and experimenting with new ways to get the most out of it, he’s turned into something wholly different. He’s still extremely wild, but I have a feeling that the two-fastball version of Joyce is going to end up as one of the best relievers in baseball in the next year or two.

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the latest apparent change in the baseball’s behavior (this time it seems to be deader) and, in a tribute to Tommy John (11:35), retrace the timeline of his trailblazing surgery and his return to a major league mound 50 years ago through contemporaneous accounts and quotes. Then (55:58) they bring on top-tier Patreon supporter Jamie Verbrugge to discuss his podcast and baseball backgrounds before answering listener emails (1:05:02) about the upper bounds of a cup of coffee, a really entertaining but trophy-less season vs. a really boring championship season, an undercover baseball robot, whether Jefry Yan would celebrate a strikeout on an overturned ball call, whether fans are suggestible enough to be fooled by fake home run distances, an ultimate frisbee-style integrity rule for baseball, the value of Ron Washington, and the advisability of bringing the infield in, followed by Stat Blasts (2:01:49) about Pete Crow-Armstrong leading his league in offense and defense, every team in a divison having the same recent record, team games with high matching run, hit, and walk totals, pitchers who got a win, a loss, and a save in a single three-game series, team games with streaks of the same start to each offensive inning, bullpens where one pitcher out-WARed all the others combined, and strikeout-free shutouts.

Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Sean .P, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Sheehan on the ball
Link to Savant drag dashboard
Link to earlier ball analysis 1
Link to earlier ball analysis 2
Link to John’s statement
Link to MLB.com on John’s statement
Link to Reuters on John’s illness
Link to Tommy John wiki
Link to Frank Jobe wiki
Link to Jaffe on John
Link to career IP leaders
Link to Grant on Posey/Avila
Link to NanoNeedle article
Link to Maness repair article
Link to TJ timeline links
Link to TJS database
Link to Strom surgery article
Link to Bordley surgery article 1
Link to Bordley surgery article 2
Link to Ben’s baseball/America course
Link to Ben C. on Skubal and Detroit
Link to Dickson on “cup of coffee”
Link to Asimov’s Robot series
Link to Super Baseball 2020
Link to Baseball Highlights 2045
Link to Data smell Reddit thread
Link to Skenes photos
Link to Yan game video
Link to Yan box score
Link to Yan Savant search
Link to ultimate’s integrity rule
Link to Arraez/Washington article
Link to article on Wash in 2027
Link to SIS infield-in study
Link to Ben on shifting vs. RHB
Link to Stirnweiss SABR bio
Link to PCA/Snuffy Blast spreadsheet
Link to AL Central streaks image
Link to 13-13-13 Stathead query
Link to win/loss/save spreadsheet
Link to leadoff streaks info
Link to 2026 Guardians relievers
Link to bullpen WAR gaps spreadsheet
Link to Tigers-Guardians gamer
Link to zero-K, zero-run games
Link to listener emails database
Link to MLB All-Century Team
Link to BNS Jays play podcast

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2:01	Jason Martinez: Welcome to the 1st post-trade deadline RosterResource chat! Still a lot of good topics on the table even if the popular “who will be sellers/buyers” one is off.   Here we go …

2:03

Jon Becker: I wouldn’t think his first appearance or two back from injury will be in the closer’s role; they’ll want him to get his feet back under him first. But I saw he averaged close to 102 on his fastball in his first rehab outing so the stuff is clearly all the way back. Very good odds he’s the closer by the end of the year, which allows Lovullo to deploy Morillo and Garcia earlier in the game and lengthens the whole bullpen.

2:05

Jason Martinez: Doesn’t appear to be anything standing in his way for the remainder of the season unless he looks absolutely terrible. He should be in the lineup every day vs RHP and get occasional starts vs LHP. Beck and Johnston have gotten sporadic playing time so I don’t expect them to cut into Zeen’s playing time. Beck has struggled and Rockies have already seen him quite a bit over the past couple seasons. Johnston’s numbers are fine but is probably settling into more of a part-time role. Veen destroyed AAA pitching and deserves the month-and-a-half audition before Rockies have to decide where he fits in 2027.

2:11

Jon Becker: I love questions that require solving roster puzzles! Let’s pretend it’s September 1 because that’s a more realistic date for everyone to be healthy (at the earliest) and more importantly for me, I get an extra spot to work with. I’m not going to focus too much on starters vs. relievers because there could be piggybacking with pitchers like Steele and Brown who probably won’t be fully stretched out if/when they’re back. So: Locks for spots if healthy (11): Gausman Holmes Boyd Imanaga Cabrera Brown Steele Palencia Webb Zeferjahn Miller That leaves just three spots for: Peterson Rolison Rea Thielbar Assad Civale Milner Harvey Of those eight arms for four spots, I don’t know that anyone is so obviously ahead of the others right now. Rolison and Assad being optionable really works against them, and I think how Harvey and Milner look on rehab is going to be really important for them. As for the hybrid SP/RP arms (Peterson, Rea, Civale) and Thielbar, they’re actively auditioning every time they go out there.

2:16

Jason Martinez: That Royals’ bullpen is a dumpster fire so I think they’re just happy to have 2 semi-reliable late-inning options who throw in the high-90’s for now. My guess is that they’ll both continue to get save opportunities and whether there is any separation depends on performance. Pearson is auditioning to avoid being non-tendered. Good move to take a flyer on him but it doesn’t mean they’ll offer him arbitration. He has one year of control remaining. Cruz is auditioning for high-leverage role in 2027. Stuff is great. Looking much more consistent over the past month or so. If Joyce is healthy in 2027, I don’t think there’s any question that he’s the primary closer. They’re easing him now, for good reason, which is why guys like Natera and Fermin are going to get save chances. Good opportunity for them to lock up spots for next season. Natera has been terrific.

2:17

Jon Becker: Wrobleski’s had a horrible three starts so I suppose it could be him if he keeps getting hit around since he can be optioned and they may want to keep Lauer around (and he can’t be optioned), but Lauer seems the likeliest to just get bumped to the bullpen into that rotating long relief/mop-up role that Roberts really likes to have for games that have gotten out of hand in one direction or another.

2:20

Jason Martinez: They’ve been facing mostly LHPs since acquiring him so hard to know how often he is going to play vs RHP. Peters has struggled badly the past month so I think there is an opportunity for Doyle to take over the full-time role. I don’t know if there’s much they can change with Doyle mid-season. He kind of is what he is right now. Some pop but low BB/high K rate. If he’s going to be anything more than a 4th OF/platoon vs LHP, which is still valuable on a playoff contender, I think they’ll have to make big changes with his swing during the offseason.

2:23

Jon Becker: I could see it transitioning from the latter into the former as we get closer to the playoffs, assuming he’s back with enough time for them to start him off in a more structured “a couple innings every five days ahead of Bello” role before letting him loose in single-inning bursts as the game dictates a little bit more often. It’s not to say he’s completely useless on a playoff roster if he’s basically working as a starter but can only go 2-3 innings, but that puts a lot of strain on a bullpen and I’d rather be able to be more liberal with when I can use him late in games.

2:26

Jason Martinez: Jackson has barely been on the field in the last 2 weeks, but Jeffers/Caratini are in the lineup together often enough that keeping him as the 3rd catcher is probably valuable. They also don’t really have much catching depth so losing Jackson on waivers wouldn’t be ideal. Would also suck if he gets DFAd a week before the series in San Diego (Jackson is from San Diego). I can see them sending Roden to AAA until rosters expand.

2:29

Jon Becker: Judge still hasn’t started to swing and Stanton has just started “engaging with the bases” (whatever exactly that means) so we’re still a ways away from those two and Bellinger all having to get squeezed on the roster. Jones has been hitting well (and hitting third!) but the playing time just isn’t there for him when everyone’s healthy, so I think he has to be one of the moves. Assuming we’re talking September 1 or later, I think the other moves comes to Caballero to the minors or a Rosario DFA. Rosario was signed to mash lefties but actually has reverse splits this year, but they may prefer the flexibility of keeping both him and Caballero around. Caballero has a ton of utility on the bases and will certainly be on the playoff roster for that but his role right now in the regular season is pretty niche, and he hasn’t hit in months.

2:34

Jason Martinez: Similar question as the last one so I’ll just expand on Jon’s answer. By the time Stanton (and maybe Judge) are back on the field together, it will be late in the season and the focus will be more game-to-game and every lineup could be matchup-based. Unless they start giving Rice time at catcher, there will likely be one lefty masher who sits vs LHP. But this won’t be a bad thing once they get to the playoffs. Having Stanton or Ramos available off the bench would be a luxury. I think Cashman wanted to add more good hitters and let Boone worry about who plays if it does get to the point where everyone is healthy.

2:37

Jon Becker: Most teams aren’t going to sweat too much about bench decisions for the playoffs because benches really aren’t used too much for a lot of teams, but you’re right that having Rushing, Feduccia, and Rortvedt all on the roster would make for a tough decision of picking two of Enrique Hernández, Rojas, and Alex Call. I think maybe Call is the odd man out there considering the postseason pedigrees of Rojas and Hernández, and they’ve got some more cachet in the clubhouse. But both of those guys are pros and wouldn’t complain about getting left off the roster, either. One thing they also have to consider with Rushing: can you find the right time to use him such that his inclusion on the roster makes sense? He’d really only hit for one catcher before getting subbed out by the other — there aren’t any other spots in the lineup you’d want to pinch hit for — so they might decide it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense anyway.

2:40

Jason Martinez: A few factors involved, including whether the Dodgers temporarily go back to 5 starters or when Glasnow returns, but it seems to be lining up for Skubal to start one of those games. If they just stick with a 6-man rotation and don’t push him back for any reason, I believe he’s in line for Game 3 on 8/30.

2:43

Jon Becker: Good time to remind that if you click on the notepad icon on a team payroll page next to a player’s contract description, you can see this. We don’t have specifics on what a “qualifying injury” is but since Pivetta has a right arm injury I would think his current injury qualifies, and he’s already past 130 days, which should flip his opt out for next year into a club option. But assuming he’s back this year (or even Opening Day next year) he won’t have missed enough time to have a club option for 2029.

2:49

Jason Martinez: This was actually a topic of conversation I had with a colleague over the past 2 days in the Padres’ press box. For obvious reasons. Fermin looks really good as of late. Campy is having a terrific season. And Salas seems like he’ll be ready in 2027. My guess is they trade Campy or Fermin in the offseason. I don’t think they want to go with 3 catchers. At least not on a permanent basis. They value a catcher’s role on defense way too much to give Campy or Salas a lot of DH at-bats. Catchers also get hurt often so Padres value the off-days. A few important factors. Campy is out of options. I don’t think the Padres would send Fermin to AAA but he does have options. Campy should have a ton of trade value because of his offensive numbers (.900+ OPS) and his defensive has looked much-improved. Fermin will have value for a team looking to add a reliable backup but not nearly as much as Campy. I think Salas/Campy would be the best pair.

2:51

Jon Becker: It’s tough because the concept of a righty platoon DH doesn’t really exist, and for good reason, but to your point: who are you starting him over? Maybe against an especially tough lefty they want to load up on righties and sit both Rice and García, but it’s not like that’s going to be an every-lefty situation. And Rice catching at any point this year seems to be out the window. So Stanton’s role may be limited to the very occasional DH start and pinch-hitting, which he’s been pretty awful at.

2:54

Jason Martinez: Barring anything changing performance-wise to finish out the season, I have to believe they feel pretty good with Weaver and Montgomery as closer options for 2027. If they want a primary closer, however, I think Weaver probably has the edge unless they’re able to add another lefty setup man. And finding a lefty setup man is not easy, which I why I say that.

2:57

Jon Becker: I think the former is likelier than the latter. Bohm got a pretty good vote of confidence from Dombrowski (albeit one based on RBI, which, uh… not great!) but that doesn’t mean he’s going to start every single day either. With the knee soreness Harper’s experiencing from the OF move I can’t imagine he’ll realistically play more than 4-5 days a week there for the time being.

3:01

Jason Martinez: According to my math, he has at least 2 hits in 8 of his last 14 starts. He’s a hit machine and he’s doing it with the Cubs on the rise and looking like a legit WS contender. I don’t think the Cubs are thinking too much about how he fits in 2027 other than he’s going to be a big part of their team (unless he’s traded for an impact player, which the Cubs will probably be open-minded about). I think the big question is going to be whether they think he can be an everyday LF. Because he’s not needed there this season, he can’t really prove whether he can or not. At least not during an MLB game.

3:03	Jason Martinez: That will do it for today. We’ll be back next Thursday. Have a great rest of the week!

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The Detroit Tigers are one of the hottest teams in baseball. Since the calendar flipped to August, they’ve gone 7-3, scoring more than six runs per game in the process. In a muddled American League, that puts them right in the thick of the AL Central and Wild Card races. That, in turn, means they’re back in the hunt for a World Series ring. This burst of activity has them about as likely to make the playoffs (and win a ring) as they’ve been in the last few months, in fact; they’re back above 30% to reach October after dropping as low as 18% the day they traded Tarik Skubal.

That feels weird! Less than two weeks ago, the Tigers traded their best player, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, for three prospects. They followed that up by trading Casey Mize, who had briefly inherited the title of top Tigers pitcher. It was a classic deadline sale – not a thread-the-needle plan with some additions and some subtractions, but a declaration that the plan was to get ‘em next year, and the years after that.

Does this mean the Tigers shouldn’t have traded Skubal and Mize? I’m not here to opine on that (OK, fine I’ll opine at the end of the article, but you have to read it first). But they did make those trades, and they did go on that hot streak, so here we are. The Tigers can’t un-trade those guys. MLB doesn’t have a takebacks rule. But I can’t help but wonder how the Tigers would look if they hadn’t made any moves at the deadline, and so I decided to write about it.

The key to answering this question is to build a tool that can take hypothetical rosters (the Tigers with their two top pitchers back) and plug them into today’s actual standings and schedules. Luckily, I have one of those. I told my computer to undo the Skubal and Mize trades while leaving the rest of the deals from the deadline intact. Obviously that’s not a perfect assumption – the Dodgers probably would have landed on a separate starter if they didn’t get Skubal – but it does a good enough job for my purposes, which is to analyze how different Detroit’s path in particular would look if the team had held its course at the deadline instead of pivoting to the future.

The Tigers have backfilled their rotation thanks to some spot starts by Drew Anderson and Jackson Jobe’s return from injury. That’s meaningfully better than nothing; it’s surely part of why the Tigers made the trade in the first place. Even with two remaining starters (Jack Flaherty and Justin Verlander) on the shelf, they still have a functioning rotation. Here’s what it looks like today, with each pitcher’s rest-of-season Depth Charts projections:

Our system has that as the 19th-best rotation in baseball, though my own outlook is slightly rosier; I think that Melton and Jobe are better than their projections imply. The Tigers are in a position to compete for a playoff spot thanks to their pitching, undoubtedly so, but that’s largely because Skubal and Mize each made 16 starts and each notched ERAs around 2.75. After that, it’s been Melton and Montero picking up the slack that Valdez, Flaherty, and Verlander have left; Skubal and Mize recorded nearly as much WAR as the rest of the rotation combined before they departed.

The Detroit bullpen has been poor so far this year. How poor? Well, we give Tigers relievers credit for 1.4 WAR. Half of that comes from Anderson and Montero’s relief work, though; Montero flexed to the ‘pen when everyone was healthy, and Anderson has spent most of this year as a short-stint reliever. With those two now assuming starting responsibilities, we think the group that’s left is abysmal, a bottom-five unit. Put all of that together, and it’s no wonder that we project Detroit to allow 4.62 runs per game the rest of the way, far more than it has surrendered so far.

OK, then: Let’s bring back the two aces and shift some arms into the bullpen. I swapped in Skubal and Mize for Anderson and Jobe, then bumped those two up to priority bullpen arms to give the relief corps some extra oomph. The new rotation (same as the old, pre-trade rotation) naturally looks a lot better:

The real question, though, is what that does to their Playoff Odds. We consider the true talent of the Tigers as currently constituted to be slightly worse than a .500 team. With their two best pitchers back in the fold, that true-talent winning percentage goes up 27 points, from .497 to .524. And while that doesn’t sound like a huge move, the Tigers are in the perfect position for that boost in talent to matter most. The AL Central is ripe for the taking. The top four teams are within four games of each other, and while the three clubs that Detroit is competing with all made deadline moves, none was earth-shattering.

It’s not just about a division title, either. Winning the Central comes with a decent chance of a first-round bye, because the AL West has been even worse this year. With the three best records in the American League all residing in the East, whichever team finishes best out of the other divisions is going to get a relatively easy draw considering its final record. That means that adding expected wins is about as valuable as it could get for any of the teams on the AL Central and AL West bubble; more wins doesn’t only make you more likely to win your division or the last Wild Card slot, it makes it more likely that a division title will come with a bye.

Reverting to the old rotation would make the Tigers narrow favorites to earn that bye. That’s a really big deal; winning three playoff series is a lot easier than winning four. It more or less doubles your odds of winning the World Series, because it removes a 50% chance of losing before the tournament really gets going. My model sees it this way, with or without Skubal and Mize:

Like I said, that’s a big bump. Adding two percentage points to your odds of winning the World Series is no joke. Even when we projected the Tigers as clear division favorites before the season, we only gave them a 4% shot at winning it all. Why can adding just two players increase their odds by so much? It’s because they’re in the perfect spot for those wins to apply with leverage; most teams don’t hit August in a position where one win could make the difference between staying home or playing in October, or between a bye and a Wild Card round berth.

I promised that I’d answer whether the Tigers “should” have traded Skubal and Mize, and I came up with a rough framework for that assessment. I took the same tool I’m using to build hypothetical alternate lineups, rewound it to the start of the season, then figured out how much adding a win’s worth of projections at various projected records would affect World Series odds. Here’s a rough distribution of how much an extra win matters, from various starting points:

Next, I got even more theoretical. I took some distributional studies that got left on the cutting room floor when I updated prospect valuations and worked out, more or less, the odds that prospects of the caliber traded for Skubal and Mize would turn into average regulars or better, plus the average WAR per year delivered in those outcomes. I also looked at the last six years of Tigers teams to figure out how many extra wins adding players like that to replace weak links would be worth (limiting those weak links to the rotation and the outfield, to match the prospects). I worked out that the guys traded to the Tigers project to boost their average projected wins by around 1.2 per year.

At this point, I’ll stop and point out that I’m doing a lot of approximating, so the error bars are large here. But with that caveat, we can do the math. Say that the Tigers bounce around between 78 and 90 projected wins for the next six years, and take the average of those World Series-odds-per-win sensitivities. Multiply that by the 1.2 wins per year I think the extra prospects are “worth.” Multiply that by six years of team control. You get an added 3.3 percentage points of World Series odds, comfortably more than the boost they’d receive from having Skubal and Mize the rest of the way this year. That might understate it, too. If the Tigers didn’t sell, they likely would have bought, but probably only on the margin, considering where they were in the standings and their underperformance over the first four months of the season. The risk of going all-in would have been too high. While we don’t know the counterfactual there, it’s reasonable to think that it would’ve made their future teams even a little worse, for small present benefit, amplifying the effect I’ve already measured here.

That’s an unsatisfying answer for me, but that doesn’t make it less true. The Tigers stand to benefit a lot from raising their floor in future years. Even though they’re in a place of maximum leverage right now, making the playoffs is not the same as winning the World Series, and even with Skubal, Mize, and a few marginal upgrades, this year’s squad would’ve faced a huge uphill battle, likely underdogs in nearly every round of the playoffs (against various AL East squads and then the Dodgers NL champions). Getting a little better in many future years doesn’t sound as fun as being a lot better right now, but my math suggests that it’s pretty clearly the right move, even taking into account their recent performance.

I doubt the Tigers made this exact calculation when they opted to deal their two best pitchers. But I assume their motivation was at least similar in spirit. I’m all for trying to compete, and I generally dislike teams perpetually playing for the future. But this was an extreme case. The Tigers haven’t been amazing this year, Skubal and Mize were rentals, and they fetched enough return that it looks likely to change the trajectory of future teams enough to matter, given how many weak roster spots they’ve tended to carry and the competitive window they’re in. Not the most exciting conclusion, perhaps, but hopefully a salve to observers who, like me, saw the Tigers start winning and thought, “Boy, Skubal would make this team look better, huh?” They may yet go on a run. Heck, they might win it all anyway, despite making these deals. But even taking into account their winnable division, and even cheating a little and taking into account how well they’ve played after the deadline, I think they made the right decision by the numbers.

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Splits Page on the Player Pages

• We’ve added nine new stat groups to the splits page, including Statcast, Bat Tracking, plate discipline, and pitch-level metrics.
• We’ve changed the UI to include a stat group selector at the top of the splits page to accommodate the addition of more stats. If you want to see stats that appear in Advanced, Batted Ball, or our new stat groups, you’ll simply click on those options instead of scrolling down.

Splits Leaderboards and Player Page Splits Tool

• We’ve added the same new stat groups we added to the player page splits, including Statcast, Bat Tracking, plate discipline, and pitch-level metrics.
• We’ve refreshed the UI using our modern interface, making it responsive to user interaction.
• We’ve integrated the page with our updated Custom Teams feature. Please note, this integration is only available on the splits leaderboards.

When comparing the updated splits leaderboard page to the legacy version (which will remain available until the end of the World Series), the most striking changes are the cosmetic updates we’ve made to the UI. The tool itself works just the same, but it benefits from the integration of Statcast and Bat Tracking stats, along with an entire Pitch-Level Data tab:

The Statcast preset will apply your filters or splits to tried and true Statcast metrics like exit velocity, barrel rate, and xwOBA. Here are the top 10 hitters by xwOBA against lefties through games played on Tuesday:

Bat Tracking contains the newer Statcast metrics that have been introduced in the last couple years, like bat speed and ideal attack angle. Here are the righty relievers with the lowest rate of squared-up contact through Thursday’s action:

The Pitch-Level Data tab uses Statcast pitch-type inputs (with the exception that, at least for now, all sweepers are categorized as sliders, as they are elsewhere on the site), allowing for filtering within each tab the same way you’d filter with the other stat presets:

That adds up to the nine new stat presets, with seven housed in the Pitch-Level Data tab.

Odds and Ends

We appreciate all of the feedback early users have given us on the update, and thought it would be helpful to address a few questions we’ve received from them:

• First, we haven’t removed any stat fields from the splits page on the player pages. If there’s a stat you “miss” from the legacy tool, it’s still there. It may have just moved!
• The custom player control has been moved to a Custom Players button above and to the right of the top of the data grid. This is a similar location to where it sits on our other leaderboards.



• We updated the CSV export to be in line with the format of the rest of the site, which includes having the appropriate diacritical marks in players’ names. We include our player IDs, the MLBAM player IDs, and the name field stripped of diacritics for the sake of compatibility across data tools.
• As with all of our tools, exporting to Excel is a Members-only feature. You can sign up to become a FanGraphs Member here.

To provide additional feedback, you can click the “here” within the light blue banner at the top of any of the three features:

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