Monday afternoon’s game between the A’s and Yankees ended in impressive fashion for Oakland, with closer Mason Miller buzz-sawing through the top of New York’s lineup to close out a 2-0 victory. The 25-year-old righty struck out Anthony Volpe, Juan Soto, and Aaron Judge consecutively on 14 pitches, mixing eight four-seam fastballs — all with velocities above 100 mph — with four nasty sliders. He absolutely overpowered Judge:

Those fastballs Judge flailed at were clocked at 100.7 mph, 102.2 mph, and 102.5 mph, the last of which wasn’t quite as fast as the 103.3-mph heater Miller used to strike out Soto. Whoosh! Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Hendricks has long been lauded as a cerebral pitcher, and for good reason. Nicknamed “The Professor,” the 34-year-old Chicago Cubs right-hander not only has an economics degree from Dartmouth College, he relies far more on guile than gas. The antithesis of your prototypical power arm, Hendricks subsists with a heater that sits in the second percentile for velocity. Moreover, he’s no spin monster in terms of breaking stuff. As he’ll readily admit, his four-pitch arsenal is sans a plus breaking ball.

His 2024 season is off to a slow start. Over five turbulent outings, Hendricks has surrendered 37 hits, including a league-worst eight round-trippers, seven walks and 28 runs across just 21 innings. Adjustments are in order, but that’s nothing new for the righty. An ability to adjust accordingly has gone a long way toward his career ledger, which coming into this year included an 84 ERA- and a 3.80 FIP, as well as stingy walk and home run rates. When push comes to shove, Hendricks has proven more than capable of outsmarting big league hitters.

Hendricks discussed his evolution as a pitcher and his overall M.O. on the mound during spring training.

———

David Laurila: How have analytics impacted your evolution as a pitcher?

Kyle Hendricks: “Analytics have changed a lot throughout my career, and I’ve had to learn a lot about them. I still don’t know a whole lot, to be honest with you. We have such a good support group behind me on the pitching side, and I rely heavily on them. I’ll go through all my work, throw my bullpens, etcetera, and they’re breaking down all the data, what everything looks like. So, the most it’s probably helped me with is consistency — consistency of pitch shapes, and action on my pitches.

“From there, I’ve always been a guy searching for a better curveball and how to spin a ball better. It definitely can help, just looking at the shape of my curveball, the spin overall, the spin efficiency. Things like that. Those have helped me put a good visual to what I’m searching for in a breaking ball.”

Laurila: It’s interesting to hear you say that you don’t know a lot. Zack Wheeler recently told me that [Phillies pitching coach] Caleb Cotham was his pitching nerd. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, Ben Clemens published an article containing a list of the hitters who are getting the most power from the fewest swings and misses. It’s a ratio of barrels to whiffs, which Ben — because of his inexhaustible capacity for alliteration — calls “whomps per whiff.”

One name that stood out to me was Jake Cronenworth, who came in seventh on the whomps per whiff leaderboard. I first encountered Cronenworth many years ago, when he was the Shohei Ohtani of the Big Ten, and have been mightily pleased to see him evolve from a seventh-round pick to a two-time All-Star, and a starting infielder on a Padres team that usually buys its infielders from the Rolls Royce dealership.

A year ago, Cronenworth singed a seven-year contract extension that will keep him in brown and gold into the 2030s, and then the wheels fell off. Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams has that look this year. After showing a glimpse of his offensive potential in 2023, his skills are on full display to start the season. Abrams’ projectable frame always seemed like it could facilitate him adding power. Whether he ever got to that power was dependent on his swing mechanics.

Up until this year, the lefty had a steep, pushy entry into the hitting zone. That resulted in a suboptimal launch angle distribution. In 2023, he had a 32.6% sweet-spot rate, which was in the 30th percentile. (A player’s sweet spot percentage is defined as the percentage of their batted balls hit between eight and 32 degrees.) So instead of hitting balls at launch angles that would result in line drives and hard-hit fly balls, Abrams hit a ton of popups and groundballs. His swing had a limited range of quality contact points.

He may have swatted 18 home runs, but those long balls were mixed in with consistent mishits. When you swing down into the hitting zone like Abrams did last year, it can lead you to be what a lot of hitting coaches call a collision hitter. If your bat path doesn’t have much room for error, you might still run into some homers from time to time, but there is only a tight window for you to do so. Rather than your barrel moving up through the entire hitting zone, it only does so at one point in space. That might be hard to conceptualize, so let’s check out some video of Abrams last year, focusing primarily on how his hands descend when he starts his swing. Read the rest of this entry »

This all started because I was staring at Jose Siri. I don’t think I’ve ever set out with the intention of staring at Jose Siri, but it ends up happening kind of a lot. He’s very watchable. He runs like the wind, if the wind had big muscles. He swings with a righteous fury, and on the rare occasions when he connects with the baseball, he threatens to reduce it to a smoking heap of carbonized yarn. He throws hard too, but not hard enough to wax poetic about it. A few weeks ago, I was researching tromps and whomps (you know, baseball stuff) when I noticed the emblem on Siri’s jersey. It wasn’t the entire Rays logo. It was just a tiny part of it meant to symbolize the whole. Jose Siri was wearing a metonym.

I started wondering about that yellow starburst design: where it came from, what it was supposed to be, and how long I’d been staring at it without actually seeing it. Despite the bright colors, Tampa Bay’s Columbia Blue alternates are the sparsest jerseys in baseball. No other team has a jersey whose front features a graphic with no characters whatsoever. Few teams in the history of the league have worn jerseys like that, and when they did, the graphics were much more representational than the asymmetrical sunburst shape that Tampa Bay uses to evoke a ray of sunshine. Over the past few weeks, I spoke to several people with knowledge of the intersection between art, graphic design, and baseball. I was also lucky enough to speak to two of the people who created the logo in the first place. As it turns out, that piece of the logo is called “the glint,” and it was born on a rooftop in New Jersey.

I first spoke to artist Graig Kreindler. He hadn’t noticed the jerseys either, and he gamely agreed to let me send him some pictures the moment before we got on the phone so that he could give me his reaction in real time. Kreindler loved the jerseys. “I had no idea that they’d gotten rid of the type altogether,” he said. “I love that idea of having your visual identity tied around something… that in this case is pretty abstract.” Kreindler specializes in gorgeously detailed paintings of baseball players and scenes, usually from previous eras. When I asked him whether he could think of anything comparable to the Rays jerseys, he brought up the Philadelphia Athletics of the 1920s, whose jerseys had an elephant on the breast, and who were apparently forbidden from smiling.

“Anything that makes me think of something vintage,” said Kreindler, “I’m all for it.” As a painter rather than a graphic designer, he was also acutely aware of how challenging this logo must have been to come up with. “I guess it’s kind of hard to make a shape —” he started, but then he cut himself off. “How do you illustrate rays of the sun?”

It’s a good point. After all, until a ray of sunshine hits something, it’s just a line. It’s hard to make that fun enough to put on a hat or a jersey. Still, there are plenty of wrong ways to answer the question. Just ask the Hagerstown Suns, who decided to lean into their name and ended up going full-on Raisin Bran.

MLB teams don’t just pick their own logos. The league has a carefully curated aesthetic, overseen by the internal MLB Design Services team. Some clubs have been around since the 19th century, and anything new needs to be of a piece with what came before, as well as with the league’s vision for the future. And there is more new design work than you might realize. Each season, there are a million things that require branding: the All-Star Game, the World Series, spring training, each round of the playoffs, the Home Run Derby, All-Star workout day, the Futures Game. Even the Winter Meetings get a new logo every year.

Long before Tampa Bay picked just a portion of its visual identity to focus on, it did the same thing with its name. From the franchise’s 1998 debut to 2007, the Devil Rays ran the worst record in baseball and finished last in the AL East nine times. When Stu Sternberg assumed full ownership of the team in 2005, it was in need of an exorcism. Whether or not it had anything to do with complaints from religious groups, Sternberg’s top-to-bottom reinvention of the franchise included a name change. Before the 2008 season, Tampa Bay dropped the word Devil and set out to rebrand around the idea of rays of sunshine. They were no longer fish; they were photons. (The devil can be hard to renounce, though. Rather than shell out for new uniforms, the team’s Appalachian League affiliate in Princeton, West Virginia, stayed the Devil Rays for an extra year.)

That history has colored how some people view the rebrand. Sarah Ingber is an artist who worked on the Too Far From Town project at Baseball Prospectus. When she looks at the new logo, her first association is a religious one: the Star of Bethlehem. However, she readily admits that the origin of the name change left her biased. “Devil Rays are a weird team name but cool animal,” she told me. “They can’t help their little head shapes. Justice for satanic nomenclature!”

Once the decision to cast out the devil had been made, MLB brought on FanBrandz, a sports branding agency run by Bill Frederick, to create the visual identity for the Rays. A team of four or five people worked on the project, with MLB vice president of design Anne Occi essentially acting as creative director. It was the first big project Maureen Raisch, a designer not long out of college, had worked on. “They really threw me in the deep end creatively, which was really exciting,” she said.

Raisch and Frederick explained that Sternberg, a Brooklyn native who grew up worshipping Sandy Koufax, had a very specific aesthetic in mind. “In the meetings, he really wanted the sophistication of the Yankees uniform,” said Frederick. “So that really drove the process.” The futuristic fonts and rainbow gradients of the Devil Rays were out. Navy blue was in. “Classic typography,” explained Raisch, “you want that in baseball. It’s right at home in the aesthetic of MLB.” However, she drew the line when there was talk of pinstripes. “Do not do it. You cannot,” she remembered thinking. “For God’s sake, you’re in the division with the Yankees!”

“I think that the glint came very, very late in the process,” said Frederick. “We had done quite a bit of exploration at that point.” His team had tried out concepts using sunbeams to create the leg of the R in Rays, or coming through the wordmark. “We had done some stuff that was very expressive, and it was determined that it really should become much more sophisticated.” Eventually, they hit on the winner. Said Raisch, “These classic baseball letter forms were going to be the thing. You kind of knew that.” That simpler design “needed that little special thing.” The idea for the glint arose during a meeting at MLB’s New York office in early January 2008. “We had this meeting, just up here on Park Ave,” said Raisch. “And something in this meeting sparked, where I go, “I know what we’re going to do.”

“We had played around a lot with it,” said Frederick. “And it just occurred to us at some point, and I think it was probably with Maureen. We said, ‘Well, what about what the sun does to the type?’ It actually reflects off the type, as opposed to trying to image sunbeams. And then Maureen basically took it on herself.”

Rather than simply draw a cartoon glint, Raisch preferred to work from real life. “I think it speaks to the way I approach creative work in sports,” she said. “I think everything should be kind of grounded in reality. Reality is what is familiar to the human eye, so you can’t fake it. Think of movies done with practical, in-camera effects. They’re the best, they hold up. Indiana Jones, from 1981, still looks great.”

Raisch went looking for gold lettering, the kind you’d get from a hardware store to put your street address on your front door. “So I go back home and all I could get is a [number] four. Like a mailbox, brass four.” She took it up to the roof of her Jersey City apartment and took pictures of the four catching the setting sun. “In my mind’s eye, it was more about maybe we bevel or give it a dimensionality, and you’d have this real hotspot. That was kind of the theory.”

Raisch still has the photos, which she showed to me. Wearing gloves to ward off the cold, she held the four by the base with a pair of needle-nose pliers. With a flaming sunset and shadowed Jersey City skyline as the background, the sun shines through the crook of the four, glancing off the corner and refracting into five beams of light. Another picture shows two images side by side, the glint coming off the four and the glint coming off the R in the finished Rays jersey. The two match almost perfectly.

“That’s how it was created,” said Raisch. “There’s my hand in a glove. I swear it’s my hand. That’s Jersey City also; not sunny Florida, you can tell.” The idea took off. Said Frederick, “I think it was very novel. It had a lot of energy. It was different, you know? It was special. And the team really embraced it, and we saw that aspect of the logo really gain traction very quickly after we introduced it. And the next thing you know we see it being used independently as its own graphic.”

He’s not wrong. The glint is absolutely everywhere. Glint-only hats were rolled out for spring training and batting practice in 2013. Since then, it has worked its way into every corner of the franchise. There are multiple variations of it on the team website. It’s on the mound and the outfield wall. The glint-only jerseys became the team’s spring training look in 2016 and the regular season alternates in 2022. “The jerseys themselves are awesome,” said Dan Abrams, the designer behind Athlete Logos. “I love the color combo and just having a graphic logo on the front chest like that.”

LJ Rader, the art history savant behind Art But Make It Sports, prefers the boldness of the original Devil Rays logo — after sending me a picture of Randy Arozarena in a throwback uniform, he wrote, “like, these slap so hard why would you ever not make this your branding” — but he did identify some touchstones for the glint. He first thought of it as a 21st century take on a Joan Miró star.

After chatting for a few more minutes, he sent an image of Edvard Munch’s “The Sun.” It was a picture he had taken at the recent Munch exhibit at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. That brought him to an ironic point about the heliocentric rebrand: The Rays play in Tropicana Field, arguably the gloomiest place in baseball.

Tampa Bay is well aware that some people adore its original Devil Rays look. This year, clubs were limited to four sets of uniforms. Rather than lose the glint or the throwbacks, the team jettisoned its road grays. (This proved wise, as it turns out that when exposed to so much as one drop of sweat, the new road grays take on the appearance of a drowned moth.) Predictably, some people are bothered by that decision. Chris Creamer, the founder and editor of SportsLogos.net, wants the team to pick a lane, rather than staying beholden to both its old and new identities. “If you are going to lean into the glint as the primary image of your brand, jump in with both feet,” he said. “Go with a yellow uniform. If this team is named after sun rays, the sun is yellow; let’s go yellow. Let’s really have fun with this.”

Still, the focus on the glint has only grown over time. Amazingly, the team didn’t alter the glint whatsoever when it decided to make it the focal point. When the glint is on its own, said Luke Hooper, who has designed many of the graphics here at FanGraphs, “you really notice how strange it is.” It would have been reasonable to rework it, given its new, more prominent role. But it still has the exact same dimensions, the little curve in the middle surrounded by all those sharp angles. The strangeness that gives it character really shines through.

Neither Frederick nor Raisch had any idea that the team would come to focus on the glint. “No,” said Raisch. “Absolutely delighted. I think they make foam glints. I think there are people with tattoos, if you want to Google this. I know during the playoffs, I found a guy with it shaved into the side of his head.” Said Frederick, “We didn’t know it was going to take on a life of its own to that degree. It was fun to watch, because all of a sudden, they really embraced it and started using it all over the place: in front of the stadium, in the entrance, and in the outfield cutting it in the grass. It was just turning up all over the place. It was really fun. They were able to find the most fun aspect of the identity.”

At this point, FanBrandz has worked on 28 All-Star Games and more than 15 World Series. Raisch spent 14 seasons designing for MLB and the NHL. In 2019, she left to become a senior designer for the NFL. In 2022, she became creative director for the National Women’s Soccer League, entrusted with shaping the aesthetic of the young league the same way Anne Occi did for MLB. “We’re creating an ethos at this league,” she said. “The Tampa Bay Rays glint is older than this league. And if you’re a 10-year-old league… you can actually really do different things that an NFL and a Major League Baseball, over 100-year-old brands, can’t do.”

The last thing I asked Raisch was whether she would go back and change anything about her work for the Rays if she could. She didn’t miss a beat, jumping into an idea she’d had for working the glint into the hats. Just as quickly, she caught herself, and relayed something she heard from a designer who worked on the NWSL’s new championship trophy: “There’s a fine line between simple and elegant, simple and classy, and simple and bland.” She went on, “So no, we wouldn’t do more with that. That is what makes a major league franchise feel on the level of a major league. They’re simple, they’re elegant, they’re poignant. They’re not overdone. So putting the glint there, I just corrected my 22-year-old wannabe thing that I would have wanted to do. Because it would have been too much on a TV. It would have junked it up.”

The Rays rebrand remains special to Raisch. She even wears their gear around New York City, occasionally drawing the ire of hometown fans. “I’ve had Yankee fans get nasty with me,” she said. Then she laughed. “And I’m like, ‘But do you like the glint though?’”

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

It’s not easy to be in playoff position — no matter how early we are in the season — with an offense ranked 23rd in wRC+ entering Tuesday. But that’s exactly where the Tigers stood, above .500 despite an offense that’s better than only seven other teams. Spencer Torkelson doesn’t yet have a home run, Colt Keith has been anemic in his first few weeks in the majors, Javier Báez has continued his backslide, and Detroit is getting almost no offense from its catchers. Mark Canha, Riley Greene, and Kerry Carpenter have been great, but three well-performing hitters can’t carry the other six spots in the lineup. So, then, it’s not hard to see what’s keeping the Tigers afloat: the performance of their pitchers.

A FIP of about 4.00 has the Tigers right in the middle of the pack in pitching WAR, but in terms of ERA — however sustainable or unsustainable it may be — they are among baseball’s best teams at preventing runs.

Detroit’s main contributor has been, of course, ace Tarik Skubal. He’s already been worth 1.0 WAR over his five starts, striking out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced and walking less than 5% of them. He’s allowed just two home runs, a major improvement from a few years ago. He surrendered 35 homers over 149.1 innings in 2021, his first full season in the big leagues, when he was a fastball-heavy prospect who tried to shove his heater down batters’ throats, an approach that often led to uneven results. Now that he’s mixing his pitches, Skubal is overwhelming hitters and making it far harder to guess what he’s going to throw, leading to far more weak contact.

Other than Kenta Maeda, who’s struggled badly this year despite his five scoreless innings Tuesday night, the rest of the rotation is doing its job, too. Jack Flaherty has his best strikeout percentage since 2019, when he finished fourth in the NL Cy Young race, Casey Mize is fully healthy, and Reese Olson looks like a solid back-end starter.

Where the Tigers have especially shined is in relief. Their relievers have an incredible 1.83 ERA, which actually went up after Tuesday night’s 4-2 win over the Rays, though it’s worth noting that mark has been aided by an unsustainably low BABIP against. Jason Foley is the headliner in the bullpen, firing high-90s sinkers to keep his ERA spotless through 11 appearances, but he’s had plenty of help. Shelby Miller’s deceptive fastball is difficult to square up, lefties Andrew Chafin and Tyler Holton are getting out right-handed hitters as well as lefties, and Alex Lange has been effectively wild. Even multi-inning relievers Alex Faedo and Joey Wentz, who largely pitch in low leverage situations, are doing well.

Opposing hitters won’t continue to run such a ridiculously low BABIP, but Torkelson won’t go homerless either. Such are the ebbs and flows that come with a long season, and right now the pitching is flowing and the offense is ebbing, with the former doing juuuuuust enough to keep the Tigers in the conversation as true contenders.

Will Daulton Varsho’s Adjustments Stick?

By no means was Daulton Varsho bad in his first season with the Blue Jays, but he was definitely underwhelming. He was still worth over two wins on the strength of his outfield defense — he led the majors in defensive runs saved — after hanging up his catcher’s mitt for good. However, his bat lagged far behind, with his 107 wRC+ from 2022 dropping all the way down to 85 last year. His strikeout and walk rates were similar, and he actually hit more balls in the air, but fewer of his fly balls turned into home runs because he was popping up far more pitches and pulling the ball less.

In working with bench coach and offensive coordinator Don Mattingly to flatten his swing plane a little in an effort to create fewer automatic outs, Varsho is thriving so far in 2024. His hard-hit rate is the highest of his career, with his average exit velocity up a full mph from 2023. Ironically, his IFFB% is actually higher than it’s ever been, but it’s more than outweighed by better contact overall, which has led to six homers (already 30% of last year’s total) and a 158 wRC+.

Varsho still has some holes in his game: Along with the popups, he’s pulling even fewer of his balls in play, and while he’s walking more, he’s also striking out more than ever. His offensive profile right now looks more boom or bust than Varsho and Mattingly intended, and the bust could come as quickly as the boom did. But for now, he and the Blue Jays should keep riding the wave of his boom for as long as it lasts.

RIP to Robert Suarez’s Fastball Streak

All good things must come to an end, and so it has with Robert Suarez’s fastball streak. For 79 pitches, the Padres’ closer threw nothing but four-seam and two-seam fastballs, until, finally, he mixed in a changeup at Coors Field on Monday night.

Although his ERA has fluctuated in his three MLB seasons since coming over from Japan, Suarez has been mostly the same pitcher when looking at xERA, though FIP feels differently about his 2023. At any rate, Suarez is taking a new approach in 2024; his pitch mix was essentially unchanged from 2022 to 2023, but now he’s throwing his two fastballs nearly 90% of the time.

The rest of his pitches are changeups, meaning Suarez doesn’t have any breaking pitches in his arsenal, but hitters have been flummoxed nonetheless. That fastball-changeup combo is enough to give hitters fits. Entering play Tuesday, he’s allowed just one run in 10.2 innings and earned eight saves. That’ll play.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Rockies (and their charter pilots) running afoul of the FAA, Jackson Holliday’s slow start, whether the Astros or Twins has hurt their division-title chances more, two embarrassing umpire incidents, offense being down relative to last season, the concept of a “combined Maddux,” Shohei Ohtani’s WAR as a DH, the Blue Jays’ self-funded ballpark renovations, new research on Tommy John surgeries in Japan, and more.

Audio intro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme 2”
Audio outro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Rockies plane video
Link to AP on the Rockies
Link to new flight deck rule
Link to Blum on Holliday
Link to O’s prospects joke
Link to Animorphs meme
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Link to article on Scott
Link to story on Mays start
Link to story on Mantle start
Link to change in division odds
Link to García injury update
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Link to Dan S. on the Astros
Link to Boone ejection video
Link to EW on ump-heckling
Link to CNN on Boone ejection
Link to SI on Boone ejection
Link to KBO ABS incident
Link to offense through 4/22
Link to Joe Sheehan on offense
Link to BallparkPal thread
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Link to “combined Maddux” mention
Link to WAR leaderboard
Link to Jaffe on the Dodgers
Link to Cardinals funding post
Link to more on Cards request
Link to article on Jays funding
Link to Diamondbacks statement
Link to Jim Allen TJ research
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Thanks to an eight-run fifth inning that included Andy Pages‘ first major league home run, the Dodgers beat the Mets 10-0 on Sunday to avoid being swept at home. Even so, they’re off to a sluggish start this season after committing nearly $1 billion in free agent contracts this past winter and pushing their payroll to a club record $314 million. Maybe they’re not the juggernaut that figure suggests, though even given their star-laden roster, they came into this season as a work in progress.

The Dodgers entered Sunday having lost seven of their past nine games. They dropped the finale of a six-game midwest road trip to the Twins, then two of three to the Padres at Chavez Ravine, followed by two of three to the Nationals and two in a row to the Mets. The skid undid a 10-4 start, and they were in danger of — gasp — sinking to .500 had they lost on Sunday. They weren’t exactly getting steamrolled by powerhouses, either. The aforementioned teams had a weighted projected winning percentage of .472 at the outset of the season, and finished Sunday having produced a .453 winning percentage outside of this nine-game stretch against Los Angeles.

For the Dodgers, run prevention has been the biggest issue. Even with Sunday’s shutout — their first of the season, with eight dominant innings from Tyler Glasnow and one from Nick Ramirez — they’re allowing 4.54 runs per game, 11th in the National League. While they haven’t allowed runs at that clip over a full season since 2005, they allowed exactly the same number of runs over their first 24 games last year while going 13-11, then picking up the pace and winning 100 games. Déjà vu all over again? Read the rest of this entry »

C’mon now. You don’t really believe in Reed Garrett. Honestly, you might not even know who he is unless you’re a Mets fan or really into interchangeable middle relievers. Garrett debuted for the Tigers in 2019, tossing 15.1 forgettable innings. He departed for Japan and pitched for the Seibu Lions for two years, where he was good but not great. Upon returning to the states, he delivered more of the same: nine bad major league innings for the Nats in 2022, 20 split between the Orioles and Mets in 2023, and plenty of minor league time mixed in.

Some of that minor league time was fairly good. Garrett struck out 28% of opponents while pitching for the Norfolk Tides, the Triple-A affiliate of the Orioles, in 2023, though he walked 10% there and 14.5% in his time with the Mets. He posted a 1.59 ERA there, too, though it came with an unsustainable 91.9% left-on-base rate. He even looked fairly decent for the Nats in Triple-A in 2022, recording a 3.04 ERA in 47.1 innings with a 27% strikeout rate. We listed him on our Positional Power Ranking bullpen preview — as the 11th reliever out of New York’s bullpen, with a projected ERA of 4.75.

Garrett has thrown only 10.2 innings since then, which doesn’t sound like enough to change opinions of anyone. But my, oh my, have they been good innings. Let me just put it this way: We now project his ERA the rest of the way at 4.07, a drop of nearly three quarters of a run. Imagine how good someone has to be in less than 11 innings to outweigh their entire career up to that point. Garrett has faced only 41 batters this year; 21 of them have struck out. Ah, yeah, that’ll do it.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Nationals are 10-11 coming out of last weekend’s 2019 World Series rematch with Houston, which is a mild surprise. I thought they’d finish way off the back of the pack in the NL East, and based on how the Marlins have faceplanted out of the gate, it seems I owe the Nationals an apology. And this is not a case of a mediocre team coming off the blocks hot by beating up on a bunch of glorified Triple-A opposition. Washington has played some pretty solid competition, with a series win against the Dodgers on the road sprinkled in there, too.

When a team exceeds expectations like this, there’s usually a good bullpen involved. Sure enough, Nats closer Kyle Finnegan has been strong (though his underlying peripherals are concerning), but the team’s real standout has been Hunter Harvey. Harvey made his first appearance in Washington’s second game of the season, entering in the eighth inning of a tie game in Cincinnati. It didn’t go well; he allowed two runs in one inning of work. But the offense bailed him out, tagging no less a reliever than Alexis Díaz for three runs in the top of the ninth. So despite a rough day at the office, Harvey escaped with a win.

And perhaps as a token of gratitude, Harvey has been basically untouchable since. In his past nine outings, totaling 10 innings, Harvey has struck out 17 batters, walked none, and allowed just a solitary run. He’s recorded holds in seven of those appearances and a positive WPA in all nine. His FIP in that span is below zero.

Far out. Read the rest of this entry »