Welcome back to Top of the Order 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. After an interminable wait for Pittsburgh fans (read: under 10 months), the Pirates on Wednesday finally announced they…
Keaton Winn is a rare big league pitcher, and not just because he’s the only one who grew up in Ollie, Iowa, with a population of 201 in the 2020 census. The 26-year-old San Francisco Giants right-hander’s primary pitch is a splitter, and by a significant margin. Through seven starts this season, Winn’s usage breakdown…
Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports We are now deep enough into the 2024 regular season that many of the initial surprises and outliers have leveled out. Mookie Betts is leading the league in position player WAR, Shohei Ohtani leads in wRC+, and Patrick Corbin is close to the top of the leaderboard in earned runs allowed….
Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports Yesterday, I wrote about at the mysterious disappearing zone rate of Mookie Betts. Today, we’ll be looking at a player who has seen his zone rate go in the other direction: Adley Rutschman. This season, opponents are throwing 51.7% of their pitches in the zone against Rutschman, up from 47.3%…
Dan Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports Daulton Varsho must have been disappointed. After a breakout 2022 season, he was traded to Toronto, a World Series contender in need of outfielders. However, he experienced a down year, the Jays were swept out of the Wild Card round, and his former team made a surprising run to the World…
Matt Kartozian-USA TODAY Sports Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in…
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the Pirates calling up pitching prospect Paul Skenes, Mookie Betts’s defense at shortstop, Willson Contreras, catcher’s interference calls, catcher technique in a world of automated strike zones, reliever shuffling, Chase Anderson’s Phiten necklace, issues with amateur prospects being exploited, Ippei Mizuhara’s guilty plea, Shohei Ohtani’s WAR and two-way potential,…
(Photo by Scott Taetsch/Getty Images) The Washington Nationals have been one of the more surprising teams through one month of the 2024 MLB season and are looking to end their streak of four consecutive last-place finishes in the NL East. Fans recently learned one stat that added some context to how long it has been…
(Photo by Tom Pennington/Getty Images) It’s always fun to see fan favorites return to their former teams, and it seems that you see it happen in baseball a little more often than you do in other sports. Texas Rangers fans will now get to experience this after the front office just made a nice…
(Photo by Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images) The 2022 Philadelphia Phillies were sneaky good: they almost missed the postseason, then went on and made the World Series. The 2023 Phillies were dangerous, but couldn’t win key games in the NL Championship Series and lost to the Arizona Diamondbacks. The 2024 version of the team might be the…
