Notes and Essays, Week Ending 5/16

5/10 N1: The Marlins elevated Esteury Ruiz to the majors a couple of weeks ago, and he’s been something of a difference maker, with four extra-base hits and six steals despite only making six starts. However, it’s hard to countenance no walks from his type, and that was a glaring weakness in his one real big-league try, which came in 2023; Ruiz had only 20 walks in 497 plate appearances. At AAA last year, he walked 64 times in about that number of plate appearances, apparently demonstrating great progress.

5/10 N2: Twins register another high-pitch count — Joe Ryan throws 107 Saturday.

5/10 N3: Now a 37.4 strikeout percentage for Matt Wallner, but he’s been here before. He struck out 36.4% in 261 plate appearances in 2024. Somehow, he hit .259 that year. He’s hitting .172 currently.

5/11 N1: Here are some particular nuances with the calculation and historical calculation of Rbaser (Baseball Reference’s Baserunning Runs) I gleaned over the past several minutes:

First, there has always been the debate and analysis around whether stealing is a net positive endeavor, and if so, to what extent. Obviously, you change the rules and make stealing an 81% play instead of a 72% play, its value increases. But this does not mean that Rbaser changed at all from 2022 to 2023, or in response to stealing success. You can check league totals to confirm what I say. The league sum is always set to 0. I think what happens is that expectations for raw baserunner runs just theoretically increase in a pro- versus an anti-stealing environment. Just as each player is expected to advance an extra base at least some of the time on hits, and so the base for that is positive, in a pro-stealing environment, the same becomes true of steals. This is an ingenious way around the problem of the changing stolen base success rate.

Second nuance….One place where I think I might have the statistical masterminds who do this stuff is that they always center hitting with pitcher hitting taken out. Consequently, any league where pitchers hit, in the team value box, sums very negative for Rbat. But this doesn’t seem to have been done for pitcher baserunning. Granted, pitchers didn’t do a lot of it when they stayed in the lineup, as they were on base a below average amount of time, but to be technical, the rates for baserunner advance should have pitchers removed, aligned with the approach for hitting. Yet RBaser MLB-wide when pitchers hit was sum 0, instead of negative.

Third nuance….This one an observation, while the first two involved endorsement (in the first case) and critique in the second. The observation is the base for Rbaser has always been set for MLB, even when the leagues didn’t play each other. My source for this is 1972, where NL Rbaser was 27, AL Rbaser -27….O.k., I can’t resist some comment, which is that, to the extent that culture or ballparks affected advance rate within league, then the centering would better be done just within league, too.

5/11 N2: Highest totals of Rbaser, single season, among players with fewer than 30 steals in the season, by period (I give a different number of players by period because I didn’t want to be servant to long ties).

1996-2005

(1) David Eckstein 2001 13

(2) Alex Rodriguez 1997 8

(2) Tony Womack 2004 8

2006-2015

(1) Chase Utley 2009 10

(2) Ian Kinsler 2008 9

(2) Matt Holliday 2008 9

2016-2025

(1) Byron Buxton 2017 9

(1) Mookie Betts 2016 9

(1) Mookie Betts 2017 9

(4) Lorenzo Cain 2017 8

(5) Jose Ramirez 2021 7

(5) Nicky Lopez 2021 7

To answer a question I had, the average age in the above seasons was 26.3, ranging from Rodriguez 1997 (21) to Womack 2004 (34).

Rodriguez stole 46 bases the next year, and Womack led the NL in steals every year from ‘97 to ‘99, totaling 190 steals (87% success rate!). So perhaps one might question if the design worked to capture the intended spirit of the inquiry.

5/11 N3: When I see a pitcher like Chris Bassitt (who, if you wouldn’t say he’s a “classic” starting pitcher, has always at least been “classification clear”) turned into a bulk reliever, at least for a start, I wonder if this opener stuff isn’t going to mess up/complicate the statistics.

5/11 N4: Brandon Marsh on fire. 4-for-4 Sunday.

5/11 N5: Although Sal Stewart had started at second, third, and DH as well as at first by April 11, through April he had still made 23 of his 31 starts at first. In May, it’s been harder to figure out just what he is, although I am convinced Terry Francona opts for creative lineup to amuse himself and keep the depression demons at bay. Stewart has started at each of the four previously-given positions over the last six games.

5/11 N6: I know Gavin Williams’ E.R.A. is 0.68 higher than it was at the end of 2025, but I think he’s vastly improved — in fact, I think maybe one of baseball’s most improved starters.

5/11 N7: I would consider May 11 still early, and Julio Rodriguez has a 122 OPS+. That’s all positive — slow-start jinx put to bed. And if he shows his prior improvement, he could put up some serious numbers. But what is going on with his fielding? To have an Outs Above Average of -4 from center field, as he does, is something that takes some very negative doing. 2022-2025 saw with two “+8s” and two “+11s.” He was not only good but graded consistently.

5/11 N8: Milwaukee is 8th in strikeouts from starting pitchers this year, 27th in innings by starting pitchers. An yes, in SO-per-inning among their starters, they are #1.

Hunter Greene has been out, but the Reds starting pitching looked deep before the season and made some starry-eyed. And yet the Reds are 29th in ks-per-inning from starting pitchers. E.R.A.-wise, they are 24th.

5/11 N9: Love me some Chase Burns but he has a 3.75 FIP, a 2.11 ERA. Last year, those numbers were flipped: 2.65, 4.57. His inning counts have actually been the same: 47 (so far in 2026), 43.1 in 2025.

5/11 N10: Walt Weiss continuing the practice of Braves playing every game: striking to see four of them (Baldwin, Albies, Riley, and, of course, Olson) with “perfect attendance” and league black type of 41 games played. Then Dubon has played 39 games. And Yastrzemski and Harris, 38.

5/11 N11: Some interesting offensive statistics for the 93-68, 2nd-place 1966 Giants. For some context, Mays’ 1965, at 11.2, is his best-ever bWAR. This 9.0 in 1966 could either be looked upon as the first year of an inevitable decline, or as his last great season. He led in NL bWAR for the 10th and final time.

In terms of speed, the team stats do not look like Willie Mays could played on the team, and that is an indication that he was indeed, in a way, declining. Mays himself went 5-for-6 stealing, but the Giants were both last in steals (29) and SB% (49.2 in the NL). No one on the team (Tito Fuentes) had more than 6 steals!

Something that says “old team” is that, in the ten-team league, they were 2nd behind the Braves in home runs, but 9th in batting average. That is a split associated with older players. Yet, when you look at “batting age” for the Giants, it was 26.6, 3rd-lowest in the NL, with the 35-year-old Mays the only significant aged contributor.

The actual paradox, it turns out, isn’t about a young team with old-player profiles, but in the way that team statistics are (1) sums of players of different skills and (2) quirk-laden in ways we don’t imagine. Mays (.288, 37 HR), McCovey (.295, 36 HR), and Jim Ray Hart (.285, 33 HR) hit for average and power. They were 1-2-3 on the team in both categories. Catcher Tom Heller (27 HR) did get more in on the HR act than the batting average one (.240). But what you really had on the Giants was, yes, a bit more power than average in a .256 hitting league, but more truthfully, a division between their haves and have-nots. It was the Hal Laniers (.228/.255/.275 slash in over 1,000 career games) who brought down their team average. We should know that a team is not the same profile, repeated however many times over; it is a composite that comes from different places, and ends up looking different than its members.

In referring to the statistical quirk, I had in mind the observation a made a week or two ago that as home runs increase, so too does the percentage of home runs to hits. Home runs are the higher variance statistic. There are 7.7 hits for every home run today, but that does not man that our 65 home run player has 501 hits (indeed, Bonds hit his 73 home runs on 476 at-bats). So I’m thinking these really outstanding home run hitters could “carry” the Giants in home runs more than they could in batting average. And, with many of the players doing little in either category, that is what shows up in the team statistics.

5/11 N12: Retrosheet equals discovery, so we now know that the ‘66 Orioles, Baltimore’s first World Series winners, had an excellent season hitting with runners in scoring position. With a .258 average, Baltimore was the AL’s best batting team overall, followed by Detroit (.251), Minnesota (.249), and Boston (.240). (Coincidentally or not, all would win AL pennants or divisions in the next three years, by the way.) But the key to that was RISP. With no one, Detroit topped Baltimore, .250 to .249. With men on 1st only, Minnesota was transcendent, hitting .291, while Baltimore was all the way down to 5th in the 10-team league at .246. But with RISP, Baltimore hit .291 themselves, giving them a whopping 40-point edge on Detroit, second in the category.

Basically everyone on the team but Davey Johnson raked with RISP.

Boog Powell .346

Russ Snyder .346

TC Winner Frank Robinson .333

Luis Aparicio .331

Brooks Robinson .314

Paul Blair .439 (just 57 AB).

I didn’t know Snyder. He was 32, Blair 22. From the getgo, center field was Blair’s; if he was playing, that was pretty much always where he was going to be. But Snyder was in center for 84 games in ‘66, too, and since he was left-handed and Blair right-handed, I wondered if they had platooned, and been a hell of a RISP platoon.

I checked, and Blair wasn’t hurt in ‘66 (for one thing, he even appeared in 133 games), but he only had 325 plate appearances. The two players do seem to have platooned a good bit, but Blair would play against right-handers sometimes, too, actually hitting them very well. By contrast, although Snyder had 4014 PA in his career, he had less than 500 of them against lefties. But Snyder could move to left field; he split his career games 451/422/394 left to right. That meant that Blair could sometimes play center against right-handers, with Snyder handling the left field duties, in place of the usual starter, “secondary average” guy, Curt Blefary.

That .291 RISP was just for the regular season, though. It didn’t play a direct part in the Orioles winning the World Series. And we know they did, sweeping the Dodgers. So did they keep the magic going in the Fall Classic?

I myself was surprised to see that they won the four games by a combined score of 13-2, pitching shutouts in the last three. So they just about matched the 1905 Giants, who won all their games by shutout, but lost another 3-0. I didn’t know it was quite that extreme, nor that it could have been in a a World Series after Deadball. So, with this context, even the question seems disconnected.

On the other hand, only scoring 13 runs in four games doesn’t necessarily preclude the possibility of some clutch hitting. And this for fun anyway. RISP elevation is bullshit, and this is a sample of four games. But not surprisingly, the analysis proved every bit as choppy as it seemed it might.

In the Orioles’ opening 5-2 win, they went 1 for 7 with men in RISP.

The next day, beating Koufax 6-0, they went 3-10 with RISP (I believe 2 for 6 against Koufax himself). Thoroughly clutch.

But in the final two games, they had a total of one at-bat with a runner in scoring position! They won both games 1-0, thanks to home runs by Blair and Frank Robinson. The only RISP at-bat came in the second inning of game 4; Johnson grounded into a double play against Don Drysdale.

The Orioles hit .222 (4 for 18) with RISP in the Series. For the Series overall, they hit .200, and hit .196 when they didn’t have a runner in scoring position. The Dodgers averages were .142 overall, .173 without men in scoring position, 0 for 22 with RISP.

Oliva (.381) and Killebrew (.360 with 1.292 OPS) were the Twins’ stars with a man on 1st only. That is a category of nearly the size of RISP, by the way, and if you sum it with RISP, if gives you the total men on base performance.

Killebrew hit right-handed, so I would take his split in 1966 to be non-indicative. I haven’t seen the effect as pronounced in other years, but players in MLB as a whole hit 12 points better with men-on-1st-only than they hit with no one on in 1966, and hit 9 points better with men-on-1st-only than they hit with men in scoring position. So you see what is probably the “holding the man on” benefit for left-handed hitters.

As a loose end, if you just go by his raw numbers, it seems Killebrew hit better with men on base in his career, whether they were on 1st only or with RISP, than with no one on. But I don’t know how much of that increment, if any, would remain if one adjusted to the different baselines.

5/12 N1: We take what we get, but we always want a World Series or All-Star game to match the importance of the event, to be compelling in its own right. The same can be said about the first or last game in a stadium. “Busch Stadium II” was the Cardinals stadium of my youth. It was torn down after 2005, but it opened 60 years ago today, with a game that randomly did turn out well above the average, particularly in hindsight.

The Cardinals won 4-3 in 12 innings, Lou Brock singling home the winning run. The losing pitcher for the Braves was Phil Niekro, who was pitching in relief. Atlanta chose to put Charley Smith on and face Brock, giving up the platoon advantage in the process, but setting up a potential force play at home. There were no outs in the inning, so they were up a creek.

Brock was Brock then, 26 years old, with a World Series ring and stolen-base title to his credit, and a .306 career average with the Cardinals in 281 games.

As for Niekro, he wasn’t Niekro. He was two months older than Brock, but had only started one career game. He had relieved effectively for the Braves in 1965, and the next year would ease into the starting rotation and prosper, with a NL-best 179 ERA+ and a 1.87 E.R.A.

By the way, maybe it’s just me, but when I see a 12-inning game, I automatically assume this was a great game, or at least a game that would have to have a lot of sloppiness to ruin its intrinsic appeal. Yet we’ve decided we don’t like these games, that we don’t want extra-inning games. I absolutely do not get it.

No artificial turf at Busch Stadium on 5/12/66,. So not quite the Busch Stadium of my youth (I’m a 1975 baby).

5/12 N2: 23 walks and 17 hits for Rhys Hoskins. As I documented, for a hitter to have more walks than hits is a far-out thing, but Rhys had a 0.90 ratio in 2019 (he was second in baseball with 116 walks but hit only .226). In shorter seasons, he had a 0.84 ratio in 2017, and a 0.78 in 2020. You see that those were earlier Hoskins seasons, and this then is a reversion — from 2021 to 2025, his walks and OBP really dropped, and he had a 0.52 ratio.

5/12 N3: Guerrero Jr.’s May so far is 5 hits in 37 at-bats, all of the hits singles. I heard a prophesy of 40 or 50 home runs this year. He’d better get going.

5/12 N4: Nolan Ryan’s first major league start, if not his first-ever game, came on 9/18/1966. He was 19. He lasted just an inning, giving up 4 runs. The Mets put out a lineup of Bud Harrelson, Chuck Hiller, Ken Boyer, Al Luplow, Ed Kranepool, Cleon Jones, Larry Elliott and Jerry Grote. Boy, I thought, how terrible.

But the Mets were actually much better than they had been. You wouldn’t call 66-95 respectable, but the best the Mets had done previously was 53-109. As for offense, and that lineup, they were also not cellar dwellers, scoring more runs than the Cardinals.

The Cardinals? The team that had won the 1964 World Series, and would win it again the very next year, in 1967? Yes.

With ex-Met Al Jackson having a career year, Gibson top five in the league in E.R.A., WHIP, innings and strikeouts, and sub-2.00 E.R.A. relievers Joe Hoerner and Hal Woodeshick, overall the 1966 Cards themslves were respectable, 83-79 (and even 80-82 by Pythagorean). But I was interested in breaking down why they scored fewer runs than the Mets. At first, this seems exceedingly curious. While the Cardinals had very poor offensive showings in everything but the speed categories, their numbers were not as bad as the ones the Mets posted. The Cardinals hit for an average 12 points better than New York. They led the Mets by 10 home runs, 45 extra-base hits and 89 steals. With all of that stolen base advatage, they were only caught stealing 15 times more, and grounded into 13 fewer double plays.

One important point is that the Mets had a runners-in-scoring-position average of .250, 18 points better than the Cardinals. But an even bigger thing was probably the walk column. The Mets had 446 walks, placing them 5th in the 10-team NL; the Cardinals had just 345 walks. The Cardinals were only team in the NL with fewer than 400 walks

If you are a stat-crazy person, you recognize that 345 walks is a very low total. So low, in fact, that it was and remains the 162-game schedule all-time low.

On an individual basis, even though St. Louis had five players with 500+ plate appearances, and three more in the 400s in plate appearances, the team’s co-walk leaders were Dal Maxvill and Mike Shannon, who had 37. This placed Maxvill and Shannon in a tie for 44th in the NL.

If we go back to 1965, the Cardinals walked 477 times, 4 over the league average. Not surprisingly, the offense also functioned better, posting the third most runs scored in the league (although without the 1966-quality pitching, the team won just 84 games). So, what happened from 1965 to 1966?

The three biggest walkers on the 1965 Cardinals were Bill White (63), Ken Boyer (57) and Dick Groat (56). All were over 30 years old in 1965, and all were gone in 1966 (White and Groat in fact packaged in the same trade to Philadelphia).

In early May of ‘66, the Cardinals replaced White by acquiring Orlando Cepeda from the Giants, something that is hard to argue with. But with just 34 walks in 123 games for St. Louis, the Baby Bull continued his free-swinging ways.

Again, in relinquishing Boyer, the Cardinals made a fine trade, as they got Jackson. But the third baseman coming back was Charley Smith. He retired with a career walk rate under 5%.

Groat’s replacement, to complete the record, was Maxvill, promoted from within. Dal struggled to hit, if he did at all. But from a walks standpoint, the Cardinals could have done worse.

The odd aspect to the team downturn in walks in ‘66 was that team holdovers walked a lot less, too. The walk performance of 1965 of both Curt Flood (51) and Lou Brock (45) would have led the ‘66 Cardinals. But despite averaging 158 games in ‘66, both fell off a cliff in walks, Flood down to 26, and Brock to 31.

It would be trying to inject too much order into things to point to team culture, in my opinion, as tempting as the pattern might make that. But even theorizing that a managerial difference was the culprit doesn’t work, as Red Schoendienst managed both the 1965 and 1966 teams, the shock of Johnny Keane’s departure to the Yankees something that happened after the ‘64 championship season.

Hopefully your curiosity is now piqued about how things swung back up in 1967. With 101 wins, 97 by Pythagorean, the Cardinals were legitimately outstanding.

The walk deficit was no longer glaring. Walks around the NL were up 27 a team, but up 98 walks, the Cardinals did much better than that.

Their offensive improvement as a whole was more dramatic: only the Cubs, 7 runs ahead of the Cardinals, prevented them from leading the NL (and you have to think a swap of home ballparks would have reversed that). Unlike walks, runs were down (way down, by 40 a team), but the Cardinals still increased their run total by 124.

They only hit 6% more home runs than they’d hit in ‘66, but the runners-in-scoring-positon thing came back, and more. How’s this for an interaction effect? Their “bases empty” batting average in ‘67 was actually down a point, from .254 to .253. But with RISP, the Cardinals improved from .232 to .275.

I’m not a big fan of the idea that batting average alone is determinative, even with RISP, where its preeminence might make some sense. I just haven’t seen the evidence supporting that idea. But this case is interesting.

To address the improvement in walks specifically, the one thing the Cardinals did to improve things was they traded Smith for Roger Maris (straight up). Where Smith had walked 22 times in 423 plate appearances, Roger walked 52 in 472. Because the Cardinals 1965 right fielder, Shannon, stayed in the lineup in ‘66, moving to third base, this was really a direct replacement.

The only one other real factor of significance was improvement by Cepeda and McCarver, incidentally 1-2 in MVP (although, as Cepeda was unanimous, McCarver’s second-place finish is more or less trivia). In ‘66, they walked 62 and 54 times, also good for first and second on the team. Per plate appearance, the two players’ unintentional walk rates improved by 30% and 49%, respectively. Drawing 23 and 19 intentional walks, Cepeda and McCarver also added some padding to the team walk total — their intentional walk totals were a more moderate 10 apiece in ‘66.

I found with the ‘66 Giants, researching yesterday, that generalizing from team statistics to individual statistics can be dangerous, that assumptions might not hold. And we also see evidence of that here. For we see remarkably little change in the walk statistics of the five remaining regulars. It would be natural to guess that Flood and Brock returned to their 1965 levels, but they didn’t. In 1966, Maxvill, Flood, Brock, Shannon and Julian Javier walked 157 times in 2781 plate appearances. In 1967, their aggregate was 171 walks in 2900 plate appearances.

5/13 N1: On 4/26, I noted about a streak of days with very good batting averages. So much for that. Subsequently, the league average has been .236, bringing it down to .241 from its peak of .243. Additionally, home runs per at-bat over these past 17 days are 3.3% lower than the overall season average, and the walk percentage has been 9.1%, compared to 9.5% for the season as a whole. A definite pitching season is emerging (unfortunately).

5/13 N2: With Walbert Urena starting for the Angels in a 3-2 loss against the Guardians, neither the team’s walks (4) or total pitches (142 in 8 innings) reached a very high level, but their overall strike percentage (53.5) and first-strike percentage (38.7) were uncommonly bad. The discrepancy was really just there with Urena; Silseth and Pomeranz fell off the tightrope, walking 3 in their 2 innings.

5/13 N3: Nolan Schanuel has not gotten in on the 2026 walk party. Has a rate of just 6.4%, after a 2+ season career showing of 11.3% heading into this year. His plate discipline metrics don’t look bad, but his chase rate is up a bit, and it has technically risen every season of his career.

5/13 N4: Kyle Schwarber the MVP runner-up a year ago, and with his OPS up 40 points, he’s certainly been better this year.

5/13 N5: Louis Varland has a 0.44 E.R.A. He’s given up a few more walks than you would like and has given up two regular unearned runs and two in extra innings, but I guess I buy him as an elite reliever given his strikeout percentage (37.0) and GB/FB ratio (2.27).

5/13 N6: The Tigers have good clutch hitting statistics this season. Their slugging average with men on base is .433, versus .358 with the bases empty. Their RISP average is .266 vs. .243 overall. Yet they’ve quite clearly underachieved their overall .OPS (.716, which is 9th in MLB), scoring just 4.21 Runs/Game (18th in MLB). This is both a headscratcher and an indication of the limited extra importance hitting with men on and with men in scoring position really has.

With Greene and McGonigle among the league leaders, the Tigers lead MLB in doubles. However, they are just 23rd in MLB in home runs. They were 10th a year ago. They seem to have more power than their home run total this year reflects, and I think this is a team that can produce better offensively.

5/13 N7: With my long note of yesterday still fresh in mind, I notice that the Giants, with 87 walks in 42 games, are actually on pace to break the Cardinals 1966 162-game record of only 345 walks. This is nuts. First, in the 1966 NL, there were 2.72 walks a game. This year in MLB, there are 3.59. Then, the Giants have Rafael Devers, who drew 112 walks last year, and Willy Adames, who had 70+ every year from 2023-2025. They have Matt Chapman, who has a solid 10.8% walk rate for his career.

Leading the team with 16 walks in 172 plate appearances, Champan has not been part of the problem. But Devers has a 7.0 walk percentage, and Adames a 3.4.

No, I do not think the Giants can “keep it up.” But it has been a remarkable category performance to this point.

5/13 N8: Corey Seager’s awful start to 2026 has cost him 3.6 points off his career batting average. Whether he gets 502 plate appearances is a different matter, but he’s been .300+ in five of his 11 seasons.

5/13 N9: Josh Naylor is again on pace for 30 steals, which was exactly his combined Arizona/Seattle total a year ago. He may not be the 19-for-19 he was with Seattle in a third of a season in 2025, but opponents still haven’t solved his walking leads.

5/13 N10: This playing Cam Smith without a minor league indoctrination has the feel of an experiment. A failed experiment.

5/13 N11: I’m not going to say JJ Wetherholt is a finished product or that his rookie year has been an unqualified success at the plate, but he is on pace for over 30 home runs. That’s some pretty serious power for a middle infielder with a good glove.

5/13 N12: Last year, I staved off boredom by tracking Nick Kurtz’s slugging average versus the .600 standard. This year, Shea Langeliers is at a ridiculous .641.

But 400 total bases is a tall order. Leading the AL (with Yordan Alvarez) in TB, and as great as Langeliers has been, he’s just on pace for 387. Matt Olson, though, is on pace for clearing 400.

5/13 N13: Most of the Cubs regulars during the Durocher years were names who have a secure place in history, but center field was a position of agita. Durocher’s first year was ‘66, and the 59-103 Cubs had 24-year-old Adolfo Phillips to play center. Phillips had a big year in ‘67, not only with an eye-popping 29 intentional walks, but 6.0 bWAR. Unspectacular in ‘68, however, in June of ‘69, the Cubs basically gave him away, coupling him with pitcher Jack Lamabe for backup infielder Paul Popovich (apparently no relation to Gregg).

In Phillips’s stead was some Jimmy Qualls of Tom Seaver-foiled-perfect game fame, yes, but more often another kid, Don Young. Young didn’t even make it into the ‘70s as a major leaguer.

In 1970, it was apparently pure committee for the first four months (29-year-old rookie Cleo James, anyone?) before the Cubs gave the Astros cash for Joe Pepitone, who started 56 games over the final two months or so.

With Ernie Banks in a last and very limited season, Pepitone was more realistically placed at first base in ‘71, leaving James and Brock Davis (a 76 OPS+ in 344 PA) to man the center field fort.

Durocher was fired at the All-Star break of ‘72, and so was denied most of the peace and stability of the Rick Monday center field reign, one which lasted until late August ‘76, when he was moved to first base, the team taking a look at rookie Joe Wallis in center (with his final career -1.0 bWAR, they and everyone else ultimately said “no thanks”).

The Cubs leveraged Monday’s cachet after the season to obtain Ivan de Jesus and Bill Buckner, significant players, if not center fielders. The 1977 starter in center was Jerry Morales, and it would not be until Mel Hall in 1983 that the Cubs would even have a center fielder with as high as 1.0 bWAR again.

As the first-ever draft pick, Monday began with the Athletics, and they were the only team he knew before coming to the Cubs. In his Cubs tenure, he hit .270 with an .826 OPS, with an average of 21 HR, 88 runs, and 59 RBI.

That Runs/RBI ratio alerted me to the fact that, despite his power, and that that wasn’t the typical deployment of the slot, he was often the leadoff battter, on 298 occasions during this time. In his Cubs .893 OPS at home vs. .760 on the road, we can observe the Wrigley effect, which is one reason why his pre-1976 bWARs underwhelm (in ‘76, he had 32 home runs, tied for 3rd in baseball, and 4.4 bWAR).

5/14 N1: I read today that Giancarlo Stanton is not recovering from his calf injury as hoped. The whole thing with him and other players just seems a farce, year after year. We have to pretend they are regular members of the team and this won’t happen, but we know it will. Not drawing any equivalency in terms of morals, but these chronically injured are like those who serially cheat in relationships or have substance problems. First, because the off-again, on-again nature might be said to be illusory, as there is always an underlying problem. And second, because everyone around the person has nil trust that the problem is actually in the past.

If we throw out 2010, when Stanton came up in June, and the shortened 2020, he entered 2026 having played an average of 114.5 games. Throwing out those years leaves 15 seasons. Numbering them 1 through 15, and going with a linear relationship, the correlation between season and games played is -.34, which seems rather modest. But the slope is 3.1 fewer games with each season, and the projection for 2026 was rather aggressive, just 88 games. Only in 2015, 2019, and 2025 has Stanton not done better than that. So I think the correlation cefficient actually shows a pretty strong relationship. It’s no consolation, but Stanton’s chronic injury problem (of course) has gotten worse over time.

5/14 N2: On offense, the Guardians have had the platoon advantage 78.7% of the time. No other team is close. Arizona is 2nd at 68.3%, and their margin over the #10 team is less than the Guardians margin over them. The MLB average is the platoon advantage 57.5%. The Guardians are 2.54 standard deviations over the mean.

If you look at their Baseball Reference starting position-player box, there’s little wonder why. They have righty Rhys Hoskins, but then five lefties and three-switch hitters, and the switch-hitters and lefties will now be equal with Bailey coming in for Bo Naylor. A left-handed pitcher might rather like facing the Guardians from a platoon standpoint. But there are fewer left-handed pitchers than right.

5/14 N3: As if Cedric Mullins’ other statistics such as an MLB-worst -13 Batting Runs don’t pose enough of a problem, he now has 5 caught stealing, tying him with Caballero for the most in the major leagues. His all-around futility has been thwarted by a surprising +2 Defensive Runs Saved total in center field, though.

5/14 N4: Only five teams have a .250 or better average at this point. The number by season from 2022-2026:

2026 5

2025 12

2024 7

2023 15

2022 10

The lowest total in the “no pitcher batting” era stands out to me because it figures that extremes or at least atypical performances will fall off as the season goes on. So we could end up with an even lower than 5. And the trend in batting average in May has not been increasing, despite what one would expect given the weather. 1968 saw 3 of 20 teams with .250+ averages (but note that pitchers batted then).

In terms of the particular teams, it’s 2023 all over again. That year, the Braves’ .276 led MLB, with the runner-up team, the Rangers, at .263. This year, the Braves are hitting .272. It is the Dodgers in 2nd this time, again hitting .263.

5/14 N5: Second in MLB in runs, the Nationals have a 50-run edge on the Marlins, who are 16th. But offhand, I think I like the Marlins’ offensive talent better. Let’s check in at season’s end. The other take would be that the Marlins have been average even with Lopez, Edwards and Hicks overachieving.

5/14 N6: A pitcher getting pulled from the rotation, or in worse scenarios, sent down or released, is like a manager getting fired: there is a breaking point, and it is predictable. Watching him pitch against the Mets, he seemed relatively plausible to me, but I suspect Simeon Woods Richardson, and his now MLB-leading 41 runs allowed, will force the Twins to take action. If nothing else, at a certain point, it looks bad if you don’t. But maybe the Twins fans are too depressed about the team in general to boo him, I don’t know.

5/14 N7: The Miz! Has 80 strikeouts through the Brewers first 40 games. That puts him on pace in this season alone to exceed his career minor league total of 320, which corresponded to a rate of “only” 12.3-per-9, while this year he is at 14.1-per-9.

5/15 N1: There are three shortstops this year with 100 chances and a .990 or better fielding percentage. They all have outstanding Outs Above Average, too: Jacob Wilson (1.000, +5); Bobby Witt (.994, +11); Colson Montgomery (.993, +7). This is particularly hard to figure because the only errors that seem to get charged in today’s baseball are for bad throws and very easy flubbed chances. As we don’t walk around with this frame of reference in our heads, there are 25 shortstops in the 100+ chance category.

The two guys who have struggled some with errors at short this year are Otto Lopez (.949 fielding) and CJ Abrams (.953 fielding). With -7 OAA, Abrams furthers the trend, although Lopez (+1 OAA) does not.

5/15 N2: Konnor Griffin 10-for-10 in steals.

5/15 N3: Their 49 stolen base attempts are only moderately above the league average of 40, but the Rockies have been really aggressive trying to steal. A lack of opportunities belies how aggressive. They’ve attempted to run on a MLB-leading 3.3% of pitches from first base, with their leading instigators Brenton Doyle (8.1%, 8 for 10 stealing on the year) and Tyler Freeman (5.9%, 4 for 5 stealing on the year).

Jake McCarthy isn’t a qualifier but has an outrageous 18.6% attempts from opportunities. Annually one of baseball’s fastest players by sprint speed, he may now be exploring the possibilities on the bases. Whether this will prove to be a risk worth taking will depend on how successful he is; right now he stands 7 for 9. Curiously, last year he attempted just 6 steals in 67 games.

The heydey of his running was 2022 ansd 2023, when he played 99 games each year and averaged 25 steals with an 88% success rate. 2022 was before the baserunning rule changes, so his 23 steals stand up, and he was one of only 24 major leaguers with 20 steals. With that excellent basestealing percentage, Baseball Savant had him the 6th-most valuable thief in baseball. If he had been playing every day, his numbers would have been that much better.

5/15 N4: As last year they were tied for 3rd in MLB in steals, I think of the Cubs as running. This year, their 86% success rate is excellent, but their 31 steals just on the league average. If you look at the activity per opportunity from first, though, they fall much farther still: their 1.4% has them ahead of only the Blue Jays. Like the Blue Jays, the teams right behind the Cubs in running percentage from first, the Astros and Giants, do figure from their total attempts.

Don’t let this stat give you the wrong idea about PCA, though, whose 9.0% try rate from first is 7th in all of baseball. The overall ranking must instead reflect the 100+ opportunities and no attempts of Alex Bregman, Carson Kelly and Seiya Suzuki. And Michael Busch, Ian Happ and Dansby Swanson have just one attempt each.

From this group, only Swanson, who had 39 steals over 2024-2025, is really surprising. Swanson also is officially credited with 3 steals this year, including 2 of second. So I don’t know what’s behind the discrepancy (but for my money, I’ll go with Baseball Savant’s numbers).

5/15 N5: Aaron Judge seemed to be giving some signs in the box scores of wanting to join the Soto/Josh Naylor/Sal Stewart movement of savvy base stealers, but he just hasn’t had the opportuniies this year. Despite being on pace for 107 unintentional walks, the 83 pitches where he could have stolen second place him in a tie for 194th this year. His 7.2% attempts from opportunities, then, rank him 12th in all of baseball. Over 2023-2025, among players with at least 1000 chances to steal second, only Elly De La Cruz (a huge 9.4%) had a percentage higher than that.

These limited chances of Judge’s appear an anomaly; last year, he had the 26th most chances to steal second. I would guess the number is not just about how many times you get on first, but about how many outs there are when you do, and how many pitches the batters behind you see….

By the way, Judge also shows a Dansby Swanson-like discrepancy between the attempted steals of second Baseball Reference and Baseball Savant have for him. I’m guessing Baseball Savant doesn’t count cases of runners on first and second as an opportunity, although of course steals of second on the back end of a double steal can come from them.

5/15 N6: A guy who’s been exceptionally quiet this year is Sal Frelick. He’s started 35 of the Brewers 41 games but doesn’t have a 3-hit game or 3-RBI game. He doesn’t have a game with more than 5 total bases. He has just 2 doubles on the year and 1 steal. He has a .621 OPS. So he’s not at all in the Ke’Bryan Hayes or Josh Lowe category, but he’s been quiet.

5/15 N7: The 92nd percentile in k rate but 15th percentile in walk rate, Jung Hoo Lee has some Arraez in him. OK, that’s stretching it, but that’s the profile. This is more or less in line with what Lee did in Korea — had an excellent k/bb ratio (0.79) but only 9.7% walks, despite being a dominant player.

5/15 N8: Schwarber’s 2.70 total bases-per-hit this year would be a single season record, topping Bonds 2001 (2.63) and Joey Gallo 2017 (2.56). Bonds 2001 is the strongest possible endorsement, but actually this is a stat that really slants towards low-average guys. What matters is your total bases-per-at bat (your slugging average), not your total bases-per-hit.

5/15 N9: No runs allowed for Ranger Suarez in five of his last six starts, if with an average of less than 6 1/3 innings a start (hence the controversy).

5/15 N10: Shades of Lucas Giolito, 2018 to 2019, in this Ben Brown turnaround. Brown has been vastly helped by long relief work but has a 236 ERA+ in 33.2 innings this year after being baseball’s 3rd-worst pitcher by bWAR (-1.6) last year.

Brown actually had a better SO/BB ratio last year. Go figure (but there is nothing wrong with his 3.40 this year).

For the record, Giolito went from a 6.13 E.R.A in 2018 in 32 starts to the All-Star game and a 3.41 in 29 starts in 2019.

5/16 N1: The New York Post reports that the former major league pitcher Buzz Capra died on May 11. I will therefore paste a note of mine from last July 7 that ended up as a dissection of some of his statistics. Such posts do seem trivial in the wake of someone’s death. I am sure the compulsion to repost them more serves my ego than makes any real contribution to the memory of Buzz Capra, but hopefully no harm is done.

“Some interesting facts from the 1974 game in which Aaron broke Ruth’s record:

The Dodgers committed 6 errors in the Braves’ 7-4 victory, five players (catcher Joe Ferguson, second baseman Davey Lopes, shortstop Bill Russell, third baseman Ron Cey, left fielder Bill Buckner) getting in on the act.

Buzz Capra closed out the game for the Braves. Capra wasn’t a strikeout pitcher (5.68 ks-per-9 on the season, vs. the 5.13 NL average), but racked up 6 in this game over 3-hitless innings. The save would be his lone one of the season, but the spring training purchase from the Mets, who entered the Aaron game with a career 5-11 mark, 4.54 E.R.A., and 61 walks in 111 innings, would be converted to a starter on May 15, and go on to lead the league in E.R.A., throwing 217 innings. From the time he was put in the rotation through June 28, Capra posted a 0.96 E.R.A. in 84.2 innings.

For an Atlanta pitcher to lead the league in E.R.A. seems super impressive, but Capra’s E.R.A. advantage on the road was moderate (2.14 vs. 2.41). However, what was possible is indicated by the 31% better strikeout rate he had at home, too. So It probably just happened that he brought his ‘A’ game more at home, and that masked how much the ballpark hurt him.

Capra allowed a .466 OPS versus righties that year, a .719 versus lefties. Righties’ slash against him was .158/.215/.251. He also struck out righties at over twice the rate, per batter.”

5/16 N2: The 76 strikes the Pirates’ Braxton Ashcraft recorded from 100 pitches Friday tied him with a May 8 Chris Sale start for the second-most strikes in a game this year. Parker Messick has them beat with 78 strikes from his no-hit bid on April 16. You wouldn’t think good Pirates pitching went with this game in any way, shape, or form — total runs allowed were padded with an extra inning, but the game was already tied 8-8 at that point. And Ashcraft himself gave up 4 runs, including runs in three different innings. He gave up 7 hits in all.

But this might not represent a disconnect, because I’ve seen games where pitchers had a high strike percentage, but the explanation was that balls were coming back as fast as they came in, often not making it to the catcher’s glove. In Ashcraft’s case, though, he did record 5 strikeouts, suggesting this paradigm doesn’t totally fit.

To check the atypicality (or not) of Ashcraft’s line, I went back to 2020 and compiled all starts of 73-79 strikes and exactly 5 strikeouts. How did the pitchers perform?

Two no-hitters, by Alec Mills and Michael Lorenzen, were among the 45 games. But for parameters rather gamed to finding successful starts, the composite E.R.A. of 2.85 was underwhelming.

The positive was that the walk rate of the pitchers was outstanding. They only allowed 47 walks in 309 innings, or 1.4-per-9 innings. For just striking out 5 each, their hit rate of 7.7-per-9 registers as solid.

The average was for 6.87 innings and 106 pitches. Wondering how much of this above-average E.R.A. could just be traced to lasting that far into a start, I took all starts of 105-107 pitches from 2020-2026 (strikeout total could be what it was) . 105-107 pitches is a much more common thing than 73-79 pitches and 5 strikeouts, forming a dataset of 732 games.

The composite E.R.A. from them was 2.78. So it was basically the same as for the games with the high number of strikes. The strikeout rate did predictably come to a higher number, 9.7-per-9.

With a 3.09 E.R.A., Ashcraft has been very good this year, and probably even better when you go under the hood. He’s been throwing strikes all season. His 67.9 percent places him 5th in MLB among those on pace for 502 plate appearances-against. And, since he is tied for 6th in innings in MLB, the Pirates have hardly been hiding him. But just how well he’s pitched is underscored by the fact that, throwing a very high percentage of strikes and a good number of innings, he is only tied for 31st in total strikes. So what this means is that he’s not throwing that many pitches, total, and is throwing even comparatively fewer pitches per inning.

Further supporting this, his 3.58 pitches-per-batter faced rank him 9th in efficiency of 131 pitches. Couple that with a WHIP of 1.048 vs. the MLB 1.310, you get an even more impressive statistic of 14.2 pitches-per-inning (unfortunately, Pit/IP has to be hand calculated in Baseball Reference and isn’t an official category. So I can’t tell you offhand just where Ashcraft ranks).

5/16 N3: Riley Greene hasn’t hit a home run this month, but he’s 21 for 48 (.438).

5/16 N4: Like Riley Greene, Daylen Lile has been hot, but who cares about that? His “0” in the triples column is what really matters, and has me deeply depressed. Based on his rate of 1 triple for every 3.2 extra-base hits last year, he should have 6 and be ahead of Corbin Carroll.

5/16 N5: Gunnar Henderson’s .256 OBP is certainly ugly. That is partly because it was unexpected: Henderson came into the season with a good .347 mark for his career, as well as a .270 batting average. Hitting .202 with a walk rate of 6% instead of his previous 10%, he’s rather given up ground on both counts. But considering we’re early in the season, and relative to some other players, he seems more “off” than alarming.

On the other hand, he’s reached base in just 52 of his 203 plate appearances. That means that, to get to each even a .300 on-base percentage, he needs to reach base his next 13 times up. People like Ted Williams (16 straight) have done that, yes, but it’s going to take Gunnar time to dig out of his hole, if he does. I suppose one has to take the long-term view, like with the Mets. While they theoretically could make the playoffs, they are very unlikely to be in playoff position at the All-Star break.

5/16 N6: Dramatic turnaround for Chandler Simpson in the field. His 6 Outs Above Average rank him only behind Pete Crow-Armstrong among outfielders. And (I believe unlike Defensive Runs Saved) Outs Above Average is absolute for outfielders (not relative to left, center, or right), meaning that Simpson is competing against center fielders on a level playing field. Before you get to Cody Bellinger and his 2 OAA, there are 11 center fielders and 4 right fielders on the list.

5/16 N7: Luis Arraez went 4 for 5 yesterday with a double and a home run, giving him 8 total bases. Playing for the Marlins, he had a cycle on 4/11/23 (the year he hit .354), and that is the only time he had 10 total bases in a game. Besides yesterday, he’s had 8 total bases in a game four times.

He has 44 career games of 5 total bases or more. Even by his own career standard of 6.5%, his 6 walks in his 215 plate appearances in them makes for a low percentage. I wasn’t sure whether it would be constructive to give his strikeouts, as I assumed he had basically batted perfect in these games, but in fact he has had 71 unsuccessful at-bats and “only” a .659 average. He’s only struck out for 3 of the outs. For his career, 9.5% of Arraez’s outs have been strikeouts.