Notes and Essays, Week Ending 6/20

6/14 N1: Most regular baseball fans and those in the industry of at least average intelligence realize and accept, at least when they take a step back, that all baserunners for the trailing team in the 9th inning are created equal so long as those baserunners are not the tying run. In other words, if a member of the team in these situations doubles leading off the 9th inning instead of homering, his team’s win probability is not one bit lower on account. But few people act and react consistently with this view.

This is unfathomable to me, unfathomable to my core philosophy of life, and it is frankly offensive to me when announcers get more excited about home runs in these situations than doubles. I still hope, however, that they privately “get it,” and are just reacting as they are from an entertainment perspective and not a win probability perspective, even though a close parsing of what they say and how they say it does not give much hope on this score. Plausible deniability generally remains, though.

But then sometimes these people who take liberties give themselves away. The case with Juan Soto and the Mets on Sunday was exactly the double versus home run question we’re considering here. It was the 9th inning, the Mets were trailing 3-1, and Soto led off. He either homered or doubled, with the ball around the homer line, and a fan reaching over the fence to boot. The hit was initially called a home run, then overturned, with Soto being put on second base.

Here’s a whole ballgame to describe, and yet the Post’s story for the game is this decision….this meaningless decision.

“Upon Further Review: Soto homer in 9th inning overturned, killing potential rally in loss to Braves.”

Repeating, the umpire decision had no impact on the rally. Once Soto made second base, whether the Mets won or lost would be entirely dependent on what the players behind him did or didn’t do. It wouldn’t matter whether Soto had scored early in the inning or not, because he was guaranteed to score later if the key run behind him scored. And if that run doesn’t score, the Mets lose, regardless of whether Soto does.

Idealist that I am, I think everybody involved with this story should be fired. There is nothing that reveals how one is understandings things on a fundamental level more clearly than this case. The logic is irrefutable. Unfortunately for most people, logic is optional. It is something they feel they can abide by when it suits them.

On the specifics of the case, yes, technically, because of the risk of a “ground into double play” when the batter just reaches first, a stronger hit is worth more than reaching first for batters whose run only pulls the team to a smaller final deficit in the 9th and not to a tie or win. So my opening statement of the case was a simplification. A sorely needed simplification, but a simplification nonetheless. The GIDP risk only affects the probabilities slightly, though, and can usually be quickly resolved with a steal that the defense usually takes few pains to prevent, rightly recognizing the priorities as it does in that situation. But for a double compared to a home run, or any BB/1B/HBP with 2 outs versus any other baserunner for a team trailing in the 9th that doesn’t have the tying run up, there are none but the tiniest differences in probability impact for the respective outcomes.

But as I said, where people come up short with this isn’t mostly in their analysis, intuitive or formal. It’s in the issue of whether they live their beliefs. Commentators and writers aren’t involved in the action on the field, but what they say and write still creates a picture of reality for the public that the public tends to buy.

It is the responsibility of all citizens to support reality. When they don’t, we get who is in the White House, and we get the damage from that. That is the bottom line, whether it is comfortable to face or not, and whether it is politic to state it or not. The voting booth is just the apotheosis of the decision crucible we face everyday in small areas like baseball reasoning. Are we conscientious, or aren’t we? To be conscientious is to be faithful to reason.

6/14 N2: On May 20, I noted that the Brewers had been much better in runs-per-game (5th) than OPS (16th). It’s hard to tell where that balance has been lately, because they’ve been off the charts in both. In June, they’ve scored 8.17 R/G and have a .920 OPS, both tops in the majors. The Cardinals are second in June R/G, almost a full 2 runs behind at 6.17.

6/14 N3: On the grounds that he hadn’t hit enough this year or a low enough number in previous years (3.2 per 575 AB), I’ve been trying to resist mentioning this Luis Arraez triple phenomenon, but he refuses to cooperate and just keeps hitting them. He’s alone in second place in MLB and has 6. Corbin Carroll and his 8 may not be in Arraez’s tracks but aren’t out of sight. Arraez isn’t fast (26.7 ft/sec sprint speed) and surely hasn’t gotten any faster. His 14 doubles also are only a solid number.

6/15 N1: I sure don’t think Boston thought they were getting a .255 OBP with Caleb Durbin, third-worst among qualifiers in MLB. You thought you would at least be ok on the OBP part. For one thing, his 24 HBP last year would have seemed to give him a good base. He has only 4 this year.

6/15 N2: I believe I wrote in the offseason that the Athletics, with their .550 OPS, were worse at second base offensively last year than any team at any position. In Jeff McNeil, I therefore thought they were shoring it up, if somewhat by default. At the close of May 3, McNeil was hitting .314 with an .801 OPS. But his slugging average from May 1 on now reads a Nasim Nunezesque .235. He has a .604 OPS overall. And that’s before we even think about the ballpark.

As it happens, he hasn’t taken advantage of it all, with a .608 OPS at Sutter Health. I guess that’s good news, means there’s an opportunity that hasn’t been exploited. He has no home runs at home and a .235 BAbip. The one place where he’s done a lot better at home is strikeouts, oddly — a 7.8% SO rate at home, a 18.9% on the road.

6/15 N3: Given his numbers (.829 OPS; .267/.398/.431; 12th-most PA in baseball) that Ivan Herrera has the 10th-most Batting Runs in baseball is a surprise to me. The Cardinals’ park factor is under 100, so those numbers improve a touch with adjustment. But he is principally an example that Rbat+ (146 for him) likes OBP compared to SLG more than OPS+ does (Herrera has a 137 OPS+).

It isn’t one of these cases like, with height and arm length, a straight comparison of the really tall guys doesn’t work, and that most players show the same kind of bias Herrera does — the top 20 Rbat+ players this year have an average Rbat+ of 157.4, an average OPS+ of 157.8 And if we take the seven qualifiers besides Herrera with an OPS+ in the 135-139 range, Randy Arozarena has an Rbat+ 6 points better than his OPS+, but five of the other six have higher OPS+es than RBat+s.

I also wondered if the difference with Herrera might be a reflection of his high hit-by-pitch total, which is 16, tops in MLB. It is true that a HBP rightly counts for more than a walk in Runs Created +, because of the different correspodences between frequency and baserunner situations (walks tend to happen when the pitcher minds them less and they are less damaging, but that is not the cases with HBP

Sam Antonacci, who has only batted about two-thirds as often as Herrera has but has only 1 fewer HBP, has a wild 130-113 pairing in his Rbat+ and his OPS+. But Antonacci’s OBP is .379, compared to a .381 SLG. And that is a good formula for a good relative Rbat+.

Willson Contreras is 3rd in MLB in HBP, with 13. But befitting the high SLG guy that he’s been, his OPS+ is 4 points better than his SLG.

The Antonacci case certainly gives you pause, but looking at the other HBP leaders, it is very hard to sensibly eyeball measure the HBP effect. And that probably tells you something right there, that it’s less important and somewhat overrun by the general OBP/SLG ratio effect. Some high HBP guys are higher in Rbat+, and some are higher in OPS+.

Noting the RBat+/OPS+ difference with Arozarena (a high HBP and a high OBP/SLG guy), I also thought about team effects. I thought about if the two measures might do their park effects differently, and if we’d see that everyone on Seattle was better in Rbat+.

I didn’t find that at all, but I did find a couple of Seattle players with huge differences favoring Rbat+.

(1) Mitch Garver. .327 OBP, ,322 SLG, 108 Rbat+, 87 OPS+, 107 PA, 0 HBP.

(2) Connor Joe. .308 OBP, .333 SLG, 102 Rbat+, 84 OPS+, 39 PA, 0 HBP

I learned later those kinds of RBat+/OPS+differences are not typical with that kind of OBP/SLG ratio.

Look at Taylor Ward: a .404 OBP and a .352 SLG, but an Rbat+ only 6 points better than his OPS+. If a simple difference between OBP and SLG drove the difference in the indices, he should have a greater disparity than Garver and Joe, but his difference isn’t even in the same ballpark.

Here’s another one. Nasim Nunez’s OBP is .286, his SLG .226. His Rbat+ is 50, his OPS+ 48.

This seems to leave open the idea that somehow Garver and Joe’s OPS in the low .600s peculiarly translates into a huge edge for Rbat+. Or that maybe the ho-hum comparison in the case of Nunez reflects an additional aspect of Rbat+ giving much harsher ratings to the very worst hitters.

The first point of the magic low .600s OPS range seems refuted by Jakob Marsee, whose .330 OBP and .300 SLG gives him an Rbat+ edge of just 7.

On the second point, unlike on the top end, low Rbat+es might run a little more extreme than OPS+es, I found. Taking an average of the bottom 10 OPS+ qualifiers and the bottom 10 Rbat+ qualifiers, I got an average edge for OPS+ of 3.4 points for these hitters. But this isn’t on the scale of the difference we see between Nunez and Garver/Joe.

The low slugging averages for Garver and Joe are largely due to their low batting averages. And Manny Machado, whose one decent category this year has been home runs and is hitting .175, has a better Rbat+ than OPS+, which doesn’t seem to follow from his OBP/SLG data. But if low batting average is de facto weighted less in Rbat+ than OPS+, than there should be no difference between Marsee and Garver in Rbat+/OPS+ disparity: they have similar SLGs, and both are hitting exactly .200. And we know Marsee’s Rbat+/OPS+ split is completely consistent with his OBP and SLG numbers, while Garver’s is of a different order.

So it seems like the one stone I haven’t turned over here is that somehow a low sample of plate appearances can mean a very different Rbat index than summary statistics would indicate. Maybe Rbat+ is very sensitive to the opponent and pitcher, but that evens out with enough playing time? Could Rbat+ be a lot lower than OPS+ when sample size is lower then, as opposed to just a generic difference favoring Rbat+?

Anyway, thoughts to keep in mind as looking at more players.

I made a more thorough investigation of the Seattle idea that there could be systematic differences between players on different teams (again with the thought that if they existed, this probably implicated different bases for park adjustment). Rbat+ on a team basis is tricky to track down, but the one place where you can find it as at the bottom of each team’s “Standard Batting” table.

The Cubs, who have come to play in a real pitcher’s park, do have a 111 Rbat+ this year, a 107 OPS+. But 7th in OBP and 17th in SLG, we would probably expect that kind of difference with them, outside of anything else. Starting with Arizona, of the other 11 teams of the first 12 alphabetically, seven show the exact same on the two numbers, and four are different by one point. That’s the important finding, and park factors therefore seem to be handled the same way.

6/15 N4: I see a lot of mediocre and flawed teams this year, but outside of the Rockies and Angels, I’m not sure who the bad teams are, if there are any. This is good, no? We are still experiencing PTSD from the ~120-loss seasons of the White Sox and Rockies, after all.

The Twins were supposed to be bad. Adding to the sense that it is just a matter of time before this reality takes hold, since May 15, they have third-worst run differential in MLB, with only the Athletics and Rockies behind them. But month by month, mediocrity is certainly a better description, as they haven’t been more than 2 games under in any month. They have Buxton and Ryan. Jeffers will be back. And Brooks Lee and Connor Prielipp have their points.

6/15 N5: The National League has lots of good second baseman, but the deserving All-Star starter in the American League is a head scratcher. Ernie Clement? Chase Meidroth? Oswald Peraza? Cole Young? Barring a Bonds-like power surge, Jazz Chisholm isn’t going to do his 50-50, but he does lead AL second basemen in both homers and steals.

6/15 N6: The Buck Truck reaches a .600 SLG.

6/15 N7: There is absolutely no one like Michael McGreevy from the standpoint of being a nibbler. He’s 20th of 66 in walks per inning, but 59th in strike percentage. He obviously pitches this way on purpose, only coming in to you when he has to. In no start this year has he reached two-thirds strikes.

Not sure what to make of the following numbers without analysis, but giving us a fuller picture, he throws 43% fastballs, with another 11% of his pitches cutters.

6/16 N1: They tell us it’s a 24/7 news world now, but sometimes players go very quiet. Not so with Pete Crow-Armstrong. It’s been dizzying trying to keep up with him! Keeps pouring it on!

6/16 N2: Shota Imanaga now has gone two starts that have spanned 10 2/3 innings without giving up a home run. This has coincided with a change in his pitch mix. He has had almost a 3:1 ratio of four-seamers to splitters in these last two games, when he entered them with just a 1.17:1 four-seam/splitter ratio on the season. My hunch is then that he and the Cubs decided the splitters were largely implicated in the home run problem (a high fastball such as he throws is notoriously home run vulnerable, but then, so is a splitter, so this isn’t quite counterintuitive).

We can’t get overexcited because the clean result was repeated against the same team, and that the Rockies. But I wouldn’t think the different pitch mix itself had much to do with the Rockies. Pitchers feature entirely different repertoires versus right and left (for instance, Imanaga throws 36% sweepers to lefties, 5% to righties). But left-handed pitchers like Imanaga rarely face many lefties, regardless of team, so I doubt the explanation is that the Rockies featured lefty-heavy lineups. Imanaga used his sweeper overall in these games 13%, a very typical percentage for hom.

Imanaga’s overall home run data this season doesn’t lead to any obvious diagnoses, with 6 home runs allowed a piece on both the splitter and four-seamer. Perhaps we should home in on the outings that preceded the last two, though, because that is when the home runs against him got out of control. He was limiting teams to one or no home runs a start until mid-May.

6/16 N3: Some teams are as much as 5 games behind other teams in games played right now. 74 games: Twins and Astros. 69 games: Rays, Red Sox and Brewers.

6/16 N4: Ranking 23rd in BB/9 as they do, the 2026 Twins are traitors to their history. Their record as a remarkable control staff dates back a long time. However, if you just look at their starters, they are 9th in BB/9 (2.96). It is their 28th-ranked bullpen (4.80 BB/9) that is disappointing.

With no walks and 71% strikes before he was taken out in the 5th inning, Monday’s rookie starter Mike Paredes inspires hope. Paredes’ minor league history is rather consistent with this. He has a career 87 walks in 372.1 innings, or 2.10-per-9. Ironically, though, Paredes is fringe enough that a lot of that time was spent relieving. He had an 11-0 record in the Texas League last year, with the strong whiff of vulture wins that follow someone with a long reliever/bulk pitcher profile. Paredes has mediocre fastball velocity (93) and a mediocre minor league strikeout rate (8.07-per-9).

6/16 N5: So far, from my stat-loving perspective, I would say this has been somewhat of an underwhelming baseball season. There is always plenty to get excited about, but relatively, I would say this year is a little light. At least we have Misiorowski; he is doing his best single-handedly to make it a fun season.

A second story could be Yordan Alvarez and a triple crown push. He is hitting .328, with Yandy Diaz (.314) the only other American Leaguer over .310. Yordan only has one previous top 5 in AL home runs (3rd in 2022), but his 24 lead the AL this year, and wihen the main threat to you is that Byron Buxton might stay healthy all year, I’d say you’re looking pretty good.

With 57 RBI to Alvarez’s 54, Nick Kurtz is spoiling things right now . Kurtz isn’t ahead because Alvarez isn’t optimally placed for RBI as a #2 hitter in the lineup, although that’s true. When Kurtz isn’t hitting 2nd himself, he’s often hitting leadoff. But Kurtz has a .429 average with RISP, and a .703 SLG with men on base. For the season’s duration, I think he walks too much to be a likely RBI leader. He’s in range with 18 home runs, and I think he actually poses more of a threat to Alvarez there.

6/16 N6: Update on total bases allowed on first pitches this year:

(1) Nathan Eovaldi 41

(2) Aaron Civale 38

(2) Seth Lugo 38

(2) Ryne Nelson 38

(5) Nick Martinez 37

6/16 N7: I clearly did not appreciate Warren Spahn, did not let his record sink in. He led the NL in wins 8 times in 13 years from age 28 to 40. It seems almost impossible. But age 26 is his best bWAR season (9.5), so better than any in his period of leading in wins, and he went 23-7 with a 2.60 E.R.A. at age 42. He led the NL in complete games seven straight times, from ages 36 to 42.

6/17 N1: After my railing for quite some time about Nasim Nunez’s lack of extra-base hits, he went 2 for 2 with 2 triples and 2 walks on Tuesday. I’m guessing he rates no higher than the 0.5 percentile lifetime for his 6 doubles in 346 AB. He’s posted some odd extra-base hit configurations, somehow producing 4 home runs in 39 games last year, and now with 0 in 68 this year. Tuesday was a continuation of the theme. It’s not entirely a coincidence Nunez is doing this, as with his speed, he is always a candidate to turn a double into a triple.

With those two triples, he got over the 4 total bases that would come with a home run. What are the highest-ever total base games without a home run, I wondered (in 9 innings)?

I love these constellations. There have been three 12 total base games without a home run.

Ginger Beaumont 8/9/1999 (1 1B, 1 2B, 3 3B, 1 out made)

Turkey Mike Donlin 6/24/1901 (2 1B, 2 2B, 2 3B, 0 outs made)

Lance Johnson 9/23/1995 (3 1B, 3 3B, 0 outs made)

Beaumont was a hell of a hitter. I did a post kind of about him, “A Ginger Beaumont Diagram.” That revolved around a 1903 contest in which 31-game winner Iron Joe McGinnity started and Beaumont had a single, a triple, and 2 home runs. But I painstakingly note in my post that Beaumont was actually deficient in triples. He hit lots of singles, and he hit home runs for his era. So I guess he picked his spots.

Beaumont’s Pirates lost this game, 14-13. Jesse Tannehill, quite a good pitcher, was made to go all the way, giving up 22 hits, and the Phillies walked it off against him in the 9th at Baker Bowl.

The Phillies were 3rd in the standings at the end of the year, but 36 games over .500, and had 2-3-4 hitters in this game of Roy Thomas, Ed Delahanty and Elmer Flick. Delahanty and Flick are in the Hall of Fame, and Thomas certainly could be.

Losing when a player has a game like Beaumont’s is exceeding rare. As you can see, it took allowing 14 runs to do it. There have been 45 games in which a player had 10 total bases in 9 innings and didn’t hit a home run. The record in such games, including Beaumont’s, is 43-2 (Lefty O’Doul 6/27/30 is the other loss). What I think makes the games so particularly strong is that, by definition, you must excel in number of hits, not just strength of hits. Even if you hit 3 triples, that just gets you to 9 total bases. The more hits you can make to get you to the same number of total bases in a constant number of at-bats, the better a game it is.

6/17 N2: Luke Weaver now with a 19-inning scoreless streak.

6/17 N3: The 2024 version of the Brewers’ Robert Gasser got 15% whiffs on his four-seamer over 28 innings. The 2026 Gasser is getting 40% whiffs on it, 24 innings in. Not all that many swings are involved, I’m sure, but it’s enough of a difference, there’s probably something to it. For his career in the minors, he’s been a decent strikeout guy —11.1-per-9.

6/17 N4: Nico Hoerner’s consistency over his career has been such that his current .233 average disorients me. I suppose there is the consolation that his walk rate is easily the best of his career. And he has also never had more walks than strikeouts before. Since May, he’s hitting .188 with no home runs and a .231 SLG.

6/17 N5: There are eight active big leaguers with 2 total bases per hit for their careers and 1500 at-bats.

(1) Kyle Schwarber 2.173

(2) Cal Raleigh 2.130

(3) Aaron Judge 2.099

(4) Max Muncy 2.061

(5) Gary Sanchez 2.056

(6) Shohei Ohtani 2.053

(7) Giancarlo Stanton 2.041

(8) Pete Alonso 2.030

You can approximate this by dividing slugging average by batting average, since the averages represent Total Bases and Hits, respectively, and both are on an at-bat basis.

Among qualifiers, this year the leaders are Munetaka Murakami (2.333), Schwarber (2.303) and Byron Buxton (2.183).

6/17 N6: Just an hour and 52 minutes to play Rays-Dodgers last night. 109 pitches for Rasmussen and the Rays, 100 for Wrobleski and the Dodgers. Junior Caminero with the only walk, but Ohtani with the at-bat that mattered, a 6th-inning home run.

6/19 N1: The parallel in the shocking Guerrero Jr. and Tatis Jr. power outages extends to their both having their best home run year in 2021, when they led their respective leagues. They are also within three months of each other age-wise, apparently not moved to power success by the history of age 27 as being perhaps the peak within a player’s peak.

6/19 N2: Another example of the offensive craziness of 2019. Mariner catchers combined for a .282 average and 40 home runs. All but 22 of those plate appearances went to the left-right combo of Omar Narvaez and Tom Murphy. The Mariners were 9th in the AL in runs, 10th in wins, and lost 94 games. Both Narvaez and Murphy hit just 31 career home runs outside of 2019.

6/19 N3: I rationalize that the Guardians stick with Rhys Hoskins and his .178 average at first because they don’t have anyone else. On a hunch I went to check how long it had been since they had a .800 team OPS at first, but they did that in 2023, thanks to the .904 OPS Josh Naylor put up there in 89 games. From 2007-2026 (last 20 years), the Guardians have a .760 overall OPS at first, which rates them 23rd in MLB.

The longest current sub-.800 OPS streak at first, which goes back to 2015 (the first exception), belongs to the Orioles. They are currently at .735, so Alonso hasn’t changed this yet. He certainly figures to; the Mets were sub .800 every year from 2012-2018, then with Alonso, +.800 every year except 2024.

Chris Davis’s 2013 was actually his real great year, but he led the AL in home runs in 2015 as well, and he was the key to the Orioles’ .851 first base OPS that year. Davis also played 52 games in 2013 at right field or designated hitter. Steve Pearce was solid filling in (.775 OPS, 101 PA); Chris Parmelee was not (.458 OPS, 71 PA).

From 2007-2026, Baltimore is 28th in MLB in first base OPS.

But for one stray season, the Mariners, Padres, Twins and Marlins would all have streaks quite a bit longer than Baltimore’s, and all of these teams are also under .800 in first base OPS in 2026. The Mariners overall .727 first base OPS is the worst of the 2007-2026 period.

The only time in the 2010-2025 window the team wasn’t under .800 in OPS was in 2019. A .235 average made things difficult, but 44 home runs got them past .800 and to .824. Edwin Encarnacion and Daniel Vogelbach combined for only 6 first base doubles, but hit 29 home runs. Austin Nola got the other third of the action, and with a .290/.370/.494 slash, gave more of an all-around performance.

The Twins and Padres can be placed together. Both had an excellent first baseman at the beginning of the period (Justin Morneau for the Twins, Adrian Gonzalez for the Padres), and both have not come close to replacing him, explaining the streak.

Morneau was AL MVP in 2006 and remained in the .OPS .800+ level over 2007-2009. After a monster first half in 2010, he went down with concussion, but with the start he had gotten off to, the .800+ number was in the bank. The next year, Morneau played poorly when he was able to at all, but Michael Cuddyer saved him, and the team finished at .809. Morneau stayed with the Twins through August 2013, but not as the same player he had been prior to 2011. Minnesota first basmen had a .751 OPS in 2012, a .721 in 2013.

The team only bucked their new first base trend in 2017, and then just barely, with an .802 OPS. Joe Mauer had the best of his five seasons as a Twins first basemen, but he unfortunately clearly contributes to the dismal post-Morneau record rather than belying it, this a very different Joe Mauer than the one whose catching and hitting got him elected to Cooperstown.

Gonzalez was not only even better than Morneau, but a lot less complicated, too, playing all but 12 of the Padres games at first from 2007-2010. Petco or no Petco, the Padres OPS at first was at least .850 every year in the period, including .942 in 2009.

After 2010, Gonzalez was traded to the Red Sox (that Anthony Rizzo came back only leading to “what might have been” ruminations, since Rizzo was traded for Andrew Cashner before he could properly show his stuff with the Padres), and the Padres only .800+ OPS season since came in 2020. Getting about half the acton at first, Eric Hosmer improbably put up the best slugging average (.517) of his career that year.

Granted the 2007 cutoff is arbitrary, but underperformance at first has been endemic to the Marlins. They have only seven players who have 500 plate appearances at the position since that time, with a high of only 1631, courtesy of Justin Bour. The other six players are Gaby Sanchez, Jorge Cantu, Mike Jacobs, Garrett Cooper, Jesus Aguilar and Garrett Jones (two Garretts?)

The Marlins’ run of sub-.800 futility, in every season except 2017, dates back to 2010. Cantu and Jacobs own first base OPSes of better than .800 since 2007, but neither has played an inning for the Marlins at first since 2010. Bour explains the .839 OPS in 2017 — he was quite good.

As it happens, not only does Seattle have a lower OPS than Miami from 2007-2026, but Texas does, too. They simply escaped my paradigm because they had .800+ OPSes in 2015 and 2022. But those have been the only seasons of the past 20 when their OPS has been over .800.

A couple of interesting teams have been the Yankees and Brewers. With the position being dominated by left-handed hitters and the short porch in right in Yankee Stadium, not to mention the lineage of Lou Gehrig, the best first baseman ever to play, it seems certain that the Yankees have been strong at the position. But, since 2007, they are tied for 17th in OPS. Mark Texeira spent eight years and almost 4000 plate appearances there and was very good, with an .830 OPS. Following Texeria, the Yankees gave a lot of time to Rizzo (.735 OPS) and DJ LeMahieu (.752). There have been worse representatives, and it must be remembered that Rizzo is key to the Cubs’ .822 first base OPS from 2007-2026, tying them for 5th best. But Ben Rice has been a while in coming.

Not to shortchange Derrek Lee, but the other top teams in first base OPS are like the Cubs and Rizzo. No player, of course, spent all 20 years as his team’s first baseman, but the team flags the first basemen for us. The Reds, Cardinals, Braves, Tigers, and Diamondbacks, first through fifth, are just handles for Votto, Pujols/Goldschmidt, Freeman/Olson, Cabrera and Goldschmidt (again), respectively. The Cubs are tied with the Diamondbacks.

But the #7 team, the Brewers, are more interesting. Hefty and with a hefty .954 OPS as a first baseman from 2007-2011, Prince Fielder was very much the team’s version of Gonzalez or Morneau. But from 2012-2026, Jesus Aguilar, with the meager total of 1017 plate appearances, has done enough to claim second place in Brewers’ first base activity over the 2007-2026 period. In Brewers’ fashion, they have still been productive at the position, even with all of the turnover.

Since 2012, here is the Brewer with the most plate appearances at first by year.

2012: Corey Hart

2013: Yuniesky Betancourt

2014: Mark Reynolds

2015: Adam Lind

2016: Chris Carter

2017: Eric Thames

2018: Jesus Aguilar

2019: Eric Thames

2020: Justin Smoak

2021: Daniel Vogenbach

2022: Rowdy Tellez

2023: Rowdy Tellez

2024: Rhys Hoskins

2025: Rhys Hoskins

2026: Jake Bauers

A bit of a full circle moment, seeing Hoskins again.

A history like this can probably only go with qualified success, not resounding success, and the overall OPS clearly does owe a lot to Fielder. Where the Brewers’ largely defied the odds was in 2016-2019. In 2016, Carter hit 41 home runs. Then the Thames/Aguilar combination/platoon from 2017-2019 (with a few at-bats from others sprinkled in) was very effective, particularly in 2017 and 2018.

They hit the same 41 home runs in 2017 as Carter had in 2016, but increased batting average at the same time from .225 to .269. The next year, Brewers’ first baseman hit 44 home runs and drove in 132 runs, reprising the exact numbers of a famous Milwaukee solo act, Henry Aaron, from 1957.

Currently Milwaukee is 3rd in first base OPS, behind the A’s and Yankees. The statistical possibilities of a Bauers and Vaughn platoon not only seem great enough to make us forget the (sadly rather already forgotten) Thames/Aguilar duo, but to make us simply salivate. But since Bauers can play outfield, this is a luxury the Brewers probably do not have.

6/19 N4: With Paul Goldschmidt, they have certainly not been one of the perennial first base laggards I discussed, but right now the Diamondbacks’ .561 OPS at first base would be the very worst of the last 20 years, eclipsing the .584 of the 2014 Astros (Jon Singleton, Jesus Guzman, Marc Krauss, Chris Carter). We’re almost halfway through the season, so this isn’t good.

It’s also a bit of brain teaser; Ildemaro Vargas is the main culprit. Yes, he’s come down to earth and then some, but he still has a .711 OPS.

But that breaks down to .839 in 19 games at second, and .622 in 41 games at first. I guess he was cooking playing second while Marte was hurt.

Vargas has gotten just over half the Diamondbacks’ plate appearances at first. At 20%, 22-year-old Jose Fernandez makes for the only other significant share. Fernandez has hit .263 as the Diamondbacks’ first basemen, but with a .070 secondary average, so that his OPS is .557. I imagine he hasn’t, but looking at his array of numbers, it really is as if he’s taken Vargas for a model.

The Diamondbacks certainly have come to their .561 OPS honestly, not that there could any other way. A .215 composite average in 279 AB for their first basemen, with 7 2B, 6 HR, and 13 BB.

6/19 N5: Kody Clemens has played 63 games this year. His slugging average seems inexorably to rise toward .500. So I broke it down into 15, 16, 16 and 16 game increments:

games 1-15: .356

games 16-31: .380

games 32-47: .563

games 48-63: .590

Clemens began his career with a .340 SLG over 2023-2024. But over the last three years, he has a .453 SLG in a decent sample, 682 at-bats. One doesn’t want to make too much of it, but the pattern for this 30-year-old has been improvement both from year to year and in this year specifically.

Walks remain something of a weakness and are just 6.4% from plate appearances for him over his career.

6/19 N6: Gage Jump (0.94 GB/FB) gives up fly balls, but (quite literally) no home runs, despite three of his five starts coming in Sacramento. I don’t like whiff rates that don’t measure up with his very good velocity, and have my doubts about the strength of a 79% fastball/slider/sweeper mix. But it jumps out that he is 93rd percentile in Chase Rate. That’s the one thing that makes me think he might ultimately be more than serviceable.

I haven’t seen him pitch.

6/20 N1: My perception that, besides Tatis and Guerrero Jr., there are quite a few guys who suddenly can’t hit home runs this year doesn’t square with the fact that home runs per at-bat in June are up an enormous amount, 26.7%, from what the rate was through the end of May. Some players are certainly hitting home runs these days, if not everybody. The .431 slugging average in June hasn’t been seen in a month since the 2019 season, when the the (pitcher-hitting removed) slug for the whole season was .443.

There are still 10 days left in June, and with regression to the mean operating, I do imagine the month’s SLG will probably go down. What we might project the next days at, though, is an open question. Some of the trend seems likely to continue.

Interesting data for comparative MLB slugging averages in June and July going back to 2015. I’ll give the July SLG compared to the June.

2025 +10

2024 +11

2023 +8

2022 -10

2021 +4

2019 +4

2018 +12

2017 -12

2016 -19

2015 +4

So if I had just done the last five years and not the last ten, I would have quite a different conclusion than I have now. With the benefit of theten years, the number one takeaway seems to be just that month-to-month SLG, at least at this time of the year, is volatile. That seems clearer than that there is the increase we assume based on hotter summer weather in July.

We do get somewhat different pictures from the median and mean. Slugging average in July has been up 4 points by median, but by mean, only up 1.2 points.

6/20 N2: A real drop in Gavin Williams’ pitches per batter, from 4.14 last year to 3.83 this year.

6/20 N3: Although I noted well into Jose Soriano’s uncanny start that his walk rate remained ordinary, it still seemed unlikely that this would mushroom into such a problem it would provide the dominant storyline for his statistical line at year’s end. But given his current MLB leadership in walks, this seems very possible.

6/20 N4: The last time the Phillies hit lower than their current .229, it was the 19th-century. 1888, to be exact. One shudders to think what the average for that team would have been if they hadn’t played in a hitter’s park (113 single-season batting park factor). But like the current Phillies, they had a winning record, too. Ben Sanders and Charlie Buffinton, now recognized as 2-3 in the NL in E.R.A., led the way (the E.R.A. title going to the Giants’ Tim Keefe, who also had an edge of more than 100 in strikeouts on anyone).

Back to the current Phillies, they’ve hit over .250 each of the past four years.

6/20 N5: And Bryce Miller’s sensational WHIP just goes down. Mariners’ fans must be tempted to believe, “Give us more Bryce, less Luis.”