Notes and Essays, Week Ending 6/6

5/31 N1: Yahoo Mail decided my own Substack post was spam. Any frustration or embarrassment outweighed by the relief of finding it.

5/31 N2: With 13.3 ks/9 both this year and last and 13.5 in his brief minor league experience, there is little indication the White Sox’ Grant Taylor is going to stop striking out batters, and he is obviously a sexy young pitcher and real weapon. One might also draw on respective 2026 whiff rates of 31%, 30%, and 29% for his curve, slider, and four-seamer as evidence that this is a singular power pitcher. Yet, at least for the breaking pitches, while the whiff numbers are uniform, those numbers actually aren’t that high, and his overall 29% whiff has him at just the 79th percentile, compared to his 98th percentile for strikeout rate.

Other than the possibility that Taylor has been lucky, I have two theories for the discrepancy. Those three pitch make up 93% of what he throws, and that they all have above-average whiff rates may mean that he never gives a hitter an out, an exit ramp, from a strikeout, never lets up the pressure.

Picking up from this theory, Taylor also throws a lot of four-seamers, comparatively speaking, which we can guess is even more true of him before he gets batters to two strikes. Maybe a subtle key to being able to strike out hitters is being able to get them to two strikes in the first place.

A third explanation I just landed on is that Taylor induces a lot of foul balls. His swings-and-misses crowd out the other kinds of strikes to an extent, but his 32.3% strikes that are fouls is tied with Cam Schlittler, and would rank him 6th in MLB if he were a starting pitcher (we call also guess that many of the fouls come off that good four-seamer). When batters foul off pitches, that lowers his whiff rate, but keeps the possibility of a strikeout alive, thus not affecting both categories in the same way.

The simple and most intuitive explanation for the discrepancy, that Taylor is getting “looking” strikeouts not “whiff” strikeouts, does not apply. The 18% share of his strikeouts that have been looking is below the 24% MLB average.

5/31 N3: The outlier explanation for a pitcher’s E.R.A. usually doesn’t hold water, but Anthony Kay’s E.R.A. is 2.68 if you take out his 8 earned run outing on 4/22. I was under the impression he had started poorly and turned it around, but except for that one start, he’s actually been pretty good all year. The recency part includes just 6 runs allowed in his last five starts. He is a bete noire of the FIP crowd, though, with a 5.19.

5/31 N4: A stout pair the Pirates have in Bryan Reynolds (a .403 OBP and 6th in MLB in times on base) and Spencer Horwitz (.394 OBP). They’ve hit .323 and .333 this month. As part of his May batting average push, Reynolds has only struck out 15 times in 111 plate appearances. He had a 26.5 strikeout percentage last year with 173 total.

5/31 N5: Joc Pederson had a .614 OPS last year. He was not done, as I thought very likely. He has in fact been one of the better Rangers hitters, third on the team in Batter Runs. He has an .801 OPS, versus a .798 for his career. Even taking into account that he’s being platooned with a discipline or courtesy afforded few contemporary left-handed hitters, his OPS+ this year of 137 makes an even stronger case for his current skills. Globe Life Field is given an 89 Batting Park Factor.

5/31 N6: Jac Caglianone is showing 100 percentile arm strength on Baseball Savant, and although not on time, that throw he made yesterday trying to deny Brandon Nimmo the winning run was nothing less than breathtaking. Check it out. I think it’s looks even grander from a left-handed thrower; we know there are not that many. Check out the play.

I don’t know if it’s this throw that gave him his 102.7 maximum velocity this year, or if this one has even gone into the books yet. He had a 104.1 last year.

Jac is actually Jeffrey Allen. I’m obviously not an amateur baseball guy, and I was wondering.

5/31 N7: Despite antics like those 7 walks of yesterday, Trey Yesavage’s perfect regular season home run record is keeping his FIP (2.42) down. That’s through 51 innings career in the regular season, that he hasn’t given up a home run. 4 allowed in 27 2/3 innings last postseason.

Overall, he’s been of a fly ball pitcher than a ground ball pitcher. So we’ll see if this continues.

5/31 N8: A random fun question: who will end 2026 with the better slugging average, Konnor Griffin (.402 now) or Pete Crow-Armstrong (.391 now)? They have the same .327 OBP now, but there I feel confident Griffin is the favorite.

5/31 N9: No walks for the Rockies pitchers in their 8-3 win on Saturday. Impressive….Wait, no, scrap that….The opponent was the Giants (who are stubbornly clinging on to their pace to walk the fewest times ever for a team in a 162-games schedule)….As for the Rockies, though, yes, they don’t walk that many people this year, ranking in the top half.

5/31 N10: Yes, he strikes out a bit, but just deal with it, Nick Kurtz hits for average. He’s raised that BAbip of last year (.364) he wasn’t supposed to be able to keep up 43 points this year.

Kurtz’s strikeout rate career is 30.5. There are certainly guys who are worse, and since he takes a high (if not super-high) percentage of pitches, he’s not making things easy on himself.

5/31 N11: Misiorowski enters today’s start 1st in MLB in total strikeouts and 140th in total hits allowed.

5/31 N12: The mystery Yankee for today’s trivia during the game will be announced as Roger Maris. Part of the prompt involves showing the player’s final season, which for Roger was 1968. It hadn’t dawned on me before that Mantle and Maris both had their final season in 1968, making for symmetry. A sports year is perhaps about more than just one thing or player in my mind, but most decidedly those things that come to represent it for me do shove others things that deserve recognition to the side.

Gehrig and Grove being rookies in the same year is one case.

And how about the fact that Walter Johnson’s final season was 1927? 1927 was all about the Yankees, but Walter was there, too (in how much of a farewell tour, I don’t know).

If I were just there then, whenever and wherever it was, I know the scales would fall from my eyes, and I’d have a fuller perspective.

6/1 N1: I must say that the 6:40 start time on Wednesday of Sanchez versus the Padres fits very well with the ~8:45 tip for the NBA finals, what with the pace of games now, and what with pitchers rarely going 9 innings. But a part of me regrets not having to make the chouce, and not having to make the NBA Finals sacrifice so I could show (or virtue signal?) my love of baseball. I am just a casual NBA fan, and I don’t begrudge the rest of you rationally recognizing the greater importance of the Finals.

Nothing really makes you feel more credulous and less like the universe is a sane and ordered place than buying into a no-hit watch and turning on the television in the middle or late innings. Even ghost-runner baseball scratches your itch more than that first hit.

Just about the only thing that Padres hitters do in an able-bodied way this year is hit the ball over the fence, so even with Sanchez’s miserly tendencies there, the decision and conclusion may be disarmingly quick. A home run in this context equals a knockout in a fight, where that scenario means a truncated event.

6/1 N2: I guess Bryce Harper is all the way back from his torn UCL. His 88.2 MPH arm strength right now would stack up well at any infield position. At 84.2, Willson Contreras is well behind in second place, although Harper does fall to third place in maximum speed throw, behind Jake Bauers and Gavin Sheets. There are a couple of readings for Harper when he played outfield and before he got hurt: 89.8 in 2021, 89.3 in 2020.

Obviously, he has at least a pretty good arm, but my question is how much of the way he appears at first base is a statistical quirk? Because no one else seemingly knows this competition is on? Ideally, the formula for throwing out non-competitive throws addresses this, but it it hard to put that into practice at first base when “easy” throws are perhaps the norm and not the exception.

There are certainly different styles in general, regardless of position; Watching him this year, Bo Bichette sometimes has problems with accuracy, but seems to throw as hard as he can every time because I bet he understands that to aim the ball is to generally to invite “the yips.”

6/1 N3: Shocked and a bit sad at the Tigers’ 2026 season. It’s easy to lose perspective, so ChatGPT’s report that their over/under before the season was 85.5 wins gives me an idea of whether I am overreacting in my surprise (the answer? I’m not sure).

They are now last in MLB in runs per game. They also did the trick in 2022, when they scored just 557 runs. This year, they are on a pace for 602, at least. Maybe he’s just “wrong place, wrong time,” or maybe his teams can be very volatile like Showalter’s were, but I remember not having much patience with the Tigers’ offensive struggles in the early Hinch years, and thinking he had to be in some way responsible. It was just a pattern of underachievement so pronounced that it strained credulity, and here we go again, it seems.

Those 2022 Tigers (66-96) didn’t have a lot of pieces on the mound, either. Skubal led them with 21 starts. Their other pitchers who made 10 or more starts, in order of starts: Drew Hutchinson, Tyler Alexander, Eduardo Rodriguez, Beau Brieske, Matt Manning, Alex Faedo and Michael Pineda. That was only four years ago, and is a trivia question that will stump anyone who’s not a Tigers fan.

6/1 N4: Suddenly, Jung Hoo Lee is hitting .304, and the Giants have two of the National League’s nine .300 hitters.

6/1 N5: Which Matthew Liberatore do you like? The one who gave up 11 earned runs over 14 2/3 in his three starts from May 13 to May 25, but with an impressive whiff rate, which was just under one third? Or the Liberatore who had an 11.4 whiff % Sunday night, but shut out the Cubs, if over a cautious 5 1/3?

Liberatore’s whiff rates in the three consecutive starts were his three best of the season. It is not the case that starts 1 thru 8, with low whiff rates, showed him pitching well, though, the way he did against the Cubs. He entered that game with a 4.07 E.R.A. So overall, I can’t say it’s a very positive picture, or that Liberatore has proved much.

I will say that when you look at actual whiffs and swings in a start, the gaudy or ugly percentages, as the case may be, don’t go as far with you. We should probably never lose sight of those swing counts. Liberatore had only 37-47 swings against him in each of the four starts. An impressive whiff percentage for an individual start does look a look like happenstance.

But three starts in a row, all better from a whiff perspective than any of the ones previous? It’s hard to dismiss that. Something was going on.

6/2 N1: 2019 was the year of the home run, but in something of a paradox, I noticed that with the big pitching games (which I defined as the “very clean’“ games), it also seemed to be something of a highwater mark for them. And I now find the following comparison with 2025:

2019, 19 162+ IP pitchers w/ 10 k/9

2025, 10 162+ IP pitchers w/ 10 k/9

It would be natural to ask if this decrease was just a result of fewer pitchers qualifying for rate titles, but that number only went down from 64 to 52.

MLB-wide, in 2019, there were 8.88 k/9, compared to 8.49 last year. So, that, too was in 2019’s favor, although perhaps not as dramatically as when focusing on the top guys. One might ask how much of the higher rate in 2019 was from fewer outs made per plate appearance, period, going along with the heavy hitting, but despite the 8-point better OBP in 2019, the strikeout rate per plate appearance was still higher in 2019, 23.0% to 22.2%.

I think the data reflect that some pitchers were really able to strike out hitters at very high rates because they were using “sticky stuff.” The policing of that began in 2021.

Like when steroids were not policed, the records and big stat that remain are fun, but not completely for real (you could say), unfortunately.

6/2 N2: So, exhausted as I wrapped up “Clean and Super Clean Starts,” I neglected to mention the irony — that Buehler’s 7 “super clean” starts in 2019 place him tied for 6th for the highest single-season total since 2013. The irony is that I designed the measure with Buehler and Jack Flaherty expressly in mind as the antithesis of the clean pitching line over the last couple of starts.

While he was ace caliber over a period of several years before his second Tommy John, by summary stats, Buehler didn’t have a fantastic year in 2019. His 2.3 bWAR and 127 ERA+ more come across as solid. Both his April+ (3-0, 5.22 ERA, 6 starts) and September+ (3-1, 4.50, 5 starts) were underwhelming. But he had a brilliant four starts in a row from June 3 to June 21.

If you know game scores, you know a run of 85, 75, 77, and 89 is highly impressive. In there was a 16-strikeout game. All four of the starts register as “super clean,” and, since this year only 2.3% of starts have earned that classification, a streak like that might be considered as difficult to do as hitting 4 home runs in a row. Over the four games, he totaled 31 innings, 13 hits, 3 runs, a 0.87 E.R.A., 1 walk, and 42 strikeouts. All three of the runs were via solo home runs (hit by Christian Walker, Nolan Arenado, and Charlie Blackmon). He worked that deep into the games despite throwing a total of only 404 pitches.

I am filled with admiration for the kind of pitcher he used to be.

6/2 N3: No team has slugged 1.000 in a game this year. The game in which Baltimore reached Brayan Bello for 13 hits and 5 home runs (4/24) tops the charts at .929. Philadelphia’s 8-home run game against Miami last 9/24 is the last 1.000 slugging game. From 2021-2025, there were 15, or 3 a season. Atlanta’s 1.171 against Pittsburgh on 5/21/21 is best in that span (good luck omen? They won the World Series). They hit 7 doubles and 7 home runs and won 20-1. Eight runs came in the 8th inning off position player Wilmer Difo, Ehire Adrianza getting him for a grand slam.

6/2 N4: Now 8 home runs for the Nationals’ Jacob Young. It’s his best home run rate, including his minor league and college careers.

6/2 N5: Because he is 2 ½ years younger, Bryce Eldridge is rated a much better prospect than Spencer Jones, but I see similarities. Both are six-foot-seven, and both might not only be long on power and short on hit, but lacking on walks as well for high strikeout sluggers (Jones a 10.4% walk rate in the minors, Eldridge an 11.6%, although 14.6% in a small sample at Triple-A this year). But, making up for the age difference at least to a degree Jones can run, and Eldridge can’t (11th percentile speed). Jones also hits for average in the minors better than people think he’ll continue to do, while Eldridge’s .249 in the PCL last year was a red flag. On maximum exit velocity, they seem pretty similar, although I’m not sure that Eldridge (a 114.6 best over the last two years) quite lives up to the hype.

Maybe this is one of those cases like with Colson Montgomery last year where you just have to see the guy. I don’t know.

6/2 N6: Danny Jansen’s steal yesterday was not only just the second of his career, but the second anyone had ever had against Michael McGreevy. It was in the 5th inning of a one-run game, a legit steal, although aided by the expected weak throw by Ivan Herrera.

Jansen also hit only his second triple this year, but at 26.9 sprint speed in 2026 and with a career best of 27.9, runs better than many catchers, if not notably so. He’s listed at 240 pounds, so should take pride in that.

Even in the minors, he’s never played a game at any position other than catcher, though.

6/2 N7: After my harassment of Tony Senzatela last year, I think I have to be an equal-opportunity jerk and recognize the saga that is Kyle Freeland. His career and early season work certainly argued for patience, but he just has not been major league caliber recently. His median run total allowed over his last seven starts has been 6, and the starts have averaged under 5 innings. It doesn’t actually seem that the Rockies have contractual incentitive to pitch him; going by Baseball Reference, he’s a free agent after this year, provided he doesn’t reach 170 innings.

He needs to go to about a 196-inning pace to do that. Ain’t going to happen. Only time he reached 196 innings was his 7.8 bWAR, 166 ERA+ 2018.

Four of these bad Freeland starts have been on the road, by the way.

6/2 N8: At the plate, Andy Pages is really much like Teoscar Hernandez. He hits for good average and power but doesn’t walk. Their career slashes:

Pages .268/.316/.457

Hernandez .261/.317/.482

In the field, granted, Pages is day and Hernandez is night.

By sprint speed, Hernandez is not only every bit as fast as Pages, but has two seasons of greater than 29 ft/sec, in 2016 and 2019. This year, Hernandez is at 28.4, Pages at 28.2

Hitting .411 with runners in scoring position and slugging .723 with runners on base, Pages is on pace to drive in 135 runs.

6/3 N1: In light of his three home run robberies in one game earlier in the year, and now his team-induced “home run off the head” Tuesday, it’s been a Wide World of Sports, “Thrill of Victory and Agony of Defeat” season in the outfield for Jo Adell. This juxtaposition certainly will always have a place in his baseball bio.

6/3 N2: Corbin Carroll has 8 triples right now, which means he has twice what anyone else does. Hits a pleasant funny bone for me. Makes me think he is in a league of his own, and that is special for any trait.

I think the general rule is that the smaller a total category is, the more realistic it is to double everyone else. This also is just true in terms of time. With his history, Carroll has a good chance to also lead MLB in triples this year from now forward, and an even better chance to eventually win the triples title by more than his current lead of 4. But I bet he doesn’t have double the next closest competitor at year’s end.

To demonstrate the principle by citing the extreme case, by definition, the first guy to “2” in anything has doubled everyone else. And that is the only time a lead automatically means a lead of 2x.

So, historically, making the point with small categories and not short timeframes, I can show you George Case leading MLB with 51 steals in 1939, with Mike Kreevich second with 23 (stolen bases were rare), or I can show you Ron Hunt with 50 hit-by-pitch in 1971 and Mike Epstein next with 12 . If Bonds had doubled everybody with his 232 walks in 2004, it would have been on account of his dominance in the small category of intentional walks, but he didn’t — three guys had 127 walks.

My view of his numbers, without killing myself to figure it out, has generally been that Carroll is in fact uncanny at hitting triples, despite having the benefit of playing at Chase Field. But this year he only has 1 triple on the road. He came into the year with 16 road triples in his career, 27 at home, and at 37%, that doesn’t look like such a tiny share. It’s not like he never hit triples on the road. But the curreny evidence must be incorporated.

Since 2023, with his 34 triples at Chase, he is now doubling up everyone at home over that time but Bobby Witt (18). But on the road, Shohei Ohtani leads with 17 three-baggers, and Elly De La Cruz, Jarren Duran, CJ Abrams and Carroll all either have 15 or 16. So whether he is even the game’s best triples hitter, outside of ballpark, is thrown int doubt. (Home and road triples is one way of gauging the park effect; on the whole, while it can be more time-consuming, I think applying one park effect for everybody on one franchise, rather than looking an individual home/road, is a better approach.)

Continuing to work with the home and road data from 2023 onward, there are actually more players with 15+ triples on the road (5) than players with 15+ triples at home (3). This suggests, if anything, more triples hit on the road. It argues against the idea that certain players have learned to exploit their home parks for triples, or tap into some other home advantage.

But that’s just the leaders, and actually (again using 2023-2026), triples is the onlyone of the four hit types where there have been more occurrences of the species at home than on the road. (51.3% of at-bats come away, and this is principally why splits tend to go in that direction.) The data are

Singles 51.0% Away

Doubles 50.5% Away

Home Runs 50.1% Away

Triples 51.9% Home

So why is there, even aside from Carroll, a generic home field advantage for triples (small at is), even compared to other hits? You could argue that players tailor their swings to hitting home runs at a park, and that this consequently cuts into their triples, and the same thing doesn’t happen on the road. But if that were true, then doubles as well should benefit from reverse cannibalization to the same degree, and they don’t.

So a tentative guess is that a kind of official scorer’s bias exists giving players triples at home and not doubles, when throws are to other bases, etc, and there is subjectivity involved.

Or maybe home triples are a residue of road outfielders not handling the balls they have to field as smoothly on the road as they do at home….Come to think of it, I like this hypothesis better.

6/3 N3: Like Matthew Liberatore, Dustin May is missing more bats than he did earlier in the season. In none of his first seven starts did he have 20% whiffs, but with one more whiff on 5/15, it would now be five starts in a row that he had done that. He has also struck out 12.5-per-9 over his last three starts, while his season rate stood at 6.5 before then.

6/3 N4: Concerning numbers across the board for Alex Bregman. At .255, his average remains above-average, and is not too different than what he’s done since 2020. But he’s hit just 1 double per 30.4 AB and 1 home run per 48.6 AB. Both of those are career worsts. His strikeouts (17.2%) remain rather low but are his highest since his rookie year. His average exit velocity is his worst since his second year.

These numbers gave me a suspicion he’s hitting more balls on the ground than before, particulary since his exit velocity isn’t down as much as his power-hitting outcomes.

This is incorrect. His 1.14 GB/FB is over the league average of 1.07, and is also the highest of his career.

It’s more a shift from high on the fly ball scale (he is 0.81 for his career) to the middle, than what you would call a rut of hitting ground balls. But, historically, hitting fly balls has worked for Bregman.

6/3 N5: Who will be the first to get to four extra-base hits on the season? Jake Mangum or Nasim Nunez? Nunez plays more.

6/3 N6: Just stumbled into this, so I don’t know if the same thing is going on at Double-A and Triple-A, but in five of the six Class-A leagues, SO/9 are up about 1.0 from last year.

Northwest League: 10.1 2026; 9.3 2025

Florida State League: 10.4 2026; 9.2 2025

Carolina League 10.2 2026; 9.3 2025

California League 10.2 2026; 9.4 2025

Midwest League 9.9 2026; 8.8 2025

The increase in the South Atlantic League also is there, from 9.6 last year to 10.0 this year.

I would call the increases enormous. Are rule changes at the heart of them? Something else? I can’t imagine Baseball Reference has tweaked the definition of SO/9 somehow. Assuming it’s not a statistical artifact, baseball must be displeased.

6/3 N7: I might timidly suggest that George Kirby is overrated and was overhyped, but it is more or less true that he’s a good pitcher, I’ll grant you. Part of the case that he is overrated is the pitching luxury that is Seattle/T-Mobile Park, but even with that going for him, I notice that, for this day and age, he gives up quite a few hits. With his start today, his composite numbers over the last couple of years are going to read 203 hits in 204 innings. Then, in 2024, he led the AL in hits allowed. His biggest difference between innings and hits in a season is 11 and change.

He came into today with 124 career starts. Of the 44 active pitchers with 100-150 starts, his .252 batting average allowed placed him 25th. In comparison, his E.R.A. in the group was 9th. E.R.A. certainly trumps batting average, but it’s something to file away, at least.

What about if we just look at road games, and take active pitchers with 50-75 starts? The group changes to a sample of 42. Kirby’s .267 allowed placed him 36th. His road E.R.A. is 0.81 higher than his home E.R.A., but 4.01 still places him 13th (so that’s good news)

His strikeout rate is way down this year, but at 8.6 per 9 for his career, it will still play. His 1.0 HR/9 are probably a bit better. So BAbip (.305 career) is the weakest of the three points for him. You could guess from my relation of his season-by-season hits and innings that BAbip has consistently plagued him, and if we go to the column, we find that that is indeed the case.

6/4 N1: Max Meyer, 6-0 for a sub-.500 Marlins team, is 5th among E.R.A. qualifiers in SO divided by H and is 11th in HR per inning. There are 73 qualifiers. Within this season, in his results, I see consistency more than improvement (he was starting off at a high enough level, only so much can be expected). But he has maintained that early performance with a median of 95 pitches since May 1, while his median was just at 84.5 in March and April.

O.k., the Marlins are kind of bad, but as usual, Meyer’s actual run support does explain why his won/loss record is even better than his runs allowed: per 9 innings, the Marlins are scoring him 6.5 runs, 8th-highest among qualifers.

6/4 N2: The improvement of 2.1 bWAR Dillon Dingler over the 2025 version is most dramatic in the home run column, where his 14 potentially could expand into something pretty flashy and cement the passed legacy from Tettleton, Nokes, Parrish, Freehan and York (York’s 35 home runs in 1937 remain the record for a Tiger majority backstop). Dingler has also increased his walk rate from thee 4.9% of last year to 8.7% this year. What has stopped his rise from looking even more pronounced is a BAbip that has fallen from .345 to .243. Thus, in all, his OPS is just up from .752 to .831 (it actually likes more improvement that way than quoting the OPS+es of 108 and 129).

6/4 N3: I believe my “notes” at the beginning of the season expressed skepticism that the Tristans (Peters and Gray) would be long for the major leagues, and here we see them hitting .289 and .252 in a June White Sox/Twins affair and facing off against each other while in the starting lineups. Peters has started in center all year against right-handers (no hits against lefties!) and has been one of the shocks of the season, playing (by the metrics) superior defense, in addition to having that average.

He had a career .777 minor league OPS in 489 minor league games, which for the minors, doesn’t jump out at you. While with the Brewers and Rays, Baseball America never even had him as a top-30 prospect within organization. Whups.

6/4 N4: The two pitchers who were in the top ten in pitches thrown and are in the top ten against this year are Freddy Peralta and Kevin Gausman. Peralta has an 85-pitch lead on Zac Gallen for the most pitches thrown over the last two years. Gausman is 3rd in pitches thrown over 2025-2026, followed by Robbie Ray, and then Logan Webb.

Webb was #1 in pitches thrown in both 2025 and 2024.

Gallen was also #3 in pitches thrown in 2023.

Peralta was also in the top 10 in 2024. So it’s actually a three-year streak for him.

6/4 N5: With 4007 pitches for the 2005 Washington Nationals (their first season after relocating from Montreal), Livan Hernandez is the last 4000-pitch pitcher for the foreseeable future. As that broke down into 114.5 pitches a start and 35 starts, I am confident you will second the notion. I am not exactly going out on a limb.

Although he did not reach 4000, Justin Verlander carried out the same model. He averaged 3874 pitches over 2009-2011, then another 3730 over 2012 and 2013. Particularly since he would sacrifice velocity at times to achieve them, heavy workloads have to be part of his legacy.

6/4 N6: Maybe it’s not quite a “full circle” moment, but here’s a fun one. My TV conception of the strike zone jibed nicely with Harry Wendelstedt when he was active, and you know I have taken an interest in son Hunter (now 54 years old) since he sustained a serious injury last year. Harry has gone down in history because he was the ump who declared that Dick Dietz hadn’t made proper effort to get out of the way of the ball, thus negating what would have been an RBI hit-by-pitch against Drysdale in inning 46 of Drysdale’s streak. Who was home plate umpire in Cristopher Sanchez’s game yesterday? Hunter….

6/4 N7: And, going against Cristopher Sanchez, that was a “clean” game for Walker Buehler! Not “super clean,” but clean. It’s o.k., Walker, no need to thank me.

6/4 N8: Much improved control from Texas’s Jacob Latz as he has assumed the closer’s role. Entered 2026 with 4.3 BB/9 in his 140.1 innings, and is 1.7 this year.

6/4 N9: I gave him shit before for his on-base percentage, but Jake Burger has turned things around. An excellent May at the plate included a .359 OBP and 10 walks. Patience paying off for Skip Schumaker. At .290, Burger is now in front of 24 qualifiers in OBP.

At .254, Mark Vientos is last among qualifiers.

6/4 N10: Yordan Alvarez has opened up a lead of 6 Batting Runs on second-place Ben Rice, and a lead of 9 on third-place James Wood. He has 29 through 62 personal games, 63 Astros’ games. This has him on pace for 75.

Alvarez’s career best stands at 51 in 2022. That season projected to 62 per 162 games. He had the same rate as a rookie in 2019 in 87 games, and a rate of 60 per 162 games in 2023. He’s never played more than 147 games.

Since 2015, the only seasons of 75+ Batting Runs are the Judge seasons of 2024 (96 Batting Runs), 2025 (81 Batting Runs) and 2022 (80 Batting Runs).

On-base percentage counts for a lot here — .400 OBP guys Ohtani, Trout, and Kurtz ranking 4th, 5th, and 6th in 2026.

6/4 N11: It’s a shame Colorado’s Troy Johnston (-7 Defensive Runs Saved in about 300 innings) is this bad in the outfield. Indications are he is better at first base, and about 80% of his minor league games came there. Of course Colorado has helped, but Johnston has a 119 OPS+. He is 4th in MLB in batting average at .320, and tied for 4th with 17 doubles.

6/4 N12: The record for the most 6-plate appearance (or more) games in a season belongs to Frankie Crosetti in his role as main leadoff hitter for the 1936 Yankees, and it’s not particularly close. Crosetti had at least 6 plate appearances 33 times in his 151 games. He is also second on the list with his 29 6+ PA games for the equally legendary 1939 Yankees. Behind him with 28 6+ PA games are two other guys from that short timespan, Augie Galan of the 1935 Cubs, and Rip Radcliff, also in Chicago, but with the 1936 White Sox.

In 1936, Crosetti hit .288 with a .387 OBP, both career bests among seasons he was a batting average qualifier. He got a hit in 30 of the 33 games, and reached base in the other three.

The Yankees record in the 33 games? 31-0-2, which has very much a championship boxer’s record sound to it. The ties came in games that went 12 and 16 innings, respectively. Seven additional games from the batch of 33 were extra-inning games, meaning the Yankees somehow went 7-0 in them. Assuming the ‘36 Yankees really were great, who says one-run games are decided by luck, after all?

The team scored an average of 11.9 runs when Crosett batted 6 or more times, reaching double digits in 23 of the 24 games that didn’t go extra innings, and in two of the nine that did. The one game in which Crosetti batted 6 times and they didn’t scored 10 runs was a 9/15 7-1 win over the White Sox in which they didn’t hit a home run. On the season as a whole, the Yankees averaged 6.9 runs a game. Their 1065 runs topped everyone else in the AL (Indians and Tigers tied) by 144 runs.

On that ‘36 Yankees team, Red Rolfe also batted 6+ times 26 times. Rolfe was the #2 hitter and had some leadoff assignments, too, but missed some time, only starting 131 games.

6/5 N1: My old Sal Frelick/Brice Turang fixation no longer works, but the numbers of Ceddanne Rafaela and Wilyer Abreu have converged to an amusing extent.

Rafaela: .286/.347/.437

Abreu: .283/.347/.433

They also match up eeerily in terms of runs (Rafaela 24, Abreu 27), doubles (12 each), home runs (Rafaela 5, Abreu 7) and strikeouts (Rafaela 47, Abreu 49). (Clearly, these guys spend too much time together). If you think carefully when presented with this, you can figure out that Abreu has more plate appearances; he’s started 7 more games. The main divergence is that Abreu has 24 walks versus Rafaela’s 13, but this is offset in OBPs by Rafaela’s edge in hit-by-pitch of 6 to 0, and his edge in sacrifice flies of 0 to 2 (you don’t want sacrifice flies for OBP). Abreu is one of 12% of batting qualifiers who has not been hit by a pitch this season, and hasn’t been nailed in fact since 2024.

Although Rafaela had flashed offensive talent for periods, Abreu led him in career OPS entering this year, .791 to .685. Rafaela isn’t yet 26— so that qualified him to make a jump.

6/5 N2: With 129 or 2.05 a game, the Giants are killing everybody in team doubles. The z-score for this translates to 2.60 — or an easier avenue of perspective is that the Diamondbacks and Nationals are next with 113.

The bottom line, admittedly, is that San Francisco is 26th in runs and hasn’t gotten past the 4.00 average mark.

They’ve played 7 more games on the road but have 81 of their doubles there. 63% of their doubles on the road, versus 56% of their games on the road. So this is definitely not a matter of Oracle Park’s increasing doubles.

Last weekend, statistics models were loving the Giants doubles, as they faced the Rockies, and faced them in Colorado. In giving up 142 doubles, the Rockies have outdone the Giants. The Giants hit 3 on Friday, 4 on Saturday, and then 9 on Sunday, in a game in which they scored 19 runs. That was the most doubles a team has had in a game since the Mariners had 9 against the Mets last August 15.

The Giants are the last team to hit 10 doubles in a game, which they did on 6/30/24. Seven different Giants hit doubles in that game, but only one of them, Heliot Ramos, has hit a double for the Giants this year.

The Giants finished 11th in MLB in doubles in 2024.

6/5 N3: Last week I noticed and wrote about 1 out of every 3 hits against Jameson Taillon having gone for a home run this year, something that has never happened in a season in which a pitcher has faced 502 batters. In his start since my note, Taillon pitched well, and allowed just 1 home run.

But now the watch is also officially on with Shota Imanaga. His reputation for home runs is well-established (his 26.50% HR/H last year was second highest all-time behind Josiah Gray’s 2022), but the news here is the alarmingly negative trend. Imanaga didn’t allow more than 1 home run a game through his first nine games this year, but then allowed 2 on May 18, 3 on both May 24 and May 29, and 4 last night.

Taillon has now allowed 20 home runs, Imanaga 17, which places them 1-2 in baseball. Imanga’s percentage of home runs from hits is now 27.0, topping what he had last year. Both he and Taillon have allowed the same 63 hits.

As a whole team, the 88 home runs the Cubs have allowed ties them for the 2nd-most allowed But in fewest hits allowed, they are in the top half, having allowed the 17th most. Putting the two things together, the percentage of hits that have gone for home runs against them is 17.7. Removing Imanaga and Taillon, their team percentage falls to 13.7. The major league percentage is essentially that, 13.4.

6/5 N4: The Pirates’ Jared Jones pitched last night, his second start since coming back from internal-brace surgery. His average fastball in the two starts is 99.0. He’s throwing more changeups than he did as a rookie in 2024 — against lefties, 24% of the time, versus 11% then. He’s already gotten 3 strikeouts on the change; in 2024, he had just 6 over 22 starts.

6/5 N5: Jake Mangum hit a double last night, so he beat Nasim Nunez to 4 extra-base hits.

6/5 N6: Konnor Griffin has a 1.87-1 GB/FB ratio, 10th highest of 164 qualifiers. Track record says this was more or less expected; he was at 1.66-1 last year. I imagine a hitting coach or two will get ahold of him. (But having grown up on The Science of Hitting, I say, “Kid, don’t ever change. Don’t ever let them change you.” Kidding. Really have no opinion.)

6/5 N7: Luis Arraez’s numbers this year are good (.800 OPS), but there’s really not a material difference in them. He hasn’t done anything unexpected. However, his GB/FB ratio has slid in the ground ball direction. 1.37-1 for his career, he is at 1.04-1 this year. It’s a career break from his year-by-year record.

His teammate Matt Chapman (1.25-1 vs. 0.87-1 career) has gone the other way, as have Pete Alonso (1.18-1 vs. 0.91-1 career) and Max Muncy (1.04-1 vs. 0.79-1 career).

Based on his production, moving toward ground balls obviously hasn’t hurt Muncy. He is almost exactly at the MLB average with his 1.04, and my rather uninformed opinion is that is where you would like to be (not that it is “one size fits all”).

6/5 N8: After executing none through their first 57 games, the Tigers have 3 sacrifice bunts over their last 6 games. Did AJ Hinch cave?

At least this year, he and bunts are very much on the outs, even when it comes to bunting for hits. The Tigers don’t have any bunt hits this year. They are the only team blanked.

Checking….last year, they were at the bottom with 2 bunt hits.

In 2020, the Angels and White Sox didn’t have any bunt hits. Otherwise, every team season in the decade has had a bunt hit.

6/6 N1: Just sent down, Texas’s 23-year-old Alejandro Osuna is another guy who has been extra-base challenged, with just 2 doubles and no home runs in 91 AB. He’s made it tough on himself with 41 grounders and 17 flies (FanGraphs). Somewhere in there, there is apparently some power in the 5’9” Osuna — 9 home runs in the South Atlantic League in 2024, then another 9 in the Texas League that year (and 2025 Baseball America Prospect Handbook touts “plenty of thump”).

He has a .376 OBP this year, and I imagine not many players get sent down with that. He owns that OBP thanks to a solid average (.253) and walk percentage (10.9%) and 6 HBP.

At 2.0%, his minor league HBP rate was probably shy of twice the typical average, while this year with Texas it’s been approaching 5 times the average.

6/6 N2: Willson Contreras has never had a season where he’s hit this well. His .934 OPS places him 6th in baseball. He’s hitting .299 and is on pace for 33 home runs and 26 hit-by-pitch.

I’m not quite sure why he is only on pace for 542 AB. He’s started 59 of Boston’s 63 games and the team’s on-base percentage is middle of the pack. He typically hits cleanup. I mention this because the relatively AB total means this his OPS tends to outpace his surface production.

6/6 N3: Yandy Diaz’s 4 run, 4 RBI game on May 18 was the first of the season, but now we’ve had four of these in the last five days.

6/1 Dillon Dingler

6/4 Jackson Chourio

6/5 Willy Adames

6/5 Adley Rutschman

No one has blown past the RBI part of it, as you might think, with Rutschman the only case of the player actually having 5 ribbies. But last year’s precedent says, just wait. There were six cases of a player scoring 4 runs and driving in 6 or more. And, when Nick Kurtz hit 4 home runs, he not only drove in 8, but scored 6.

It’s not entirely rational, but these games do more for me if they’re not in the context of the 18 team runs that accompanied Adames’s game. It seems more of a feat when your team “only” scores 9, as happened with Chourio (and, taking a page from Bob Horner’s 4 HR game, Milwaukee lost, too).

6/6 N4: With 31.3 PAge, the Braves tie the Cubs for the highest in baseball. Some amazing percentage of their amazing bullpen’s outings must have come from 30-somethings: that describes Raisel Iglesias, Dylan Lee, Robert Suarez, Tyler Kinley, Aaaron Bummer and Reynaldo Lopez.

But another generation is represented with converted starter and 20-year-old Didier Fuentes. With a 2.52 E.R.A. and .191 batting average allowed, he has also been good.