Nearly two years after his last major league start, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Walker Buehler returns from the IL tonight. He is slated for a two-step this week.
That's right. Buehler is a two-start pitcher, meaning for those who set weekly roto lineups, the potential upside is enormous but not without risk.
If you've been stashing him on your IL, you're no doubt eager to slot him back into the rotation. Buehler finished fourth in Cy Young voting in 2021—the last full season he pitched—striking out batters at a rate of more than nine per nine innings and finishing with a 2.47 ERA.
Monday will be Buehler's first start on a major league mound since undergoing Tommy John surgery in August 2022. He'll be facing the Miami Marlins, who are already waving the white flag on the season. Miami traded Luis Arraez to the Padres on Saturday morning and promptly got walloped by the Oakland A's20-4 that night.
Buehler made six minor league rehab starts, posting a 4.15 ERA and striking out 21 batters across 21 2/3 innings pitched. While his K-rate is in good shape, his command has not been ideal. Buehler walked nine total batters in those starts for an average of 3.7 per nine innings, and he finished with a 1.64 WHIP.
Buehler's second start comes vs. the Padres in San Diego. The Dodgers' rivals have been playing strong baseball this season and, as mentioned above, just acquired Arraez, who has a league-low 7.1% strikeout rate this season. The Padres have scored the fifth-most runs per game this season (5.08) and have won three of their five matchups with the Dodgers in 2024.
Nearly two years after his last big league start, the 29-year-old right-hander should have a little rust. Expect Buehler to be on a pitch count, which reduces his chances of qualifying for the win.
I'll wait and see in all but my deepest leagues with a weekly lineup lock. I don't trust Buehler in his first week back facing major league pitching.
In DFS, however, I'll be giving Buehler a start vs. the Marlins. It's a contrarian play that could pay dividends in a GPP tournament.
As Willie Mays turns 93 years old Monday, the position he redefined with his combination of speed, power and elan has lost its glamor. Center field is the worst position on the field this season and populated with one of the worst collections of hitters the position has ever seen.
Center fielders entered play Monday hitting .224 with a .292 on-base percentage and .648 OPS, all of which would easily be the worst rates at the position. With the way modern hitters sacrifice batting average for power, you might excuse the ineptness if there was some serious slugging. Nope. Center fielders this season are slugging .357, well below the nadir of .370 in 1989 since the mound was lowered in ’69.
How bad is the center field crisis? This bad:
Nine teams are hitting less than .200 out of center field.
The .648 OPS from center field is the worst of any position, 19 points lower than the next worst, second base. Center fielders also have the worst batting average, worst OBP, worst slugging, fewest hits and fewest total bases among all positions.
Seven teams have one or no home runs by their center fielders.
It’s not just a bad month. Since the mound was lowered in 1969, the seven worst batting averages for center fielders all have occurred in the past seven seasons (2018 to ’24).
Even the arms are worse in center field. Average arm strength has dropped from 90 mph in 2022 to 89.4 in ’23 to 89.2 this year.
What in the names of John Fogerty and Terry Cashman is going on here?
Mike Trout, Byron Buxton, Clay Bellinger and Luis Robert Jr. are hurt.
Aaron Judge, Julio Rodríguez, Corbin Carroll, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Cedric Mullins are having slow starts.
Judge, who has had an uncharacteristically slow start this season, was given his first career ejection against the Tigers on Saturday.
Tommy Gilligan-USA TODAY Sports
A bevy of young center fielders are having a hard time hitting their weight, or at least .230, such as Tyler Freeman, Parker Meadows, James Outman, Ceddanne Rafaela, Kyle Isbel, Dominic Fletcher, Jose Siri, Johan Rojas, Michael Siani, Victor Scott II, Stuart Fairchild and Will Benson.
What is so strange is that the amazing athleticism and offensive profile we see from a new generation of shortstops—Elly De La Cruz, Bobby Witt Jr., Gunnar Henderson and CJ Abrams—isn’t showing up in center field.
It was Mays, who debuted with the 1948 Birmingham Black Barons and in the National League with the ’51 New York Giants, who popularized center field as a glamor position of power and speed. His two home parks, Rickwood Field and the Polo Grounds, had enormous outfields that allowed him to showcase his range.
Mays changed the game. In 1955 he became the first player to hit 50 homers while stealing 20 bases. He led the league in stolen bases each of the next four seasons, pulling the game away from its station-to-station conservatism. Until Mays, baseball had seen only one 30–30 player, Ken Williams of the St. Louis Browns back in ’22. Then Mays did it in back-to-back years, ’56 and ’57.
Mays hit .300 with 30 home runs eight times, a record for center fielders, followed by Mickey Mantle (7), Ken Griffey Jr. (5), Duke Snider (4) and Trout (3). Only three center fielders in the past six years have done it even once: Judge (2022), Ketel Marte (’19) and Trout (’18).
Comparing anybody to Mays is folly. As the journalist Murray Kempton wrote, Mays was as original as Faulkner or the Delta Blues. The actress Tallulah Bankhead, a fellow Alabaman, supposedly said the world had two true geniuses: Shakespeare and Mays.
There will likely never be a center fielder quite like Mays, who hit .300 with 30 home runs eight times.
Neil Leifer/Sports Illustrated
Leo Durocher, Mays’ first manager with the Giants, once wrote that “If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases and performed a miracle in the field every day, I’d still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better.”
Durocher said Mays was the ultimate five-tool superstar.
“And,” he added, “he had the other magic ingredient that turns a superstar into a super-superstar: charisma.”
Mays remains the pinnacle of what a center fielder should be. There is no one like him before or since. Forget finding a center fielder who hits .300 with 30 home runs these days. Can we at least get a center fielder who hits .280 with 20 home runs? Sadly, the answer last year was no (for the first time in 47 years) and it might be too much to ask again this year.
The Seattle Mariners' decision to trade Jarred Kelenic to the Atlanta Braves this offseason came as quite a surprise given the apparent up-and-coming status of both the Mariners and Kelenic. Regardless of the why of it all, the Braves were more than happy to add Kelenic to their loaded lineup.
So far it looks like a solid enough decision. Atlanta went 20-12 in the first month of the season. Kelenic hasn't quite found his swing and is still hunting for his first home run of the year, but he's batting a perfectly fine .274 in 26 games played. The 24-year-old outfielder is also stirring discussion with his impressive American flag cleats, which he apparently got from the unlikeliest of sources.
During Sunday afternoon's broadcast of the Braves' matchup with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Bally Sports play-by-play announcer Brandon Gaudin revealed Kelenic did not have his cool kicks custom-made or anything of the like. In fact, as Kelenic tells it, he got it from a "random guy" on eBay.
Jarred Kelenic says he got the cleats he was wearing today from a "random guy on eBay" pic.twitter.com/bev9pDTNe3
In a day and age where any professional athlete can shell out thousands for highly-customized apparel through avenues unavailable to the average consumer, this is a beautiful thing. A throwback to when times were simpler and eBay was the only place to find pretty much anything unique.
Those are some seriously high-quality shoes from some random dude, though. Pro athletes put their shoes through incredible wear-and-tear in short periods of time no matter the sport. If they're up to snuff in Kelenic's eyes then maybe Nike should be reaching out to get his design ideas because he's got the durability factor down already.
Unfortunately the shoes held no magic yesterday as Kelenic went 0-1 against the Dodgers with one strikeout. But tomorrow the Boston Red Sox will come to town for a quick two-game series and give the shoes another chance to shine.
Like race car drivers and opera singers, pitchers need to summon another gear in pivotal moments. It is how Jack Flaherty in 2019, at just 23 years old, joined Clayton Kershaw and Roger Clemens as the youngest pitchers in the past 48 years with a league-leading WHIP under 1.00. Averaging 93.8 mph with his heater, Flaherty, then with the St. Louis Cardinals, could hit 97 when he floored it.
The complement of two sharp breaking balls also made him the best young pitcher in the game. Riches and awards were to follow as surely as they did for Kershaw and Clemens.
His ascension never happened. The pandemic and injuries, especially to his oblique and shoulder, cast him into such a four-year wilderness of mediocrity (4.42 ERA) that when he hit free agency last winter at the prime age of 28, he could do no better than a one-year, $14 million prove-it flier with the Detroit Tigers.
That contract today looks like one of the best bargains of the winter. Jack is back. Entering a start Monday against the Cleveland Guardians, Flaherty leads the league in strikeouts, has posted a historic strikeout-to-walk rate to start a season, has tweaked his delivery and pitch usage and, yes, has rediscovered that extra oomph when he steps on the gas.
Look no further than the 1-and-2 fastball he threw to Lars Nootbar of the Cardinals in his last start Tuesday. Dotting the outside corner, the pitch was clocked at 97.8 miles per hour, as hard as Flaherty has thrown a baseball in five years.
“There were definitely times last year where I wanted to go to another gear and it was like it just stayed the same,” Flaherty says in a conversation I had with him earlier this year. “It was weird, and it just wasn't there, for whatever reason. And this year when I want to go to another gear, I’ve been able to get there.”
Says Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, “He was electric in his last start. He can really miss bats with his two breaking balls. His fastball was special the other day.”
Flaherty tied an American League record by striking out the first seven batters he faced in that game against his former team. He tied a career high and an MLB season high with 14 strikeouts overall. His average fastball velocity was 95.1, the fourth highest game average of his career and his best in four years. He obtained 24 swinging strikes, one short of his career high set in 2018. Ten of those whiffs came on his fastball, tying a career high.
The rebuilding of Flaherty began as a free agent after last season, which included telephone conversations with Tigers pitching coach Chris Fetter and assistant pitching coaches Robin Lund and Juan Nieves. They noticed his fastball properties improved after his Aug. 1 trade to the Baltimore Orioles, though his ERA in nine games with Baltimore was 6.75.
“I didn't feel great and by the end, it was just, ‘How can I get outs?’ “ Flaherty says. “Regardless of how it feels and whatnot, it's September. You’re put into a pennant chase. It was, ‘We'll just see. Find a way.’”
The Tigers’ coaches had success that year rebuilding another free agent pitcher, Michael Lorenzen, then 31. They de-emphasized his sinker in favor of more high-spin four-seamers. Lorenzen set career highs in wins, innings and strikeouts, made his first All-Star team and, after a trade to Philadelphia, threw a no-hitter. They had plans for Flaherty, but only hinted at them during the recruitment.
“When things were getting serious, we were on a call for two hours,” Flaherty says. “We talked this out. They presented ideas, but they don't want to … Those are tricky calls. They can't give you everything, like, ‘Here's all the secrets of what we think is going to make you better.’ But like, ‘You know, here's what we saw last year, and we can kind of help you get back.’ I've definitely never gone through it.
“Those calls are tricky because it's like, how do you ask them, ‘What can you do to help me?’ And then they give you a little bit, but not be able to give you everything because ‘If you don't sign here, we don't want to tell you this is what to do.’
“But in the end, it was their effort and the attention to detail that sold me.”
Flaherty pitches against the Minnesota Twins at Comerica Park on April 14.
Brian Bradshaw Sevald-USA TODAY Sports
Flaherty signed with Detroit on Dec. 20. Two weeks later, Frankie Montas, who is three years older than Flaherty and threw just 1 1/3 innings last season, signed with the Cincinnati Reds for $16 million, $2 million above Flaherty’s salary.
“Obviously it was a different offseason,” says Flaherty, who was a free agent for the first time. “At first it was not like having a team or anybody to go to and say, ‘Hey, what adjustments need to be made?’ So, I was kind of diving into it with my own team, my group, and figuring out, ‘What do we need to change?’ Because obviously, I was healthy, great, but I was not able to sustain success the way I wanted to. I didn't feel like the ball came out the same way. So, we had to dive into that and start making those adjustments.
“Once we signed here, then it was constant conversation [with the Detroit coaches]. ‘Okay, these are the adjustments that we think we can make.’ Now I had somebody to bounce ideas off of and go back and forth and send video to when it came time for a [bullpen]. So, it was a little bit more of, I kind of had to get back to a daily grind. Every day. And try to get back to the way I wanted my body to feel.”
Flaherty did not overhaul his delivery. He still has the smooth, old-school, three-part windup – hands over the head, kick and fire. He worked at fine-tuning the tempo and sequencing of that delivery. Ever since he starred on the mound and at shortstop for Harvard-Westlake High in California, Flaherty has been at his best when he relies on athleticism more so than pure mechanics. The injuries had compromised that athleticism.
“There were points last year where I just didn't … I tried as hard as I could to just be an athlete and for whatever reason it just felt weird,” he says. “I would say that I'm moving a lot better this year. Whether you want to call that mechanical? Sure. But I think the way that I'm going to fix it is the way I've moved, the stuff that works better for me. We really dove into the way that I was moving last year, and it would just be like, ‘Yeah, that's it!’”
An even bigger change came with how Flaherty used his pitches. Back in 2019, Flaherty threw fastballs 58.4% of the time. Since then, as analytics grew more sophisticated and technology around the game exploded, fastball use in MLB has declined every year—down to 46.7% this season, an all-time low.
The change was driven by a new generation of coaches, such as Fetter, who grew up with those modern tools. They know average spin is harder to hit than above-average velocity, and that the shape of spin can be custom designed. Fetter, 38, was hired by the Tigers after the 2020 season after serving as pitching coach for the University of Michigan. In a reversal of the historical paradigm, change flowed up to the majors from amateur baseball, including colleges and private instruction facilities.
Under Fetter, the Tigers have reduced their fastball use for a fourth straight year, ranking among the bottom 11 teams. Despite finding his turbo-boosted fastball again, Flaherty is throwing about as many fastballs as he did last year (43.7%), which is below major league average.
The biggest changes Flaherty has made under Fetter are ditching his ineffective cutter (.545 slugging percentage last year) and leaning much more on his swing-and-miss slider and curveball. He is throwing a career-high 52.6% breaking pitches, up from 44% last year and the fourth-most in MLB (min. 500 pitches). He has cut the batting average against his slider from .339 to .224 and his curveball has the third-most horizontal movement in MLB (min. 100 curves).
Pitchers who trade fastballs for spin often do so at the cost of more walks. Not Flaherty. He became only the seventh pitcher with 50 strikeouts and no more than five walks through the month of April. Even allowing that the modern era features more games in April, he joined a very impressive group:
Sure, it’s only six starts. And Flaherty hasn’t thrown 150 innings in a season since his breakout year of 2019. But one month into this season, the baseball is jumping out of Flaherty’s hand again. The athletic feel in his delivery has returned. So has 97 when he steps on the gas. It took an entire winter, when a 28-year-old free agent starter could do no better than a one-year deal, to bring back Jack.
“There’s working hard,” he says about his way back, “and then there's also being super intentional about it.”
Off the field, the Oakland Athletics are a mess, pushing through a relocation to Las Vegas unwanted by nearly all except boss John Fisher and MLB's other 29 owners.
On the field, to the shock of the baseball world, the Athletics are doing just fine.
On Saturday, Oakland raised eyebrows on a crowded sports day by destroying the Miami Marlins 20–4 at the Oakland Coliseum—a win that moved the team to .500 on the season.
Before 7,809 fans, the Athletics jumped on the Marlins with 10 runs in the third inning to take a 12–0 lead. The offense never slowed down, racking up 21 hits on the day. Seven players had multi-hit efforts.
Key contributors for the Athletics included pitcher Paul Blackburn, who threw seven innings of one-run ball to move to 3–1 on the season, and designated hitter Brent Rooker, who drove in five of Oakland's 20 runs.
While the Athletics moved within a game and a half of first place in the AL West, Miami dropped to an abysmal 9–26.
As one of the most merchandisable film franchises ever made, Star Wars figures regularly and prominently in the promotion-friendly world of Minor League Baseball.
This year, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and company have been called up to the big leagues.
On Saturday—Star Wars Day, so designated because of its pun on "May the fourth be with you"—Baltimore Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson showed off a special bat for the occasion ahead of a game against the Cincinnati Reds.
The bat—designed to mimic trademark Star Wars lightsabers—is red with Darth Vader and Death Star designs on one side, and blue with Luke Skywalker and Yoda designs on the other.
Gunnar Henderson's Star Wars bat goes insanely hard 🤯
Philadelphia Phillies shortstop Trea Turner was placed on the 10-day injured list Saturday with a left hamstring strain, but he'll likely be out much longer than that.
Turner told reporters in Philadelphia that he expects to be out for about six weeks.
When asked how long he expects he’ll be out, Trea Turner said six weeks. https://t.co/CPArUeWL9N
If that projected timeline holds up, Turner would miss around 30 games and be able to return sometime around June 15.
Turner picked up the injury in the fourth inning of the Phillies' 4–3 win over the San Francisco Giants on Friday night. After a pitch glanced off Giants catcher Tom Murphy's glove, Turner showed off his incredible speed by scoring from second base on a passed ball. But he told reporters that he felt something in his left hamstring a few steps before crossing home plate.
Turner was replaced at shortstop by Edmundo Sosa in the top of the fifth.
It will be tough sledding for the Phillies (22–11) without Turner in the lineup. The 30-year-old is batting .343/.392/.460 with 10 doubles and 10 stolen bases in 33 games this season.
To take Turner's place on the 26-man roster, the Phillies recalled infielder Kody Clemens from the Triple A Lehigh Valley IronPigs.
Miami Marlins infielder Luis Arraez was reportedly traded to the San Diego Padres in exchange for three prospects and a relief pitcher on Friday night. Well, one of the prospects, Nathan Martorella, a first baseman for the Padres' Double-A affiliate, the San Antonio Missions, learned that he was included in the deal in perhaps the most unexpected way possible.
Martorella, who had just lined a single to right field in the top of the third inning of the Missions' game against the Arkansas Travelers, advanced to second on a walk and was standing on second base when Missions manager Luke Montz emerged from the dugout and signaled for a pinch runner to replace a confused-looking Martorella.
Martorella and outfielder Jakob Marsee, who was also included in the Arraez deal, then said goodbye to their Missions teammates before jogging off the field to the clubhouse.
Nathan Martorella was on second base when he got traded to the Marlins
He and Jakob Marsee then said bye to teammates on the field during the third inning pic.twitter.com/bjN8qwkhlE
Kudos to Martorella and Marsee for making the best of the situation, and props to broadcaster Steven Davis for his outstanding call of the moment.
Along with Martorella and Marsee, the Padres also dealt outfield prospect Dillon Head and relief pitcher Woo Suk-Go to the Marlins for Arraez, a two-time National League batting champion.
Washington Nationals shortstop CJ Abrams already has six doubles, four triples and seven home runs, but the loudest roar he received from his teammates in the first month of the season came on March 30, when he looked at a fastball just off the outside corner for ball 4—and for his third walk of the day.
“Whoa!” shouted second baseman Luis García Jr. “Barry Bonds!”
Abrams understood his friends’ surprise: Only 10 qualified hitters walked less often than his 5.2% last year. This season he’s above average at 8.7%, and he’s also reduced his strikeout percentage from 19.2 to 17.3. The underlying numbers suggest he’s still swinging at too many balls, especially over the past week or two, but he’s also making contact with them, and the Nationals will take it: By wins above replacement, at 23 and in his second full season, Abrams has been the ninth most valuable hitter in the sport.
Did he always know he was this good?
“For sure,” he says. “I just had to play my game.”
Well, actually, he had to change his game a bit. Abrams’s problem has long been that he’s such a talented hitter that he believes he can do damage on any pitch, no matter how close to the strike zone it is.
“Whenever I’m seeing it and I’m swinging it well, I kind of expand my zone,” he says. “I feel like I’m seeing the ball better, so everything looks good, but maybe it isn’t. I need to get back to getting my pitch.”
This is new vocabulary for a young man who never gave much thought to his swing decisions before he debuted in the majors at 21. Last July, manager Davey Martinez approached his young star, the jewel of the return for his previous young star, outfielder Juan Soto, who’d been traded to the San Diego Padres a year earlier. Abrams was hitting .233 and had walked 11 times against 66 strikeouts in 289 plate appearances.
“You’re going to lead off,” Martinez said. “But it’s up to you. If you can handle it, great. I think you can, but you’ve gotta make it yours.”
“And obviously he ran with it,” he says now.
Those results didn’t come immediately. Abrams was only slightly better the rest of the year, but he committed himself this winter to controlling the strike zone. He has taken two paths toward that goal, one focusing on his approach and one on his mechanics.
The approach method is fairly simple: The Nationals have instructed their batting practice pitchers to try to get Abrams to chase pitches outside the zone for the first two rounds, then serve up meatballs for the last two, so he can see the difference.
“You gotta simplify it,” Abrams says. “The game’s already hard.”
And indeed, he spent the winter working on the harder part. His agency, Roc Nation, put him in touch with Tyler Krieger, who played six years in the Cleveland and Atlanta organizations, topping out at Triple A, before retiring in 2022 to open a training facility in Atlanta. Abrams trained at Maven Baseball Lab every day this winter, focusing on getting Abrams into a good position to hit.
“You want to work on your mechanics, and there’s a time to work on your game plan,” Krieger says. “I’m a firm believer in having a good game plan. I just think that it’s like showing up to a gunfight with a squirt gun. You’ve gotta have good mechanics in order to have success. You can have the best game plan in the world, but if you’re not in the right spot to hit, it’s going to be hard at seven o’clock.”
So they attacked Abrams’s balance first; he had a tendency to jump onto his front leg, which wasted some of the power he could be generating with his back leg. Then they worked on his bat path.
“He would flatten and pull the bat more across his body,” Krieger says. “His bat would kind of fall more behind himself and get trapped behind, where then he had to start to rotate really hard and throw the bat more out and around his hands. He wasn’t able to really pull his hands toward the pitcher.” They did one-hand drills, “learning how to let the bat release itself rather than have the barrel go in front of his hands,” Krieger says. “That’s been big for his adjustability, being able to have the barrel come at the last second, not be the thing that leads his swing.”
Essentially Abrams found more time, which he has used to make better choices.
“When you have good mechanics, in my opinion, it allows you to make decisions later, and probably more accurate decisions,” Krieger says. “So [mechanics and approach] go hand in hand.”
Attitude helps, too. Martinez sees a much more comfortable Abrams this year. The kid who once looked unsure of his role recently now napped in the clubhouse 45 minutes before a game while García snapped photos.
“Gets his uniform on, gets ready, makes a play in the field,” says left fielder Jesse Winker. “Then, first pitch of the game, homers.”
Abrams just smiles. That was a pretty good game. Almost as good as the game he walked three times.
The flu couldn't keep Francisco Lindor from delivering for his team in the clutch.
The New York Mets shortstop left Wednesday night's game with flu-like symptoms but bounced back on Thursday. While Lindor didn't start the afternoon game against the Chicago Cubs, he pinch-hit for Joey Wendle in the sixth inning and delivered a two-run double. He wasn't finished.
The four-time All-Star came up in the bottom of the 11th inning with one out, runners on first and second and the Mets trailing 6–5. He lined a 3–2 pitch from Daniel Palencia down the left field line, scoring Brett Baty and Harrison Bader and giving the Mets a 7–6 walk-off win.
Lindor came off the bench to go 2-for-3 with two doubles, four RBIs and a run scored. It was a big performance for a Mets team trying to find consistency.
After the game, Lindor told SNY's Steve Gelbs that he spent the day trying to get ready to play because of how badly he was feeling.
Francisco Lindor joins @SteveGelbs after his big-time walk-off hit in extra innings
He spent time today trying to get ready to play since he is feeling under the weather pic.twitter.com/RVSQtJNXLx
This could be the kind of game that could get Lindor going. He has really struggled this season and is currently slashing .207/.287/.380 for an OPS of .667. He has five home runs, 15 RBIs and a 0.6 WAR. Given that he's in the third season of a 10-year, $341 million contract that's obviously not good enough.
Maybe he needed a touch of the flu to turn things around.
