Matthew Trueblood

Image courtesy of © Brett Davis-Imagn Images Let's start here: Bat speed is good. All else equal, you'd rather swing faster, rather than slower. All else is often not equal, of course, but bat speed gives you a greater margin for error, just as foot speed or arm strength do. The faster you can move the barrel through the zone, the later you can make swing decisions, and the harder you can hit the ball even if you don't quite catch it flush. It is, on balance, a good thing—or, to draw a tricky but important distinction, an encouraging thing—that Pete Crow-Armstrong has more bat speed this season than he had in 2025. There's no mistaking that fact, at least. According to Statcast, Crow-Armstrong's average swing speed is 74.3 miles per hour this year, up from 72.7 MPH in 2025 and up nearly 4.0 MPH since 2024, when he first got a meaningful run in the majors. He swings as fast as some of the top sluggers in the game, which was certainly not true even as he enjoyed a breakout, 30-homer season last year. The first thing you should look for, to assess the efficacy of a bat-speed bump, is increased exit velocity. With Crow-Armstrong, we have it. Crow-Armstrong's average exit velocity is up by 1.5 MPH this season, and his hard-hit rate has gone from average to plus, in lockstep with the bat speed itself. The second thing you should check is whether a hitter has sacrificed contact by swinging harder, and have thus set themselves up to strike out a ton. That's not happening here, though. Crow-Armstrong has gotten slightly more selective this year, especially early in counts, and his contact rate on swings is actually up slightly. All the news, to this point, is good. Here's the bad: Last season, a solid 33.9% of Crow-Armstrong's batted balls clustered in the Statcast-denoted sweet spot for launch angle, between 8° and 32°. Those are line drives and fly balls with the best chance to carry through or over the infield, and to land before an outfielder can run underneath them—while still having a chance to clear the fence, if hit hard enough. That 33.9% number was unbremarkable, but it was good enough to make Crow-Armstrong a star slugger. This season, that figure is down to 23.0%, one of the worst in the league. Crow-Armstrong is just not hitting the ball flush often enough. At first blush, you might struggle to explain this. Statcast has a metric to estimate the solidity of a player's contact, by using physics to estimate the maximum possible exit velocity given the player's swing speed and the speed of the incoming pitch and then calling a ball Squared Up if it exceeds 80% of that possible maximum. Crow-Armstrong's Squared Up rate is flat (or even up, albeit very slightly) in 2026, so he hasn't lost the ability to catch a fair piece of the ball. If he had, we would also have seen that in his exit velocity distributions, despite the boosted bat speed. It's easier to see it this way. Here's a plot of all Crow-Armstrong's batted balls from 2025, by launch angle and exit velocity. He found all that offensive value last year because he got quite good at hitting the ball hard in that launch-angle sweet spot—but also because, when you find that sweet spot, you don't have to hit it hard to get some value out of it. Soft line-drive singles live there, too. Crow-Armstrong hit a good number of those last season. Here's the same chart for 2026. I've highlighted two areas to which we should pay special attention. He's hitting more balls hard, although very weakly hit balls are also slightly more frequent. What's missing? A bunch of medium-speed liners that should be inside that blue square. Many of those would be hits, but they're simply not there. Meanwhile, look up at the top of the chart. Crow-Armstrong isn't hitting more lazy, routine flies this year. In fact, he's hitting fewer. But he's hit a bunch of unusually hard-hit balls straight up, which tells us something. Those are the balls that are still counting as Squared Up, and that are propping up his hard-hit rate—but they're still easy outs. They look like this. NXk5bktfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWdBRUIxSURWVkFBWGdSUlVBQUhBd0JWQUZnQ1dsY0FVMWRRQkFWUUJnUmRVMVpX.mp4 That left Crow-Armstrong's bat at exactly 100.0 MPH, but you don't care, because he hit it way up in the air and it never had a chance to be anything but a flyout. This is a frequent problem for him this year, and it stems from the increase in his bat speed—but not necessarily in the way you might think. Crow-Armstrong isn't out of control and unable to deliver his barrel to the right part of the hitting zone. He's just habitually, almost unavoidably early, and the nature of his swing yields lots of these kinds of batted balls. Crow-Armstrong has a steeper than average swing, and he catches the ball well out in front of him. That much, we already knew. It's why the Cubs were willing to invest in him for the long term, with a nine-figure payout that will look wise only if he at least sometimes flashes what he did for the first two-thirds of 2025. That type of swing gets the barrel working uphill toward the ball, and when it's on time, it generates a lethal combination of loft and ball speed. It looks like this: eHk5VmtfWGw0TUFRPT1fVXdsVFZRWlhBMU1BQzFGUlZ3QUhCQUZUQUZnTlZGZ0FDZ1lDVWxCUVVsZFFBRkFG (1).mp4 Or this: N3lSR3JfWGw0TUFRPT1fVndGWFZBVUZVZ1VBWGxJRlVRQUhBZ2NDQUFOWFVGRUFCbFlCVkZBTUF3WUhBUVlI.mp4 However, it's possible for hitters who work this far in front of their bodies to get too far out there, for long stretches. Crow-Armstrong reinvented himself offensively in 2024 and had a different contact point in 2025 than before. It also came with a different attack direction, which is the orientation of the barrel relative to the front edge of home plate at contact. Season Contact Point (in. in front of center of mass) Attack Direction 2024 32.8 0° 2025 36.2 4° Pull 2026 37.3 6° Pull It's possible to consistently barrel the ball at 36 inches in front of your body, but that's about the maximum. Beyond that, you're basically too early. Meanwhile, Crow-Armstrong's barrel is still moving. Once it passes that 33-36 inch zone in front of him, it's turning enough that (despite that loft that keeps him capable of getting good wood on the ball and slicing one the other way) a mishit is likely. It'll be a specific mishit, too, most of the time. It'll look like this. M3k2WnlfWGw0TUFRPT1fQmdaWFZGSU5VZ0FBQVFBRFZRQUhDRk5XQUFCUkFGa0FDZ1JRQUFSV0FGZFVBQUFB.mp4 The point of that tilt and that pull orientation in Crow-Armstrong's swing is to get behind the ball and send it screaming toward or over the right-field fence. Obviously, that won't always happen, but the swing is geared to maximize the chances of it on any given cut. When he misses, though—when he's not rolling over on the ball, but has just swept past the optimal zone in that arc before he meets the ball—it hits the upper, outer side of the bat and goes way up. The bat speed was still delivered to the ball, but the angle is all wrong. Flatter swings usually do better farther out in front; most hitters with tilt similar to Crow-Armstrong do better with deeper contact points. Right now, he's not missing because he's moving the bat too fast to maintain control. Rather, the ball is where he means for the barrel to go, but by the time it gets there, the barrel has already come and gone from that optimal zone. A flatter swing on which a hitter was similarly early would produce rollover grounders and whiffs. Crow-Amrstrong's swing creates, technically, better contact even when he's early. He's getting a lot of the bat on the ball, for a hitter who's early. In practice, though, it's a glancing blow, steered forward by the angle of the bat but much like a foul ball. It comes to the same thing as if he were hitting the ball much less well (or not at all), because those are virtually guaranteed outs. This isn't bad news, really. There are worse ways Crow-Armstrong could be getting to his underwhelming .675 OPS, in general. There are even worse ways he could specifically be suffering from his own increase in bat speed. Instead, he's still in control of his swing, and if anything, his swing decisions have improved. Swinging faster still should be good for him, in time. For now, though, he's yet to figure out how to alter his timing in a small enough way to compensate for being early, without falling into the trap of being late, as he was for some stretches last season. It's not easy to make that adjustment, small though it might sound. There are no guarantees that Crow-Armstrong will lock in and start producing a .900 OPS again any time soon. There is, however, a real chance of that—because his bat speed is up, and bat speed is good. It's just a matter of paying the cost of it. View full article

Image courtesy of © Raymond Carlin III-Imagn Images Ben Brown will start for the Cubs Thursday evening at one of the more successful attractions on The Battery, a suburban entertainment district in the northwest suburbs of Atlanta. It's his second turn in the starting rotation since the team lost left-hander Matthew Boyd to a torn meniscus in his knee, and Brown will be hoping to play stopper, opposite future Hall of Famer Chris Sale. The Cubs are in danger of losing five games in a row; their last win came in Brown's last start. In that outing, Brown managed four scoreless, hitless innings against the Texas Rangers, though he did issue one walk. Working on three days' rest after spending most of the season in the bullpen, he threw 46 pitches. Presumably, this time around, he will have a longer leash, and he might need to pace himself more. Normally, that would spell trouble for Brown. His fastball has sat comfortably around 96.5 miles per hour this season, which is where he's always needed it to be in order to find success. The shape of his heater has always been pretty much what a hitter would expect, based on his high three-quarter arm slot, so the only ways for him to avoid getting hurt on the pitch were to locate well and to throw very hard. For almost no pitcher is there a bigger difference between throwing 95 and throwing 98 than for Brown, as we've known him dating back to 2024. There's also his limited arsenal to consider. For most of his career, Brown has functionally been a two-pitch pitcher. He's tinkered with a cutter, a slider and multiple flavors of changeup, but he's only ever been able to rely on his four-seamer and a sharp (though short) knuckle-curve. Starting has tended to strain his capacity for fooling hitters with only two options at his disposal. Everything is different, now. That doesn't mean the results will follow, or that Brown is now set up to enjoy a long run of success as a starter, but to the hard questions posed by those past problems, Brown now has pretty robust answers. First, let's tackle that dead-zone fastball problem. The solution there (if, indeed, it turns out to be one): lower the arm angle, and change the profile. Arm Angle Pitch Type 2025 Apr. 2026 May 2026 Four-Seamer 44.1 42.6 39 Curveball 46.5 45.1 42.8 Kick-Change 42.7 41.5 37.3 Sinker - 41.7 40.7 From last year to this year, Brown made one slight downward move in his arm angle. Since the season began, he's made another. You can see the progression, below, in the way his arm works at release. A lower slot has meant a bit less carry on his four-seamer, but it's also given his curveball a bit more depth. The kick-change he's developed has more depth on it than it would from the higher slot, too. His sinker can run to the arm side more. The change takes his fastball slightly out of the dead zone, but more importantly, it frees up his arm to work more naturally. His other pitches have improved because of the tweak. That, of course, also answers the other problem. Brown's sinker is exclusively a weapon against righties, giving him two different heaters to work two different lanes horizontally and three different levels of vertical movement to force the hitter to cover a bigger zone. The kick-change is used exclusively against lefties, and it, too, rounds out his arsenal just enough. The fleshing-out of each as part of his attack has been made possible by the change in his arm angle. Brown's command and variety of shapes still aren't good enough for him to succeed as a starter without throwing hard, but the mechanical changes he's made appear to have helped him maintain his velocity better. The Cubs need to stop suffering losses to their rotation, but for the moment, there's reason to hope that they've found another good solution at the back end of it. Brown has shown more adaptability over the last several months, as he's discovered the limits of the simple, unrefined approach he used in the past, and he's been healthy enough to implement some new things. They're working. View full article

Image courtesy of © Raymond Carlin III-Imagn Images The numbers are a bit deceiving. The Cubs entered their series in Smyrna, Georgia Tuesday night with the third-most runs per game in the league so far this season, but that doesn't feel like an accurate depiction of the quality of their lineup. They've benefited, within one quarter of the campaign, from seeing a few teams overwhelmed by pitching problems. They've benefited, too, from loud hot streaks by Nico Hoerner and Ian Happ. They were a bit over their skis. Over the last three days, though, they've been exposed—and, of course, suffered disproportionately, just as they thrived disproportionately at other points. Alex Bregman hit a very timely home run to give the team a short-lived lead Tuesday night, but they eventually lost, 5-2, and Bregman's homer was the only hit they mustered. They're struggling. Since hitting his last home run on April 21, Nico Hoerner is batting .205/.280/.274. Dansby Swanson is 6-for-39 in May, with just one extra-base hit, and his walk rate has tapered off, too. Bregman entered Tuesday with a .661 OPS for the season, and Pete Crow-Armstrong's is on the wrong side of .700, too. Those four players will be in the lineup just about every day, though, as much for their defense and intangibles as for their bats. When they flounder the way they have of late, therefore, Craig Counsell has to look for ways to make up for them. On Tuesday night, that took the form of a second start behind the plate this year for Moisés Ballesteros. When Ballesteros catches, Michael Conforto can serve as the designated hitter, putting both of them in the lineup without taking out any of Happ, Seiya Suzuki or Michael Busch. It's a way to trade some run prevention for run production, and given the way Miguel Amaya is playing, it's a reasonable thing to try. Unfortunately, Ballesteros is hitting a bit below his best, too. He's 2-for-30 in May and hitless in his last 21 at-bats. He hit into tough luck Tuesday night in the shadows of the freeway, next to the outlet mall, with a 106-MPH lineout and a 107-MPH fielder's choice, but both were playable because they were hit too low. Worse, he's still looking like a shaky defensive catcher, struggling to navigate tough spots for his pitchers; framing poorly; and wasting challenges early in the game, as he did in the bottom of the first Tuesday. Conforto is the offensive bright spot for the team right now. He probably won't produce power all season to match the binge he's been on lately, but hitting the ball hard is just part of his early success. He's also dramatically reduced his swing rate this year, leading to a walk rate over 18%. Last season (and throughout his long career), Conforto maintained roughly a 45% overall swing rate, with good discipline outside the zone. This season, though, he's ratcheted that all the way up. His chase rate (the percentage of pitches outside the zone at which he swings) is all the way down to 16.4%, without a concomitant loss of swing rate inside the zone. His overall swing rate is down to 39%. He's honed his swing to catch the barrel within the zone, and isn't worrying about whiffs on the rare occasions when he does chase. The slightly smaller zone this year, thanks to the implementation of ABS, has been a boon to Conforto. He won't be able to sustain his extraordinary plate discipline, either, but he should be able to hold onto enough of it to keep getting on base well. That makes it very tempting, for Counsell, to look for ways to get both Conforto and Ballesteros into the lineup at the same time. There just isn't a good one. Conforto is a markedly worse defender in each outfield corner than Happ or Suzuki, and anyway, those two are impending free agents who rightfully want to be in the lineup every day. Politically and logistically, the only viable way to play both Conforto and Ballesteros regularly is to have Ballesteros get some reps behind the plate. Gambits like that don't often pay off, and this one didn't on Tuesday. Counsell might continue trying it from time to time, though—at least until one or two of his four slumping stars get going again. Managers have to make tradeoffs, and the Cubs might have to give up a few extra runs as they fight to score more consistently in the weeks ahead. View full article

Image courtesy of © Jerome Miron-Imagn Images In every start he's had against right-handed opposing pitchers this year, Alex Bregman has slotted in between two left-handed hitters, or between one lefty and one switch-hitter. In theory, that should punish whichever manager is trying to outguess Craig Counsell that day for any effort to get a left-on-left matchup with the likes of Michael Busch or Moisés Ballesteros, or to turn around Ian Happ to what has historically been his weaker side. Bregman, sitting in the middle, should get an advantageous matchup. Reality was never that well-suited to theory in this regard. Bregman has very narrow platoon splits for his career, and though he hammered them last year, he'd been pedestrian against lefties for the previous few seasons. This year, he's getting on base against them at a .400 clip, but he's only slugging .325—hardly the kind of punishment one is looking to dole out when a team wants to turn to a matchup guy for lefties on either side. Of the nine walks he's drawn, two have been intentional, when the other team decided they were fine with him being on base and elected not to risk having him beat them. More troubling, though, is the fact that Bregman has struggled mightily against right-handed pitching so far. He's batting just .227/.301/.336 in those same-handed platoon showdowns, which is most of the reason for an ugly .661 OPS in the first 5% of his five-year deal with the Cubs. He's not hitting for power. He's not hitting much, at all. Admittedly, there's a little bit of real cause for concern beneath the surface. Bregman's bat speed is down about 1 MPH this year. That's not a glaring issue, in a vacuum, because it's still at a level where many hitters succeed, and he's never been dependent on bat speed, anyway. He's also much slower afoot, with a sprint speed starting to reach positively plodding levels, and it's not fun to watch when Ballesteros and Bregman end up on the bases at the same time. On balance, though, Cubs fans would be fine with that—if only they (and especially Bregman) were on a bit more often. Most of the numbers would tell you not to worry, and if you're taking a far-sighted perspective, you shouldn't. What makes Bregman special at the plate is his command of the strike zone, and he's still chasing at an exceptionally low rate. What makes him special is his ability to hit the ball squarely and cleanly, on a line, and he's still doing that at a healthily above-average clip, too. So, why has he been so unproductive? Bregman is hitting a few more ground balls. He's whiffing a bit more. And his swing isn't producing the pulled fly balls that made him just dangerous enough to force pitchers to throw him lots of slightly less bangable balls, which he would then deposit into the outfield for singles and doubles. The cause of all these symptoms is the same: he's seeing a crazy number of breaking balls. This is the breakdown of pitch percentage by pitch type group and season for Bregman's whole career, but you can subdivide it in any of several ways and end up in the same place. Last month, he saw more breaking balls than he had in all but two or three previous months of his career. This month, it's much higher: he's seeing more breaking pitches than fastballs. It's true if you break things down by handedness. It's true if you break them down by count. Bregman is simply getting a steady diet of breaking stuff, and it's affecting his profile. As good as Bregman is, even he can't consistently square up sliders, without being unready for the fastball. As he always has, he's running great batted-ball numbers and an exceptionally low whiff rate on heaters, but much worse numbers on breaking balls. It's just that breaking balls suddenly make up a much larger share of the pitches he sees, so the bad things that happen when he goes to pitch his signature swing on a fastball and gets a breaking ball instead are piling up, while fewer of the good things that happen when he gets what he's looking for are there to counterbalance it. The dynamic of hitting between lefties so often could be part of the issue. For most of his career, Bregman has batted in lineups loaded with righty bats, so maybe pitchers are trying some new things against him in the rhythm of a different kind of order. It's more likely, though, that they're seeing his slightly reduced bat speed and attacking it. While your first instinct might be to guess that bat speed helps one hit fast pitches, what it really does is to let one make later decisions. Bregman is still making good ball-strike decisions, but as his bat slows down, it gets harder for him to wait long enough to deliver the barrel to stuff that bends, without being too late on the stuff that's hard and straight. That doesn't mean any of this is permanent. The rate at which the league has thrown him breaking balls over the last two weeks is surely unsustainable. It has something to do with the teams the Cubs have happened to face; it has something to do with what he's looked like on those pitches. He'll make an adjustment in the cage, and the team will face some pitchers who don't like their breaking ball as much, and it will level out. For now, though, Bregman has a real challenge on his hands. The league is assailing him with pitches that aren't his preferred targets. He'll have to figure out how to make them stop, or to profit from their refusal to do so. View full article

You're absolutely right, and that's gonna be the subject of another piece on Rea I'm working on. There are at least two key changes at play.

Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images If Colin Rea pitches six innings Tuesday night in the northwest suburbs of Atlanta, he'll reach 650 for his career. That's not exactly a significant milestone, in the historical context of the big leagues. It's remarkable, however, because Rea is less than two months shy of his 36th birthday, and almost exactly half of his career frames have come in the last two years. On May 13, 2024, Rea threw an unremarkable quality start: 6 innings, 3 earned runs, 1 walk, 5 strikeouts against the Pirates. To that point in his career, 'unremarkable' had been a pretty good encapsulation of Rea. He'd finally gotten some traction in the majors the previous year, with the Brewers, but before that, injuries had slowed his long ascent to the majors—so much so that he spent time pitching in Japan before coming back and finding a new toehold Stateside. He finished the night with 323 1/3 innings pitched in the majors, over the nearly 13 full years since he was drafted in June 2011, and a 4.56 ERA. Since then, though, Rea has spent almost all his time in the starting rotation of either Milwaukee or the Cubs. No, that wasn't quite the plan, in either place, but one way or another, Rea keeps being needed—and he keeps meeting the need. Over the last two years, 'quality' has been the word that best defines him, and there's nothing unremarkable about his career, anymore. In addition to doubling his career volume in his mid-30s, he's posted a 4.21 ERA in the last 320-plus frames. Born Jul. 1, 1990, Rea is the oldest possible person who could be listed at age 35 for this season at Baseball Reference; the baseball age convention is to give the player's age on June 30 of the season in question. If he were born one day earlier, he'd be listed as 36, instead. Nonetheless, he has more innings pitched since the start of his age-33 season (365, since 2024) than he had before that. More importantly, he's become so established that it's relatively easy to see him pitching another 350 innings or more—something that would have been almost unthinkable when he turned 33, in the middle of a 2023 season in which he was an up-and-down swing man for the Brewers. Among pitchers whose age-33 season came in 2005 or later, 34 have pitched at least 700 innings from that point to the end of their career. Mostly, though, those are long-time stars and potential Hall of Famers. Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, Zack Greinke and Roy Halladay are on the list. So are slightly lesser workhorses like Adam Wainwright, Tim Hudson and Mark Buehrle. There are several guys who pitched that much because that's just what you did back then—soak up innings at the back of a rotation throughout your mid-30s: Aaron Harang, Kyle Lohse, Ryan Dempster, Jeremy Guthrie. Only six of those hurlers actually pitched more after the start of their age-33 campaign than they did before it. Two guys (Jose Contreras and Hiroki Kuroda) pitched more in MLB after 33 than before, but they'd had long careers in Cuba and Japan, respectively, before coming to the United States. The main six—the six pitchers of this century whom we might call real comps for Rea, if he can turn in another couple of seasons like his last three—are: Chris Bassitt Rich Hill Derek Lowe Miles Mikolas Charlie Morton Ryan Vogelsong Two of these guys (Hill and Morton) are heroes of the player development revolution; they became stars late in careers that started out seemingly doomed by injury trouble or extreme hittability. Unlike them, though, Rea has no high-spin curveball story, and no multi-year, eight-figure contracts await him. Bassitt was in the same draft class as Rea, but is 16 months his senior, which means he's listed as two years older than Rea. Like Rea, he was a late-round pick, but unlike Rea, he gained a modicum of prospect buzz and reached the bigs on a normal trajectory; he was waylaid almost solely by injuries. Morton and Lowe each pitched fairly big numbers of innings before turning 33; they just stuck around long enough to be more voluminous in their old age than in their younger days. Bassitt and Mikolas had each thrown more than 500 innings before their age-33 seasons, so even though Bassitt shares that draft history with Rea and Mikolas went overseas like Rea did, each was much more established much earlier than Rea was. Remember, at the beginning of his age-33 campaign, Rea had only amassed 279 innings in the bigs. That really only leaves Ryan Vogelsong as a true match for what Rea went through, and what he might hope to achieve. Vogelsong is a fascinating case, too. He had some injuries—you really can't end up on this kind of list without some—but that wasn't his main problem. His main problem was that he was bad. After being a fifth-round pick in 1998, Vogelsong pretty quickly proved he was too good for the minors, but he wasn't good enough for the majors in any of his first seven seasons there. At almost the same age Rea did, though, he went to Japan, and he came back as something a whole lot like what Rea is now. Vogelsong came back from NPB to the team who had initially drafted him: the Giants. With them, from ages 33-37, he had a 3.89 ERA and pitched almost 800 innings. He was even useful (and occasionally heroic) in the postseason, en route to the team's 2012 and 2014 World Series rings. Baseball Prospectus still runs a regular feature called the Vogelsong Awards, honoring players who weren't in their annual preview book but end up having a significant impact in the majors. Rea hasn't ever been quite as good as Vogelsong was in 2011 and 2012, but he's already showing more staying power than Vogelsong did. At age 35, Vogelsong went over a cliff. His velocity dipped from 91-92 MPH to 89-90, and the rest of his stuff couldn't make up for the loss. Rea, by contrast, is sitting just under 94 MPH in average velocity, virtually exactly where he was last year and harder than he'd ever thrown before that. He's also using seven different pitches, including a slider and a splitter that each miss bats at above-average rates. In a perfect world, the Cubs would have Rea working in long relief. We know that for sure, because they came into the season planning on that. It was never all that likely to stay that way for long, though, and now, it looks like Rea will be in their rotation all season. He should be. He's earned it. And if he keeps doing this much longer, he'll be the best virtually anonymous late-blooming pitcher in recent memory. It's not enough to earn him a chapter in the next book about tech in baseball or to make his grandkids ultra-rich, but Rea is a shining example of persistence, resiliency, and having your best years just when everyone else is hanging them up. View full article

Image courtesy of © Raymond Carlin III-Imagn Images This might sound a bit joyless, at first, but lately, I find myself trying to catch Pete Crow-Armstrong lacking. It's become a pet project for me. I watch any single to center field against the Cubs several times. Each morning, I refresh Crow-Armstrong's page on Baseball Savant to see what new points have been added to the peculiar pointillist masterpiece that is Statcast's chart of balls hit toward him, with catch probability estimated based on the hang time of the ball and the distance Crow-Armstrong would have had to cover to get to the ball. I want to know: is it possible to hit a ball that any other center fielder could catch, but which Crow-Armstrong can't? It sounds a little silly, because (as we've already documented) Crow-Armstrong has made a couple of misplays this season. He misplayed a sinking liner during the first week of the season. He misplayed a ball at the wall during the Cubs' trip to Dodger Stadium. But we know those were just hiccups. As if to neatly confirm that, he's made the play on near-identical balls hit his way on other occasions this year. It's possible to be (very slightly) more reliable than Crow-Armstrong in catching routine fly balls, but it's his incredible range extension and the jumps he's using to beat every ball to its spot that make him special. I'm trying to figure out whether there is, in effect, any weak point in the phalanx he forms in the Cubs outfield. You've probably heard it said, by some broadcaster or other, that if a certain outfielder didn't make a play, it was impossible to make. Andruw Jones had that reputation. So did Willie Mays. Like the apocryphal story of an umpire telling a whiny pitcher that if he'd thrown a strike, Ted Williams would have swung at it, there are a handful of center fielders in the game's history of whom it's been said that if they didn't get there, it was an ironclad, unquestionable hit. In addition to Jones and Mays, Tris Speaker and Devon Whyte enjoyed that reputation. Broadly speaking, it was earned, in all cases. That doesn't mean it wasn't exaggerated, though. It almost certainly was. The halo effect often leads us to imagine that someone doing 97% of what's humanly possible is really touching or busting that 100% threshold. Jones, for sure, would sometimes be caught flat-footed on sinking line drives in front of him, and at other times, he'd be victimized by balls hit over his head. (He played way too shallow, even for his era.) Great defenders end up being remembered for their highlights, rather than their foibles, and anyway, the balls that separate a superb player from a nigh-supernatural one don't look like mistakes. They look like innocuous hits—balls they couldn't have done anything about. We can quantify defense much better than we used to, though. We can find those hang times and distances to cover on every ball hit toward a fielder, and Statcast can feed that into their model and tell us where the boundaries of possibility lie. Last summer, Crow-Armstrong made one catch the system thought had a 0% Catch Probability, so we already know he pushes that limit. But how consistent is he? Aren't there some balls falling in at the edges of his range that he could, theoretically, have gotten to? Don't get mad, but the answer is: yes, and no. Already, though, I think that means Crow-Armstrong is doing something extraordinary and historic. Here's a ball that caught my eye and raised my suspicions. TzA0bm9fWGw0TUFRPT1fRHdrSFZsTURWMU1BWFFSUVV3QUhCd0pYQUFNTVZWZ0FVRlJRQ0FCVUJBRlNBbFFB.mp4 Yes, that's a line drive, and yes, Crow-Armstrong was shaded toward left-center, but we've seen him run down balls at least a bit like this one. Was his jump even a half a second slow? Did he fail to accelerate all the way through the catchpoint? Was there a chance missed? Well, Statcast says no. This hit didn't register as having any catch probability assigned to Crow-Armstrong, and on a closer watch, I'm forced to admit that if there was a failure here, it was one of location: either Shota Imanaga throwing a ball there to Nolan Arenado, or Crow-Armstrong being set up where he was before the pitch. Besides, the elements were against him. Here's the first frame after the switch from the center-field camera to the one high and behind home plate on the play. I've put a square around the ball's position at that moment and a dot where it will land. This is a hard-hit ball, but it's both knocked down and pushed toward right field by the wind, in addition to slicing that direction because of its spin. Crow-Armstrong got a great jump, really, but he's 10 feet from the ball when it lands, which was the responsible way to play it, given the only read he could have gotten off the bat. He probably could have gotten much closer to catching it, but I don't think he could have caught it, and the truth of the art of outfield defense is that you occasionally have to play the angles, rather than trying to catch every single ball hit your way. For great outfielders, those plays are rare, but they do happen—especially outdoors, on windy days. Here's the other play from the first 10 days of this month that had me checking things. a0R2Tm5fWGw0TUFRPT1fVjFVRUFGd0JYMUFBWGdFQ1VRQUhVZ0FDQUZrTlVGUUFCVklBVlFzRkFGVURCd1lD.mp4 This one feels more like a limitation, right? You can see Crow-Armstrong balk just a bit off the bat. First, then, I checked whether he was caught unprepared when the pitch was thrown. Not so, though. Here's the Gameday 3D animation of Crow-Armstrong and Bleday at (essentially) the instant of contact. The center fielder timed his hop correctly; he was slightly in the air (and on his way down) as the ball passed through the hitting zone. (By the way, how cool is it that we can do this now?!) Crow-Armstrong does take a false turn, though. When Bleday makes contact, he initially turns his left shoulder back and takes a half-dropstep with his left leg. All weekend, it seemed, Bleday hit the ball hard to that very part of the park, and Crow-Armstrong might have been caught anticipating solid contact that didn't come. It takes him a split-second to get his momentum moving forward, instead. By the time the ball falls, you can certainly convince yourself that he should have been able to get there, with a better jump. He's much closer to this one than to the Arenado ball, and his jump was clearly worse. So the question becomes: was a better jump possible? Could any other outfielder have made this play better? Here's one piece of what looks, at first, like damning evidence. It's from a Marlins-White Sox game on the other side of Chicago, last season. b0daOERfWGw0TUFRPT1fVUFCU0JsWlZWd0lBWGxFTFZnQUhDUVVDQUZrQVUxY0FCRkJYQlZCVUFsVUJBd3RW.mp4 That's a heck of a catch, by Dane Myers—now of the Reds, as it happens. But Statcast didn't even rate it as overwhelmingly impressive. It gave a 95% catch probability on the ball. Yet, it didn't ding Crow-Armstrong at all for not catching the Bleday bloop. His catch probability on it was 0%, as far as the model is concerned. First, let me explain that briefly. I picked the above catch by Myers because it was the only ball since the start of 2025 that fit the same contact constraints as Bleday's (a 77-79 MPH exit velocity, a 33-35° launch angle) and was hit to center field, but which was hit as shallow or shallower than Bleday's. It's not hard to see that the wind played with both balls. Without wind (and with truer batted-ball spin), most balls hit like this travel an extra 10-20 feet, which makes them relatively easy to catch. These two are good foils for each other. They were hit relatively high, but they weren't really pop-ups, and they weren't hit hard enough to go a long way, but they were clearly over the infield. Conditions kept each from flying very far, though. Already, these are extreme plays, in terms of where the ball ended up relative to what the outfielder could reasonably have hoped to read off the bat. Two things separate the two plays in important ways. First, Tim Elko's flyout to Myers hung in the air a hair longer. Its hang time was 5.0 seconds, which is a lot of time to run under a ball. Bleday's wasn't much less, but slightly so. That left Crow-Armstrong with less time to make up for that misstep off the bat. Secondly, though, Crow-Armstrong was playing deeper than he usually does on his play. With two outs in the ninth inning of a game that wasn't especially close, and with a batter in the box who'd showed good power in the series, he was 326 feet from home plate when the pitch was thrown. Myers was only 318 feet from home when Edward Cabrera threw his pitch to Elko last year. One could pick nits with the Cubs' positioning, perhaps, but it seems like Crow-Armstrong was in a smart spot, in general. On this particular ball, it just left him with zero margin for error. The combination of these two factors means Myers had a good 15 feet on Crow-Armstrong, before accounting for Crow-Armstrong not getting a clean first step on the ball. It's not such a wonder, then, that two similar balls produced Statcast estimates at extreme ends of the catch probability spectrum. Here's the crazy takeaway: Crow-Armstrong could have caught this ball. That's true, even though Statcast absolutely would have regarded it as uncatchable, anyway. He could have drawn an earlier bead on the ball, but misreading the contact is almost a necessary part of this unusual piece of contact. Were the stakes higher, however, he probably would have dived for it—and he might have had a play. It's getting very, very hard to find balls Crow-Armstrong can't catch that are (in any realistic sense) catchable. That doesn't mean he's perfect. But as we've discussed before, he's pushing the boundaries of defensive possibilities. Hitting the ball to center field just isn't a viable option for Cubs opponents. Crow-Armstrong is, in some sense, a fulfillment of the hype attached to so many generational center fielders before him. He might force us to reconsider what the position can be. View full article

Image courtesy of © Dennis Lee-Imagn Images As midseason pickups who cost nothing but cash considerations go, Tyler Ferguson is a reasonably interesting one. He's a low-slot right-handed pitcher with a mid-90s fastball, a sweeper that can flash above-average, and a cutter and sinker that can play well when located well. He's 32 years old, but still has one minor-league option remaining. He was a college teammate of Dansby Swanson at Vanderbilt. Of course, pitchers don't get to age 32 with fewer than two years of cumulative big-league service time without having warts. Ferguson is reasonably interesting, but the Athletics—hardly a team awash in high-end arms—designated him for assignment a few days ago. He's prone to walks, and his stuff seems unlikely to consistently miss bats in a compressed strike zone. The Cubs traded for him because they thought he might be claimed before he got to them on the waiver wire, but they had to give up virtually nothing because he's never been a good big-league relief pitcher for an extended period. Why was this transaction worthwhile, then? It's pretty simple: the Cubs are desperate. With Javier Assad moving into the rotation to replace the injured Matthew Boyd, the team was an arm short. They're very short on pitchers whom they trust in the majors who can also be optioned to the minors, as exemplified by the fact that they had to designate Corbin Martin for assignment in the wake of his poor outing Wednesday night. They've already called up multiple pitchers they had hoped to stash at Triple-A Iowa a bit longer. If one more starter gets hurt, they'll have little choice but to stretch Ben Brown back out to work as a modified starter. If they get back an injured reliever or two, they could quickly face a roster crunch and lose some of their depth. They needed a pitcher with at least a modicum of upside who can still be sent to Iowa as needed; Ferguson fits the bill. For a team currently 26-12, the Cubs will have to answer a lot of tough questions over the coming weeks. They're nowhere near as securely placed in the driver's seat of the NL Central as they appear, because of the injuries piling up and the fragility that threatens their staff. Ferguson is unlikely to be this year's Tyson Miller or Drew Pomeranz, but he's worth a shot. It's only fair to note that pitchers like him—a low arm slot, feel for spin, average-plus velocity—often prove malleable, and that Tommy Hottovy and company have had success with such hurlers before. The team will, at least, hope he can give them five or six outs when needed while they try to get healthier and manage the workloads of their uninjured arms. View full article