Matthew Trueblood

If you're a baseball fan, you have at some point lamented that there aren't more triples in the big leagues. It might be the most universal opinion in the wide and varied community that is the baseball world. Triples are the most interesting play in baseball, and while the overall trend for the last century has been toward a more athletic, more impressive, (eventually) more compelling game, the most exciting individual outcome has become tragically rare. Many blame this on the fading role of speed in the game since the dawn of the PEDs Era in the late 1980s. Players are bigger, stronger, and the fastest of them are even faster, but there are fewer players who have what we used to call plus speed, and some of the fastest ones hit the ball over the fence too consistently to put all that speed into action on the field. There's an attribution error in play there, though, because here's the twist: triples aren't as much about speed as you think. Look at the all-time leaderboard for triples, and you'll see a solid wall of grayscale faces under squashed, logo-free hats. Of the top 50 hitters with the most triples in baseball history, only two spent any significant period of their careers playing after World War II. Those two guys—Stan Musial and Roberto Clemente—start to point us in the direction of a revelation. Study the many players above and around them on the career list, and you'll take another step toward that epiphany. They probably were fast, for the most part, but these were also some of the best power hitters of the Dead Ball (and early Live Ball) Era. It's just that, given the equipment and the dimensions of most parks during those players' careers, it was hard to rack up home runs. Hitting a triple wasn't just like hitting a double, only you were fast enough to take another 90 feet by becoming a blur between bases. It was a sign that you could hit the ball far enough to force defenses to spend extra time chasing it. The disappearance of triples in the modern game is much more about shrinking parks, a livelier ball, and better, deeper-positioned outfield defenders than it is about diminishing speed in the game. More long hits clear the fences. When they don't, they're pursued by faster people with stronger arms, to fences closer to the cutoff man waiting for the throw to the infield—and those people play deeper, in the first place, so they get to the ball more quickly than players did even a decade ago. That's why, after flatlining at what seemed to be a practical minimum for the previous 30 years or so, the global triples rate fell through that false floor and found a new one after Statcast data came into play. However, in parts of four big-league seasons, Seiya Suzuki has 16 career triples. That's despite having speed on par, perhaps, with the best years of Musial or Clemente, but nowhere near that of the guys you think of hitting lots of triples: Willie Wilson, Brett Butler, José Reyes, and other gap-splitting speedsters. Suzuki has tripled in almost 1% of his career trips to the plate, well over double the league-wide clip. Why? For the same reasons why Clemente was great at it. He hits the ball hard, everywhere, and opponents don't understand how or respect him enough in the process. Firstly, let's talk about the disrespect defenses show Suzuki. It's perplexing. Here's the player- and ball-tracking map of Suzuki's triple Tuesday night in Pittsburgh. This ball was not that resoundingly struck. It was hit well, to be sure, but under 100 miles per hour off the bat. With better positioning, it might have been catchable. More plausibly, Tommy Pham could have gotten to it much more quickly and held Suzuki to a double. In reality, though, the Pirates left fielder was playing just 293 feet away from home plate. That's why you see the depth of the angle he had to take back to the ball, and why it took so long to get there that Suzuki was at third before the Bucs could relay the ball back in. Pham's was egregiously bad positioning, but this is a habit for the whole league. You can call it general disrespect, or speculate that teams are trying to position their left fielders to collect the scalded ground balls Suzuki often shoots through the left side of the infield, but the fact is that Suzuki has batted-ball quality similar to that of the Athletics' Brent Rooker and the Rangers' Wyatt Langford. The league doesn't defend him as cautiously as they defend Suzuki. Here's the average starting depth of each outfielder against each of those three hitters, and against right-handed batters, on average. Player LF CF RF Brent Rooker 305 328 297 Wyatt Langford 307 327 298 Seiya Suzuki 302 322 293 League - RHH 301 322 291 One reason why Suzuki can often take third, then, is the fact that teams don't play deep enough against him. He hits balls over fielders' heads that should be caught, because they don't believe he's going to hit it that far until he does. TGw3azlfV0ZRVkV3dEdEUT09X0JRSllWQVVFQXdBQVdWRlRCQUFBQmxKVEFBQUNVbEFBVjFBQ1ZWQlVDRlZWQkFNRg==.mp4 There's certainly more to it than that, though, and we'd give Suzuki too little credit if we acted as though this is fully avoidable problem the league is creating for itself. After all, as mentioned above, he does hit it hard through the infield often, which requires outfielders to be ready to come get the ball in front of them. More than that, though, Suzuki also has a tendency to hit balls that fool you. When he drives the ball to the middle of the field, it often has a bit more juice on it than the center fielder thinks. Something about his swing—which is decidedly unique, in the way that he generates his cleanest contact to center, whereas most modern hitters gear up to maximize their power to the pull field—is hard to read. TzBxZWFfWGw0TUFRPT1fQkFRRUFGTUhWVllBQ2xRR0JRQUhDUTVmQUZnSFZnY0FWbE1CQkZZQUJnRUhWQVZU.mp4 Leody Taveras could have cut this ball off, if he had fully realized how hard it was hit. He didn't. A lot of Suzuki's triples look something like this; they involve a fielder slightly underestimating how well he hit it, and either taking a poor route or failing to field it cleanly when they get to the ball. Often, there's a combination of the player having been out of position when the ball was hit and their not being ready for the carry on it when they try to finish a play. TVpSME5fWGw0TUFRPT1fRDFOV0FWY01WbGNBRFZGVFZnQUFVd1FGQUFBQUJWWUFWMU1HQUFvR0NBUUhCd0VE.mp4 Suzuki's doubles look a lot like the typical double. His triples are unusually well-struck. Doubles Triples Player Exit Vel. Launch Ang. Distance Exit Vel. Launch Ang. Distance League (s. 2022) 97.9 17 261 98.6 19 292 Seiya Suzuki 98.8 16 257 102.6 18 319 Now, there's another element to a triples hitter, beyond power and speed. You also have to be a heads-up, high-motor player. Suzuki has those traits in spades, too, which is the final ingredient in the soufflé. He gets out of the box well, notices when a fielder has trouble with the ball, and knows where each park might have a quirk that allows him to take an extra base—like the deep corners at his own home, Wrigley Field. MzVERERfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWdoVFhGWUJCRlFBQ3dZR0JRQUFWMUlEQUFOVUIxZ0FDbFlHQVFRQ0IxRUFBZ3RR.mp4 The ability to surprise teams. A systematic defensive weakness of which he's well-wired to take advantage. Very real power and good speed, and the awareness to maximize the value of them. Suzuki is a unique player, and it's allowed him to hit a bunch of triples, in a league slowly losing that skill—despite not fitting the archetype many have in their heads of a triples hitter. It's a delightful thing to watch, and a source of sneaky added value for the Cubs' star slugger.

It would be unfair—it would be downright wrong, actually—to suggest that Shota Imanaga's splitter has been worse thus far in 2025 than it was in 2024. Based on results (not just when it ends at-bats, but whether it goes for a strike or a ball on all the others), it's been worth 1.5 runs above average per 100 thrown this year. That's identical to last season's rate. By StuffPro, Baseball Prospectus's pitch-valuation model, it's been a hair better (0.9, versus 1.0, where 0 is average and a negative number is better) than it was in his first Stateside season. By PitchPro, which gathers in the same inputs as StuffPro (release point, initial trajectory, velocity, movement, count and handedness) and then bakes in location, it's been better by an even wider margin (0.0, versus 0.3). However, we still have to note this: Last year, batters whiffed on 43% of their swings against Imanaga's devastating lefty splitter. This season, through six starts, that number has plunged to 30.6%. It's a major change to the primary changeup for the Japanese southpaw. To project how the rest of his season will go, we have to establish an answer to the question: Why is this happening? Firstly, let's talk about what it isn't. There's no major change in the velocity relationship between these two pitches. If anything, meanwhile, his rising four-seam fastball and his sweeper are diverging farther from the splitter in their flight than they did last year. The red triangle here marks out the movement of his four-seamer, splitter and sweeper for 2024. The blue one shows 2025. One risk when a pitcher creates more of a seemingly desirable movement separation between two pitches, of course, is that it's easier to spot the difference early. That would make hitters less likely to chase the offspeed or breaking ball in the pair, which would deflate whiff rate. Really, though, Imanaga is doing well at disguising the splitter, just as he did last year. Here's a 3-D representation of his arsenal (with average release points, trajectories and final locations) as seen from a right-handed batter's vantage point in 2024: Here's the equivalent image for this year: Maybe the latter image leaves the splitter looking a hair more detectable, but only that much, and it's not like hitters have reacted much differently to it in terms of swing decisions. They swung at 62.9% of his splitters last year; they're swinging at 61.2% of them this year. So, it's not velocity, it's not movement, and it's not release or early trajectory. That leaves two things that I do believe are contributing to the reduction in whiffs on the splitter for Imanaga. For one: he's throwing it more, right now. Here's how often he's thrown each of his pitches to righty batters, by season, since coming to the States. When you throw a given pitch more often, hitters will look for it a bit more. It's hard to make a significant adjustment, from a hitter's perspective, based on a few starts and a small difference, but if teams have been monitoring this closely, the surge in splitter usage against righties this year has been large enough to impel hitters to come into games hunting Imanaga's splitter more. The good news with this explanation for the downshift in splitter whiffs is that we should expect to see more fastball value, in compensation for it—and indeed, we do. Batters are enjoying much better results against Imanaga's fastball so far, but their average exit velocity and launch angle are unchanged, and they're whiffing on 21.7% of their swings at it, up from 17.7%. Because they're more ready for the splitter, they're less ready for the fastball. The other reason why hitters are finding the splitter better also comes with lots of consolation: the thing is in the zone more often, and closer to the zone even when it misses. Last season, the pitch's aggregate called strike probability (the chances of a strike being called if the batter didn't swing, across all splitters thrown) was 41%. This year, it's 45%. Here's what his locations looked like in 2024. And here's the same image for 2025 to date. You don't want splitters in the middle of the zone, but where he's living with it is fine. Very little hard contact will happen on a well-executed splitter there, even in the higher of the two dense red spots. Being able to land it there, meanwhile, forces hitters to either swing more or accept more called strikes when they don't. That's how he's coming out even in value, even while getting so many fewer whiffs. Imanaga has other pitches, of course. The sweeper is doing interesting things this year, too. He'll always be defined by the fastball and the splitter, though, and despite the lost whiffs on the latter, he's enjoying an excellent start to 2025 because of his adaptability. Eventually, he might need to more consistently push that splitter down out of the zone, but if and when he does, the whiff rate will rise again. In the meantime, his 2.95 career ERA is proof of his capacity to flummox big-league hitters in myriad ways.

I understand that, for some, this will be anathema. Many Cubs fans regard the white, pinstriped home uniforms as essential pieces of the team's identity, and a tradition as deep (or at least as important) as the iconic uniforms worn by the Yankees, the Cardinals, the Dodgers and the Giants. In truth, though, that's never been the case. While the Cardinals' birds on the bat; the Dodgers' trademark script and red numbers; and the Yankees' minimalist, professional look have all undergone very few changes in the last century, the Cubs only started consistently using pinstripes in the late 1950s. Even then, there were many, many changes between now and then—flirtations with piping on the sleeves and collar; a switch to pullovers, and back; and tweaks to the specifics of the logo over the left breast, among other things. The idea that the Cubs have a brand identity as strong as the other flagship franchises of the league has always been a minor delusion. That said, again, I understand the value of tradition and a certain wariness about big changes, for a team so dedicated to its own history. The Cubs are 150 years old (technically), and Wrigley Field (or parts thereof) is 111 years old. Those years matter; they are a part of what makes the Cubs the Cubs. In their new Blues Alternates, though, the team has stumbled upon a design that honors that very tradition, without being slave to it. The baby blue color is a callback to the road uniforms of the 1970s, but the pants are a clean white, with a dark stripe—rather than giving in to the pajama-inspired tendency to match colors with the tops, as so many City Connect uniforms do, and as those long-ago road outfits did. The logo on the breast is a stylized reimagining of logos the team used in the 1920s and 1930s, but again, it's not just a reproduction thereof. It looks good to a 21st-century eye, too. The numbers being in red is a welcome, superior use of their secondary color, compared to decades of Cubs uniforms that were really just blue and either white or gray. The standard, Cubbie bear blue alternates in use for most of the last quarter-century do use red numbers, of course, but that look is clearly and unavoidably an alternate. Its use of the deep Cubbie blue makes it suitable for home or road, but not as a primary home kit. The only other notable use of red in the last 30 years was the red bill the team's caps used to feature for road games, and even that is gone. The Blues jerseys welcome red back into the palette, with pleasing results. Both the numbers and the lettering of the names are in a font that comes closest to making the whole look feel too retro—but it's graceful, instead. It pays homage to the halcyon days the city enjoyed in the Jazz Age and afterward, with an Art Deco aesthetic that the Wrigleyville City Connects attempted but failed to meaningfully capture. The hats are a much-needed invigorating stroke, for a team whose sans-serif 'C' caps have looked more bland and blasé than truly classic for the last 25 years. The guitar-pick patch on the sleeve is a fun risk that ties the whole thing closely to something specific, but isn't distracting. The whole visage is just gorgeous. Admittedly, I didn't even expect to like it as much as I do. It seemed a nice change of pace from the City Connects, but little more. Instead, I'm seriously calling for this: the Cubs should bid adieu to the pinstripes, for good. This should be their home uniform, with the darker blues as available but sparingly-used alternates. Maybe the pinstripes could come out on occasional Sundays, or something, but I;m in favor of leaving the whole look in the past and turning toward a future that still has close ties to that past. The Blues should become the Cubs' new primary identity.

He's neither missing bats at a high level nor keeping the ball on the ground, but Jameson Taillon is finding ways to thrive. He gave up two home runs, worked only 4 1/3 frames and had a lone strikeout on March 28th against the Diamondbacks, but since then, he's made five more starts, and posted a Game Score between 55 and 65 in all five. He's averaging almost six innings per start in April, despite not having thrown 100 pitches in any outing this year. With Justin Steele sidelined, Taillon is the de facto No. 2 starter for the Cubs. They need him to hold up all year, delivering not only solid work and chances to win every sixth day, but durability. He's on the right track in that regard, with plenty of innings already under his belt and so few pitches on the odometer. One reason for the efficiency he's managed is that Taillon is leaning much more on his fastball this year than he has in almost any other year of his career—and certainly since he joined the Cubs. The pitch losing its place in his arsenal as he ramps up the four-seam usage is his cutter, which is welcome news. Though it's played a role as the pitch to induce weak contact and set up other things, the cutter is Taillon's worst pitch. Here's a breakdown of his arsenal this season, with the movement of his pitches charted on the right and the StuffPro distribution on the left. StuffPro, from Baseball Prospectus, rates each pitch a hurler throws based on its expected impact on run production. Zero is average, and a negative number is better, as it indicates that the pitch was less likely to result in runs. It's a pitch-modeling metric based not on results, but on the characteristics of the pitch: release point, arm angle, velocity, movement, and spin. Taillon's reduction in cutter usage at the expense of the fastball has been a good thing, but a year ago, it wouldn't have been possible. Taillon's four-seamer wasn't good enough to bear the extra usage. This season, he's materially improved the utility of that four-seamer. Here are his StuffPro and PitchPro numbers (PItchPro is related to StuffPro, but also bakes in location) on the four-seamer for each year of his Cubs tenure, thus far. 2023: StuffPro: 0.3; PitchPro: 0.1 2024: StuffPro: 1.1; PitchPro: 0.5 2025: StuffPro: 0.5; PitchPro: -0.4 Again, the lower a number is, the better, so the best number here (by a fair margin) is the last one. On average, when Taillon throws 100 four-seamers this year, opponents are likely to score 0.4 fewer runs than against an average pitcher. A year ago, for every 100 he threw, expected offense went up by 0.5 runs. But why has Taillon's fastball been so much better? As you can see, the answer has to do with both raw stuff and location. His heater is a half-tick faster than it was last year, and his extension on it is slightly better, but that's not the primary reason for the improvement. Rather, it's coming from changes to how the pitch is moving. He's getting more carry on the pitch—more induced vertical break—and more arnside run, at the same time. Here's the thing: I'm not sure how that's happening, except because he seems to be altering his targets. If his mechanics are different, overall, it's only very, very slightly. He hasn't made a change in his arm angle, or his spin rate, or the direction of that spin. He hasn't moved on the rubber. Normally, when we see a significant change in fastball shape, it comes with a noticeable change in mechanics, spin axis, or release angles. Instead, Taillon is throwing his heater in the lower half of the zone more often than he has in any season since the pandemic—and when he does so, there's a lot more run on his offerings. Season Hi/Lo Velocity Spin Rate Extension Ind. Vert. Brk. Horz. Brk. Arm Angle 2021 High 93.9 2418 6.69 17.9 3.2 43.9 2022 High 94.1 2370 6.62 17.8 5.6 42.5 2023 High 93.7 2329 6.73 16.9 7.6 42.9 2024 High 92.2 2280 6.68 16.2 6.7 44.1 2025 High 92.7 2313 6.77 18.2 7.8 44.1 2021 Low 93.9 2420 6.75 17.9 4 43.4 2022 Low 94.1 2373 6.65 17.7 6.1 42 2023 Low 93.6 2332 6.75 16.7 8 42.2 2024 Low 92.3 2288 6.73 16 7.1 43.6 2025 Low 92.5 2304 6.81 18.2 9 43.7 More low heaters will tend to mean fewer whiffs, and in the modern game, it can also make a pitcher vulnerable to power. With the extra horizontal movement, though, Taillon is fooling hitters enough to induce weak contact. They're still lifting the ball, but without the authority to make it hurt, most of the time. Meanwhile, throwing the fastball so much is giving him the ability to get in and out of counts quickly, working ahead and filling up the strike zone. This is a slightly unsatisfying explanation. I would love to have a clearer sense of why Taillon's fastball is moving differently this year, and of why he gets so much more horizontal run when he works down in the zone. In the meantime, though, we can at least say that the root of his success at being both efficient and sturdy lies in eschewing the cutter and leaning on the heat. With better locations on a primary pitch he throws more often, Taillon is avoiding trouble and giving the Cubs what they so badly need from their veteran workhorse.

Somehow, if the season ended right now, Carson Kelly would be the best hitter in baseball for the year 2025. Somehow, as a catcher hitting the age when most catchers decline steeply in all facets, Kelly is swinging the bat 1.3 miles per hour faster than he did last year; his walk rate is roughly triple his strikeout rate; and he's tapping into power he's never achieved in the majors before. Call it a homecoming, since he's from Chicago. Call it a fluke, because it sure seems likely to be subject to regression, just like any sample this impressive. Just know that a little bit of it is good, old-fashioned mechanical cleanup. As you know by now, Baseball Savant has begun publishing data on where batters set up in the box and where their swings would intercept the pitched ball, in addition to things like bat speed, exit velocity and launch angle, They haven't yet included stride length as a datum in that set, but they do offer visual representations of batters' stride, using three moments of reporting: Pre-pitch, when the batter takes his stance; The moment when the pitcher releases the ball; and The moment when the bat meets (or would meet, in the case of a whiff) the ball An animated graphic will show you, for instance, how dramatic Matt Shaw's leg kick was, and how far he ended up striding after that initial movement. The batter's boxes in the visualizations are plotted out into six-inch squares, so although the site doesn't report an easy number, an educated and careful observer can easily rough out a hitter's stride length. It's just Applied Pythagorean Theorem, along with a little judgment about what part of the foot to measure from and to. So, I examined Kelly's swing data (including stance and contact point data) for the second half of 2023, all of 2024, and the first handful of weeks of 2025. Here's what that stride looked like in 2023: Kelly's going right at the baseball, doing things this way, but some of the energy his swing is creating is likely to be wasted. That's because his stride is a little longer than his swing requires. Kelly is not a highly athletic hitter, reliant on getting into his legs and being able to adapt and attack in fractions of a second. He doesn't need this much movement to create torque. He's just reaching. Here's the same visualization, but with 2024 highlighted: Uh-oh. That stride got even longer last year. He still had a solid season at the plate, but there was certainly still some wasted movement in his swing. Now, here's him so far in 2025. I used those grids to figure out approximate stride lengths for each campaign. Here's how far the center of his front heel moved from his setup to his contact point. 2023: 15.3 in. 2024: 19.2 in. 2025: 13.6 in. I think we'll eventually get an official, Savant-published version of this stat, and maybe we'll all learn something about my skills in this strange measurement discipline. For now, though, the estimates will do. As you can see, Kelly's shortened that stride. He's starting from a strong, balanced position, and he's staying in it, because he's remaining more upright and focusing more on generating the torque to maximize his swing speed, rather than on moving forward to catch the ball out in front of home plate. His contact point is basically unchanged, but when his bat gets there, it's moving faster, and because he's moved his head less during his swing, he's catching the ball more flush. That's why we've seen his quality of contact spike so handsomely. If it were this easy, everyone would do it. Kelly might get back into bad habits with his stride, or the novelty of his new set of moves might wear off and he might lose the fine calibration required to make such superb contact. The league might figure him out a bit and start attacking him in a whole new way, forcing a wave of counter-adjustments that destabilizes this whole array of initial changes. For now, though, Kelly is providing more production than the Cubs could possibly have hoped for, and it's thanks to a simple principle: stay tall, don't overstride, and catch the ball squarely.

Wednesday brought a flurry of roster moves for the Cubs, as they try to survive a gauntlet of an early schedule that has seen them play teams with superb offenses, almost without a break. This time, the urgent need was to freshen the bullpen after yet another demanding, wild contest, so they recalled just-acquired lefty reliever Drew Pomeranz, whom they scooped up in a cash deal with the Mariners earlier this week. The bigger news, perhaps, was the team giving it a second go with infielder Nicky Lopez, who missed the cut for the big-league roster in spring training because of the scorching spring training showing by Rule 5 pick Gage Workman. After Workman committed two more errors at third base Tuesday night (the latest in a long string of misplays by a toolsy but unpolished defender, with no compensation coming from his overwhelmed bat), the team had little choice but to cut bait on Workman, who is likely to end up back in the custody of the Detroit Tigers. Lopez answers the otherwise sticky question of who could replace Workman on the roster, because the team has already had to demote Matt Shaw due to poor performance. It was too early to recall Shaw, and there aren't enough available at-bats to justify bringing up top prospects like James Triantos or Kevin Alcántara. Still, the bulk of the freed-up time at the hot corner figures to go not to Lopez, but to Jon Berti, who has acquitted himself nicely in his relatively limited playing time this year. The Cubs still have a bit of a looming bench problem. Berti was held back from a chance to start every day at third base, in part, because he is so valuable as a floating backup at multiple positions. Now, that job falls to the less impressive Vidal Bruján. Meanwhile, Justin Turner's swing speed is bottoming out in a way that inspires very little confidence about his ability to hit more than the odd single. Lopez makes it a trifecta of punchless infielders backing up the starting lineup. Nonetheless, the team should be ok with this configuration in the short term. Berti is good enough to bring stability to the bottom of the batting order and to third base, though that's not his best defensive position, either. In the medium term, the team's hope will be to get Shaw right and bring him back to the team, as they did with Pete Crow-Armstrong a year ago. As for Pomeranz, he gets the roster spot of the unlucky Gavin Hollowell. After giving the team two sparkling innings in what seemed like low leverage at the time, Hollowell set them up for the comeback win Tuesday night—only to be shuttled back to Iowa, because they can't afford to be down an arm for the next two days or so. If his appearance was any indication, though, he could yet play a larger role for the team as the season progresses. Pomeranz, 36, hasn't appeared in the majors since 2021, so this is quite the comeback story. He's purely a fastball-curve guy, and the fastball only sits at 92.7 mph, but it's taken on an enticing cut-ride shape that pairs well with the curve. He also throws from a very high arm slot, and the combination of his slot and his shapes gives hitters a very different look than does, say, Matthew Boyd, who starts Wednesday night for Chicago. That bullpen spot will remain a revolving door for a while, in all likelihood. Pomeranz is likely to make only a relatively brief stop with the team, unless he performs exceptionally well, is highly efficient, and can avoid being called in to soak up multiple innings amid one of the chaotic games to which this team seems uniquely prone. He's a superior second lefty to either Luke Little or Jordan Wicks, though, and since neither of them were eligible to come back to the majors absent a player being placed on the IL anyway, Pomeranz makes sense. He might be used to help neutralize the left-leaning danger cluster atop the Dodgers lineup, but if he sticks around for the weekend, he could also be of help against the likes of Bryce Harper and Kyle Schwarber when the Phillies come to Wrigley Field starting Friday.

Twelve days ago, Pete Crow-Armstrong was batting .211/.286/.263, and had yet to hit a home run on the young season. He was an absolute mess at the plate, but even then, you could hear the gathering thunder in his bat. He was swinging fast and generating some intriguing contact. He just needed to swing less often. We talked, then, about the fact that (unlike most hitters in such dire straits, statistically) Crow-Armstrong had a relatively simple path to being not only productive, but stellar: swing a bit less often. The goal, there, is not even to walk more. Crow-Armstrong has actually walked plenty, throughout this season, and some of them were "bad walks"—the kind that happened only because when he got his pitch, he whiffed on it or fouled it off, and the opponent worked around him otherwise. Instead, the goal is for Crow-Armstrong to get into counts where he can sit on a particular pitch, and not worry about fighting the ball off or flipping it out into the field somewhere. As valuable as his speed is, it can't turn routine ground balls into hits, and he was making too much low-quality contact early this year. Since that date, Crow-Armstrong has modulated his approach. Guess what happened when he did so. Since April 11, he's batting .366/.381/.654, with four home runs. He's still been very aggressive, especially within the strike zone. However, he's reduced his swing rate enough to force pitchers to approach him a bit differently, and to give himself a chance to hit a pitch of his own choosing, rather than one hand-crafted for him by an opponent. It's worked, obviously. More to the point, for his entire young career, it's worked. When he swings less often—not less often than other people, even; just less often than he tends to the majority of the time—Crow-Armstrong finds success. He gets himself into trouble mostly when he gets too much into swing mode. You won't find many hitters for whom overall production and swing rate move against one another this way. However, one reason why this chart looks the way it does is relatively universal: the hot hand effect. When a shooter in a basketball game or a hitter on the diamond starts to feel themselves, they get more eager to pull the trigger. That allows for the scorching stretches we sometimes see from great players—you can't score if you don't shoot, or hit the ball if you don't swing, and guys who are genuinely going well should be ready to do those things so as to take full advantage of their momentum—but it's also nature's cooling system. Eventually, you'll swing too much or shoot from too outlandish a place a few times, and the feedback will be negative. Thence another cycle of getting hot by being smart, only to get stupid as one tries to stay hot. Because Crow-Armstrong's baseline swing rate is so high, he's vulnerable to a more extreme version of this cycle, so he'll have to learn to manage it. As you can see, his swing rate has already crept back up over the last few games. Still, he's working some deeper counts, yet. It was a 2-2 pitch Tuesday night on which he hit a key home run in the Cubs' eventful win. That dinger bought the Cubs two extra outs of Shota Imanaga, because there was no way Craig Counsell could have asked his ace to go back out for the sixth (on a night when he was grinding and working hard against baseball's most dangerous lineup) if the lead were only one run. Because it was three, Counsell was able to get two more outs from Imanaga (albeit at the cost of another run), and you can make a case that the Cubs don't outlast the Dodgers to win that game but for the little bit of length Imanaga gave them there. It was facilitated by Crow-Armstrong, who (of course) also produced two runs on this swing, alone. I'm not yet ready to say he's turned a corner. Indeed, he looks poised to cool off again, because he's creeping back toward swinging too much. As he demonstrates his adaptability, though, his tools shine through more clearly than ever. If this trend continues, and particularly if he can mature into a hitter who doesn't get swing-happy as soon as he starts to warm up, the data tells us that he can be a formidable force in the lower half of the Cubs lineup.

At the tail end of last season, the Cubs claimed Gavin Hollowell on waivers and got him onto the big-league mound for a game. They liked some of what they saw from Hollowell, a 6-foot-7 righthander with an utterly vexing arm angle, if you're an opposing righty. His deception seemed to be ahead of both his command and his raw stuff, and the smart money said Hollowell would end up being peeled off the 40-man roster at some point during the winter. Improbably, though, he survived the team's considerable winter roster turnover, and once he got as far as spring training, it was relatively easy for the team to keep him. He can be optioned to the minor leagues, which is a qualification for a depth arm almost as valuable as any given pitch or characteristic, in the modern game. Tuesday, the team recalled Hollowell to the parent club. The lanky hurler did himself some favors by adding about a tick to his fastball, the four-seam flavor of which now sits at 94 miles per hour and touched 96 in his most recent outing, April 17 against the St. Paul Saints. The Cubs also had an idea, though, and the big hurler has embraced it: he's slid over to the third-base side of the rubber. From his upright sidearm slot, and with all that height, Hollowell gives opposing hitters a profoundly uncomfortable angle with which to work when he comes from that side of the rubber. He's releasing the ball about four feet wide of the center of the rubber. When hitters talk about some big, side-slinging pitchers appearing to throw the ball from somewhere behind them, Hollowell's new combination of setup and delivery is what they mean. Because of the extremity of these angles and the disparity in movement between his four-seamer, his sinker, and his sweeper, all three of those pitches fare better this spring in stuff models. The challenge is throwing strikes from such a bizarre angle; the strike zone gets smaller, because you're going at it sideways. Hollowell won't step into a high-leverage role for the team. He's more likely to be used as a bridge when a Cubs starter has a short outing, or as a sharp zig against the zag of (for instance) the high-slot, left-handed delivery of Shota Imanaga or the equally wide-sweeping but lefty look of Matthew Boyd. He's a temporary solution, at least for now, to the team's need for depth and fresh arms in the pen. That said, he's genuinely improved this season, and the new placement on the rubber gives him a new way to pose hitters difficult questions. As spare arms slotting into the underbelly of the bullpen go, Hollowell is a fairly interesting one.

There is a sizable, well-meaning contingent of Cubdom who would have you believe that Seiya Suzuki has been secretly elite, for a while now. Some of them are in the pockets of Big Wind At Wrigley—which is to say, they (rightly) took note of the extreme quiddities of the weather patterns at the Friendly Confines last year and (less rightly) believe that that masked a breakout whereby Suzuki stepped forward and became one of the league's best hitters. Others are just devout observers of park- and league-adjusted rate stats for offense, which scored Suzuki as 21, 28, and 36 percent better than average in his first three big-league seasons, respectively. I appreciate where those folks are coming from, because amid what has been a frustrating and protracted rebuild, there's always a risk that a team's best players will take perverse, misplaced blame for the failures of their franchise. Suzuki has been, inarguably, the best Cubs hitter of the last three seasons. It's not his fault that the team failed to build a total roster within which he would have been a sufficient linchpin for the lineup, or to add players who could push him down the offensive pecking order (until this winter, of course). It would be grossly unfair for Suzuki to be treated as the problem with teams who would not even have had winning records, if not for his contributions. Pumping up his accomplishments shields us against that danger. Here's the thing, though: At a deeper level, examining all aspects of his process and then zooming out to view his topline results, Suzuki has not been the caliber of hitter his biggest boosters would have you believe him to be. Counting numbers don't always tell the truth, and they never tell the whole truth, but it's true that he only hit 21 home runs in 582 plate appearances last year, setting a new Stateside career high. Yes, Wrigley might have dampened his power slightly, but he also had some process issues to iron out. He's been very good, all along. He was not, in any season from 2022-24, good enough to be the best hitter in a championship-caliber lineup. Ironically, just as the team acquired a player who removed the pressure for him to be that kind of hitter, that's exactly what he's become in 2025. Whether Suzuki can keep this up is impossible to say, but what he's doing so far is legitimate. It's elite, in a way he'd never been before. In 2023, Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus created a hitting metric called SEAGER. It's a backronym that pays homage to the foremost practitioner of the skills it rewards, Corey Seager. The stat itself is a compound measurement. It first maps the expected value of a swing or a take for all pitch locations, based on the outcomes hitters see when they do swing at given offerings (and, of course, on the likelihood that a given pitch would be called a strike if not swung at). Then, it evaluates each of a hitter's swing decisions. The first number it tabulates, then, is the percentage of a hitter's good swing decisions were takes on pitches on which the expected value of a swing would have been negative—versus, of course, the good decisions that stem from pouncing on hittable offerings. So, whatever the percentage of good decisions that come on takes is, SEAGER uses it as an index of selectivity at the plate. Next, the model calculates the percentage of pitches with a positive expected swing value at which a hitter didn't swing. This is labeled their "Hittable Pitch Take %". To find a player's SEAGER score, you just subtract their Hittable Pitch Take rate from their Selectivity score. A higher SEAGER score is better, then, and usually, anything over 25 puts you in elite company. Last year, Aaron Judge led the majors with a 26.5 SEAGER. Here are some key metrics for Suzuki in all four of his seasons in MLB, including one of the two major inputs for SEAGER and SEAGER itself. Season Hittable Pitch Take % Zone Contact % Contact % Over Expected SEAGER 2022 38.2 87.6 4.7 18 2023 35.4 86.1 3.9 19 2024 36.6 85.2 -5 18.7 2025 29.7 78.5 -5.3 26.8 Suzuki has always been plenty selective. What he's needed to, ever since he arrived in the league, is find a better way to cover hittable pitches—not just the strike zone, but the sections thereof where a hitter has to do damage in order to thrive in the American majors. Lo, and behold: he's done that this year. Specifically, he's gone from average or worse in terms of letting hitter-friendly pitches sail by to being in the 92nd percentile. He still knows how to tell a strike from a ball; his chase rate outside the zone is actually down this year. He's just getting a whole lot more assertive within the zone. I included the middle two columns as a way to understand how he's doing so much with so many hittable pitches this year. This early in any season, no one should trust a hitter's change in numbers if they've achieved an improvement without a sacrifice. If a guy has 100 great plate appearances in which they haven't had any negative indicators, that's not a permanent change; that's a hot streak. Suzuki, however, has traded some contact to get himself geared up and more attacking in his sweet spots. As you can see from the Contact Above Expected column (which compares a hitter's actual contact rate to what we'd expect, based on the quality of pitches they swing at), he began to make that change last year, but he wasn't really ready to accept more swing-and-miss within the strike zone. As a result, he did less damage than he might have. This year, he's showed up with some subtle adjustments in place, ready to demonstrate a different level of commitment to being an attacking, dangerous offensive player. Firstly, he's moved a bit closer to the plate. Here's what his stance, stride, and contact point looked like in the second half of 2023. He's never really been one to get cheated, when he swings, but even late in his second season in the majors, Suzuki was waiting to see the ball a fractional moment longer, which pushed his contact point deeper than might have been ideal—both relative to home plate, and relative to his own body. He was not much for going and getting the ball. Here's what Suzuki looked like at bat in 2024. In this particular way, little changed. This season, though, Suzuki has moved a bit closer to the pitcher, and a bit closer to the plate. It's not enough to even spot on TV, but in a game where a sliver of a difference in where the bat finds the ball can matter a great deal, the change is important. It's not just about where he's setting up, though. Suzuki's contact point is about 3 inches farther from his own body than it was in the past. He's getting on top of the plate more, and because he hits from a slightly more spread-out base, he's been able to get even more aggressive with his stride. He's catching the ball out where there's more power to be found. That he whiffs more in the process shouldn't surprise you; that's the nature of this tradeoff. But it's very much a worthwhile trade. That small move toward the plate has helped a great deal, because of the approach Suzuki has taken this spring. He's noticed, over the years, that pitchers felt they could bully him and set him up inside (often with sinkers down and in, which he would too often foul off, but not exclusively in that way), then go away and either freeze him or draw a flailing, reaching swing. He had a very general, middle-middle approach last year, and because opposing pitchers don't make enough mistakes to turn that into an especially fruitful approach, he created only as much power as their slips permitted. This year's Suzuki is laying off that pitch inside, for the most part. He knows where pitchers want to live against him, and he's in position—physically and mentally—to make them die there, instead. Because he's closer to that outer third, and because he's swinging more aggressively and getting the bat head out there, Suzuki's pull rate has risen sharply, even as he focuses more of his swings on the outer half. He's lifting the ball more often, because his only grounders now are the balls on which he's a hair too early, and therefore rolls over. Anything he times better is still likely to be pulled, but in the air. He's not swinging quite as fast this year, and that might remain true from now on. Set to turn 31 later this summer, his bat speed might be in for irreversible (if gentle) decline. It doesn't really matter, though. With a better-organized approach, Suzuki is making higher-value contact even amid a slight diminution in swing speed. Orr also created a statistic called Damage Rate, which gives the percentage of batted balls by a hitter that meet a slightly more rigorous standard for expected power than the one offered by (say) Baseball Savant, which uses Barrel Rate for the same purpose. Season Damage% 90th Percentile Exit Velocity Pulled Fly Ball % 2022 22.6 104.8 3.5 2023 23.2 106.3 5.9 2024 30.6 106.8 6.5 2025 33.3 108.5 8.8 Having Kyle Tucker alongside him in the lineup has certainly helped Suzuki find a few more pitches to hit. He's made significant and valuable changes independent of that, though. It's not just better weather that has allowed him to hit six home runs early this year. It's a full-scale change of approach that has taken him from good to great in several categories. He was a great hitter the last three years. Now, he's inarguably more dangerous than ever.

Look, this is just a bit of silliness for a Monday morning. But I figure we might as well have some fun, while we're all here. I woke up with a rather humdrum line of poetry in my head and decided to humdrum it all the way out into a full poem. Here it is: Matt Shaw had far too long a stride at bat. He hunched and lunged whene'er he swung—fell flat. A trip to D’Moines will do him good, I think. Without him, though, Chicago’s armor’s chinked. A lineup hole, a question mark, and that Is not just ‘cause they’ve mounted lousy stats. Were this the org they truly ought to be, Their youth would be a surer strength—a key. This problem any oracle could’ve told. On fact’ry lines, you oughtn’t break the mold. Farm systems are, perhaps, outdated terms. When th'industry’s high-tech fires so fiercely burn. A fairer sport—a poet’s—Shaw’s would be, But you can’t mass-produce the bumble bee.

Over the weekend, MLB.com reporter Mark Feinsand reported that the Cubs and center fielder Pete Crow-Armstrong have had discussions "about an extension worth roughly $75 million." He later issued a clarification to that tweet, stating that the deal would only have reached that range if all the options involved had been exercised. That's an important clarification, indeed, because the difference between a pre-arbitration extension that guarantees $75 million and one that can merely max out there is often the difference between a house and a housefly. In this case, according to sources familiar with the proposal, the truth is closer to the latter. The Cubs control Crow-Armstrong's services through 2030. A deal that begins next year would have to cover five years of team control before eating into his free agency, and that is the most important reason to expect the two sides to move closer together on a deal over time. While the shape of this particular deal never fully came into focus, a source said the general structure would likely have resembled this: 2026: $1 million 2027: $2 million 2028: $4 million 2029: $8 million 2030: $16 million Add a signing bonus (likely around $5 million), and that would have secured around $36 million for Crow-Armstrong through the years for which he's assured of being under team control. The real crux of the deal, though, would be the years thereafter. Sources said Crow-Armstrong would stand to make somewhere between $20 million and $25 million per year for what would otherwise be his first two free-agent years, were a deal to come to fruition. The Cubs, however, aren't yet ready to guarantee those seasons, which would be his age-29 and age-30 campaigns. So far, Crow-Armstrong's lack of a coherent approach at the plate has stunted his development, even as he's racked up value by being one of the best defenders and baserunners in the league. While there remains (in the team's eyes) a real risk that he won't hit enough to stick in the starting lineup, they're wary of committing to those years, when his defense could also be starting to slip. Let's sketch this out. If both of those seasons were guaranteed, it would push the value of the deal as high as $80 million. In reality, though, the Cubs were offering two team options, with a buyout similar to the size of the signing bonus, which likely meant that the guaranteed money in the deal was around $40 million. 2031: $22 million ($6 million buyout) 2032: $24 million ($2 million buyout) If you're part of Crow-Armstrong's camp, that deal is not especially appealing. It does ensure that he makes generational money over the course of his career, but severely caps him in terms of ceiling. One source speculated that guaranteeing the first year of what would be free agency and adding a similar team option for 2033 could be an effective compromise. In that case, we'd be talking about a deal with a floor around $65 million and the chance to reach nine figures. Again, though, the Cubs aren't ready to take that much bigger leap, especially if it means moving more of the total money toward the front end of the deal. Even as they've given him a wide runway and an opportunity to prove himself as anywhere from the next Andrew McCutchen to the next Kevin Kiermaier, they harbor quiet concerns that his extremely aggressive approach will hamper his offensive output throughout his career. Each side has some degree of interest in a deal to keep Crow-Armstrong with the Cubs well into the 2030s. Right now, they're not especially close to agreeing on the terms of such a deal, but as Crow-Armstrong settles into his job and shows increasingly encouraging flashes of offensive competence, that possibility becomes more like a reality. The fact that the Cubs control him for what could easily be the first 1,000 games of his career gives them ample leverage. Crow-Armstrong's leverage, meanwhile, is the fact that his tools could permit him to blossom into one of the best players in the game—rapidly tripling his reasonable asking price. The Cubs have to decide how long to wait him out before taking a step toward him in talks, to avoid suddenly finding him much harder to sign when they most want to.

Four score minus two years ago, a few brave people (with hundreds of thousands at their backs and millions standing shoulder-to-shoulder in their path) brought forth upon this continent the first worthwhile version of the United States of America. Jackie Robinson took the field for the Brooklyn Dodgers that day, breaking what had been a six-decade color barrier for entry into Major League Baseball. Robinson, a former Army officer who made a stand against segregation on the Texas base where he served during World War II, was an acutely self-aware symbol of the nascent 20th-century Civil Rights Movement. At various times in the decades since then, biographers and orthogonal narrators of that moment have downplayed that fact, preferring to cast Robinson as someone who just wanted to play his beloved game without fetter or restriction. He did want that equality of opportunity, but not in some boyish, vapid way, and not just because he had a deep competitive fire. By the time Robinson and Branch Rickey set fire to the official barrier between MLB and the Negro Leagues, the fire of the Civil Rights Movement had been burning for a handful of years. It wasn't just Robinson who spoke up and fought successfully against segregation during World War II, but he had a certain level of privilege and leverage: he was serving domestically, not in combat, and his excellent educational background (he was raised in an integrated Pasadena, California, and attended UCLA) made him much more difficult to cast as a troublemaker or to browbeat than many other servicepeople of color were. When the Allies defeated the Nazis (for the moment) in May 1945 and then mercilessly crushed Japan with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, huge waves of soldiers returned from battlefields where they and their fellows had been wounded, tortured, killed, or traumatized by the violence they themselves had had to inflict, in order to stay alive or complete a mission on which they were told the fate of their beloved Republic hinged. A great many of those soldiers, Black and White alike, came home disillusioned and resentful. The way the Armed Services themselves treated divisions of different colors was intentionally disparate. White soldiers got better weapons, better assignments, better supplies, and far, far more respect. At times, Black soldiers—and not a few White ones, watching it all happen—felt that they were fighting to preserve a country built on lip service to ideals it was betraying even as it demanded they put their lives in peril. When all those soldiers came home, the disparity in the opportunities and the aid that awaited them was just as wide. It was galvanizing, for Black communities beginning to be empowered by the Great Migration and the roots they'd put down over the previous generation in places more like Pasadena than like Shreveport, La. It was also eye-opening, for many White people who had previously held segregationist, racist views or had failed to grasp the profundity of the rot at the root of the American flower. Robinson was not uniquely talented, among the greats of the Negro Leagues. He was not a happy accident—a "lucky us" scouting find by Rickey and the Dodgers. He was not just a ballplayer, though even he sometimes used that oversimplification as a shield to keep the (literal) haters at bay. He was the result of a monthslong pressure campaign by local and national groups in favor of racial progress, involving coordinated letter-writing; a rising tide of editorials and opinion columns in even White-owned newspapers, from even White columnists; and boycotts. He was carefully chosen for his background as a part of that movement, having won a court-martial after being arrested for refusing to move to the back of a military transport bus. He was chosen for his commitment to nonviolence and for his refusal to compromise on the question of his own qualifications or humanity. He was the tip of the spear that would be shoved into the heart of Jim Crow, inch by inch, by Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, and millions more over the ensuing three decades. He was also a beneficiary of the time being right. Seeing the widespread disrespect and maltreatment that befell even heroes of battles on which hung the question of the survival of American democracy made many see the dark hypocrisy at the heart of their country. Spending a decade fighting (not, at first, with weapons and troops, but fighting straight through, from 1935 or so through the end of the war) the Nazis and their atrocious, vile extermination campaign against so many innocent civilians threw the sins of American racism into such sharp relief that it could no longer be ignored. Yes, therefore, Robinson was a DEI hire. That is, unequivocally, a good thing, and the clearest illustration of the need for such hires that can be offered. He was an exceptionally qualified applicant for a job long held by players who were much worse than him, sheltered from competition with him by systematic racism. He brought diversity, equality and inclusion into the workplace, not diminishing meritocracy in the process, but introducing real meritocracy for the first time in the history of that workplace. It's important to say these things now, because the United States has sagged badly since gaining all the ground that Robinson helped begin claiming 80 years ago. America has never been what it claimed to be, and for some, that illegitimizes it entirely. For others, inexcusably but truly, it's not a problem, because they never wanted America to be what it claimed to be, anyway. A plurality of us live in the middle. We believe that what America aspires to—not what Thomas Jefferson or George Washington (let alone Andrew Jackson or Richard Nixon) aspired to, but what the country has stood for in a broad sense over almost two and a half centuries—is worthwhile. We believe that its failure to even come especially close to that goal is unacceptable, but not in such a way as to make continuing to pursue that goal unworthy. The United States has never met its own standards for success. The American dream has yet to be realized. Until this date in 1947, though, the country didn't even try—not really, not hard enough. Beginning with the movements and efforts that culminated in that day, though, we did try, and try hard, for a long time. The results weren't good enough, because "good enough", like the American dream itself, is perhaps something only to be chased, and never to be grasped. However, looking back over the last 78 years—to Parks on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and to Lewis and King on the bridge in Selma; to Harry Truman following Rickey's lead by desegregating the military, and the Supreme Court following it by desegregating the nation's schools; to movements that gave rise to generations of genuinely empowered Black thinkers, artists, and businesspeople; to Barack Obama in Grant Park in 2008—it's impossible to conclude that there wasn't progress. It's impossible not to believe that that progress was worthwhile, and hard for me not to conclude that there is hope yet for the country Robinson brought forth upon the diamond in 1947. Yet, we're surrounded by urgent indicators that all that progress is in jeopardy. The Department of Defense, newly led by a coalition dedicated to erasing that progress and the hope it infused in so many, tried to remove Robinson's story from before he became a sports hero, because they know how much power lies in the connection between his service (and the racism he faced therein) and his later barrier-breaking, given the way World War II stirred the movement. Corporations, including MLB, are being bullied and cowed into either doing away with DEI initiatives or pretending they matter less than they do, all on the urgent and diametrically dishonest premise that DEI damages meritocracy, rather than being its only reliable set of guiding principles in a multicultural world. Abraham Lincoln, himself a deeply flawed man with no stainless racial record, faced a moment like this. He stood astride a country that was fracturing and falling apart, because (in two very different ways) its two halves could no longer live with the lies they had told each other to make the union work in the first place. Lincoln himself saw right through the Declaration of Independence, to its hidden agendas and crucial elisions. Still, he knew that the best hope for the future of his people—even the ones in the opposing uniforms—was to re-establish that the United States was "conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." He knew that promise had not been delivered upon, and he knew it would be a long time before it would be, but he believed it was worth persisting in the pursuit. Now, as then, we find ourselves facing a test of "whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." It's not a hopeful moment. When Lincoln resorted to those words, he was standing amid a battlefield still pockmarked by pools of blood. It's comforting, though, to remember that while Lincoln came just 80 years after Jefferson and his Declaration, Robinson came just 80 years after Lincoln. Robinson was the first beacon of light in a generation of it—of shining, surging hope, and huge victories. He's the first symbol of America making a more serious, informed, earnest dedication to its founding ideals, and although those ideals now seem as much in danger as they did in the days just before Gettysburg or D-Day, Robinson's legacy is the reminder that we have already come a long way, and that bravely pushing forward against resistance can take us even further. The last two decades, with a bit less bloodshed than the Civil War or World War II on the parts of American soldiers, have done plenty to open the eyes and the minds of Americans. That hopeful plurality with which I identified myself above is better able to see and name the things they're fighting for, and the things they're fighting against, than such pluralities could have been at any previous moment of American history. Ultimately, that only matters if we all here dedicate ourselves to the great task remaining before us. Today, when you turn on a baseball game and everyone is wearing Jackie Robinson's 42, consider the gravity of that symbol, but remember that it's a mere echo of the real moment that mattered. Robinson, whose most famous bit of wisdom was that we only matter if we leave a mark on one another, would surely want you to see his mark on the backs of so many players and think about how you can leave your own.