Thursday’s News & Notes
| Team | Yesterday | Today | Pitching Probables |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rochester | Won, 5-3 | @ Lehigh Valley, 6:45pm | J. Kent (1-0, 7.27) vs. |
| Harrisburg | Lost, 4-2 | vs. Somerset, 6:30pm | Ogasawara (2-1, 2.29) vs. Rivas (2-3, 7.11) |
| Wilmington | Lost, 3-1 | vs. Bowling Green, 6:35pm | Y. Tejeda (1-3, 4.82) vs. Kartsonas (2-1, 4.91) |
| Fredericksburg | Won, 5-0 | vs. Hill City, 6:35pm | Portorreal (0-1, 3.94) vs. Oakie (0-3, 4.65) |
| FCL Nationals | Lost, 7-6 (8 inn.) |
OFF DAY | |
| DSL Nationals | OFF DAY | @ DSL Tigers1 @ 10am |
Rochester 5 Lehigh Valley 3
• Champlain (W, 5-1) 5IP, 4H, 3R, 3ER, 1BB, 7K, HR, HBP
• Yean (SV, 9) 1IP, 0H, 0R, 0BB, 0K
• Pinckney 3-4, R, SB, CS
• King 2-5, 2B, RBI, 2K
• Barrera 1-1, 2R, 3BB, 2RBI
The Red Wings scored all their runs in the 2nd but got enough pitching to beat the IronPigs, 5-3. Chandler Champlain picked up his fifth win with all three Lehigh Valley runs allowed on four hits (one HR) and a walk. He struck out seven. Four relievers each put up a goose egg, with holds going to Andre Granillo, PJ Poulin, and Seth Shuman, and the save going to Eddie Yean. Andrew Pincknew led the Rochester hit column with three singles, followed by Seaver King with a single and a double.
Somerset 4 Harrisburg 2
• Luckham (L, 3-5) 7IP, 10H, 3R, 3ER, 1BB, 2K
• E. Mejia 1IP, 1H, 0R, 0BB, 3K
• Wallace 3-5, R, 2B
• S. Brown 2-5, R, HR, RBI
Harrisburg got 13 runners on base but was only able to push across two as Somerset doubled ’em up, 4-2. Kyle Luckham scattered ten hits but let in three runs over seven innings. He walked one and struck out two in his fifth loss. Sam Brown homered to break up the shutout and singed while Cayden Wallace had two safeties and a two-bagger to lead the Senators offense, which went 1-for-10 with RISP and left ten men on base.
Bowling Green 3 Wilmington 1
• Maddox (L, 3-5) 5IP, 3H, 2R, 2ER, 2BB, 6K, BK, WP
• Biven 2IP, 1H, 0R, 0BB, 1K
• Petry 2-4, 2B(10)
• A. Feliz 2-4
The Blue Rocks’ slide extended to five games with a 3-1 loss to the Hot Rods. Riley Maddox took the loss despite turning in a solid five innings of two-run ball on three hits and two walks with six whiffs. Wilmington barely avoided the shutout, pushing across the long run on a two-out RBI by Ethan Petry in the bottom of the 9th. Petry and Angel Feliz both went 2-for-4 to lead the Blue Rocks’ seven-hit offense.
Fredericksburg 5 Hill City 0
• Tepper (W, 1-0) 5IP, 4H, 0R, 2BB, 4K
• Amaral 2IP, 0H, 0R, 0BB, 4K
• Willits 2-4, 2R, HR(5), RBI, 2K
• James 2-4, R, 2RBI
• Moroknek 1-3, 3B, BB
Fredericksburg’s steamroll through the Carolina League continued with a 5-0 shutout of Hill City for their seventh straight win. Mikey Tepper pitched five full innings for the first time in his career as he picked up his first win of ’26. Led by Austin Amaral, three relievers combined for four scoreless to notch the FredNats’ fourth whitewash. Eli Willits singled and homered while Coy James singled twice and drove in two to lead the Fredericksburg offense. Roster moves: RHP Austin Amaral demoted from Wilmington.
FCL Mets 7 FCL Nationals 6 (8 inn.)
• Bothwell 3IP, 5H, 5R, 5ER, 0BB, 4K, HR
• Cerkownyk (L, 1-1) 1IP, 0H, 2R, 1ER, 0BB, 0K, HBP, WP
• Arias 3-4, 2R, 2B, HR, 2RBI
• Tavares 3-4, R, 2B, 2RBI, SB
• Cortesia 2-5, CS
The F-Nats erased an early 5-0 deficit and took a 6-5 lead in the 8th but were walked off by the F-Mets, 7-6. Ty Bothwell was dinged for five runs on five hits, including a two-run HR over three innings. The loss went to Brady Cerkownyk on a pair of sac flies after a wild pitch moved the free runner to third, a hit batsman and steal put two runners into scoring position with nobody out.
A note for the big board: Jackson Kent (2024 draftee) is playing for the York Revolution of the Atlantic League.
I wonder if players who decide to play indy ball are the ones that don’t end up on the transaction list as having left the Nats org. (I presume anyone can leave the Nats org in the off season to play indy ball). They aren’t retiring and I don’t think they show up as “released”. (I wonder if the Nats still have Jackson Kent’s “rights” – otherwise, players could go to indy ball and be available to any MLB org.)
By the way, looking through the Atlantic League rosters, there are 5 ex-Nats:
Wilmer Difo, Alejandro De Aza, Nick Senzel, Josh Palacios, Blake Rutherford
The Atlantic league also has some former Nats farmhands:
Viandel Pena, Tommy Kane, Carlos De La Cruz, Osvaldo Abreu
The American Association has Brady Lindsly, Delino DeShields Jr., and Frankie Tostado
Hey Bob I’m the one that maintains the Big Board. Thanks for the Jackson Ross tip. I’ll update the board.
MILB.com rosters frequently “miss” releases, and thus players end up sticking on that big board in XST until we figure out where they are.
FYI, Players can NOT just “leave to play indy ball” though; they’re under a standard minor league contract to a team; Indy ball is exactly that: independent of any affiliation or relationship to any minor league team. Players there have been released from Milb contracts, or were never drafted in the first place. They can however go play winter league … in discussion and partnership with the team.
Asking again (in a slightly different way):
How long are minor league contracts? Are you bound to stay with affiliated ball until you are released or become a minor league free agent?
Delino , Jr told me traveling back to Texas after last season concluded : he was going back to school
Sometimes the move of the game carries many to playing fields of less attention. .
No school for Delino Junior this summer ?
Osvaldo Abreu! That’s a name I hadn’t heard of in a long time. I can’t believe he’s STILL playing professionally. Good for him!
Having been an indy-ball fan before I moved to Virginia, you’d be surprised how many of these guys are playing well into their 30s, and in some cases–Oil Can Boyd–their 40s.
From yesterday, Kevin R mentioned that both Yoyo and King had high BABIP. Could someone explain this statistic a little bit? If someone is really crushing the ball, can’t more balls get through the infield? In other words, can it be more than just luck?
BABIP = Batting Average on Balls in Play. So if you make contact with the ball and put it into play, what’s your batting average on those balls?
With enough data in the sample, BABIP should normalize to right around .290 to .300 for most hitters.
So, if a player’s BABIP is like .350 … they’re getting “lucky” with some of the balls they’re putting into play, and one might expect their actual production to regress back to the mean. In the reverse, if someone’s BABIP is like .200 … they’re getting really unlucky with balls in play, and you might expect them to improve back to the mean.
Yes, there are exceptions; not every hitter is made equal. Tony Gwynn’s career BABIP was like. 340, so yes if you have a very good hit tool, you’re not going to regress to .290. Also, slap hitters/good bunters also maintain pretty good BABIPs. Remember Nyjer Morgan? his career BABIP was .336, which is crazy b/c his career BA was .282. Players badly impacted by shifts usually have their BABIP’s shredded.
So, as for Morales and King … I’d say that i’d be really worried about Morales regressing b/c his hit tool isn’t the best, while King may maintain it b/c he had a 50 hit tool.
Thanks for all the information. I’m pretty aware of the basics of BABIP. My question is a little different than what it is. If a player is crushing the ball, wouldn’t it have a better chance of getting through the infield? In other words, is BABIP more than just an indication of luck? Maybe you need to combine looking at that with other data like solid, hard contact hits and exit MPH? Does BABIP alone tell you accurately what the level of luck is? I have no idea what the answer to this is, but I’m very interested in what you have to say.
In theory, yes, but defensive positioning has made it so that you don’t have to be Ozzie Smith to get to a ball if you’re closer to where the typical ground balls go. Yes, there are exceptions, but this is not unlike how people used to accuse Jim Rice of being slow because he hit into so many double plays, when in reality, he often hit the ball so hard that the infielders had plenty of time to make the two throws.
BABIP is a sign that certain stats–e.g., batting average for hitters and ERA for pitchers–are misleading. It’s a more useful signal for pitchers than for hitters, however. Batting average does not distinguish between the line drive single over the SS’s head or a 13-hopper to the SS hole that results in an infield single. A high BABIP for a hitter is evidence that “too many” of those 13-hoppers have turned into hits rather than outs, and that some regression to the mean is coming. The problem for batters is that there is relatively wide variation in “true” BABIPs. Fast guys have higher BABIPs. Guys who hit a lot of line drives have higher BABIPs. Lefties have lower BABIPs because a higher percentage of GBs go to the right side of the infield, which are easier to convert into outs compared to the left side So, you are correct that “crushing the ball” can result in a higher BABIP that’s based on more than just luck. At the same time, we know quite a bit about what’s “normal” for BABIPs. Mike Trout is a very fast runner and crushes the ball. His career BABIP is .339 and his highest one-season BABIP is .383 when he was 20 and ripped 49 bags. Seaver King’s BABIP this year is .385. There are good reasons to think King might be a high BABIP guy, but it’s going to come down.
For pitchers, the BABIP band is much narrower. Cade Cavalli’s BABIP is .361, and it’s rare for a pitcher to sustain a BABIP above .310 for any length of time unless that pitcher simply isn’t good enough for MLB. This is why FIP only considers walks, Ks, and homers: over a long-enough sample, pitcher BABIP tends to normalize between .280-.310, and ERAs can be very misleading because hits (and especially hits with men on base) can move the ERA needle significantly. Clayton Kershaw is famously a low-BABIP guy and his career mark is .271. Scherzer is .286. Strasburg is .293.
Great explanation. Gracias.
Thanks for the terrific information. I’m still interested in what the luck factor can actually be if a hitter is really hitting the ball hard. Shouldn’t that be taken into account? In contrast, the multi-bouncer weak hits that somehow get to deep SS (too late for throw to 1B) or squeak through to the outfield average out over the course of the year. Speed is a legitimate factor in BABIP, not something that distorts the BABIP. It is the consistently hard hits that I wonder about, rather than a player who hits the ball less hard and is just lucky.
I also wonder about BABIP for pitchers. Some pitchers are highly successful by getting a lot of ground ball outs, not by doing it all himself with blazing speed. Please know I have a lot to learn about this, so I am asking more than I am trying to make a comment.
You are correct that these things will average out over a large enough sample. But whether a sample is “large enough” depends on what you’re measuring. For batters, thinks like K% and BB% get to their normal levels very quickly. For BABIP, it takes a much larger sample. Go to CJ Abrams’s Fangraphs page: . His 2026 BB% is 10.2% whereas his career BB% is 5.8%. His 2026 BABIP is .323 whereas his career BABIP is .291. He’s played 60+ games in 2026. That’s enough for me to conclude that his career BB% is too low to use to project his BB% going forward. I don’t know if he’s a 10+% BB guy, but I trust that number for ROY more than his career number. By contrast, I would definitely use his career BABIP over his 2026 BABIP. There are simply too many variables regarding whether a hit ball gets converted into an out to think 60 games is enough for such a significant improvement.
You’re also correct that speed is not luck. We don’t know how fast a runner Seaver King is. There are good reasons to think he’s fast, so there are good reasons to think he will run a high BABIP. At the same time, CJ Abrams is fast and his career BABIP is ~.290, 100+ points lower than what Seaver is running this year.
We’re in early times with statcast data, which measures how hard batters hit the ball (and we’re in very early times with statcast data in the minor leagues). If you’re still on CJ’s Fangraphs page, take a look at xwOBA. This is his “expected weighted on base average,” which uses this statcast data to project what his wOBA “should” be based on how hard he’s hit the ball. His “actual” wOBA is .391 (12th in MLB–awesome for anybody) whereas his expected wOBA is .366 (38th in MLB–awesome for an SS but maybe not so awesome for someone like James Wood or Juan Soto). The difference between the two numbers for CJ is .025, which is slightly less than the difference between his 2026 BABIP and his career BABIP (0.032). This back-of-the-envelope math is not super reliable, but it suggests that a considerable amount of CJ’s BABIP bump in 2026 is luck driven. I would resist doing the same kind of analysis with Seaver King: he’s in just his second season in pro ball, minor league defenses are not the same as major league defenses, and we don’t have statcast data below AAA. At the same time, I would bet my life savings that Seaver King does not run a .380+ BABIP in major league baseball for anything more than a single year ever in his life. And I would bet a lot of money that, if he’s called up in 2026, his BABIP will be well below that. “Some” amount of his good minors performance in 2026 is due to BABIP luck; I’m not sophisticated enough to figure out “how much.”
The pitcher BABIP discussion is much more contested. Look up “Defense Independent Pitching Statistics” or Voros McCracken on wikipedia. How much to consider batted balls that do not turn into outs in evaluating a pitcher is the main difference between how Fangraphs calculates pitcher WAR (it does not weight this at all) and how Baseball Reference does. I think the weight of the evidence (that I am familiar with) shows that pitcher BABIP is very bunched. If a pitcher has an outlier BABIP (high or low), it makes sense to assume that number will get much closer to the league mean as his sample of innings pitched grows larger. This is not true to the same degree for batters. In statistical terminology, the standard deviation for pitcher BABIP is just a lot lower than the same for hitter BABIP.
Addendum: pitchers that have a high percentage of ground balls also tend to run high BABIPs because GBs are converted into outs less frequently than balls hit in the air but that stay in play. On the other hand, the slugging percentage on balls hit in the air is higher than the slugging percentage on balls hit on the ground–balls in the air may be converted into hits less frequently than balls on the ground, but balls in the air are more likely to be 2B/3B/HR than balls on the ground. On a third hand, a ball hit on the ground can sometimes produce two outs via the double play whereas that’s much rarer for balls hit in the air. In general, I am skeptical of any minor league pitcher who succeeds by “generating weak contact.” There are definitely examples of guys who succeed this way in the majors, but they are outliers. I’d need a large body of evidence to conclude that any single pitcher is one of those outliers.
All amazing insights and data. Many thanks!
First time poster, long time, reader. I’ve been tracking the progress of Gavin Fien. I’ve noticed he’s been playing centerfield the past few weeks after he came back from his injury. With the talent of in filters that Washington has I see Washington turning Fien into a Jackson Merrill type (top prospect infielder, moves to outfield due to log jams and free agent signings). Do you guys see this as well or am I missing something?
The Nats have a long history of trying to create “supersubs” — Wilmer Difo, Zach Walters, Adrián Sanchez, just to name a few — but with the elmination of SS-A in the 2020 MLB takeover of the NAPBL, a lot of the position-switching is now taking place at Low-A instead of strictly in the short-season leagues. Luke Dickerson has also been tried in the outfield, inspriring visions of Chris Marrero back in the day. FWIW, scouts will remind you at the drop of a hat that hardly any players end playing the position they were drafted at.
Brady Cernkoenyk switched from catcher to pitcher ?
No, for some reason there have been a lot more position players pitching in the FCL this year.
Just for the record, Rochester went 5-12 with RISP. Wilmington went 2-6. I note this because apparently RISP stats are only regarded as significant when they are bad.
Great thread!
I just wanted to chime in on Morales’ BABIP.
Ed, you’re definitely on to something that Morales could be a the type of hitter who could consistently maintain a high BABIP, because of the weird combo of elite exit velocities and very low launch angles. A lot of the time, he’s launching missiles as groundballs/low line drives, which naturally find their way through the infield. We also know Morales could be this type of hitter because he has been – without fail – in the minors. Morales’ lowest BABIP at any level in any partial season (12 partial seasons in total at various levels) has been .333. That’s the LOWEST! And it was a 4 game sample in AA in 2023. Whenever he gets an actual sizeable playing time, his BABIP has stood between .350 and .390. That’s not normal. But looking at a sample of 300 games, this isn’t any longer just a fluke.
Now, I don’t know how strong the correlation is between minor league BABIPs and major league ones, but there is more than enough evidence to suggest Morales isn’t just getting lucky.
Will, this answers my question directly and I much appreciate that. You can only get lucky for so long. After some length of time, you have *reasons* for being lucky as you point out; namely, launch angle and exit velocity. Sometimes you make your own luck if you’re good! I’ve heard it said that, “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.”