Just Regular

Smelling that Oakland turn to work Grayson into the Yankees series.

Shades of the postseason.

Rill's phrasing is a little indefinite, but sounds like Sunday it is. If he covers 60 here and 80 next Friday or Saturday....they wouldn't bring him back against the Yankees a week from Thursday, would they?

The pitching matchups, I have an eye on of if we skip Irvin and throw Grayson on Sunday. Without a change, Grayson would naturally get the Monday-Sunday next week, and miss the ensuing Monday-Thursday Yankees showdown. I think we generally want more Grayson and less Irvin, including against the Yankees, right? The other path would be to let him gas up extra after the Monday turn, and a home series vs. Oak isn't a bad scenario for a spot start.

Burnes and Grayson are an interesting compare/contrast for best Ace. Burnes (and Bradish) are ~500k college arms who have achieved amazing heights in their careers. Gausman, Cole and the Philadelphia guys are really the only ones in Burnes' class. Wheeler and Burnes production is quite similar, with Burnes ~4.5 years younger. Grayson is the classic lightning bolt in his arm kind of profile, and hopefully what we are seeing now is him putting it all together. Some chance they will see each other on opposite sides somewhere down the line.

Their 55 relief innings are a MLB low ytd as all the starters have done well. I think they probably want to ride those horses as much as they can as one of my takeaways from the first series was how slow all the relievers throw. Witt's a good MVP rabbit for Gunnar to chase, and he might bring up the question if a Club can still get a Prospect Promotion incentive bonus pick if the player is technically out of pre-Arb by virtue of having signed a LTC. Here are the ERA starting numbers of the lowest-tier of AL SP in strikeout rate: 6-4-8-6-8-1-10-4-7-7-6-7. Marsh and Lugo have two of the low numbers there. Maikel Garcia has gone ice cold, a bit surprising as he looked All World against us. They are just now getting perhaps intended starting 2B Michael Massey back from a spring injury (Adam Frazier all singles so far on the season). Burnes-Ragans rematch should have our guy's dander up...we pulled it out against the bullpen but he was outpitched by a lot that night. Doesn't matter now but it looks like Ragans has never thrown more than about 2200 pitches in a season, in case they end up needing him for more than 26.5 regular season weeks.

He's only leading Carter and Langford by about 500 OPS points, but that's nothing to the 1000 OPS point lead he has on Jackson Holliday!

So far at Camden it has been LF Hays, RF Cowser, but out on the road I'm curious to see if they flip corners if/when Hays enters as a Santander defensive replacement. There's probably some GM who feels like a RF Arm has been wasted, but OPACY has a lot more grass in LF than RF. The big unknown is if Hays can untrack with a different playing time cadence than he's ever experienced. Iron sharpening iron can break bad for some of the atoms.

The consecutive 3 HR games streak has the Team ISO at .201. wRC+ by Bats is third to ATL-HOU. The Astros maybe feel like the 2024 championship season doesn't officially begin until Justin Verlander's personal opening day in DC tomorrow.

Very strong outing - 8/1 K/BB in five no-hit innings. He had already had good K/BB results his first two outings, though he had been hit around a lot while filling up the strike zone during those. He was a UDFA last year, perhaps due to having missed the season at Liberty. BP had the detail this morning he'd been suspended for undisclosed reasons, and I'm sure Elias has insight whatever they were. A college arm where a data point on bonus pool allocation as a yardstick is absent in the typical way.

Probably as tough a night as Bradish's yesterday was encouraging. I think it'll be found some persistent aspect of the injury he's now rehabbing is somehow at the root of this ineffectiveness....otherwise I'm not sure what happens when the rehab assignment clock runs out.

It'll be interesting to see if he goes Sunday or Tuesday from here. Sunday might crack the door on a return during the Yankees series if he then went on Friday 4.26 and Thursday 5.2. I think they'll wait until next Tuesday though.

Welcome to the last Arm with options top rung Mr. Dillon Tate. Same as Hays is moving through some career transition, Orioles on the rise perhaps make Tate a 2024 Up-Down guy despite him having a couple nice full seasons in his career. Elias maybe won't have done his job well if by post trade deadline it hasn't gotten to a point he's had to risk losing guys like Irvin, Webb and Baumann. Cionel's oblique should get a nice healthy healing period.

I think today you lean playing your first string for the experience against the kind of pitchers they are likely to see in the playoffs. Friday in the Alec Marsh rematch, play anyone you want. Saturday in the Cole Ragans rematch, I hope they don't hide Holliday. Learn by doing.

Buster Olney had this detail on an action by new GM Peter Bendix. I suppose this makes Schumaker about as clear an impending FA as a manager can get. I hope Bendix and Schumaker agreed this was an okay action, and he'd see the year through while Bendix learns the org and figures out his Brandon Hyde character. The Miami Marlins, meanwhile, are 3-14, with a -36 run differential and about half of their projected pitching staff on the injured list, from Sandy Alcantara to Eury Perez. Additionally, the Marlins made the strange decision to void their 2025 option on manager Skip Schumaker, who is already regarded as one of the more coveted managers in the sport; there is an industry assumption that Schumaker will be headed elsewhere after this season.