Matthew Trueblood

The sarcastic point he's making—which I assume is along the lines of "All this over a guy with a 5.28 ERA?"—is halfway valid. But I really do think Prielipp has shown all the markings of a guy who could end up as a future No. 2.

Image courtesy of Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images Athleticism spreads across a baseball diamond in predictable ways. There are always outliers, because some geniuses find ways to succeed in unexpected places via their savvy, and because teams sometimes align their talent in strange ways for any number of reasons, but we know where the best athletes need to be during baseball games—and which kinds of athletes are most needed in which places. For instance, your tall, languid guy usually shouldn't be at third base. Nor should your fast but underpowered guy play there. No, speed goes in the outfield, and it goes up the middle. Arm strength is important on the left side of the infield and in the outfield. Those are extreme examples, and extremes always make things seem obvious. Most real-life cases are more nuanced. Take, for instance, Brooks Lee. A stocky but strapping switch-hitter, Lee entered professional baseball as a shortstop. That was where he played in high school and in college, where he was an elite athlete. Even in the minors, he was an above-average runner and thrower (and hitter, for that matter), relative to all the players around him. Eventually, though, he came to the big leagues, and compared only to the 50 or so best players at each position in the Western hemisphere, his profile becomes a bit less impressive. As we know, the Twins tried Lee at shortstop. It didn't work. In fact, it didn't work twice, but the team only fully recognized the failure the second time, when he cost them several runs over the first month and a half of the 2026 season. That's when they moved him to third base, and everything changed. In 400 innings at shortstop this year, Lee was worth -9 Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), according to Sports Info Solutions. In 738 innings at third base, he's been worth 7 DRS. The change is enormous. Only J.P. Crawford and Trea Turner have hurt their teams more as shortstop defenders than Lee did, despite how short a time he spent there. Only Matt Chapman, Alex Bregman, Caleb Durbin and Maikel García have saved their clubs more runs at the hot corner than Lee has, despite 16 players logging more innings at the position than he has. Lee, as it turns out, is an extremely good fit for third base, even though he was an extremely bad fit for the spot that neighbors it on the infield. The values are extreme; so is the difference in the eye test. Yet, the reason for it is that Lee isn't extreme, himself, in any regard; he's just above- and below-average at things that make him much better-suited to one place than to the other. Here are the average sprint speeds and arm strengths of players at each position, for 2026. Position Sprint Speed (ft./sec.) Arm Strength (MPH) Catcher 26.1 80.3 First Base 26.3 79.4 Second Base 27.7 79.2 Third Base 27.1 84.9 Shortstop 27.9 86.2 Left Field 28 87.6 Center Field 28.7 89.5 Right Field 28.1 90.5 D.H. 26.1 — Pitcher — 94.7 As you would have guessed if I had asked you to do so blindly, outfielders are the fastest players on the field. Catchers, first basemen and designated hitters are the slowest. There's also an interesting hierarchy among the three more difficult infield spots, though. Shortstops are the fastest, with second basemen close behind; third basemen can be (and are) slower. Reading the arm strength column is trickier. As anyone familiar with the game already knows, outfielders need strong arms, but they also enjoy the benefit of being able to load up and fire on their most important throws, generating greater raw arm strength readings than one finds on the infield—where a quick exchange and release is paramount. The latter is even more true of catchers, whose most important throws come when trying to throw out basestealers. Thus, while infielders generate lower raw velocity readings, it's safe to say that shortstop and catcher are the positions (other than pitcher, of course) where arm strength is most important, and where teams put their strongest arms, all else equal. Even between infielders, though, these averages are apples and oranges. Players who play both second base and third base tend to throw 5-7 MPH harder from third than from second, for the obvious reason: the throw is longer. That means that it takes more oomph to get the ball to the first baseman, and that the runner has a greater chance to beat out a weak throw from the left side than from the right. We see a lower average arm strength among second basemen than among third basemen for the same reason as that which leads the same player's average throw to be harder from third than from second. Compare shortstops and third basemen, though, and the dynamic changes. As you can see, shortstops have stronger arms, on average. That's because, though the third baseman is all the way across the diamond, they're often playing shallower than a shortstop; they more often make relatively short throws with their momentum taking them in the general direction of first base; and their longest, toughest throws tend to come from more set positions and after ranging less far than a shortstop's longest and toughest throws. Yet, of the seven players who have spent meaningful time at both third and short this year, none throw harder when playing short than when playing third. On the contrary: Two (Willi Castro and J.P. Crawford) throw almost exactly as hard, regardless of position; Three (Kevin McGonigle, Bo Bichette and Joey Ortiz) throw between 1 and 2 MPH faster when playing third base; and Two (David Hamilton and Lee) throw over 3 MPH harder from the hot corner. The game demands that exceptional athletes with elite throwing arms play shortstop. It does not, however, demand that those players use every ounce of their throwing power on most plays. In fact, third base requires a stronger arm on a median play than shortstop does. The shortstop just has to be a better thrower in order to convert the occasional, fairly extreme play. Lee is an interesting case study, then. His sprint speed (26.4 feet per second) is virtually untenable for a shortstop, but just barely below-average for a third baseman. His arm is far below the average shortstop's, but not far at all below the average third baseman's—not because he's unable to uncork a strong throw, per se, but because he throws so much harder from third than from short. And why is that? Now, we've arrived at the crux of it. It's because Lee isn't fast enough. A lot of the balls on which Lee should have had to make stronger throws from shortstop ended up in left field, because he never got to them. Some others ended up in his glove, but he didn't even make a throw because he'd had to leave his feet to make the play and felt he had no chance to get his man. There were still times, even at short, where you could see that Lee is a fine low-to-the-ground athlete and has a strong arm, just as he has above-average bat speed and surprising power at the plate. He does, theoretically, have the arm for short; the raw strength and rotational capacity is there. He just needed to have the advantage of having been shaded into the hole, so he could actually reach a ball that otherwise would have eluded him, and so that he could set his feet to make that throw. UHY2TzNfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWdaU0JWTUZWUXNBQ3dFREF3QUhWQUlIQUZrQVVsWUFBbE5UVWxJTkFWZFZCRllE.mp4 Shortstops, who tend to have both kinds of baseball athleticism bound up into one body, can make that same play after having started the play a step farther toward second base. They'd have the area to their left better-covered, and they could still flag down this ball, turn enough to be accurate, and uncork a strong throw without being in the strong position Lee enjoyed when he threw out Ernie Clement on this play. That's what's missing for Lee. When he must throw on the move, he can't get much on it. When he must move a lot to get to a ball in the first place, there's a good chance he won't reach it. At shortstop, those are fatal flaws. At third, they're fairly unimportant. Most of the throws he makes on the move some as he ranges to his left, and are therefore short and fairly easy. Most of the balls that test his range are to that side, too; he can use the foul line as an extra defender. For some players forced to move off shortstop, second base makes more sense. For some, playing third doesn't solve many problems, because they have extremely good arm strength (good enough for short, even) but not the hands or the decision-making ability to be any better elsewhere on the dirt than they are at short. Lee is not elite, because his arm is still average or worse, but he's a very good third baseman, because his only shortcoming as a shortstop is being a step too slow. He's showed the utility of his arm since moving to third, and even a slight reduction in the range required of him has turned him from subpar to superb. In the long run, Marek Houston and Kaelen Culpepper might conspire to threaten Lee's playing time even at third. For now, though, he's entrenched, and his job security is well-earned. He's not a great hitter, but he looks to be above-average in the right role, batting higher in the lineup against right-handed pitchers and lower against lefties. He's already hit a career-best 22 home runs this year, and has a good chance to get to 25. On both sides of the ledger, having the right things asked of him has revealed the best version of Lee, lending us insight into what makes various roles on a team different and interesting. He began the year a fringe big-leaguer who was a drag on the team. He could finish it as a solid prospective piece of an evolving roster. View full article

Image courtesy of Nick Wosika-Imagn Images The first thing you notice about Walker Jenkins is his size. In a profession where almost everyone is big and strong, he looks big and strong even by comparison. When the Twins called him up late last week, they placed Jenkins's locker between those of Kody Clemens and Trevor Larnach in the home clubhouse, and Jenkins practically dwarfed both—no small feat, where the 6-foot-3 Larnach is concerned. It's not that Jenkins is exceptionally big, in absolute terms. He just takes up space, in that special way some athletes do. He's only as tall as Larnach, but he stands taller. He's long-limbed, broad-chested and broad-shouldered. While he moves plenty well to play center field throughout his early 20s, it's easy to see why most scouts expect him to move to right field later in his career. He's so big that he'll have to slow down a bit, in time. Bigness defines him in the batter's box, too. From the press box, watching Jenkins set up in the batter's box was eye-opening, because he's much more spread-out than might be apparent from the center-field camera. As some huge players do, he seems to take up the whole box; he's almost too big to be held. In fact, only a small handful of players who have played in the majors this year start with more space between their feet than Jenkins does, in his stance. Most notable among that group: the Mets' Juan Soto. Here's how Soto sets up in the box, using Statcast's visualization of stance data. Here's the same visual for Jenkins, who is almost exactly as open in his setup and has almost an identical distance between his feet as Soto. Jenkins's swing doesn't look anything like Soto's, though. Whereas Soto spreads out that way to get into a deep crouch and swing flat and fast, Jenkins's stroke seems geared toward loft. His average tilt on 17 competitive swings over the three games was 35°, which is steeper than average. His attack angle (the vertical angle between the ground and the movement of the barrel at the time of contact) is steeper than average, too, and his attack direction (the horizontal angle of his barrel at contact) is more to the pull side of the diamond than average. Perhaps because Jenkins landed with the Twins via the MLB Draft Lottery, he's been comped to Joe Mauer on his way up the chain to the majors. However, this stroke—which might not be the one he settles into; it was just one adrenaline-soaked weekend—looks more like a tall and lithe left-handed batter who's still active: the Yankees' Cody Bellinger. Here's a sample swing from Jenkins: cU93R2dfWGw0TUFRPT1fQWxSWlVBWlhYbEVBRGxkVVZ3QUhBRmNGQUFCWFVnVUFCVlVFQnd0V1ZGSmRCUVJT.mp4 And here's one from Bellinger, who's much more upright and has his feet much closer together in his stance but then moves so similarly to Jenkins: YVlkUW5fWGw0TUFRPT1fVXdsV0FWQU1VZ1FBWEFCVVVBQUhBVkpWQUFBRFdsRUFCUVFFQWxCUUFRZFZDUXNF.mp4 Bellinger's swing tilt and attack angle are almost identical to Jenkins's, though he doesn't average as much pull orientation as Jenkins did over his first week. It looks like Jenkins has above-average (but not elite) bat speed, and will set up in a spread-out stance to give himself stability as he attacks the ball, looking to both be patient and lift the ball with power to the pull field. It's too early to get overconfident about what kind of hitter Jenkins is, or what kind he might become. In just a few days, though, we can glean real insight into those questions, thanks to the detail and depth of new tracking data. The Twins will hope to get more actual production over the next four weeks than they got over these three games, but Jenkins deserved slightly better results than he got in his first series as a major leaguer. He's also showing some valuable and fascinating similarities to a few of the game's best hitters. Already, there's plenty to be optimistic about. View full article

The man's base salary is $15 million a year. A $20,000 bonus is to him as $100 is to a person making $75,000 a year. Would you come to work injured, knowing you'd be criticized for underperformance as well as being in pain, for $100?

Culpepper and Jenkins can feed off each other, if nothing else, right?

It's true, though the Tiggers of Twins Daily are just as dangerous imo.

Image courtesy of © Kyle Ross-Imagn Images Not long ago, I made the case for appreciating Luke Keaschall as a bit of a throwback: a player who can really, really hit, and who is therefore worth making room for at all times—even though he's going to hurt you no matter where you put him in the field. However, that piece was about Keaschall, the defensive nomad, and especially Keaschall, the right fielder who might well become a left fielder next season. The time Keaschall spent in center field, while Byron Buxton was on the injured list, was on another level of awful—an untenable one, akin to his work at second base before the team moved him into the grass earlier in the season. Keaschall's bat is worth forcing into the lineup, but you have to do it by hiding him in a corner outfield spot, or at designated hitter. He can't be your center fielder. The Twins know that, too. Once Buxton returned from the IL earlier this month, they shunted Keaschall back to right. They kept playing Buxton in center whenever he was fit enough to be in the lineup, despite his own obvious limitations, because they knew they didn't have another viable center fielder on the active roster. All the while, momentum built toward a Walker Jenkins promotion, which would give the team a much more solid defensive option in center on non-Buxton days down the stretch. (For that matter, so would promoting Emmanuel Rodriguez.) If the team had been playing at home this week, Jenkins might have been called up already. Instead, though, the team has been on a six-game, eight-day road trip to San Diego and West Sacramento. They clearly preferred to survive this trip with their existing outfield options, including Buxton, Keaschall, Trevor Larnach, Alan Roden, and utility men Kody Clemens and Ryan Kreidler. It sounds silly, but even in the midst of a pennant race, teams try not to turn the roster inside-out during trips that involve difficult or lengthy travel. It's not about costs, of course. It's a little bit about logistics. Most of all, though, it's about the rhythm of the season and the tenor of a clubhouse. Big changes work best when they happen on off days, and they work best when they don't change the layout of a clubhouse in which a team is already only spending a few days. That Minnesota was playing the Athletics in quasi-minor-league surroundings made that an especially important consideration this week. Thus, when Buxton pulled up lame Tuesday night, it had to hit the top people in the Twins front office like a sock full of nickels. The timing was terrible. It was clear, even as Buxton limped off the field, that he would be unavailable Wednesday. That left the team with an unwelcome dilemma: make a quick move and get Jenkins (or Rodriguez) to West Sacramento in under 24 hours, only to leave town another few hours later; or ride it out for one more game without the only center fielder they really trust. As you already know, they chose the latter. Keaschall started in center Wednesday night. It was a copout, in a way. The team was just kicking the can down the road. That's understandable, under the circumstances, and they could easily have gotten away with it. Unfortunately, the universe was in a bad mood, and it decided to punish their choice harshly. In fairness, though, Keaschall made them an appealing target for that kind of karmic thwack to the forehead. The rubber game of a series the Twins could not afford to lose was decided in the bottom of the sixth inning. There was already danger afoot, some of it caused by Keaschall. The A;s had collected three hits in the frame, including one fly ball that landed well in front of Keaschall partially because Keaschall had been playing exceptionally deep. They'd pulled to within one run; it was 4-3 Twins. There were two outs and two on, and Andrew Morris just needed to find one more out to escape the jam. Alika Williams hit a long fly ball to center. You already know what happened. MnI5T05fWGw0TUFRPT1fQWdjSEJWVUhBZ1lBQ1ZJR0FnQUhBRkFFQUZsUkFBUUFCbGNDVlFVRkFRcFFCd0VG.mp4 Keaschall didn't take a good initial angle, and he didn't adjust quite enough. He still (basically) got there, though—and then failed to catch it, anyway. Statcast will be a bit more generous to him once it accounts for the fact that he was going back on the ball and was close to the wall, but its initial assessment is that the ball had an 85% catch probability, based on the hang time and where Keaschall began the play. Even if you call it a 50/50 proposition, the fact is that Keaschall didn't catch it. Two runs scored, and the A's had the lead they would hold onto for the rest of the game. If that ball is caught, the Twins have a 70% chance of winning the game, based on win expectancy matrices from Tom Tango. Once he didn't, the A's had a 73.8% chance. That's a difference of 43.2% in win probability for the Twins, and if we call the play a coin-flip for an average center fielder, we can say that when the ball left Williams's bat, the game itself was a near coin-flip. Keaschall's failure to make the play had a -0.216 WPA, though official WPA only assigns value to hitters and pitchers and ignores defense. Having Keaschall in center cost the Twins that game. In the wake of that loss, the team woke up Thursday with just a 7.1% chance to make the postseason, according to Baseball Prospectus's PECOTA-fueled projected standings. That figure was 31.5% just a week ago. Losing five of six on the road trip torpedoed the team's chances, and a major reason for one of those losses was a very avoidable failure based on the team being too patient—not quite desperate enough, to put it one way. This isn't the only game Keaschall has cost the team with his glove this year. In addition to some atrocious plays at second and in right, he also failed to catch a ball that has to be caught in the bottom of the eighth inning against the Brewers earlier this month. It fell in front of him for a single, and that hit later turned into the game-winning run for the Brewers. NnlNZWRfWGw0TUFRPT1fVjFkUVUxMEdWZ1FBQUZCUVhnQUhCRlJRQUZnQVdsVUFCbEFBVkZKVEJGZFZCQUlG.mp4 Playing Keaschall in center as much as they have is a case of the team being too willing to roll the dice and play the long game. That's part of the responsibility the front office faces, in a year when they're hardly a juggernaut. They have to think about the long-term future. This is not a year in which to go all-in. But another of their responsibilities is to recognize places where they can give this year's team the best possible chance to convert on their opportunity to reach the postseason, without hurting their future prospects. This was one of those chances. They should already have called up Jenkins, who could be taking playing time from their lousy left-hitting corner outfielders and covering for them defensively in center. They should certainly have called him up when Buxton got hurt Tuesday night. They didn't, and if they miss the playoffs by one game, we can also say they missed it by one play—a ball that should have been caught, and would have been, had the right player been placed there to catch it. View full article

I mean.... maybe he did. Maybe he had a lot more than that! Again, I just want to be clear that we don't know. Official pitch-by-pitch records don't exist. Even newspaper accounts at the time very rarely (and not always accurately; you can easily find two different notes of what the count was when a hitter came up with a clutch hit or something) provided sufficient detail to be confident that any inning lasted any specific number of pitches. It's just not something we can say with any certainty about the game before about 40 years ago.

I would argue it's *not* safe to say that, which is why we have some caveats in this piece. The league doesn't know any better than Dan does. "in history" means, for feats/stats that center on knowing the outcome of each pitch, since 1988; there's no complete data set anywhere of all pitch outcomes before that. I do wish that were made clearer, including by Cory last night. We tried to elucidate it here.

Image courtesy of David Frerker-Imagn Images Willie Mays didn't start Game 2 of the 1973 World Series. He was almost a mascot by that point, playing out the string for the Mets as they won their second unexpected pennant in five years. At age 42, he'd been limited to playing first base and serving as a pinch-hitter for the final two months of the regular season, and even in those roles, he hadn't looked especially good. He did play a few innings in center at the end of the NLCS, and he got the start in Game 1 against the Oakland A's. However, he committed an ugly error in that first game of the Fall Classic, and it seemed like he might never step into the outfield again. New York had to call upon him to pinch-run in the top of the ninth, though, after starting center fielder Don Hahn was injured. Promptly, as he tried to accelerate and go from first to third on a single to right, he stumbled and nearly fell just before reaching second; he had to settle for going station-to-station. When he went out to center in the bottom of the ninth, he whiffed on a fly ball to left-center and fell down after missing it. Later, in extra innings, he missed another catchable ball and stumbled again. The Mets won that game in 12 innings, thanks in part to a hit by Mays. For many, though, that game was a tragic and devastating end to the greatest career in baseball history. That 12th-inning hit was the last Mays recorded in the bigs; he was kept out of the outfield for the balance of the series. For decades thereafter, that sequence was considered the epitome of a player sticking around too long—of being so thoroughly hollowed out that it was hard not to feel it taint the memory of the legendary player they once were. Things are not that dire for Byron Buxton—we hope. He's 10 years younger now than Mays was then. He still shows flashes of being a great athlete. The first half of this season was a dazzling display of what he can do: He had 25 home runs by June 22. Since that date, though, Buxton hasn't homered, and he has a .519 OPS. He's made two trips to the injured list, and played only 25 games in the last two months and change. There have been times when he looks completely unable to do the things he's always done, from beating out infield singles and would-be double play balls to flagging down fly balls to the gaps. He's had good days, or at least good plays, but he's never truly looked like himself long enough for anyone to muster much hope. On Tuesday night in West Sacramento (as conceptually close to doing it in Oakland, where Mays last played, as one can get right now), Buxton tried to cut off a Henry Bolte line drive ticketed for the wall in deepest right-center. Bolte had really caught it on the screws, at 112 MPH off the bat, and maybe Buxton tried a late acceleration because he realized he was in danger of being beaten. Maybe, since he was closing on the ball when something changed, he was preparing to bend low or to slide to snare the ball on the bounce. Either way, Buxton went to make a move, and then he didn't make one. Instead, he wound up standing near the wall in right-center, moving minimally and waiting for the trainer to arrive from the dugout. Bolte's hit had turned into an easy triple. Buxton limped to the gate in left field and back toward the visitors' clubhouse. Given his relative youth and the state of modern sports medicine, Buxton probably wasn't departing center field for the last time. He might be done out there for 2026, though. It's clear that he has a major injury to his right hip. Just as Mays's frailty was exposed by the fact that he couldn't keep his feet, the fact that Buxton couldn't get down to play the ball off his feet feels foreboding. All the historic evocations of that moment were unwelcome and uncomfortable. Buxton certainly isn't on Mays's level, but Mays is one of the giants of the game, in whose shadow all great center fielders toil and to whom everyone aspires to earn a comparison. Buxton has the remarkable power and speed that made Mays so captivating, and at their best, each was the best defensive center fielder in their league. Whatever Buxton has been playing through, it looks like his ability to do so has to be reevaluated. It's worth wondering whether, in a few years, we'll remember this as the moment when Buxton's time as a center fielder came to an ignominious end. It's not quite Mays and the World Series, but it felt just as sad and wrong. View full article

That's where he's playing now, and he still sucks...