#43 Is an All-Star pitcher breaking out with geometry?

Plus: How the Home Run Derby could be even more fun

The Opener

1. On Sunday, the Washington Nationals fired general manager Mike Rizzo and manager Dave Martinez. The duo were in charge of the World Series-winning 2019 team. But since then, only the Colorado Rockies have won fewer games. It was a stunning drop off that was exacerbated by an attempt to fast forward a rebuild that has since stalled. The dismissal was not a total surprise, but the timing caught people off guard: namely, one week before the Nats have the first overall pick in the 2025 MLB Draft. Mike DeBartolo, previously an assistant GM, takes over as interim GM and former bench coach Miguel Cairo takes over as interim manager — the announcement of which was briefly stalled by Cairo needing to “think it over.” Which makes you wonder: is there a team/team situation so bad it would make you turn down a managerial job? 

2. After 651 days and major shoulder surgery, Brandon Woodruff was back on the mound for the Brewers and looked dominant, pitching six one-run innings in his first start since September 23, 2023. “For [Jacob] Misiorowski to watch that out there? For [Quinn] Priester? They’re like, ‘Whoa, that’s the big fuss about Big Woo,’” said Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy. 

3. The Toronto Blue Jays have a 10-game win streak going during which they’ve overtaken the Yankees for first place in the AL East. Standings don’t mean much at this point in the summer, but the team has been almost pathologically committed to underperforming in recent years and this, at least, is Not That. 

4. Bonus opener? Yes, we must, because the Giants were down 3-1 in the ninth Tuesday night, with two men on, when Patrick Bailey hit a walkoff inside-the-park homer with some AT&T Park ricochet assistance. I wouldn’t have thought to rank this as the most fun possible type of play an hour ago, but I now rank it No. 1.

We are just about to the All-Star break, which should really be called the Home Run Derby break because that has increasingly become the premier event of baseball’s Midsummer Classic. The awarding of All-Stars is still meaningful, but the game itself is of very little interest or stakes, and having attended the whole shebang in person four times, I don’t remember a single moment I saw in person. The derby, however, has gotten better and better in recent years and I remember both watching it live and wondering what fun tidbits I was missing from the broadcast. In short: Home Run Derby > All-Star Game.

Accordingly, I have a Derby take for you today¹. I don’t want prolific regular season home run hitters to compete in the derby, I want unconventional dudes who could conceivably mash moonshots. I already know that Vladimir Guerrero Jr. or Aaron Judge or Juan Soto, for instance, can go yard. They frequently do so against super talented pitchers who are specifically trying to prevent them from doing that! 

If we’re going to be lobbing juiced balls in there batting-practice style, we don’t need our biggest and best dinger machines. Show me something I can’t see on an average Monday night in the Bronx. 

I’m stealing this idea from Barry Bonds — who once said that Ichiro Suzuki would win “easy, hands down” if he entered the Derby. The premise of that comment being that Ichiro was well-known (or at least, frequently rumored) to launch BP bombs, and simply opted to trade his power for average in games. 

That’s precisely the kind of guy I want in my Derby. Or the literal guy I want in my Derby if 51-year-old Ichiro is open to it. Plus pitchers who miss hitting. Give me the guy who was a position player in college and claims to still have it. Give me your recently retired slugger. Give me your beefiest bench coach. Give me your minor league — or even college! — home run leader. Those guys would be seriously motivated by the million-dollar prize money. Give me Yandy Díaz, specifically, to see if we can’t entice Ground Beef to get his launch angle up a little. Bonds should have competed every season since he retired from actual MLB just to see how long it took for anyone to beat him. 

Sound off in the comments on the Derby participants you’d like to see. 

–HK 

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Another angle on lefty dominance

by Zach Crizer

Last week, I published a story at Opta Analyst about one of the season’s more mysterious macro trends. In short, left-handed pitching is way better than right-handed pitching in 2025, historically so. Here’s a snippet of the longer version, from the Opta article.

Roughly halfway through the 2025 season, left-handed pitchers have the biggest edge over right-handers in MLB history, dating back to 1903. Collectively, left-handed pitchers have a 3.64 ERA, which comes out 11% better than league average via park-adjusted ERA. The much larger pool of right-handed pitchers checks in with a 4.22 ERA – 4% worse than average. 

It’s an extreme deviation from the norm, even across three months. By virtue of being a smaller and less-familiar looking group, lefties often perform slightly better than their more common brethren. But sailing this far clear of the league average is unprecedented. 

Lefties’ park-adjusted ERA hasn’t been more than 4% better than the league in a full season since 1953, and they have never eclipsed 10%.

As I go on to explain, southpaws are also overrepresented at the good extremes of the run prevention leaderboards, to an almost absurd degree. Most of that story consists of me mustering theories to explain why left-handers would have such a collective edge over right-handers.

The theories run the gamut from a lefty ace cluster to a slider spike to an arm angle revolution. None of them fully explain this, and maybe nothing can explain this except luck and/or a confluence of events. But throughout the work for that story, it struck me that none of them explained Andrew Abbott, the left-handed Reds starter who is running a 2.15 ERA through 15 starts.