Pitching Grips

Isaiah J. Downing-USA TODAY Sports Bryan Balzer is arguably the most intriguing prospect in the San Diego Padres system. Currently ranked eighth with a 40 FV, the 21-year-old right-hander had virtually no pitching experience when he entered pro ball in 2023. Moreover, he blew out his elbow and had Tommy John surgery following his lone turn on the mound. That was at Joso Gakuin High School, roughly an hour northeast of Tokyo. His current season has been somewhat of a mixed bag. Between Low-A Lake Elsinore (60 1/3 innings) and High-A Fort Wayne (32), he has a record of 6-2 to go with a 4.58 ERA, a 5.17 FIP, and a 23.4% strikeout rate. But while at times he’s been all too hittable, he has also shown flashes of high-ceiling potential. When I saw him toe the rubber for Fort Wayne in mid-July, Balzer fanned eight batters — including Tigers top prospect Bryce Rainer with two out and the bases juiced — while holding West Michigan to one run over five frames. A day prior, I asked him ...

Eric Hartline-Imagn Images The Phillies won their ninth straight game on Sunday. Cristopher Sánchez started and Kyle Schwarber hit a game-winning home run. There are home runs and then there are home runs, and even by Schwarber’s standards, this one was a tank: straight out to dead center, over the batter’s eye. Twelve days ago, when the Phillies headed out to Iowa for the Field of Dreams game, they were 9.5 games out of first place in the NL East. If the season had ended then, they would’ve lost out to the Diamondbacks on a tiebreaker for the final Wild Card spot. Since then, they’ve cut the gap between themselves and the Braves by two thirds. With seven games remaining between those two teams in the final month of the season, the division title is truly up for grabs now: Even if the Phillies fall short in their pursuit of the Braves, they could still host a Wild Card series; they’ve gone from fourth place in the Wild Card race and 7.5 games behind the Cubs to second place an...

Jonah Cox had never set foot in Wrigley Field prior to June 5th of this season. It turned out to be a day he won’t soon forget. Six games into his MLB career, the 25-year-old San Francisco Giants outfielder went 3-for-3 and left the yard for the first time at baseball’s highest level. In front of an announced crowd of 39,060, the visitors ran roughshod over the Chicago Cubs by a count of 18-3. His initial impression of the Friendly Confines? “It’s one of those stadiums you see in movies, like Rookie of the Year , so when you walk out there it’s like ‘Oh my gosh,’” the Colorado native told me earlier this week. “Knowing the history and the fanbase, it’s just a really cool place to play.” “Oh man, the ball was flying,” Cox went on to say of the contest, which featured eight home runs, seven of them by the Giants, “It was a ton of fun watching guys swing and have so much success. Then I got the call to come in and face Hoby Milner , the lefty [in the sixth inning with the Giants...

If you want to point to an example of parity in baseball, just look at the AL Wild Card standings. There are six teams within 2.5 games of the final Wild Card berth. Yes, all six are below .500, but having that many clubs competing for one playoff spot at this point in the season should make for some very exciting baseball down the stretch. Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system . If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out between now a...

Bryce Rainer is one of the game’s most promising prospects. Currently No. 25 on The Board and No. 3 in our Detroit Tigers rankings , the 21-year-old shortstop boasts elite bat speed — eye-opening exit velocities are part of his profile — as well as arm strength that Eric Longenhagen has described as “incredible.” Our lead prospect analyst’s preseason report elaborated that Rainer was “pumping mid-90s gas off the mound in high school.” His pitching background is what I wanted to hear about when I sat down with Rainer last month. After beginning the campaign with a smattering of games at Low-A Lakeland, Rainer has put up a .267/.374/.455 slash line and a 118 wRC+ with the.High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. His left-handed stroke has produced a dozen home runs across 358 trips to the plate with Detroit’s Midwest League affiliate. Just how good was the 11th-overall pick in the 2024 draft when he was toeing the rubber for North Hollywood’s Harvard-Westlake High School? “I don’t really...