Pitching Grips

Mike Watters-Imagn Images As Pete Crow-Armstrong authors his breakout season and Chris Sale side-eyes Laz Diaz , the battle for the future of baseball rolls quietly on in the background. On Thursday, MLB delivered to the MLB Players Association its latest set of proposals for the next collective bargaining agreement . This is news for nerds and diehards — you either have to love the minutiae of labor relations or have a vested interest in the structure of the Rule 5 draft to get excited about this stuff. Fortunately, I know what my audience is. MLB’s new proposals concern three areas: The creation of a weekly roster change window, a more aggressive Rule 5 draft, and the creation of free agent blackout periods during the offseason. Let’s deal with each in turn. Currently, teams set their active roster daily, and can make changes before and after every game. MLB wants to change that to a weekly structure; every club would have to set its 26-man roster on Monday and live with it th...

2:03 Jason Martinez : Welcome to the RosterResource chat! 5 more days until rosters expand to 28 and 1 more month until regular season ends and I start work on offseason pages. My expectation is that this offseason will be similar to the last one that was interrupted by a lockout … roster chaos right before the CBA expired and more roster chaos after the lockout ended. Fun. Stress. Relief. More fun. Here we go … 2:04 Christopher : I think I know the answer, but Fried can’t be added as the 27th man Saturday only for someone else to be sent out after, right? Assuming they need Elmer for another start before the off day, I guess that means a reliever sent out for Fried and another added as Man 27? 2:06 Jon Becker : He could be the 27th man in name only, actually — we just saw the Twins do this with Buxton for the Field of Dreams game. But I think it’s likelier that Fried starts game 2 so they can activate him in between games rather than...

Eric Longenhagen-FanGraphs I had Tuesday’s Cubs-Diamondbacks Bridge League game circled on the calendar. Chicago’s big league squad is in town this week (for a series that has become spicy ), and I thought this meant the organization’s recently drafted pitchers might throw in front of traveling Cubs brass who could see their new talent in the morning before heading to Chase Field for the second game of that series. “Bridge League,” for those unfamiliar, is a fairly informal, month-long slate of backfield games that take place at the spring training complexes between the end of the Arizona and Florida Complex League schedules and the end of the other minor seasons in September. It mostly exists to give newly drafted players a soft landing spot to start their pro careers. But instead of a first glimpse at Cade Townsend or Carson Jasa, I ran into multiple, big-name rehabbers from both clubs: Justin Steele (who threw a live BP) and Ben Brown of the Cubs, and Corbin Burnes and Za...

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...