Pitching Grips

George Lombard Jr. is bound for The Bronx — or maybe Motown? According to the New York Post ’s Jon Heyman, the Yankees’ top-rated prospect is being targeted by the Tigers in a potential trade for Tarik Skubal . Swap or not, the 21-year-old shortstop has a bright future. A first-round pick in 2023, Lombard Jr. has come to the plate 287 times this season between Double-A Somerset and Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre and is slashing .258/.387/.446 with eight home runs and a 124 wRC+. Moreover, he was scorching the ball prior to being placed on the IL with sprained fingers on his glove hand this past Thursday. Over his previous eight games he had gone 11-for-30 with seven doubles and a pair of round-trippers. How has the son of former MLB outfielder, and current Detroit Tigers bench coach, George Lombard changed since I interviewed him late in the 2024 season? “From a physical standpoint, the stance and setup are a little different,” Lombard Jr. told me last month. “But it’s more the ...

Eric Hartline-Imagn Images Last season, despite his team’s struggles, Byron Buxton set career highs in plate appearances (542), home runs (35), runs (97), RBI (83), hits (129), and WAR (5.0). He only played in 126 games, his second-highest single-season total, because he made two separate trips to the injured list. We saw enough of him in 2025 to appreciate his astonishing abilities, yet at the same time, his presence was a reminder of the career that might’ve been if only he hadn’t gotten hurt so much. Fortunately, Buxton is healthy again this season. As of Friday morning, he has played in 64 of the Twins’ 76 games this year. That might not seem like a lot, but that works out to a pace of 136 games. Crucially, despite dealing with a few minor injuries, he has avoided the IL so far in 2026. He’s on track to hit 49 home runs and accumulate just shy of 6 WAR. ZiPS and our Depth Charts both project him to slow down a little bit, but they still peg him for at least 45 homers and right a...

Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images Jackson Chourio got a late start to his season. A fractured metacarpal in his left hand, suffered during the run-up to the World Baseball Classic but not definitively diagnosed until three weeks later, knocked him onto the injured list just hours before the Brewers’ Opening Day game, and he didn’t make his season debut until May 4. Since then, the 22-year-old outfielder has not only been one of the majors’ top hitters, he’s shown notable improvements in a few key areas while helping to propel the Brewers into first place in the NL Central. He’s becoming the star the Brewers hoped he would when they signed him to an eight-year, $82 million extension in December 2023, before he’d even debuted in the majors. On Wednesday night against the Guardians, Chourio hit his 10th home run of the season, turning a high cutter from Gavin Williams into a two-run opposite-field shot that helped the Brewers to a 9-4 win: The home run w...

Isaiah J. Downing-Imagn Images Top prospects like Jesús Made and Leo De Vries are among the game’s most exciting potential call-ups this season, but most of the players who make the majors in the next couple of months won’t be in the same galaxy as those guys when it comes to their potential. Some may be fringe prospects, others former standouts who fell off team lists — some may have even already been labeled journeymen or organizational players. Nevertheless, a good number of them will contribute in the big leagues down the stretch. Some of last year’s impact rookies, like Caleb Durbin , Isaac Collins , Joey Cantillo , Justin Wrobleski , and Chad Patrick , weren’t Top 100 prospects — most would have struggled to make a Top 500 list. Yet their production mattered, and you can point to a dozen players like that every year. We’re still a month away from the trade deadline, but relatively few top-tier players are available and the ones who are won’t...

D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images Monday marked the one-year anniversary of the blockbuster trade that sent Rafael Devers from the Red Sox to the Giants in exchange for a four-player package. Neither team marked the occasion by throwing a party; mercifully, both were idle, and so didn’t sink further below .500. The deal hasn’t worked out well for either side, though it’s the Giants with an expensive and apparently declining slugger on the books. While Devers was fairly productive after being dealt last season, so far in 2026, the 29-year-old first baseman has surrounded one very good month (May) with a pair of miserable slumps that are just part of the reason the Giants are buried in the NL West standings. We’ve told and re-told the story of the drama in Boston that led up to the Devers trade, but the streamlined version is that the signing of third baseman Alex Bregman bumped Devers off his natural position. After that, a lack of communication between the front office and ...