A year after Albert Pujols found the fountain of youth and spent his final season setting major league pitching on fire, the old-guy star of the 2023 season hasn’t been a positional contemporary like Joey Votto or Miguel Cabrera. Instead, April’s ultimate veteran revival has belonged to Andrew McCutchen of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Much like […]
The apex predator for the U.S. worm population bides his time in the New York Yankees’ bullpen. He begins to stir in the later innings, and he enters in the eighth or ninth. Then his assault on the nation’s underground invertebrates begins. For All-Star relief pitcher Clay Holmes, the weapon of choice is a devastating […]
Springtime in baseball is rife with expectation for pitchers. It’s a new year, and over the offseason, players have been working on their craft, whether that be tweaking their pitches, adjusting their mechanics or getting their minds right. Spring training allows players to practice those changes in a simulated setting, but it’s not until a […]
Gerrit Cole was always supposed to make hitters swing and miss. But there was a time when the No. 1 overall pick in the 2011 draft, with a 100 mph fastball in his arsenal, failed to meet expectations. In his five years with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Cole hovered around average in strikeout performance. By FanGraphs’ […]
A year ago, we conducted an exhaustive statistical search for the team that most stood out by specifically not standing out. The not-so-proud recipients of the title of most average team in major pro sports? None other than the Pittsburgh Pirates, who would go on to finish with an almost-exactly .500 82-win record last season. […]