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After Monday night’s heavyweight fight, Tuesday’s dud, and Wednesday’s pull-a-“W”-out-of-the-hat magic trick, this wacky and often less-than-fun series with the Angels wraps up this afternoon. The Yankees get to hand the ball to their ace, Max Fried, while the Angels appear ready to take the opener approach in this getaway game.

Both of New York’s victories in this series have felt more exhausting than celebratory. They have been the kind of games that leave the dugout, and the fanbase, relieved more than triumphant. Between swings in momentum, defensive miscues, and the emotional whiplash of close finishes, the Yankees have still managed to take two of the first three despite Mike Trout going full 2019, blasting four home runs and driving in eight runs through the opening three games.

The good news for the Yankees is that the ball is in the exact hands they want for a game like this. Ace Max Fried will try to reel Trout back in and keep the rest of the Halos in the clouds long enough for New York to take the series and finally exhale.

Fried enters at 2-0 with a 1.93 ERA and 20 strikeouts, giving the Yankees their most stabilizing presence on a day when the bullpen could certainly use a cleaner path to the late innings. After three consecutive games that have forced the Yankees to grind through relief arms—including a couple who aren’teven on the active roster anymore—and with this being the club’s 10th straight day of games, Fried’s ability to provide length may matter almost as much as the result itself. A deep outing would not only help secure the series, but also better position the Yankees for the Royals, who arrive in the Bronx this weekend for a three-game set.

The Angels will hope the opener allows them to fly home with a split, as they have chosen veteran lefty Brent Suter to take the ball first. Suter started his career with the Brewers before short stints in Colorado and Cincinnati, eventually landing with the Angels this past offseason. In the early going, he has appeared in six games and allowed three earned runs across 13 innings, with his last outing coming on April 11th when he worked 3.2 scoreless innings against the Reds in Cincinnati.

So far this season, Suter has not allowed an earned run against any team other than the Mariners, which is exactly the kind of oddly specific baseball note that should make Yankees fans a little nervous. Make no mistake about it, the Angels waiting until the last minute to announce their starter did little to inspire confidence in a Yankees offense that has spent much of this series making mystery arms look more dangerous than they are.

Yes, Ben Rice has been excellent, yet the Yankees keep sitting him. Aaron Judge has been good, but not yet Judge good (albeit nearly matching Trout with three homers of his own in this series), while Giancarlo Stanton has drifted into single-merchant territory and Cody Bellinger currently looks like he is swinging a pool noodle at the plate.

I could keep going and pile on, but the rest of the regulars will not get any extra baggage from me until they are hitting above .200. For the record, five regulars currently sit below that mark, at .119, .164, .185, .186, and .191. For a lineup with this much talent, today would be a nice day for the bottom of the order to stop letting opposing pitchers look and post numbers like prime Randy Johnson.

Speaking of the lineup, after last night’s sprint home to score the winning run, Austin Wells gets the day off, and the second-hottest hitter on the Yankees right now, Amed Rosario, gets the start at third. Rosario will bat sixth behind Rice, and the lineup as a whole makes a lot more sense than some of the previous configurations, even if one still has to wonder if Rice and Bellinger will eventually be flipped to better protect Judge in the three-hole.

The Yankees have already proven they can survive messy baseball against the Halos. Cleaning it up and taking the series behind their ace, though, would allow them to sleep a little easier in their own beds tonight before a makeshift offday—or at least a true night off—arrives after the final out. In a long season, getaway games often reveal how good teams convert survival into momentum, and this feels like one of those afternoons. Taking a series after surviving Trout in full shark mode, with two walk-off wins and a gem from your ace, might be exactly what this team needs to start playing better baseball.

Here’s to hoping for a less wild ride this afternoon. If nothing else, let’s all enjoy getting to watch a little Yankees matinee baseball on a beautiful spring day in the best city in the country.

How to watch

Location: Yankee Stadium — Bronx, NY

First pitch: 1:35 pm ET

TV broadcast: Yankees – YES | FanDuel Sports Network West

Radio broadcast: WFAN 660/101.9 FM, WADO 1280, KLAA 830

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It’s been an up and down season so far for the St. Louis Cardinals. It’s entirely reasonable to expect that it will be an up and down season from here on out. We’re all hoping for an outcome that’s special and unexpected, but the likelihood is that we’ll have to live through growing pains. In some ways, JJ Wetherholt’s (very, very) early season results are a microcosm for the roller coaster nature of this team as a whole. This is fitting in a lot of ways, as we all hope JJ Wetherholt will be in St. Louis for a very long time. (Unless you’re somehow anti-Wetherholt?! Please, go ahead and identify yourself so we can turn up our noses at you and cross the street to the other side. Thanks!)

Wetherholt, of course, is an uber prospect. Everybody who ranks prospects (including your pet dog), had Wetherholt as a consensus top prospect in all of the minor leagues. This designation is a bit of a catch-22 for Cardinals prospects. Wetherholt descends from a shaky Cardinals prospect tree that includes names like Carlson, Reyes, Taveras (RIP – a true sliding doors moment for the franchise), and Walker (WOW JORDAN WALKER SO FAR). I’m fine staking my non-existent Cardinals reputation on the fact that Wetherholt is absolutely not going to be a failure. While I’m here giving takes, let me just bring up the spice level. I’d happily bet money that Wetherholt will be in a red jacket someday. How’s that for confidence?

In our last episode of Redbird Rundown, we ranked the top three most untradeable major leaguers on the Cardinals roster and despite Jordan Walker’s thermonuclear start (let’s do it again – WOW JORDAN WALKER SO FAR), Wetherholt remains the top of the heap for me. You may disagree, and that’s part of being an observer! Check out that list and so much more if you’re into audio content – Apple and Spotify!

If you’ve watched any of the games thus far, you’ve seen why I have such confidence in Wetherholt. The guy is a quintessential high-floor player. His approach is elite – maybe even beyond elite? Wetherholt is a one man wrecking crew for opposing hurler’s pitch counts. As such, he’s running a walk rate that is in the 76th percentile. While spitting on balls outside the zone, Wetherholt is hacking at pitches in the zone. In the very early going (Yes, I’m still aware it’s early. Thanks for checking.), Wetherholt is displaying an aggressiveness that he’s never shown as a professional. As of this writing, he’s swinging at 5% more pitches in the zone and 3% more pitches outside the zone. 

This newfound aggressiveness, while probably explained by a little rookie pressing to produce at the big league level, does not appear to be serving him well. His bat speed is exactly league average, so to leverage the surprising power he showed last year at Memphis, he’s going to have to swing at exactly the right pitches. Naturally, Wetherholt just had a two homer game two days ago, so there’s all the proof any of us need. 

For the season though, his batted ball data is strikingly average. He’s the Michael McGreevy of batted balls so far? Not sure. May need to workshop that. He’s almost exactly 50th percentile in barrel %, hard hit %, average exit velo, and squared up %. All of these numbers last year were much closer to the top of the MiLB system. Obviously, MLB hitters on average are better than MiLB hitters, but this suggests to me that Wetherholt is making contact with pitches he just can’t do as much with. In short, he’s swinging too much right now.

The biggest plague on Wetherholt’s offensive production so far is the sharply hit ball to second base. Now, before you get visions of Victor Scott II dancing in your head, don’t. In general, just don’t do that to yourself. But, Wetherholt is pulling so many more balls than last year. It’s shocking really. Last year he pulled 42.5% of his batted ball events in the minors, this year it’s up to 53.8%. What gives? His opposite field contact has fallen a full 14%. The best version of Wetherholt anyone has ever seen in his very short career (Wetherholt himself is a bit of a short king, no?) has a spray chart that looks like a shotgun blast. It’s all over the field. Right now, he’s pulling far more pitches and suffering from a .245 BABIP. Many of these hard grounders are right at the first and second basemen.

What’s the upshot? JJ Wetherholt is running a 109 wRC+ being a substandard version of his best offensive self. I’m going to chalk it up to rookie pressing. He also has an interesting habit of going through an adjustment period at each new level and then his baseball AI brain recalibrates and he dominates. I’m not sure we’ll see the lofty 154 wRC+ he ran last year in the minors, but I expect him to improve. It’s been an impressive start, even as it’s substandard for him. If that even makes sense.

As you watch him in the coming weeks, pay attention to how aggressive he is in the box. My hope is that he edges down towards his college and minor league seasons when it comes to swing rates. The track record of this more patient player is beyond impressive. I suspect that the Cardinals have a top of the order hitter that will be there for a long time just starting his adjustment period to major league pitching. We’ll see what the future brings.

As always, thanks for reading! It’s been a great experience at VEB so far. Thanks for that! You can usually find me during games hanging out on twitter @mksmith86. I honestly tweet more from our podcast handle @redbirdrundown2. Drop by and say hey!

Detroit Tigers (9-9) vs. Kansas City Royals (7-11)

Time/Place: 1:10 p.m., Comerica Park
SB Nation Site: Royals Review
Media: Detroit SportsNet, MLB.TV, Tigers Radio Network
Pitching Matchup: RHP Keider Montero (1-1, 1.74 ERA) vs. LHP Kris Bubic (2-1, 2.50 ERA)

This spring, the Cubs have given contract extensions to two key players — Pete Crow-Armstrong and Nico Hoerner.

Other teams have done the same, primarily with young players, some even with players who have yet to play a MLB game.

The Cubs have two veteran players who don’t really fit either category above, but who have both been important contributors to the team in recent years — Ian Happ and Seiya Suzuki. Both are free agents after this season. They are almost exactly the same age, born 10 days apart (Happ, Aug. 8, 1994 and Suzuki, Aug, 18, 1994). So both turn 32 later this year.

Happ has been a consistent 4 bWAR player over the past four seasons. He’s won Gold Gloves each of those four seasons, and almost always posts an OPS near his career average of .790. You know you’re going to get around 22-23 home runs every year from him, a lot of walks that produce around a .340 OBP even with a BA in the .240s. He is a respected clubhouse leader. He’s already hit four home runs this year — last year he didn’t hit his fourth homer until June 5.

Suzuki has been a bit injury-prone, but had a breakout 2025 season in which he batted .245/.326/.478 with 32 home runs and 103 RBI. The latter two numbers were career highs, as were his runs total (75), his 31 doubles, and 75 walks. He began 2025 mostly as a DH, but when Kyle Tucker went down with various injuries, Suzuki played 48 games in the outfield and was at least competent. (Granted, he has shown little of the defensive form that had him win NPB’s Golden Glove Award five times.)

Suzuki is off to a somewhat slow start this year, .261/.393/.261 (6-for-23), with five walks giving him a decent OBP. But that’s only six games for Seiya, and I feel certain he’ll come close to matching his 2025 numbers in 2026.

So of these two, which one would you want the Cubs to extend? Or both? Or neither?

Personally, I think I’d rather keep Suzuki. It seems to me that he might provide a bit more power over the next few years than Happ, and he could slide into a DH role if needed.

What do you think?

After 21 individual articles covering the best of what the Seattle Mariners have to offer in their minor league system, Colt Emerson has officially been crowned as Lookout Landing’s top prospect for the 2026 season, concluding our annual rankings. Having already signed a record-breaking extension earlier this season, Emerson exemplifies everything the Mariners want in a young shortstop and will be a key part of this team for the next decade or longer. His highly anticipated promotion is slated to be at some point this season, and though he’s already making major league money as a 20 year old, expect him to get some additional seasoning in Triple-A before he officially breaks through to the big leagues.

Emerson features premium bat-to-ball skills, budding power, and excellent plate discipline, a prototypical offensive approach of a young shortstop primed to excel at the next level. Perhaps even more important, however, is the fact he’s now a lock to stick up the middle, taking massive strides defensively and looking like a plus defender at the position on a nightly basis. He’s got a big time throwing arm and is fluid in his actions, showing off range that the Mariners have lacked for several years now. He’s a dynamic glove that doubles as an ideal table-setter atop a lineup.

As of now, the goal for Emerson is to polish his offensive approach against veteran pitchers in Triple-A. The lower levels of the minor league typically feature a decent spread of raw “stuff” and can give hitters a taste of how pitches are moving, but Double-A and up is where things really step up. With just north of 200 PA’s at or above Double-A, getting experience against superior stuff is the final step in Emerson’s development and ultimately is what’s keeping him in the minors for now. At just 20 years old, he’s obviously way ahead of schedule and should be given plenty of time to develop regardless of his contract status. The Mariners are in on Emerson for the long haul; messing with his development in order to get him on to a roster that doesn’t have a clear role for him makes little sense and could wind up doing significantly more harm than good.

Thank you to all who have read along with this series! Hopefully the past two and a half months were able to provide some good context on state of the farm system and shine a light on some guys that you hadn’t yet heard of. We’ll still have weekly farm system updates every Monday if your prospect fix hasn’t yet been satiated, providing active updates to your new favorite farm hands. Sound off in the comments and Go Mariners!

This is going to be a piece about patience and taking it slow. I was going to start it off with a joke about stopping to smell the flowers above the left field wall, but they removed those a season or two ago, and I couldn’t quite come up with another lede, so the seams are showing a bit. And not showing in an effective, “oh god, that’s a Zack Wheeler four-seamer coming at me”, way. Anyhow. Bryce Harper’s first pitch swing percentage is down almost double digits this year.

Specifically, it’s down 9.7%, to 44.4% (all stats cited are taken from before yesterday’s game). He’s gone from swinging at a majority of first offerings to passing on most of them, though he’s still quite eager to get the at-bat started with a mighty hack. Small sample size caveats apply, but that’s still a pretty big change. His overall swing rate is down by 3.4%, so this would seem to be more than a general decision to swing less— it’s concentrated on the first swing. Although Harper’s swing is lethal, you can see the logic in his starting fewer at-bats with one: pitchers really don’t like to give Harper pitches in the zone, and they’re increasingly reluctant to give him the fastballs he feasts on. So why not start off by taking one of those pitches outside, getting into a hitter’s count, and forcing them to give him the fastball?

That would be sensible strategy, but it’s also not what’s happening. His first pitch swing rate is way down, but his first pitch strike rate has barely changed from last year (up 0.8%). Any benefit he’s getting with fewer first pitch whiffs and fouls is being offset by something. The only thing it could be, really, is that he’s getting more pitches in the zone, and thus taking more called strikes. His overall in zone percentage is actually down a bit from last year, though only by the small margin of 2.5%.

But if we look only at pitches on a 0-0 count, his in-zone percentage has increased from 45.8% to 52.8%. As Bryce has dropped his first pitch swings to under 50%, pitchers have raised their first pitch offerings in the zone to over 50%. Hence the lack of change in his first pitch strike rate. Pitchers have also changed which pitches they’re offering him on 0-0 counts: last year he got fastballs for the plurality of his initial offerings, but this year, and for the first time in his career, he’s getting more breaking balls than fastballs to start. Pitchers are starting to pitch Bryce backwards. He seems to be making an effort to swing less at breaking balls this year, and not just in 0-0 counts: overall, his swing rate against the moving stuff has dropped by 10%.

All this raises a question about what we’re seeing. Are pitchers offering Harper more first pitches in the zone because he’s swinging at them less? Or is Harper swinging less at first pitches because of what pitchers are offering him? Unlike the question of the chicken and the egg, we can make some progress towards answering this (also, did the Phanatic, being a bird, come from an egg? That’s beyond the purview of this piece, and also a little uncomfortable to think about).

See, Bryce isn’t alone. Taken as a team, the Phillies have dropped their first pitch swing rate by 7.7%, more than any other team in baseball. In part, that’s the product of a change in team composition: the Phillies parted ways with Nick Castellanos, who swung at a greater proportion on first pitches than anyone else in baseball in 2025, and replaced him with Adolis García, who ranked 100th for first pitch swing %. But it’s not just about the change in personnel:

All of the Phillies starters have dropped their first pitch swing rate from last year (we’ll exclude Justin Crawford here, since he’s a rookie and has no MLB data from last year). Even Bryson Stott, who swings at first pitches about as often as blue moons appear on leap years, has somehow found a way to do so less often. Part of this is (like everything else in April), small sample size. Case in point, during the time between my starting to poke around this topic and actually writing this, Stott’s decrease in first pitch swing % went from “wow, that’s a big drop” to “that’s a small, but notable drop” to “I’m pretty sure this doesn’t mean anything”. Realmuto’s drop also seems small enough to be negligible. But given that the growing reluctance to swing at the first offering is spread out across the entire team, it seems like there may be something real here.

The Phillies may be telling their hitters to take a more patient approach, to swing less at the first pitch (and not just at the first pitch— they’ve dropped their overall swing rate by 3.1%, more than all but five other clubs). That’s decreased their first pitch strike percentage by a bit (2.8%). I’m not so convinced that the decline in first pitch swing rate for the Phillies with small declines is all that meaningful; Realmuto and Stott’s declines are small enough to be noise, and Marsh and Schwarber’s drops could also turn out to be the same. But Harper and García seem to be genuinely more reluctant to swing at the opening offering, at least in the early going. It’s clear to me why Harper might want to make that change; only Castellanos was more likely to swing at first pitches last year, and pitchers are happy to exploit that. García’s change in approach is a little more surprising, both because of the size of the drop, and because he wasn’t unusually likely to swing at first offerings last year. But García is looking to return to form after an underwhelming 2025, and finding a way to get into more hitters counts certainly couldn’t hurt.

And on a team-wide level, the reasoning may be simple: no team in baseball was less likely to get a pitch in the zone last year. If pitchers aren’t inclined to give you something in the zone, taking fewer swings on first pitches gets you more 1-0 counts, and thus more pressure for the next pitch to be in the zone. Eventually, if pitchers realize giving a Phillie an out of the zone pitch on 0-0 is likely to get them a 1-0 count, then they’ll start off more at-bats with pitches in the zone.

It’s early. Not enough time has passed to gauge precisely how much of this is intentional strategy that’ll stick, and not enough time has passed to see how opposing pitchers will respond. So far, the Phillies are actually somewhat less likely to get pitches in the zone than they were last year. A lot of this could turn out to be noise. Still, it’s worth taking a swing at the first offering of early season data— even if the Phillies are taking the opposite approach.