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Here are five things to watch and predictions as the Yankees open a three-game series against the Kansas City Royals in the Bronx on Friday...

5 things to watch

Will Ben Rice stay in the lineup?

A lot has been made of manager Aaron Boone's lineups this week. Despite saying Rice is his first baseman, he's sat down the talented slugger a few times this week in favor of Paul Goldschmidt. 

While Boone likes having Rice as a left-handed option off the bench, with the team scuffling and Rice being the most consistent hitter this season, it would behoove the skipper to keep Rice at first base this weekend. 

Will it happen? That remains to be seen.

The Royals are deploying two southpaws in Noah Cameron and Cole Ragans, but Rice launched a homer off a lefty reliever against the Angels on Thursday, so he is capable of handling it.

Aaron Judge continues to mash

Judge is locked in.

The captain mashed four home runs in the four-game series against the Angels this week and is now tied for the major league lead in that category.

Unfortunately for the Yanks, the home runs haven't necessarily translated to victories as the Bombers had to settle for a split with the Angels. The Yankees have lost seven of their last nine games, but when Judge goes this team goes. And going up against those aforementioned lefties could benefit Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, and the other right-handers in the lineup.

Bullpen woes

The Yankees' bullpen was the weakest part of the team coming out of spring training, but they excelled early on and helped the team get out to a 8-2 start. Things have changed since.

The relievers allowed 14 runs in 17 innings during the four-game series with the Angels, including two implosions.

New York has played musical chairs with certain relievers as they try and navigate playing 13 straight days -- their next off day is Monday. 

The high-leverage guys -- aside from Camilo Doval -- have been fine, but if the starters don't go deep the Yankees could be facing problems similar to what they experienced this week.

Length needed from starters

Speaking of the starters, the Yankees will have Cam Schlittler, Will Warren,and Ryan Weathers take the mound this weekend.

All three were not great in their last starts. Schlittler had his -- relative -- worst outing of the season, allowing three runs over five innings while the Angels pounced on Warren for six runs across 3.2 innings. Weathers was the most unique, as he struck out 10 batters but allowed five runs in five innings, all from the long ball.

While it is a long season and hiccups are natural, the Yankees need their young hurlers to give them length to take the pressure off the bullpen and the lineup.

Bobby in the Bronx

Yankee Stadium sometimes brings the best out of some players, like we saw with Mike Trout this week. The future Hall-of-Famer launched five home runs in the four-game series, making a statement to the rest of MLB that he is healthy and back.

Now, the Yanks will welcome Bobby Witt Jr.,the Royals' superstar who finished second to Judge in the 2024 MVP voting. While Witt hasn't had the start he usually does -- he's slashing .254/.346/.299 with an OPS of .645 across 18 games -- it's only a matter of time until the talented infielder gets it going.

Witt has played 11 games in the Bronx. In that span, he's hitting .255 with two doubles and one home run. 

Predictions

Who will the MVP of the series be?

Ben Rice

Rice plays all three games and shows why he needs to stay in the lineup.

Which Yankees pitcher will have the best start?

Cam Schlittler

Schlittler has allowed three runs in back-to-back games this season. He didn't do that all of last season, and I don't see that going to three games.

Which Royals player will be a thorn in the Yankees' side?

Bobby Witt Jr.

Easy pick. Witt just put up three hits on Thursday against the Tigers, and it feels like he's ready to be his MVP-type self after a slow start.

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The Tampa Bay Rays will look to build on their six-game winning streak as they visit the Pittsburgh Pirates on Friday night.

Tampa Bay has been crushing opposing pitchers so far this season, and I’m picking it to win again tonight in my Rays vs. Pirates predictions. 

Let’s take a deeper look at this matchup in my free MLB picks for Friday, April 17.

Who will win Rays vs Pirates tonight: Rays moneyline (+120)

The Tampa Bay Rays are averaging 5.06 runs per game so far this season, and have put up at least five runs in every game of their current winning streak. They’ll have a great chance to keep that going tonight against Pittsburgh Pirates starter Bubba Chandler.

Chandler has allowed three earned runs in each of his last two starts without going more than 5 1/3 innings in either game.

Tampa Bay starter Nick Martinez has looked sharp to start the season, throwing to a 2.16 ERA and 0.96 WHIP over his first three starts.

With the Rays coming in this hot, I’m jumping on these odds tonight.

COVERS INTEL: Tampa Bay is hitting .267 and averaging 5.5 runs per nine innings against right-handed pitching this season.

Rays vs Pirates Over/Under pick: Over 8.5 (-102)

Pittsburgh is hitting well too, averaging five runs per game off a .734 OPS this year. Brandon Lowe has seven homers in his first 17 games, while Oneil Cruz and Ryan O’Hearn are also off to fast starts.

Neither starter is likely to give their team much length tonight. There are soft spots that these lineups can take advantage of if it takes several arms to get through this game, especially on Tampa Bay’s side.

With both lineups in peak form, I’m backing the Over.

Rays vs Pirates odds

• Moneyline: Rays +116 | Pirates -136
• Run line: Rays +1.5 | Pirates -1.5
• Over/Under: Over 8.5 | Under 8.5

Rays vs Pirates trend

The Rays are 6-0 straight up in their last six games overall. Find more MLB betting trends for Rays vs. Pirates.

How to watch Rays vs Pirates and game info

Rays vs Pirates latest injuries

Rays vs Pirates weather

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Earlier this week, the Yankees picked up a split in their series against the Angels, but it was a lot of work to get there. The two wins required ninth inning comebacks, while the two losses were both of the very dumb variety. With that over, the Yankees will remain home and welcome the Royals to town for a weekend matchup.

With the exception of the Dodgers, every team in baseball has gotten off to a middling start to the season, but the Royals sit at the lower end of that. Following a loss on Thursday, they sit at 7-12. Their lineup has been more to blame, as even Bobby Witt Jr. has gotten off to a bit of a slow start. Can the Yankees keep that going, or will we be sitting here Sunday night frustrated at another annoying series? Let’s look at what the pitching matchups might have in store.

Friday: Cam Schlittler vs. Michael Wacha (7:05 pm ET)

After a remarkable first two starts on the season, Schlittler has given up some runs in the last two, albeit both times, it was just three in five innings. The most remarkable stat of all was that a walk he issued in his most recent game against the Rays was the first he issued all season.

The veteran Wacha has gotten off to an incredible start to his age 34 season. In 21 innings across three starts, he’s given up just one run. In his perfectly fine 2025 season, he put up 3.6 fWAR and 3.8 rWAR, and he’s already at 0.6 and 1.1 respectively in 2026. Now, a non-zero amount of that had to do with throwing eight scoreless against a very bad White Sox offense in his last game, but the Yankees’ offense hasn’t covered themselves in glory so far, so we shall see.

Saturday: Will Warren vs. Noah Cameron (1:35 pm ET)

With a 2.45 ERA in his four starts so far, Warren has mostly been perfectly fine so far. That being said, he’s only lasted a full five innings once so far, and he did allowed four unearned runs in his last game. He’s also only issued six walks in 18.1 innings on the season, but if you look at the ball-strike breakdown, he has a habit of letting counts go long. While the Royals haven’t taken a ton of walks, they’ve struck out less than league average, so if he can’t put batters away cleanly and quickly in this one, that could lead to some danger.

Cameron debuted last season and had a very nice campaign, finishing fourth in AL Rookie of the Year voting. However in his lone game against the Yankees so far, they did tag him for six runs in 5.2 innings last year on June 10th in Kansas City. His stats on 2026 so far are fine, but he has allowed a higher rate of hits so far.

Sunday: Ryan Weathers vs. Cole Ragans (1:35 pm ET)

Weathers’ 4.29 ERA only grades out as a little worse than league average. However, his start to the season feels way worse than that because he’s been a roller coaster. He has two pretty good starts, including one against the A’s where he gave up just one run in eight inning. However, his two bad starts have been very bad, including getting roughed up by the Angels earlier this week.

After a fourth place Cy Young finish in 2024, Ragans was limited to just 61.2 innings last year due to injury. He appears to be back and healthy this year, but did have to leave a start in the first inning a couple weeks ago after taking a liner to the thumb. His 3.78 ERA grades out as solid, but his 8.6 K/9 rate is way down from where it has been, including in 2024.

Good news: Red Sox fans get to watch the two best starting pitchers in the American League this weekend when the Detroit Tigers come to town.

Bad news: The pitchers miss each other by one game and Boston must find a way to beat the two-time defending Cy Young Award winner. 

Garrett Crochet and Tarik Skubal will each take the mound. Last season, they represented the class of left-handed pitching in the sport. They each set the tone of excellence for their respective rotations. 

There’s only one problem: We really have to miss this matchup? 

Here are four thoughts on the excellent southpaws before the Tigers and Red Sox begin a four-game set on Marathon weekend. 

So Close

Skubal will likely pitch Saturday’s contest against Brayan Bello while Crochet will take the ball for the Red Sox in the Sunday matinee. 

Despite spending multiple years in the same division when Crochet pitched for the Chicago White Sox, the stars have only faced off against each other once.

Flashback to Opening Day 2024 and it was the pitchers’ duel baseball deserved. Crochet and Skubal each tossed six strong innings with just eight combined hits allowed and 14 total strikeouts. 

The lone run against Crochet came when Andy Ibanez plated Javy Baez on a third-inning sacrifice fly. 

Baseball deserves to see this matchup once again, especially as the reigning top-two finishers in last year’s American League Cy Young Award race. 

ERA Crusher? 

When it’s all said and done, there may be no greater winner from Crochet’s disastrous start against the Minnesota Twins. 

The Red Sox starter imploded in the second inning Monday and exited after allowing 10 earned runs to the best team in the American League (so far). That performance ballooned Crochet’s ERA to 7.58 (!!!). 

That could take him months to bring that number back down to Earth and legitimately return him to award conversations. Skubal is at 2.22 through his first four starts and could now very easily walk the red carpet to his third consecutive Cy Young win, though other AL contestants will surely arise. 

All that in a contract year to boot (more on that later). 

Revisiting 2025

Skubal won the Cy Young Award last season with the ERA title (2.22 ERA) and the league-leading WAR (6.5). He won 13 games to Crochet’s 18 (we don’t need to insert the lecture on the declining value of pitcher wins) while the Red Sox ace led the sport with 255 strikeouts and 205.1 innings pitched.

Red Sox Discount? 

Boston wasted no time locking in Crochet for the future after acquiring him in a December 2024 trade with the White Sox. In the first week of the 2025 regular season, Crochet signed a six-year, $170 million extension through 2031 with an opt-out after 2030. 

Getting the second best starting pitcher in the American League at $28 million per year already feels like a win for the Red Sox. That should resonate even more when Skubal likely breaks the bank in free agency next winter.
Extension talks with Detroit seem to be over and Skubal will walk at the perfect time, especially after a potential three-peat Cy Young performance we alluded to early. If he exceeds $40 million per year, the Red Sox can have a rare reason nowadays to pat themselves on the back.

If you are a regular reader of this segment, you have seen this before. The best stats are the stats that can be used for hitting and pitching. Offensive and defensive efficiency is one of those. Today, we are focused on the worst pitching staff in baseball. At least, that is where the Astros ranked coming into Wednesday night’s game. They were last in hits allowed, walks allowed, and home runs allowed. In fact, if we throw in Wednesday night’s game they even led the league in hit by pitches.

I stepped out of the lab on Wednesday to question whether Joe Espada or Dana Brown were on the hot seat. Of course, they have no contract for 2027, so they started the season on the hot seat. I would never fire a manager or executive in April. It was more of a question of what would happen if these trends continue. The general law of statistics is that everything will regress to the mean. Today, I present the big table of how each major league team is doing in defensive efficiency.

In the case of pitching, the lower the number the better. It is a simple accounting of what percentage of base runners score. It is not a perfect accounting. We do not include players that reach on errors, but in this case we are short-circuiting the table to include the total number of runs, total number of base runners, and the defensive efficiency rating for each team. We will go last to first this time around.

I should go over some basic math before we dive into what it means. Each category stands on its own. So, if you were to take the median for each category and actually do the math, the median would be .354. Some of you are glazing over as you read this, but I know I have some intrepid readers out there that will notice these little things. Kudos to you for noticing.

Let’s start with the good news. The Astros are due for some positive regression on all counts. This team will not be the worst pitching staff in baseball for the whole season. They will surrender fewer hits and they will definitely get their walks down to a more reasonable level. However, the biggest thing is that their defensive efficiency will also approach the league median as well. This is because the entire league will approach the median eventually.

What exactly does this mean? If the Astros had league median efficiency they would have surrendered 99 runs instead of 113. In the early going, this would probably be equivalent to three wins. Suddenly, a 11-9 team would look a lot better than an 8-12 team. Of course, the hitting efficiency would also be closer to the median. So, maybe you would be looking at a .500 team.

The bad news is that getting to the median in hits allowed and walks allowed is not necessarily in the cards. The Astros will get closer to the median, but this might be a below average pitching staff with all of the injuries. This is mainly about efficiency. You will notice the numbers are over the board in terms of runs scored and base runners. The Rays are one of the better pitching staffs in terms of base runners. They are off the charts in a negative way.

So, in the end, the Astros have been bad, but they have also been unlucky. So, even if they continue to be bad, they will still improve overall due to a regression to the mean. They will eventually get there when health stabilizes and when they move to a more conventional rotation with AAAA type of starters to replace the injured ones.

We will revisit these numbers later in the year, so we should keep these in the back of our mind. You will see the numbers tightening and the Astros improve overall as the season goes along. The other good news is that teams like the Rangers will get worse. On a long enough timeline the survival rate drops to zero. Do you agree?

Jacob Melton was acquired by the Rays as the centerpiece in the Brandon Lowe trade. He brings a high-impact toolset: fringe 70 power, plus defense across all three outfield spots (including center field), and above-average speed.

Through his first 15 games with Triple-A Durham, that hasn’t translated to production. Melton is currently running a 74 wRC+. Why would someone with a strong track record of upper-minors performance be struggling in AAA?

There are a few reasons for this. First, it’s likely just random variance in a small sample. It’s not even May yet, there’s no need to be concerned. Another reason is that Melton is currently undergoing an adjustment to his approach, so his early struggles may be less about regression and more about recalibration.

Damage on contact

In order to get the most out of his profile as a power hitter, Melton needs to ensure he’s consistently hitting the ball at optimal angles. He has seen year-over-year improvement in his SLG on contact (SLGcon), measured per “BBE” (Batted Ball Event, e.g. anytime a bat makes contact with the ball).

• 2024: .560 (127 BBE)
• 2025: .729 (97 BBE)
• 2026: .750 (22 BBE)

League average SLGcon in AAA typically sits in the mid to upper 500s each season, so we can see that he has gone from accessing his power from an average rate to a well above average rate so far this season. His launch angle (LA) distribution helps explain why.

Analyzing LAs in buckets adds an important layer than is often overlooked when one exclusively considers average LA. Categorizing LAs in groups paints a more detailed picture of a player’s batted ball distribution – something we can see with Melton’s LA buckets below:

It’s too small of a sample so far in 2026 to say that the data will be the same for the rest of the season, but the trends are more important than the exact numbers. Melton is getting into line drive and fly ball angles more consistently, and his hardest contact is coming at optimal angles for damage too. His average hardhit LA has climbed from just 9 degrees in 2024 to 19 degrees so far in 2026. I’d expect those improved angles to translate to more in-game production over a larger sample, but that production comes with a trade-off.

Next steps

Melton is whiffing significantly more this season as a result of his shift in approach. In many ways, this looks like a deliberate trade-off: sacrificing contact to unlock more impactful contact. After maintaining a solid 23.4 whiff% across 2024 and 2025 in AAA, it has significantly increased to 41.4% this season. That level of swing-and-miss would be difficult to sustain at the major league level.

Melton can hedge against this by improving his swing decisions and figuring out a two-strike approach. The two data points I’ll be following are his zone-minus-out-of-zone (Z-O) swing% with less than two strikes and his whiff% with two strikes.

He’ll need to be selective and disciplined to maintain his plus damage on contact. His Z-O swing% so far this year is a 38.9%. This number is currently better than average but getting it closer to 40% and higher would be ideal for Melton’s profile. It appears that he’s doing well in this area so far.

His two-strike approach is less polished as Melton is currently whiffing on 53.7% of pitches with two strikes. One possible adjustment is incorporating more opposite-field intent in two-strike counts. That would allow him to see the ball deeper and naturally shorten his swing, which could help reduce swing-and-miss. Importantly, this kind of situational adjustment wouldn’t necessarily come at the expense of his improved damage on contact.

Those two markers – early-count swing decisions and two-strike whiff rate – will be key to monitor as he works toward impacting the major league roster later this season and pushing for a role in 2027.

Last season, a corner outfielder wearing the jersey no. 23 got off to a rough start in his first year as a Dodgers. This season, a shiny new corner outfielder wearing no. 23 has gotten off to an equally frustrating start.

Kyle Tucker was signed to be that impact corner outfielder at the top of the Dodgers lineup, and he is still an upgrade over the maligned Michael Conforto, who now finds himself struggling in Tucker’s old stomping grounds from the year prior. Tucker has demonstrated a remarkable eye at the plate, as reflected in a 15 percent walk rate that ranks 33rd out of 189 qualified hitters, but he has just three extra-base hits on the season with a slugging percentage at .343. His strikeout rate and chase rate are both uncharacteristically high to begin the season as well.

Tucker attributed his recent poor performances with being a bit too selective on his swing, notes Sonja Chen of MLB.com, as he has struggled with adjusting his approach in unfavorable counts.

“Sometimes you just find yourself chasing more, you just have to try and just narrow your zone a little bit and look in certain parts in the zone, rather than just like swinging at whatever’s thrown,” Tucker said. “So I just try to do my best with that and just try to hone on that, and kind of pick my spots on locations where I want and just try to be early with it and try to do a little better job of that.”

Tucker did end the recent homestand on a positive note, delivering the go-ahead hit on Tuesday and drilling a home run in his final at-bat on Wednesday after lining a ball 107 miles per hour off the bat in his previous appearance. As the Dodgers prepare to open a four-game series with the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field, a stadium that ranks first in park factor this year, the four-time All-Star is starting to find his footing at the right time.

Links

Wednesday was an atypical night for Shohei Ohtani, as it marked the first time that he only took the mound instead of both pitching and hitting in a Dodgers uniform. Fans were still treated to a spectacle from the reigning two-time NL MVP, as he delivered six full innings on one-run ball while striking out a season-high 10 Mets hitters.

The decision to have Ohtani strictly pitch on Wednesday was a precautionary move by Dave Roberts, as Ohtani had been plunked on the shoulder by David Peterson on Monday and is hitless since. Bill Plunkett of the Orange County Register notes that this will not become a recurring theme on Ohtani’s start days.

‘“If he wouldn’t have gotten hit, he would’ve DH’d today,” he said. “So I just think in this one game, it just makes more sense to give him the best chance to kind of manage the shoulder and the back.

“I think that it’s something I’m going to keep an eye on if it makes sense but not just kind of do it proactively. … It’s got to make sense to not have your best hitter not in the lineup.”

Dylan Hernández of the California Post writes about Edwin Díaz’s knee issues that kept him out for the majority of the homestand. As noted earlier this week, Díaz’s availability for Wednesday’s game was dependent on how his pregame bullpen session fared. He was warming up in the bullpen during the eighth inning on Wednesday, and he would’ve entered the ninth inning for a chance to face his former team had Dalton Rushing not put the score out of reach.