MLB Notebook: Walks are the highest they’ve been this century, Pirates are surging, and more

Welcome to a new column I’m doing this season, where I take a bi-weekly look around Major League Baseball to fill you in on the league-wide trends, surging teams, and top individual performances. There will be some highlight clips, some criticisms, and some personal analysis of where I think the game is at and/or going. I hope that, if you’ve had a busy week or haven’t been able to watch as many games as you’d like, this article can be a great way to keep up with what’s happening in Major League Baseball.

So, let’s stop wasting time and dive right in.

⚾️ Baseball is back on NBC: MLB returns to NBC and Peacock in 2026! In addition to becoming the exclusive home of Sunday Night Baseball, NBC Sports will broadcast MLB Sunday Leadoff, “Opening Day” and Labor Day primetime games, the first round of the MLB Draft, the entire Wild Card round of the postseason, and much more.

Are Pitchers Struggling With Command or the ABS?

In our first edition of this column, we talked about Major League Baseball adopting an Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System that had been used in the minor leagues in previous seasons. That system has been a success so far this season, but we’re still learning what the ramifications will be throughout the game. Could one of them be an uptick in walks? It’s become a bit of a discussion point since the league walk rate is up considerably in the early stages of the season.

As you can see here, when I say “up considerably,” I’m not exaggerating. The league is averaging 3.78 walks per game, which would be the most since 1950. Only once this century has the league posted a walk per game rate over 3.4, so running a 3.78 mark is a stark difference. Could the ABS be part of the reason for that?

The argument seems to make sense. If players are now able to challenge balls and strikes, then they could extend at-bats that would have previously been strikeouts or earn walks on at-bats that would have previously continued. However, a look at Statcast’s detailed breakdown would seem to refute that. So far, league-wide, batters have gained 30 walks on challenges. However, catchers/pitchers have eliminated 40 walks on challenges. Now, this doesn’t mean that at-bat didn’t end in a walk, but it’s telling us that, due to ABS challenges alone, we should actually have seen a REDUCTION in walks, so something else is going on here.

A quick glance at league-wide stats on Fangraphs also shows that the zone rate is the lowest it’s been in the last five years.

It’s not a major difference, but it’s something to note. There are more walks because fewer pitches are being thrown in the zone, which isn’t a crazy notion. However, if you also look at the league average vertical movement on Fangraphs, which is broken down by pitch type, you can see that four-seam fastballs have more “rise” or induced vertical movement (iVB) that we’ve seen in the last five year, but also that sliders, curves, and changeups all have more vertical break than we’ve seen in the last five years. Could that be due to more teams using pitch modeling and optimizing arsenals for movement? Could it be changes to the baseball (like seam height), which is allowing pitchers to get more movement but causing them to struggle with command? At this stage, it’s hard to know for sure, and this may all revert to the norm, but it’s something we should be monitoring.

Don’t Give Up on Talented Prospects

Perhaps the star of the early weeks of the MLB season is Jordan Walker. The former 4th-ranked prospect in baseball struggled in his first three MLB seasons. After getting his first MLB opportunity at age 21, Walker was unable to establish much consistency and was demoted to the minor leagues multiple times over the past three seasons. Even though he won’t turn 24 years old until May 22nd, there was some discussion of whether or not Walker may never pan out at the highest level.

Yet, thanks to a retooling of his swing in the offseason, Walker has come out of the gates on fire, hitting .333/.394/.767 with an MLB-leading eight home runs, 15 runs scored, and 15 RBI.

While it may be too early to say this is “real,” we can say with confidence that Walker is an improved hitter who is showing that he belongs as a regular at the big league level. He’s not the only former top prospect who is off to a great start after being a bit of an afterthought. Chase DeLauter of the Guardians, Max Muncy of the Athletics, and Colt Keith of the Tigers are all off to strong starts after having seen their prospect shine fade in recent seasons.

Much of DeLauter’s waning prospect hype was connected to injury. He still ranked high on many scouting services, but injuries had prevented him from having over 242 plate appearances in any minor league season after being drafted in the first round of the 2022 MLB Draft. There was some concern that his body may never hold up over a whole season, and while we’re still crossing our fingers that it does, the 24-year-old is currently 6th in baseball in wRC+ and is hitting .300/.379/.680 with five home runs and 12 RBI.

Max Muncy may never have been an elite prospect, but he was a first-round pick in the 2021 MLB Draft and was consistently one of the top 10 prospects in the Athletics’ system. Colt Keith had been ranked as the 25th prospect in baseball in 2024 by MLB Pipeline, but had two fairly average MLB seasons to begin his career and fallen out of many discussions about the better young players in the game. Now, both Muncy and Keith are among the top 50 hitters in all of baseball in wRC+.

Perhaps the lesson here is to give young players with intriguing batted ball data a bit more of a leash. Last year, Walker had a max evit velocity of 117.9 mph and one of 115.5 mph in 2024. We knew he could do damage to a baseball when he made contact. DeLauter had no regular-season MLB data before this year, but he had a 52% hard-hit rate in Triple-A last year. Muncy had a 10.1% barrel rate in 139 batted ball events last season at the MLB level, and Colt Keith pisted a 9.2% barrel rate and a 44% hard-hit rate in his 137 games last year. All of Walker, Muncy, and Keith have come into this season with faster bat speeds and more optimized swing paths, which have led to more consistently hard contact.

It’s not a guarantee that prospects who produce hard contact while struggling in their early seasons will figure it out (cough – Jarred Kelenic – cough), but these four hitters are a good reminder that a little extra grace with young hitters isn’t always such a bad idea.

A surprising Padres starter and two early bat speed gainers are recommended grabs this week.

Starting Pitchers Are Adding More Pitches to Their Arsenals

In last week’s article, I talked about how many pitchers were adding a secondary type of fastball (two-seamer or cutter) to go along with their four-seamer. I discussed that having multiple fastball variations allowed pitchers to adjust to the fact that hitters were now getting better at hitting higher velocity pitches and that contact on higher velocity pitches usually led to more damage. To build off of that, there is some early research to suggest that pitchers are expanding their arsenal more in general, not limited to fastballs.

The increased reliance on “pitch factories” like Driveline and Tread that use modeling to map out spin patterns and create pitches tailored to a pitcher’s specific arm path and grip preferences has made it easier for pitchers and teams to create new shapes or add whole new pitches to a pitcher’s mix over the course of an offseason. As I’ve also mentioned in a lot of my writing, pitchers who can attack both right-handed and left-handed hitters with at least three pitches tend to have more success because they can keep hitters guessing and also attack all quadrants of the strike zone with different velocities and movement patterns.

Now, pitchers are also able to build pitch mixes that are specific for both righties and lefties, which means they don’t have to throw the same breaking ball to each because it’s “their best one,” or they don’t have to throw the same fastball to each because it’s their only one. They can create a deeper arsenal of pitches that is designed to fulfill a specific need against a specific type of hitter.

So far, in 2026, here are the pitches we have seen increase in usage the most across the league (remember that these are league-wide numbers, so small percentages matter a lot):

We alluded to the increase in sinker usage above, and the increase in sweeper usage is tied to a decrease in slider usage. Pitchers have been working on using multiple variations of a slider, with the sweeper, a slower pitch with more horizontal movement, being more effective against same-handed hitters than a traditional slider, which is harder and has a tighter movement profile. Changeups are also becoming more en vogue this year as pitchers adopt a “kick-change” grip, which is a combination of a traditional changeup and a split-finger that allows the changeup to have more drastic arm-side movement and create more strikeouts. I’ll likely be writing about that in more detail next time we have this column.

⚾️ Baseball is back on NBC: MLB returns to NBC and Peacock in 2026! In addition to becoming the exclusive home of Sunday Night Baseball, NBC Sports will broadcast MLB Sunday Leadoff, “Opening Day” and Labor Day primetime games, the first round of the MLB Draft, the entire Wild Card round of the postseason, and much more.

Team Trends

It’s no surprise that the Dodgers currently have the best record in baseball at 13-4; however, what might surprise you is that not far behind them are the Pittsburgh Pirates, who are 10-7 to start the season, the fourth-best record in the National League. The Pirates made some headlines this season when they added Brandon Lowe, Marcell Ozuna, and Ryan O’Hearn. None of them were eye-popping additions, but it was the first time that the Pirates had really spent money in the offseason. Even with Ozuna not producing, the offense has been noticeably better this season. Pittsburgh ranks 7th in wRC+, 7th in batting average, 7th in runs scored, 7th in OPS, and 9th in walk rate. They are middle of the pack in hard-hit rate and ISO, so this isn’t a team that’s crushing the ball, but they’ve put together a solid offense and paired that with a young pitching staff led by Paul Skenes, Braxton Ashcraft, Bubba Chandler, and – soon – Jared Jones. With top prospect Konnor Griffin also now in the mix, this could be an exciting season in Pittsburgh.

Aside from the Pirates, we’ve also seen surprisingly strong starts for the Twins and Guardians, who are 11-7 and 10-8, respectively, the two best records in the American League. It may be unfair to say that the Guardians are a surprise considering they won the division last year, but, even now, FanGraphs gives them a sub-20% chance to win the division and just a 36% chance to make the playoffs. That’s 9th-best in the American League. Before the season started, the Giardians also had the third-best odds to win the AL Central and were +240 to make the postseason, which suggested about a 70% chance that they’d miss the playoffs.

Meanwhile, the Twins were +500 to make the postseason at the start of the year, which makes a bit of sense considering they traded away Carlos Correa, Jhoan Duran, Eduoard Julien, and Griffin Jax and then lost Pablo Lopez for the season with an arm injury. Yet, a Twins lineup filled with players who were mostly considered afterthoughts is currently 3rd in home runs, 5th in runs scored, 5th in ISO, 6th in wRC+, and 9th in OPS. They do have the 9th-highest strikeout rate, and their pitching staff is 20th in ERA and 25th in strikeout rate, so there are some kinks in the armor, but this has been a nice start for Minnesota.

On the pitching front, it’s been a surprisingly nice start for Atlanta, whose starting rotation has the third-best ERA in baseball at 3.01 through the first 95.2 innings, which is also the sixth-most innings of any starting rotation in baseball. Atlanta’s rotation may be 21st in strikeout rate and 16th in walk rate, but they are 2nd in hard-hit rate allowed, 5th in WHIP, and 5th in average exit velocity allowed. Predictive metrics like xFIP and SIERA are not as convinced that this rotation is good; however, considering that Spencer Schwellenbach, Spencer Strider, AJ Smith-Shawver, Hurston Waldrep, and Joey Wentz are on the injured list, the fact that the Braves’ rotation is pitching anywhere close to this well is a surprise to many people.

Individual Player Spotlights

Starting Pitcher Spotlight: Shane McClanahan, Tampa Bay Rays

It’s been a long road back for McClanahan, but Tuesday’s win over the White Sox marked his first win since 2023. The left-hander made his MLB debut in 2021 at 24 years old and quickly became one of the best young pitchers in baseball. He finished 6th in AL Cy Young voting in 2022, and from the time of his debut until August of 2023 (more on that below), McClanahan had the 6th-best ERA in baseball among qualified pitchers with a 3.02 mark in 404.2 innings. He was also 8th in strikeout rate, at 28%, and 8th in K-BB%, at 21%. Even the ERA predictors, like SIERA, had him as a top 10 pitcher in baseball. He began 2023 at 27 years old and seemed to be entering his prime. He was having a tremendous season, posting a 3.29 ERA, 1.18 WHIP, and 26% strikeout rate in 115 innings. Unfortunately, he felt forearm tightness in August of that season and wound up undergoing the second Tommy John surgery of his career later that month.

The surgery kept him out for the rest of the 2023 season and the entire 2024 season. He was back on the mound in March of 2025 and looked good in spring training, throwing seven shutout innings with eight strikeouts and two walks. Then, in his final spring start, he suffered a nerve injury in his triceps. While the injury wasn’t expected to keep him out too long, it never quite responded to treatment the way the team hoped, and McClanahan had to have a procedure in August of 2025 to fix the nerve issue in his arm.

When McClanahan returned to the mound on March 31st this season, it was his first MLB start since August 2nd of 2023, and his win on Tuesday was his first win since June 16th of 2023. His fastball is no longer where it used to be. He’s averaging 94.8 mph on it now with just 14.7 inches of Induced Vertical Break (iVB) when his four-seam fastball sat 96.8 mph in 2023 with 16.6 inches of iVB. It no longer misses as many bats, and the command of it isn’t as pristine as it used to be; however, command issues are often the last thing to be fixed after extended absences. His slider has also lost some velocity and break, which has made it a less impactful swing-and-miss pitch, but his changeup remains a really strong offering that both misses bats and induces weak contact against righties. That profile still makes him a solid starting pitcher, but certainly not one with the upside he used to possess. Perhaps that version of him is still in there somewhere, but for now, just getting that first win is a moment to celebrate.

Relief Pitcher Spotlight: Mason Miller, San Diego Padres

I know most people reading this know about Mason Miller, but I just have to highlight how ridiculous he has been to start the season. The Padres closer has saved five games while allowing one hit and one walk in 8.1 innings while striking out 20 batters. 20 BATTERS! Pitching 8.1 innings means that he has gotten 25 batters out this season, and 20 of them have been via strikeout. He has faced 27 total batters this season, and he has struck out 20 of them. If you want to go back even farther, since August 6th of last year, Miller has pitched 29.2 innings, allowing five hits and walking 10 batters but striking out 62 and not allowing a single run. It’s absurd. He currently has the 6th-best odds to win the NL Cy Young, and while that won’t happen, that’s an impressive sign of respect for a reliever.

Hitter Spotlight: Andy Pages, Los Angeles Dodgers

After his brutal postseason stretch last year, many people forgot just how good Pages had been for much of 2025. During the regular season last year, Pages hit .272/.313/.461 with 27 home runs, 86 RBI, and 14 steals in 156 games. He did that while playing above-average defense at all three outfield spots. However, in the playoffs, Pages was just 4-for-51 (.078) with an 11/0 K/BB ratio and only one extra base hit. Considering how many people were watching those games, Pages performing so poorly unfairly tainted what was a really impressive first full MLB season for the 25-year-old.

Yet, it didn’t take him long to get redemption. As of Wednesday morning, Andy Pages is the best player in baseball. Literally. Yes, you can argue that this won’t like – and it likely won’t – but Pages, at this moment, leads all of baseball with a 1.3 Wins Above Replacement. If you want to talk about his value strictly as a hitter, he is second in baseball in wRC+, trailing only Ben Rice. Pages is hitting .417/.453/.733 with five home runs, nine runs scored, 20 RBI, and two steals. That’s first in the league in RBI, first in the league in batting average, 3rd in the league in OPS, and tied for 7th in the league in home runs. For almost a month, Andy Pages has been among the best players in the game, and considering how he must have felt during last year’s postseason run, that’s a hell of a turnaround.

Individual Stat Leaders (4/1 – 4/14)

Hits

1. Andy Pages – OF, Dodgers: 19 hits (.422 batting average)
2. Drake Baldwin – C, Braves: 18 hits (.327 batting average)
3. Jo Adell – OF, Angels: 17 hits (.340 batting average)
4. Oneil Cruz – OF, Pirates: 17 hits (.347 batting average)
5. CJ Abrams – SS, Nationals 17 hits (.405 batting average)

Home Runs

1. Jordan Walker – OF, Cardinals 7 home runs
2. CJ Abrams – SS, Nationals: 6 home runs
3. Shohei Ohtani – DH, Dodgers: 5 home runs
4. Mickey Moniak – OF, Rockies: 5 home runs
5. Gunnar Henderson – OF, Orioles: 5 home runs

Steals

1. Oneil Cruz – OF, Pirates: 7 steals
2. Bobby Witt Jr. – SS, Royals: 7 steals
3. Jakob Marsee – OF, Marlins: 7 steals
4. Jose Ramirez – 3B, Guardians: 6 steals
5. 4 players with 5 steals (Geraldo Perdomo, Jose Caballero, Elly De La Cruz, Chandler Simpson)

Strikeouts (K-BB%)

1. Drew Ramussen, Rays: 35.9% K-BB%
2. Cam Schlittler – Yankees: 32.8% K-BB%
3. José Soriano, Angels: 32.7% K-BB%
4. Tyler Glasnow, Dodgers: 27.1% K-BB%
5. Steven Matz, Rays: 26.2% K-BB%

Saves

1. Paul Sewald – Diamondbacks: 4 saves
2. Emilio Pagan, Reds: 4 saves
3. Mason Miller, Padres: 4 saves
4. Lucas Erceg, Royals: 4 saves
5. 8 pitchers with 3 saves