1) As a Royals fan, I have to point out that our bullpen is worse than the Nationals (5.33 ERA to 5.07).
2) The Yankees are 6.5 games above the wild card and have been 18-19 without Judge. They are obviously worse, but are just as obviously going to be playing - likely with a healthy Judge - in October. I like to see them fall as much as anyone, but we are going to have to wait until an October short series defeat to start dancing.
3) It seems odd to talk about "best double play combo" without even mentioning fielding.
4) I don't know why people continue to be surprised that one position player can't make a team good. Bobby Witt Jr, for instance, has 11% of the Royals PAs. He touches a ball in the field less than 4 times per game. Heck, WAR tells us this. If you get to 10 WAR in a year (like the aforementioned Judge has before) it is an all time season. I think 0 WAR is supposed to be like a 40 win season. Hey, you have just gotten your team to 50 wins! If you want to get to 90+ wins, you have to take a guy having an all time season and surround him with talent that would be at least .500 anyway playing with a guy they brought up from AAA out of necessity who wouldn't be there otherwise instead of the all time season guy. It is a team sport.
I so loved reading about the adjustment to adjustments. More than the other big team sports, baseball (especially at the major league level) baseball is at least as much about adjusting/scouting as it is about raw talent. It's why a talented prospect has such a hard time turning into a solid player - not only does the level of competition increase and the number games/length of season increase, but even if your debut is strong, the scouting humbles you. Many players can't get past that last step. It also make the game of small and mid-market teams trading good players away for prospects less successful than it could be...the players traded away have come out the other side while the ones you're getting likely won't.
You are so right. The Nationals are a good team- except for the bullpen. However, ownership is an embarrassment….even though other teams have stingy owners, the Nats seem to outdo others when it comes to not investing in current players or adding players to help the team. Nats need relievers. Nats need to sign Wood a long term extension. Nats need to extend contracts to others too…CJ, Griffin, Mead.
To us long-time fans- it’s pretty obvious that ownership would rather sell than buy.
PCA's season is more remarkable when you see where he was at the end of May. Was hitting .237, slugging below .400 and OPS in the low 700's. I truly thought last seasons first half was the aberration.
Joe, how is it possible that you wrote a sentence or two about the possible worst team in the American League, mentioned two different teams, and neither was the Los Angeles/California/Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels? I will admit that I am (was?) an Angels fan, and that Arte Moreno has pretty completely and single-handedly destroyed my love for baseball, but I find it amazing that the Angels didn't get included in your brief discussion of the worst teams in the AL.
The thing about Moreno. He isn’t cheap like the Lerners. He just happens to spend his money foolishly – Hamilton, Pujols, Rendon. Three excellent players who pretty much were all used up by the time he way overpaid for them. He wasn’t cheap on signing his own players- Trout. . He just did not seem to have a baseball person who could make good decisions as far as top flight personnel to add to the team.
While nothing is happening except the All Star Game stuff.....
So there's a thing where, for a bullpen game, the name "Johnny Wholestaff" is used to designate the "starting" pitcher.
So I'm wondering - if Johnny Wholestaff were a real pitcher instead of a combination, what would his stats look like?
1. Johnny only appears in games that are CLEARLY bullpen games (and almost certainly designated as such) - no one inning 'opener' followed by a long relief guy; no starting pitcher removed early because of injury.
2. The last pitcher used in one of these games does NOT count towards his stats. Everyone else gets added in.
How does Johnny Wholestaff compare to the average MLB starter?
Based on my lifetime as a baseball fan, now raising a 17-year old baseball fan, I believe the All-Star Game (in all sports) is mostly for young fans, so I really don't get worked up over many aspects of it. But because I think it's for young fans, I feel strongly that the first pitch should take place at 6 p.m. Eastern, allowing the core audience to actually watch it.
And, further, I think they should sharply limit the commercial breaks to keep it moving. I can't imagine that the ratings are particularly impressive, so it's not like Fox is giving back a lot of money by having two-minute breaks between innings. Last time I watched, there were so many two- and three-pitch at bats, the game felt dominated by its commercial breaks.
6pm ET would be before school gets out on the left coast, a bit too early. But I agree with the broader point that the game is for casual fans particularly children, so it should be accessible to them.
It's a big country. Someone is going to have to miss a little of the game. It would be nice if -- just once -- a 7-year old living in the Eastern Time Zone could see the end of an important game. (Though the World Cup schedule is generally working for those of us in the East.)
You really consider the All-Star game important game? I watched the All-Star game every year when I was younger. To me the only thing less appealing than watching the baseball All-Star game would be the NBA All-Star game and the NFL All-Star games which are jokes.
Rich - I clicked on "You can send in your guesses here!" which gave me an email to askjoe@joeposnanski.com. So I sent my absolutely correct guess to that email in hopes that's where it's supposed to go! Good luck.
That spelling of "Krook" goes back at least to Charles Dickens' great novel BLEAK HOUSE. (Alert: You do NOT want to meet the fate that Mr. Krook meets in the novel!) (I mention his only because I just read the book, which really is a great novel.)
You forgot to mention the Boston Red Sox who just completed a 9-0 road trip on Sunday, coming from 14 games under .500 on June 24 to 46-48 as the All-Star break arrives. That leaves the Sox just half a game behind the Seattle Mariners and Minnesota Twins for the last wild card spot. And all without injured Cy young award winner Garrett Crochet, Trevor Story, Roman Anthony and Marcello Mayer.
This is the first year since I became a Mariners fan (about 10 years ago) that I looked at the Mariners MLB roster and said "all these guys can play. No, they aren't All Stars at every position, but there are no holes in this entire roster." So they have gone out and hit like the woeful Mariners of past seasons. Sure, they've had some injuries, but who hasn't? I don't get it.
I’m so pleased you are noticing how much fun the 2026 White Sox are. We met a couple of years ago, just before the 2024 season, and when I mentioned I was a White Sox fan you gave me the most pitying look I’ve ever seen — when the rest of us saw merely a(nother) crappy season coming up, you clearly could see into the abyss. The new batch are fun to follow, though I keep expecting the bubble to pop. But they could go 0-67 after the break and still be 9 games better than 2024.
I was at the game on Friday night surrounded by Yankee fans who were sad in the ninth. I told them NOT TO WORRY, the Nats bullpen will cough this up, which they promptly did.
Matt Krook goes from being the closer against the Yankees to being unemployed in a 36 hour period. If you're going summarize the Nats bullpen in 2026 in one sentence, that about does it.
The first thing that popped into my head after that series was that you-know-who had called the Nationals ownership to make sure the Yankees won the series. A deeper dive shows that yes, Krook and Lawrence had no business being high leverage situations, but Lovelady and Lord are injured and they chose to have Poulin open a game. That thins things out mightily but then Beeter and Ribalta both got rocked. I was shocked that the Twins won a series at Yankees Stadium (first time in over a decade) but apparently there is a baseball law of conservation of energy thing and whatever applied to the Twins got reassigned to the Nats (sorry guys).
One thing that crept up on me this year...honestly didn't notice it until this morning...is that Jordan Walker seems to have put it together.
He hit my radar in 2022 as a 20-year old who hit .308/.388/.510 in 119 games at AA. I had drafted him in my semi-dynasty fantasy league that year and was thrilled to see those numbers. It didn't quite pan out and he was up and down from the big league to the minors in 2023-2025 being pretty awful for the Cards in 2025 especially. .218/.278/.306...blech.
But this year he has been one of the better hitters in the NL hitting .298/.354/.532 and he is only 24. He is top 10 in many offensive categories and leads the NL in RBI. And he leads the NL in RF assists (while also leading all NL OFers in errors...oops). Power, speed and great arm. That's where I thought his career would take him and suddenly...it has.
Oh we Cardinals fans have noticed. Most of us had just about written him off as another Cardinals prospect disappointment (see Dylan Carlson, Nolan Gorman, Victor Scott, Tyler O'Neill, Paul DeJong, et al.). But Walker appears to have panned out at last. He always hit the ball hard when he hit it, but mostly on the ground; now he's figured out how to lift it and we're hoping for Aaron Judge 2.0!
DeJong had a decent major league career - nine years so far, he probably won't make 10. Pretty good career coming out of ISU in the fourth round.
O'Neill is also currently at nine years.
I doubt Carlson, Gorman and Scott will get to nine years.
Players with nine years in a MLB uniform aren't disappointments, I don't think. Freese had a 11-year career but he's a Cardinal prospect who became an immortal part of the franchise. I wonder if he'll appear in Joe's new book?
To your point, I think when Oscar Taveras passed away, the Cards lost a possible HOFer.
The White Sox are 31-17 at home and 19-28 on the road. I don't know whether that means anything, but it's a dramatic split. I tend to think of New Comiskey Park as - I don't actually think of it as much of anything, but it has never struck me as skewed one way or the other. But the home/road record makes me wonder which White Sox team is the real one.
The Red Sox, FWIW, are 17-27 at home and 29-21 on the road. If there's one team you would expect to be able to take some home field advantage it's Boston, and yet ....
While we're at it, the Tigers are decent at home and terrible on the road, which fits a team with a big ballpark and good pitchers but that that just hasn't hit (until recently). The Rays and Marlins are both very good at home. The Nationals bullpen is apparently freaked out pitching at home (20-31 vs 28-18 road)? And the Dodgers and Brewers are good everywhere, but you knew that.
Kinda interesting that Nolan McLean has been much better on the road, though. Strikeouts are up at home, but everything else has been better on the road.
I have to point out a few things.
1) As a Royals fan, I have to point out that our bullpen is worse than the Nationals (5.33 ERA to 5.07).
2) The Yankees are 6.5 games above the wild card and have been 18-19 without Judge. They are obviously worse, but are just as obviously going to be playing - likely with a healthy Judge - in October. I like to see them fall as much as anyone, but we are going to have to wait until an October short series defeat to start dancing.
3) It seems odd to talk about "best double play combo" without even mentioning fielding.
4) I don't know why people continue to be surprised that one position player can't make a team good. Bobby Witt Jr, for instance, has 11% of the Royals PAs. He touches a ball in the field less than 4 times per game. Heck, WAR tells us this. If you get to 10 WAR in a year (like the aforementioned Judge has before) it is an all time season. I think 0 WAR is supposed to be like a 40 win season. Hey, you have just gotten your team to 50 wins! If you want to get to 90+ wins, you have to take a guy having an all time season and surround him with talent that would be at least .500 anyway playing with a guy they brought up from AAA out of necessity who wouldn't be there otherwise instead of the all time season guy. It is a team sport.
I so loved reading about the adjustment to adjustments. More than the other big team sports, baseball (especially at the major league level) baseball is at least as much about adjusting/scouting as it is about raw talent. It's why a talented prospect has such a hard time turning into a solid player - not only does the level of competition increase and the number games/length of season increase, but even if your debut is strong, the scouting humbles you. Many players can't get past that last step. It also make the game of small and mid-market teams trading good players away for prospects less successful than it could be...the players traded away have come out the other side while the ones you're getting likely won't.
You are so right. The Nationals are a good team- except for the bullpen. However, ownership is an embarrassment….even though other teams have stingy owners, the Nats seem to outdo others when it comes to not investing in current players or adding players to help the team. Nats need relievers. Nats need to sign Wood a long term extension. Nats need to extend contracts to others too…CJ, Griffin, Mead.
To us long-time fans- it’s pretty obvious that ownership would rather sell than buy.
So sad.
As long as the Lerners own the team, they’ll be one of my least favorite teams. Right now running neck and neck with thr A’s.
They're in the real estate business. That's what you have to understand about the Lerners. They don't care about anything except land.
PCA's season is more remarkable when you see where he was at the end of May. Was hitting .237, slugging below .400 and OPS in the low 700's. I truly thought last seasons first half was the aberration.
Joe, how is it possible that you wrote a sentence or two about the possible worst team in the American League, mentioned two different teams, and neither was the Los Angeles/California/Anaheim/Los Angeles Angels? I will admit that I am (was?) an Angels fan, and that Arte Moreno has pretty completely and single-handedly destroyed my love for baseball, but I find it amazing that the Angels didn't get included in your brief discussion of the worst teams in the AL.
The thing about Moreno. He isn’t cheap like the Lerners. He just happens to spend his money foolishly – Hamilton, Pujols, Rendon. Three excellent players who pretty much were all used up by the time he way overpaid for them. He wasn’t cheap on signing his own players- Trout. . He just did not seem to have a baseball person who could make good decisions as far as top flight personnel to add to the team.
While nothing is happening except the All Star Game stuff.....
So there's a thing where, for a bullpen game, the name "Johnny Wholestaff" is used to designate the "starting" pitcher.
So I'm wondering - if Johnny Wholestaff were a real pitcher instead of a combination, what would his stats look like?
1. Johnny only appears in games that are CLEARLY bullpen games (and almost certainly designated as such) - no one inning 'opener' followed by a long relief guy; no starting pitcher removed early because of injury.
2. The last pitcher used in one of these games does NOT count towards his stats. Everyone else gets added in.
How does Johnny Wholestaff compare to the average MLB starter?
And I thought my All-Star Game apathy was just me . . .
Based on my lifetime as a baseball fan, now raising a 17-year old baseball fan, I believe the All-Star Game (in all sports) is mostly for young fans, so I really don't get worked up over many aspects of it. But because I think it's for young fans, I feel strongly that the first pitch should take place at 6 p.m. Eastern, allowing the core audience to actually watch it.
And, further, I think they should sharply limit the commercial breaks to keep it moving. I can't imagine that the ratings are particularly impressive, so it's not like Fox is giving back a lot of money by having two-minute breaks between innings. Last time I watched, there were so many two- and three-pitch at bats, the game felt dominated by its commercial breaks.
6pm ET would be before school gets out on the left coast, a bit too early. But I agree with the broader point that the game is for casual fans particularly children, so it should be accessible to them.
It's a big country. Someone is going to have to miss a little of the game. It would be nice if -- just once -- a 7-year old living in the Eastern Time Zone could see the end of an important game. (Though the World Cup schedule is generally working for those of us in the East.)
You really consider the All-Star game important game? I watched the All-Star game every year when I was younger. To me the only thing less appealing than watching the baseball All-Star game would be the NBA All-Star game and the NFL All-Star games which are jokes.
I'm old enough to remember weekday day games in the LCS.
Is there supposed to be a link to submit guesses?
Rich - I clicked on "You can send in your guesses here!" which gave me an email to askjoe@joeposnanski.com. So I sent my absolutely correct guess to that email in hopes that's where it's supposed to go! Good luck.
Right under his clue for today
That spelling of "Krook" goes back at least to Charles Dickens' great novel BLEAK HOUSE. (Alert: You do NOT want to meet the fate that Mr. Krook meets in the novel!) (I mention his only because I just read the book, which really is a great novel.)
Mike Trout can commiserate with Bobby Witt, Jr.
You forgot to mention the Boston Red Sox who just completed a 9-0 road trip on Sunday, coming from 14 games under .500 on June 24 to 46-48 as the All-Star break arrives. That leaves the Sox just half a game behind the Seattle Mariners and Minnesota Twins for the last wild card spot. And all without injured Cy young award winner Garrett Crochet, Trevor Story, Roman Anthony and Marcello Mayer.
This is the first year since I became a Mariners fan (about 10 years ago) that I looked at the Mariners MLB roster and said "all these guys can play. No, they aren't All Stars at every position, but there are no holes in this entire roster." So they have gone out and hit like the woeful Mariners of past seasons. Sure, they've had some injuries, but who hasn't? I don't get it.
I’m so pleased you are noticing how much fun the 2026 White Sox are. We met a couple of years ago, just before the 2024 season, and when I mentioned I was a White Sox fan you gave me the most pitying look I’ve ever seen — when the rest of us saw merely a(nother) crappy season coming up, you clearly could see into the abyss. The new batch are fun to follow, though I keep expecting the bubble to pop. But they could go 0-67 after the break and still be 9 games better than 2024.
I'm wondering if the ChiSox are in touch with the Vatican to have Pope Leo throw out a First Pitch should they make it to the World Series......
They're in close contact with the Pope, hence the miraculous turnaround.
Correction: Chisox and Guards are in AL Central, not West.
I was at the game on Friday night surrounded by Yankee fans who were sad in the ninth. I told them NOT TO WORRY, the Nats bullpen will cough this up, which they promptly did.
Matt Krook goes from being the closer against the Yankees to being unemployed in a 36 hour period. If you're going summarize the Nats bullpen in 2026 in one sentence, that about does it.
The first thing that popped into my head after that series was that you-know-who had called the Nationals ownership to make sure the Yankees won the series. A deeper dive shows that yes, Krook and Lawrence had no business being high leverage situations, but Lovelady and Lord are injured and they chose to have Poulin open a game. That thins things out mightily but then Beeter and Ribalta both got rocked. I was shocked that the Twins won a series at Yankees Stadium (first time in over a decade) but apparently there is a baseball law of conservation of energy thing and whatever applied to the Twins got reassigned to the Nats (sorry guys).
PCA did face Mets pitching for four days in a row in late June, so that must account for at least a 100 point jump in OPS.
Mets fans look at PCA, and wish he could have stayed with them.....
Well, we did get 47 games of Javier Baez in 2021, so there's that at least.
One thing that crept up on me this year...honestly didn't notice it until this morning...is that Jordan Walker seems to have put it together.
He hit my radar in 2022 as a 20-year old who hit .308/.388/.510 in 119 games at AA. I had drafted him in my semi-dynasty fantasy league that year and was thrilled to see those numbers. It didn't quite pan out and he was up and down from the big league to the minors in 2023-2025 being pretty awful for the Cards in 2025 especially. .218/.278/.306...blech.
But this year he has been one of the better hitters in the NL hitting .298/.354/.532 and he is only 24. He is top 10 in many offensive categories and leads the NL in RBI. And he leads the NL in RF assists (while also leading all NL OFers in errors...oops). Power, speed and great arm. That's where I thought his career would take him and suddenly...it has.
Oh we Cardinals fans have noticed. Most of us had just about written him off as another Cardinals prospect disappointment (see Dylan Carlson, Nolan Gorman, Victor Scott, Tyler O'Neill, Paul DeJong, et al.). But Walker appears to have panned out at last. He always hit the ball hard when he hit it, but mostly on the ground; now he's figured out how to lift it and we're hoping for Aaron Judge 2.0!
DeJong had a decent major league career - nine years so far, he probably won't make 10. Pretty good career coming out of ISU in the fourth round.
O'Neill is also currently at nine years.
I doubt Carlson, Gorman and Scott will get to nine years.
Players with nine years in a MLB uniform aren't disappointments, I don't think. Freese had a 11-year career but he's a Cardinal prospect who became an immortal part of the franchise. I wonder if he'll appear in Joe's new book?
To your point, I think when Oscar Taveras passed away, the Cards lost a possible HOFer.
The White Sox are 31-17 at home and 19-28 on the road. I don't know whether that means anything, but it's a dramatic split. I tend to think of New Comiskey Park as - I don't actually think of it as much of anything, but it has never struck me as skewed one way or the other. But the home/road record makes me wonder which White Sox team is the real one.
The Red Sox, FWIW, are 17-27 at home and 29-21 on the road. If there's one team you would expect to be able to take some home field advantage it's Boston, and yet ....
While we're at it, the Tigers are decent at home and terrible on the road, which fits a team with a big ballpark and good pitchers but that that just hasn't hit (until recently). The Rays and Marlins are both very good at home. The Nationals bullpen is apparently freaked out pitching at home (20-31 vs 28-18 road)? And the Dodgers and Brewers are good everywhere, but you knew that.
And the Mets are terrible everywhere, but you knew that, too.
Kinda interesting that Nolan McLean has been much better on the road, though. Strikeouts are up at home, but everything else has been better on the road.