Mike Petriello

Chandler Simpson pulled off a difficult and unfortunate trick as a rookie last year, which is to say that despite being one of the fastest players in the sport (97th percentile in Statcast’s sprint speed, at 29.6 ft/sec), he rated as one of baseball’s weakest outfield defenders (11th percentile in

This story was excerpted from the Cubs Beat newsletter. This edition was written by Mike Petriello. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox. All stats updated through Tuesday's games.

Aaron Judge was widely expected to be one of the primary beneficiaries of the new ABS system, and we know that because it was all anyone could talk about at Yankees camp this spring. Due to his 6-foot-7 frame, umpires had long struggled to identify the bottom of Judge’s zone,

Last summer, Clayton Kershaw gave us one more memory for the road. Pitching against Mets infielder Ronny Mauricio in June, and nearing the end of an all-but-certain Hall of Fame career, Kershaw unleashed the curve so memorably nicknamed “Public Enemy No. 1” by Vin Scully all those years ago. The

Mason Miller is the nastiest reliever in the game today, and by extension, perhaps the nastiest who ever lived. We won’t say “pitcher,” because Jacob Misiorowski exists, but also this is maybe what it would look like if Misiorowski was coming out of the bullpen. Miller leads the Majors in

Eight years into Tyler Rogers' career, you know the deal by now. The submarine-style Blue Jays right-hander throws the slowest fastball in the game (83.1 mph) and an upside-down slider, and he does all that throwing like literally no one else does. It doesn’t look like it should work, but

For years, Luis Arraez rated as something like the weakest defensive second baseman in the game, an opinion the Padres validated when they moved him off the position to be primarily a first baseman/DH over the last two seasons. Despite that, Arraez bet on himself last winter, taking a one-year

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. just finished off the weakest full month of his career (.498 OPS), which might be written off as a slump, if not for the fact that it followed the third-weakest month of his career (May’s .623 OPS), which might itself be a minor concern if not for

Somewhat lost in all of Sunday’s drama about the Marlins lifting Eury Pérez after seven perfect innings was that it wasn’t just about pitch count, health, modern analytics, or whatever narrative you choose to apply. It’s exactly what manager Clayton McCullough said it was. It’s that the goal here isn’t

What makes for a successful evening in the Home Run Derby? It’s an incredibly difficult thing to prognosticate. That’s in part because it’s an annual exhibition of one single skill, with regularly changing rules and formats, but also because the eight participants each year have already been cherrypicked because they’re