Doctors diagnosed Rafael Devers with a bone bruise on his knee. It’s not clear he’ll go in the illjured list. Meanwhile, slugger Tyler O’Neill was placed on IL as he covers from his head laceration after colliding with Devers earlier in the week. The Guardians beat the Red Sox 5-4 Thursday afternoon ..read more

Today’s schedule is light, but the best pitching matchup takes place in Boston, as Carlos Carrasco faces opener Brennan Bernardino. Carrasco owns a 3.55 ERA despite allowing a ton of base runners, having given up 12 hits and nine walks in 12 2/3 innings. Three double plays have helped, as well as six of his strikeouts coming with me on base. Red Sox starters own the highest average game score in the majors. That comes mostly from few negatives against them. Coming into the season I expected the offense to be good and the pitching to be iffy, but so far the opposite is true. The Marlins play th ..read more

For the past few years Baseball Musings tried to help with playing Beat the Streak. The Day by Day Database keeps track of hit streak of at least five games. In addition, two programs produce top ten lists of players with a high probability of a hit. Here are the top picks my programs produced for use in Beat the Streak. This post mostly explains the ideas behind the calculations. In addition, this post shows tests on the Neural Network (NN). This post discusses an NN that includes the ballpark. I updated the models, and the results of those tests are here. The Log5 Method yields these top p ..read more

Juan Soto of the Yankees solidifies his spot at the top of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings with a perfect day at the plate in a 6-4 comeback win over the Blue Jays. Soto collects two walks and three hits, including home run for a game score of 82, the best of the day. Soto ranks high in RBI Percentage, the percent of runners on when he bats that get driven in. Number one on that list is number two in the Rankings, Mookie Betts of the Dodgers. Betts posted a rare bad game on Wednesday as he took an 0 for 4 in a 2-0 Washington win. Yordan Alvarez of the Astros collected two hits, including ..read more

The Day by Day Database is up to date ..read more

Tanner Houck pitches the first complete game of his career and the first for the Red Sox in almost two years as he shuts out the Guardians 2-0. Houck threw just 94 pitches, 69 for strikes, and did not issue a walk as the game took just 1:49. Houck got the ball, threw the ball, and kept finding the strike zone. It was a very impressive performance. Houck’s ERA drops to 1.35 as the Red Sox ..read more

The Brewers pitchers issued just two walks and three strikeouts as they defeated the Padres 1-0. The Padres managed five hits, so the Padres went five for 27 on balls in play. FanGraphs showed the Brewers defense ranked high to start the day, and they certainly did a good job of preventing hits today ..read more

Gunnar Henderson of the Orioles finishes a very good three-game series against Minnesota, going two for four today with a home run. He wound up seven for thirteen in the series, homering in each game. That helped Baltimore to a sweep. Henderson collected multiple hits in five of his last nine games to raise his OBP to .346 ..read more

It’s an unusual Wednesday as the latest start comes at 7 PM EDT. If you’re a baseball aficionado, you can spend from noon on watching games and still get to bed at a decent hour on the east coast. Steven Matz leads the Cardinals against Paul Blackburn and the Athletics. Matz eschewed the three true outcomes so far this season, with eight strikeouts, three walks, and one home run allowed in 15 innings. While his ERA stands at 1.06, three of the six runs he allowed were unearned. Blackburn allowed no runs of any kind in his first 19 innings this season. He too comes in with low K, BB, and HR rat ..read more

In looking at MLB batter splits for this season, two things stand out to me. The first is that the composite batting order is rather well constructed. The major put a lot of on-base percentage at the top, and given the stats so far, the fourth hitter is better than the third hitter in both OBP and slugging percentage. That makes sense, as the fourth hitter serves a dual role of cleaning the table, and setting the table for the rest of the order. After the fourth hitter, there is a steady decline in OBP and slugging. The worst hitters still bat ninth, and they are pretty awful this season. The ..read more