Friday, April 17
Welcome to The Pregame Lineup, a weekday newsletter that gets you up to speed on everything you need to know for today’s games, while catching you up on fun and interesting stories you might have missed. Today’s edition is brought to you by David Adler.
To bunt, or not to bunt? That is the question. And we have the answer.
You can play the manager with MLB’s new Game Strategy Explorer on Baseball Savant. It’s a “choose your own adventure”-style tool that lets you see how different decisions can affect your team’s chances of winning a baseball game.
How does it work? Plug in any game situation — score, inning, outs, runners on base — and you can see the win probability for your team, based on how often Major League teams have actually won their games when facing those same situations over the last 10 seasons.
That means you can figure out how literally any play will change the win probability in a game. You just look at the difference from the “before” game situation (aka, the start of the play) to the “after” game situation (aka, the end of the play).
The Game Strategy Explorer also has this cool feature that lets you see, at a glance, how certain player or manager decisions will affect their team’s chances to win. Those decisions: stolen base attempts, intentional walks, sacrifice flies … and, of course, bunts.
So, for example, you can look at how costly it was for Matt Chapman to try to steal second base with the Giants down three runs in the ninth inning to the Mets a few weeks ago. Or you can see whether it was a big deal that the Blue Jays decided to lay down a sac bunt when they were down to their final three outs in the 11th inning of Game 7 of the World Series.
The possibilities are endless. If you want to understand the ins and outs of the Game Strategy Explorer a little better, Mike Petriello explains how to use it.
GAMES OF THE WEEKEND
Here are three must-watch games for this weekend, one for each day. Info on how to watch every game is available at MLB.com/Watch.
Today: Rangers at Mariners (9:40 p.m. ET, MLB Network/MLB.TV)
Here, we’ve got two aces coming off their best starts of the season: Jacob deGrom vs. Logan Gilbert. deGrom just dominated the MLB-best Dodgers in a nine-strikeout gem, while Gilbert shut down the division-rival Astros to get his first win of 2026.
Saturday: Braves at Phillies (7:15 p.m. ET, FOX)
In this Saturday showdown between NL East rivals, two of the best lefties in baseball are going head to head. Cristopher Sánchez, last year’s NL Cy Young runner-up, starts for the Phillies against the 2024 Cy Young winner, Chris Sale, who’s bringing the heat right now.
Sunday: Brewers at Marlins (1:40 p.m. ET, MLB.TV)
Two electric young fireballers are pitching in this one: Jacob Misiorowski for Milwaukee and Eury Pérez for Miami. The Miz is the headliner — he leads the Majors with 33 strikeouts. But both pitchers have triple-digit heat. Only three MLB starters have hit 100 mph at least 10 times this season, and Misiorowski and Pérez are two of them. (Pirates rookie Bubba Chandler, who starts today against the Rays, is the other.)
ANGELS GREAT ANDERSON PASSES AWAY
The Angels announced sad news today: World Series hero and franchise icon Garret Anderson has died suddenly at the age of 53.
The Angels will honor Anderson for the remainder of the season by wearing a memorial patch on their jerseys, beginning with Friday’s homestand. Additionally, prior to this evening’s game, the club will host a moment of silence and run a special tribute video to honor the franchise great.
Former Angels manager Mike Scioscia once said of Anderson: “Garret played hard, he wanted to win. He’s got that internal competitive nature that every great player has to have, and he was really the foundation of our championship run back in 2002 and for many other years. He just was a terrific talent and a terrific person.”
A native of Los Angeles, Anderson went on to star in Anaheim for the franchise that selected him in the fourth round of the 1990 Draft. The power-hitting outfielder became the Angels’ all-time leader in games played (2,013), hits (2,368), RBIs (1,292), doubles (489), total bases (3,743), extra-base hits (796) and grand slams (eight). He was instrumental in the Angels’ 2002 World Series win over the Giants.
When he retired in 2011, Anderson said: “It was truly a privilege to play this wonderful game.”
Anthony Castrovince remembers Anderson’s life and career here.
AROUND THE LEAGUE
Here’s what’s going on in baseball entering the weekend.
• Trout vs. Judge in the series of the year
It doesn’t get any better than this: Mike Trout and Aaron Judge, two three-time MVPs, putting on a show at Yankee Stadium. Trout and Judge combined to hit nine home runs in the four-game series — five by Trout, four by Judge — a performance that was simply historic. Sarah Langs has all the best stats from the Judge-Trout slugfest.
• Mason Miller, still unhittable
Will anyone ever score against Mason Miller again? The Padres closer is now up to 30 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings, and nobody’s even close to touching him. Miller has struck out 23 of the 30 batters he’s faced this season (77%), and 65 of the 104 batters he’s faced since the start of his scoreless streak last August (63%). He’s a cheat code.
• Lindor’s more Met than Guardian
Francisco Lindor is playing his 778th game with the Mets this afternoon, and that’s a milestone for the star shortstop. Lindor has now played more games as a Met than he did as a Guardian. Lindor played 777 games in Cleveland over the first six seasons of his MLB career, and he was a four-time All-Star there. But he’s meant just as much to the Mets since he arrived in 2021, with four top-10 MVP finishes and some of the team’s biggest swings during his time in New York.
• The best challenge of the season
We saw the single best ABS challenge of the season yesterday: White Sox catcher Edgar Quero successfully flipped a walk to a strikeout on a 3-2 pitch with the bases loaded of a tie game in the ninth inning. And how close was the call? The pitch was a strike by one tenth of an inch. Mike Petriello breaks down exactly how valuable it is to win a challenge there in the biggest of spots.
• Volpe’s first hit of the year
Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe, who’s rehabbing from offseason shoulder surgery, smacked his first hit of 2026 yesterday at Double-A. It was just a nice line-drive single up the middle, and Volpe’s going to be in the Minors a little while longer, but he still said after the game: “It’s a big milestone, a big checkpoint.”
• The Buntin’ Brewers
Who says the bunt is going out of style? Not the Brewers, that’s for sure. The Brew Crew are forever the kings of small ball, but they outdid themselves yesterday. Milwaukee dropped down three straight bunts to score the go-ahead run and squeeze out an old-school win in the series finale against the Blue Jays. If you love the bunt, this is your team. Manager Pat Murphy says: “I think it’s coming back.”
THE RETURN OF THE KNUCKLEBALL
A grand total of zero knuckleballs have been thrown in Major League games this season. And that’s a shame.
Matt Waldron is coming to change all that.
The Padres knuckleballer — currently MLB’s only true knuckleballer — is making his season debut tonight for the hottest team in baseball. Riding high on an eight-game winning streak, San Diego faces the Angels in Anaheim at 9:38 p.m. ET (Padres.TV/FanDuel Sports Network West).
And that means we’re going to see beautiful pitches like the ones in the GIF up above.
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RJ Hamster 