Welcome to Week 23 of our Patience or Panic series!
Brandon Marsh, OF, Philadelphia Phillies
Brandon Marsh is everything Philadelphia wants in an athlete: Hairy, high-energy, strange. And most of all distinct. He’s hard to miss on the streets. Saquon Barkley has his quads. Allen Iverson has his cornrows. Julius Erving had his afro. Nick Foles has his… well, we can’t say. Marsh is a wet dog. Stringy hair to his chest, beard to the top button of his jersey, Marsh is unmistakable.
Major League Baseball, though, recognized something else in Marsh: Brilliance. More specifically, brilliance in the first-half of this season. Through his first 92 games, Marsh hit .301/.339/.490 with an .829 OPS and 122 wRC+. Marsh’s 15 homers, 15 doubles, 46 RBIs, and everything else made him an All-Star in baseball’s eyes. The dog was off the leash and tempting us all to believe he’d finally turned the corner. That it was he, not Trea Turner, who’d play second fiddle to stars Kyle Schwarber and Bryce Harper.
But that’s not been the case. Over his last 44 games, Marsh is hitting .188/.253/.250, bad enough for a .503 OPS and 32 wRC+. He’s gone from Philly’s third-best position player to their worst. Seriously. No Philly has been worse than Marsh as of late. Not many players have, honestly. Of 168 qualified hitters post-All-Star, Marsh is 166th in OPS and 167th in wRC+. He’s not in the doghouse; he’s on his way to the pound.
What’s clipped his nails? Some might think it’s regression to the mean. After all, Marsh was a career .261 hitter in his first five seasons. He’s not a .300 hitter, even if he hit .280 a season ago. The math doesn’t agree. And to some extent, that’s happening here. Marsh’s xBA in the first-half was .270, .030 points lower than his true average. Yet Marsh’s .377 BABIP was third-best in baseball at the time. Company included Detroit’s Riley Greene, Sacramento/Las Vegas/Wherever They Identify’s Nick Kurtz, and Chicago’s Pete Crow-Armstrong.
One can be muzzled by Lady Luck. They can also regress for other reasons. One of those reasons is Marsh isn’t hitting the ball the way he should. No-duh. So, let’s clarify. More specifically, let’s go back to BABIP and that player pool of 168. Of those players, Marsh’s second-half BABIP is 156th. He’s hitting .227. That’s a -0.150 difference between pre- and post-All-Star, an absurd drop.
Accompanying it are some less absurd, but just as important differences. Earlier in the season, he touted a 45.9% HardHit Rate and a 9.3% Barrel Rate. The latter would’ve been Marsh’s best mark since 2024. Marsh has a 37.2% HardHit Rate in the second-half and a 5.3% Barrel Rate. This number would be the lowest in Marsh’s career. It’s bad, to say the least. And it’s partly why Marsh has seen his power spayed. He has just five extra-base hits over his last 44 games. His ISO is .063, 161st in baseball.
Marsh struggling isn’t surprising. Well, maybe it is to this extent. More surprising is how tricky it is to find a definitive reason. Marsh is actually striking out less in the second half of the season, going from a K Rate of 26.4% to 20.8%. Likewise, he chased less in July and August than he did in June and May. He’s only walking a little less, and his batted-ball data isn’t sharply skewed. There isn’t a paper trail from the student’s spiral notebook to the dog’s mouth.
One of the few scribbled shreds is Marsh’s Edge Rate. Marsh went from an Edge Rate of 39-40% from April to July to 48.6% in August. He’s getting squeezed. Pitchers are penning him in and seeing if he can paw the luck off. Turns out, he can’t. Perhaps because of this, Marsh has grown tentative. It shows in his Swing Rate and his In-Zone Swing Rate. Both have dropped lower and lower from month to month.
The Verdict: Let go of the leash. It’s likely Marsh isn’t this bad. It’s practically certain. He’s not one of the worst players in baseball. But there have been too few reasons to throw him a bone.
Brice Turang, INF, Milwaukee Brewers
The Milwaukee Brewers are greater than the sum of their parts. There’s nothing surprising about that. It’s no secret. They rely on the cumulative talent and know-how rather than a cadre of superstars. They have their share — Jackson Chourio, William Contreras, Jacob Misiorowski — but they are an ever-evolving input-output math equation that always equals a winning formula. Always.
In the first-half of 2026, one of those highest inputs was second baseman Brice Turang. Through his first 91 games, Turang hit .266/.361/.465 with 14 home runs and 60 RBIs. Turang led the team in RBIs and fWAR, accomplishing the latter handily, and was second in OPS and third on the team in wRC+. He was another player-development success story. Especially so given Turang’s .631 OPS through his first two seasons.
Or so the math said. As of late, the numbers have changed, and with it, so has the story. Turang hasn’t been the same player since the All-Star Break. Not even close. Over his last 43 games, the 26-year-old is hitting .230/.332/.333. He has a barely-above-average wRC+ of 92, and his OPS is .665. He is, by the second metric, Milwaukee’s worst position player over the last month and a half.
Arguably the biggest difference in the numbers comes in the power department. See his .465 slugging percentage in the first half versus his .333 slugging percentage thus far in the second half. Other stats spit out the same signs, whether it’s his .199 ISO versus his .103 ISO or his 3.36 HR% versus his 1.6 HR%. Just as telling, but more detrimental, is Turang’s 8.5% Barrel Rate before the All-Star Game and his 4.3% Barrel Rate since. He’s not connecting at the rate he was, and when he does, there’s less oomph behind it. You don’t need Pythogras to tell you how that’ll play.
Still, Turang is not a slugger. He’s no power-first bat. Yet his struggles as of late resemble those of one in a slump. Case in point, Turang is chasing more. August’s 30.9%, June’s 29.3%, and September’s 28.6% are his highest Chase Rates this season. He’s hunting something. Either because of this, or in spite of it, Turang is missing more balls in the zone than he did previously. In July, his In-Zone Swing & Miss Rate was 13.5%, a season-best. In August, it was 19.7%, a then-season-high eclipsed by September’s 20.6%. He’s out of sorts, to say the least. He can’t hear the music.
Crueler than that possibility is another: That Turang can but cannot play it anymore. Turang has been battling knee pain for some time, according to the Brewers. The pain sidelined Turang four times in August, which is saying something considering he’d played in 115 of a 121 possible games to start the season. It’s also cost him his spot in the lineup. Milwaukee’s batted Turang sixth three times this season. Two of them have come this last week. The Brewers themselves know he’s a liability. What’s more, they’re admitting it.
The Verdict: Put him on the shelf until his play gets back to the mean.
Jonathan Aranda, 1B, Tampa Bay Rays
Like Turang, Jonathan Aranda is a diamond in the rough. Signed out of Mexico, never a top prospect, Aranda blossomed into an All-Star last year. It didn’t happen overnight. There was no fast track. This was a maturation. A .596 OPS as a rookie, a .708 OPS in his sophomore season, and up and up he went before 2025’s .883 OPS and .316 average. Aranda arrived, shining like some emerald.
That only continued to start 2026. Before the All-Star Game, Aranda was hitting .297/.394/.471. His 2.8 fWAR was second on the Rays, trailing only superstar Junior Caminero. His 143 wRC+ and .865 OPS lagged behind only Caminero and Diaz, a pair of All-Stars. Heck, his .355 BABIP was ninth-best in all of baseball. Nothing about this seemed fluky. Nothing. If anything Aranda, despite the lack of an All-Star appearance, seemed destined for a higher ceiling.
In case it’s not obvious by now, Aranda hasn’t hit that ceiling. Rather, he’s found his floor. Since the second half of the season began, Aranda is hitting .247/.295/.360. To compare his value to his previous self, Aranda’s generated -0.1 fWAR. His 83 wRC+ isn’t even near league-average, and his .655 OPS is dead last among all active Rays hitters. Each number has led us here, wondering if Aranda’s hot start was just fool’s gold.
That answer is no. Aranda, for all his struggles, has far better numbers than Marsh. He’s also put together a much longer stretch of awesome play than either Marsh or Turang. If their long-term futures seem fine, why should Aranda’s be viewed differently? His BABIP, for example, is .320. That’s second-best among all qualified Rays hitters and 20th among all qualified hitters in the AL post All-Star.
In that way, we’re not excavating some fatalistic determination. Aranda will be fine. He’s a Ray, for Pete’s sake. If anyone knows how to get the most from someone, it’s them. You can just ask Aranda. This dig is more focused on what’s gone wrong and what might be done about it.
What’s really caving in Aranda’s numbers is his discipline. Pre-All-Star, he was one of the best OBP guys in the game. Seriously. His .394 OBP was fourth-best in the AL, with only Diaz, Kurtz, and AL MVP favorite Yordan Alvarez ahead of him. Much of that can be chalked up to his elite average. But it’s also due to Aranda’s 12.6% Walk Rate, which was 15th-best in the AL. Couple elite discipline with great bat-to-ball skills, solid power, and you’re striking gold. At least Aranda was.
Post All-Star, Aranda’s lost that edge. Over his last 46 games, Aranda has a 5.5% BB rate. That has Aranda 52nd in the AL among all qualified hitters. 52nd! The man went from walking a little less than Riley Greene and Cody Bellinger to only a little bit less than Zach Neto and a little bit more than Nathan Lukes. Aranda went from hitting .297 to a .295 OBP. It’s an insane plummet.
Confucius says that hitters who stop walking start striking out. That remains true here. Aranda went from a 19% K-rate to a 27% K-Rate. The latter is the 14th-highest in the AL post-All-Star. Pairing nicely with this are rises in Aranda’s Chase Rate and his Chase-Miss Rate. Both have seen higher numbers in August and September than May and June. Aranda, for some reason, has gotten far, far more aggressive. He’s gotten from carefully mining to carrying cords that led to a box with the letters “TNT” written on the side.
Breaking balls have detonated Aranda especially. He went from a steady K-Rate of 27.6% in June and 28% in July to 37.5% in August and 66.7% in September. Sweepers killed Aranda with a 75% K-Rate in August. Sliders, meanwhile, are the culprit in September, with a 66.7% K-Rate. He’s been a mess.
All that said, Aranda’s shown flashes amidst the dark caverns post-All-Star. Over his last seven games, he’s hitting .286/.344/.571 with two home runs. Bear in mind, Aranda has a total of five home runs post-All-Star. His power stroke is returning, even if his attitude isn’t changing.
The Verdict: Tap back into Aranda’s veins. If he can marry his two selves, he’d be a dynamite add. If not, he should at least get back to average soon.
