The Houston Astros have a knack for disappointing Aprils. Despite usually being projected as the favorite or second favorite in the AL West every year for the last decade, the last time the Astros didn’t have a losing record at some point in the second half of April was 2019. But year after year, they’ve tended to get a powerful second wind. Excluding 2020, for obvious reasons, they haven’t finished with fewer than 87 wins in a season since 2016; overall, Houston has the second-most wins in baseball since the start of the 2017 season. During those previous mediocre starts, the projections have stood by the Astros. This time… not so much.

To see the last time the Astros started this dreadfully, you don’t have to go back very far. In 2024, they hit their nadir after 26 games, at 7-19. I wrote then, as I do now, about the hole they were digging for themselves. Though it was still an uphill battle to come back in the AL West — they in fact did, handily — the projections never turned sour. ZiPS projected the Astros to win 88 games going into that season, and despite their 7-16 record at the time I wrote that article, the computer still thought they’d continue to win games at the previously predicted rate.

ZiPS does not have the same optimism that it had in 2024.

This time around, ZiPS doesn’t even think Houston is a .500 team the rest of the way, let alone one that’ll end up close to its projected record in the preseason. The Astros had a relatively deep rotation in 2024, especially compared to today, and at the time, basically all of their starters were injured. But ZiPS thought enough pitching would filter back in over the coming weeks to get the team back on track. However, in 2026, ZiPS only loves one Houston pitcher, Hunter Brown, and just a few days ago, general manager Dana Brown said Brown won’t be back until June, and that’s if there are no setbacks.

Projecting the Astros to have a sub-.500 record isn’t something that ZiPS does often. While I don’t have rest-of-season projections for every calendar date ever, I do have monthly updates, and the last time they were projected to finish with a losing record was the 2015 preseason, when they had a 77-85 projection for the year. Pinpointing the actual date by running a few more simulations, the last time before 2026 that Houston was projected to be a losing team over the rest of a season was almost exactly 11 years ago, on April 26, 2015, when a win over the Oakland Athletics improved the team’s record to 10-7 and its rest-of-season projected winning percentage to .49927.

The 2026 Astros have been this bad even as their offense has performed extremely well. They lead the American League with 5.21 runs per game, and their 118 wRC+ ranks fourth in baseball, to go along with 5.7 WAR from their position players, also good for fourth in the majors. Considering this, the Astros shouldn’t bank on an offensive surge to turn their season around. Instead, if Houston is going to make up ground in the standings, its pitching is going to have to improve.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to follow election night coverage, you might have seen the various news desks give benchmarks for a particular candidate to beat in counties or in states to be on target to win. I can do the same kind of thing with ZiPS, so I asked it to benchmark what ERAs Houston’s pitching staff would have to hit to give the team a 50% chance of making the playoffs.

TLDR: To be a coin flip to make the playoffs, if the offense performs as expected, the Astros need their pitching staff to collectively outperform their projected ERAs by about half a run per nine innings. This is true whether or not you use the ZiPS projections or the combined Steamer/ZiPS Depth Charts projections. Just to illustrate how hard that is for a team to do, I prorated the preseason 2025 ZiPS projected ERAs to the actual innings pitched, and compared those to the final team ERAs for that year.

Only a single team, the Texas Rangers, outperformed its ERA projections by more than half a run. The Brewers and Reds came close, but they fell a bit further back when adjusting for the fact that ZiPS thought the league-wide ERA would be 0.12 higher than it actually was.

Now, consider the very real possibility that the Houston offense doesn’t merely perform as expected, but hits its 75th-percentile projection instead. The pitching would still have to beat its projections by 0.33 runs per game, meaning that even in a rosy scenario like this for the lineup, this team would still be an underdog.

On a fundamental level, the Astros need to find better pitchers from among the guys who aren’t currently envisioned by Depth Charts as contributors, and they need to find them right now. Ethan Pecko is the most interesting of the internal options, and as a fellow Towson native, I can’t help but root for him. He’s currently working back from thoracic outlet syndrome, and though he’s been very good on his minor league rehab assignment, he’s not likely to be up until later this summer. When he does return, he wouldn’t be enough by himself to fix this pitching staff, even if he had a Chase Burns-esque debut. AJ Blubaugh and Colton Gordon don’t project as instant game-changers, either. Houston would likely need to acquire some pitching, but from where? This has been an odd season so far, in that many of the worst teams (Astros, Red Sox, Mets, Phillies, Blue Jays, Royals) were expected to be contenders. That means there aren’t a lot of teams looking to be early sellers. But even if there were, these other underperforming clubs would likely be fierce competition for those players on the block.

Time is not on Houston’s side, in the short or long term. The short-term challenge is obvious, but the long-term one is nearly as daunting. The Astros are second in baseball in wRC+ from players over 30 years old (129), with Jose Altuve and Christian Walker both at ages when imminent decline is highly likely. Their two key offensive players in their 20s, Jeremy Peña and Yordan Alvarez, are free agents after 2027 and 2028, respectively. At the end of last season, our prospect team ranked Houston’s farm system 29th out of 30 teams. The best solution might be to do a bit of retooling, perhaps by trading anyone unsigned past this year. Then, assuming there’s a pre-lockout window to make some free agent signings as there was in 2021, absolutely blitz the top guys available with extremely generous one-year offers, with the hope that many of those players will want to get a second look at free agency in a hopefully normal winter after the 2027 season. But truth be told, this doesn’t really feel like something the Astros would do.

However it shakes out, this may be the most crucial period of Brown’s stint as GM. The Houston Astros are in a precarious position, and none of the options look particularly appealing. Some problems simply don’t have good solutions, and if they can’t conjure one up, we may be looking at the end of a moderately successfully dynasty in Houston.

May is just around the corner, which means that some of the early-season slumps and hot streaks we’ve seen around the league are starting to take on a bit more meaning. For a few struggling would-be contenders, drastic measures might be needed in order to turn things around.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds. (Specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%.) The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out between now and October, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise remains reactive to hot streaks and cold snaps. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Three weeks ago, things weren’t looking great for the Cubs. True, the season hadn’t hit the two-week mark at that point, but the NL Central favorites had started 4-6 and were running last in the division. Two members of their starting rotation, Matthew Boyd and Cade Horton, had just landed on the injured list, and right fielder Seiya Suzuki had yet to play after straining a ligament in his right knee during the World Baseball Classic. Soon, the injury bug would bite their bullpen, as well, but just as it did, the team reeled off a 10-game winning streak, the majors’ longest this season. While that ended on Saturday at the hands of the Dodgers, followed by another loss on Sunday, the Cubs do appear to be back on track. With a 17-11 record, they’re one game behind the Reds for the division lead.

Their streak began on April 14, a day after the Phillies pounded them 13-7 at Citizens Bank Park. To that point, the Cubs were 7-9, having won three-game series against the Angels and Rays but lost three-game series to the Nationals, Guardians, and Pirates. But Chicago turned the tables on the Phillies by dropping double-digit run totals on back-to-back days, winning 10-4 and 11-2, before returning home to kick off a sweep of the Mets with a 12-4 victory. The Cubs then capped that sweep two days later with Nico Hoerner’s 10th-inning walk-off sacrifice fly, then circled back to take four straight from the Phillies, including another 10th-inning walk-off, this time on a Dansby Swanson single on April 23. Their winning streak reached 10 games with a 6-4 victory over the Dodgers in Los Angeles on Friday. It was Chicago’s longest since 2016, when the club won 11 straight from July 31 to August 12.

It certainly didn’t hurt that the Cubs’ schedule coincided with both the Mets and Phillies playing particularly bad baseball. New York lost 12 in a row from April 8-21 and Philadelphia 10 in a row from April 14–24; both finished the weekend 9-19. The Cubs own the NL’s highest winning percentage against sub-.500 teams (.750, a 12-4 record), though they’re just 5-7 against those .500 or better after their two losses in Los Angeles this weekend. Read the rest of this entry »

Though spring training concluded several weeks ago, it’s still spring on the solar calendar, and this year, spring cleaning in Boston involved the Red Sox clearing out some dirty laundry. On Saturday night, ESPN reported the firings of manager Alex Cora, bench coach Ramón Vázquez, third base and outfield coach Kyle Hudson, hitting coach Peter Fatse, assistant hitting coach Dillon Lawson, and major league hitting strategist Joe Cronin. Further, game planning and run prevention coach Jason Varitek has been offered a different role within the organization.

The Red Sox began the season projected to win 85 games, with 60.8% odds to make the playoffs. Of the 25 writers who contributed to the FanGraphs 2026 Staff Predictions, 21 picked the Red Sox to make the postseason and nine had them winning the division, which tied Boston with Toronto as the most popular pick to take the AL East. Heading into Sunday’s games, the Red Sox had a projected win total of 80, and their odds of making the playoffs were down to 31.4%. Their drop of 29.4 percentage points in playoff odds was the largest in the AL, while in the NL, the Mets and Phillies saw their playoff odds decline by 41.0 points and 33.0 points, respectively.

At just 27 games into the season, Boston’s dismissal of Cora is the earliest manager firing since 2018, when the Reds fired Bryan Price after the club started the year 3-15. Cincinnati entered the season looking to complete the transition from rebuilding to contention, but instead finished in last place in the NL Central with a 67-95 record. The Reds simultaneously cut ties with pitching coach Mack Jenkins, which is representative of a common pattern with coaching changes. When a team’s struggle is particularly acute on one side of the ball, the coach leading that effort is often held accountable along with the manager. But rarely does an organization remove seven members of its major league coaching staff in one fell swoop. Boston’s overhaul was so dramatic, the team had to bring in what appears to be a party bus to transport the deposed coaches away from the team hotel. Read the rest of this entry »

Nathan Lukes was 28 years old and in his ninth professional season when he made his MLB debut with the Toronto Blue Jays in 2023. He almost didn’t make it that far. Life down on the farm isn’t exactly a bed of roses, and that was especially true prior to conditions — financial and otherwise — improving via a collective bargaining agreement that essentially coincided with his reaching the bigs. A few years earlier, Lukes almost walked away.

“It’s been a journey,” Lukes said of his path, which began when Cleveland selected him in the seventh round of the 2015 draft out of Cal State Sacramento. “Five games into my career — this was in short-season ball — I broke my hamate and was out for the rest of the year. The next year, I started in Low-A, and halfway through I got traded to Tampa Bay at the deadline. I stayed with the Rays until my minor-league contract was up, then signed here [in November 2021].

“It was getting to the point where it was almost time to think about hanging it up,” continued Lukes, whom the Blue Jays placed on the IL with a hamstring strain prior to yesterday’s game. “But then, in 2023, they put me on the 40-man roster. Pretty much as long I had that 40-man ticket, I was going to keep running with it.”

The now-31-year-old outfielder didn’t feel that he had stalled out developmentally when he pondered calling it a career — “I always felt that I could play in the big leagues” — but he did recognize that there is more to life than baseball. Lukes and his wife had a child in 2021, and as he explained. “Family changes things.” While his financial situation had improved somewhat thanks to minor-league free agency, he was “going to play the 2022 season, and after that, probably just be a dad.”

“You weren’t getting rich,” I said to Lukes in our spring training conversation. “No,” he replied. “I was getting poor. My wife was working at the time, which helped… actually, it didn’t just help, it kept us running. At the lower levels, I was bringing home six thousand dollars a year after taxes, so I was making a thousand dollars a month. The most I ever made on a minor-league contract was $15,000. You can’t really do too much with that.” Read the rest of this entry »

A question popped into my head as I edited Ryan Blake’s column on the Nationals Friday morning. In the piece, shortly after noting that James Wood ranked third in the majors with a 170 wRC+, Ryan mentioned that Wood’s teammate, CJ Abrams, was sixth with a mark of 168. Upon reading this, I pulled up our leaderboards to see if the Nationals were the only team to have two players in the top 10. Turns out that, yes, they are. I thought about that for all of two seconds before something else caught my eye. Just below Abrams on the list was Mike Trout, who also had a 168 wRC+. This prompted me to wonder: Can Trout return to form? Can he both stay healthy and produce this year?

I’m hardly the only one who spent the bulk of the 2020s dreaming on a fully healthy season from Trout, just as I’m not alone in having abandoned that hope as the injuries piled up. But after watching him blast home run after home run last week from the Yankee Stadium pressbox, I felt the pull of the past encroach upon the present, and perhaps against my better judgment, I started dreaming again. He sure looked as healthy as ever as his broad body barreled up baseballs and roamed center field. The best way to describe the way Trout moves — really, the way he has always moved — is that he lumbers and boulders; for all of his natural athleticism and breathtaking blend of speed and strength, he does not glide gracefully. I put that dream of a Trout renaissance on ice when the Angels left town, only for it to come back a week later. This time, though, I considered whether, at 34, he still has one more MVP season in him. He entered this weekend slashing .239/.417/.557 with eight home runs, and has posted 1.2 WAR in 25 games. He’s walking more than he’s striking out, and he’s already stolen four bases. His BABIP is a mere .228, 111 points below his career mark, so we should expect his batting average to see some positive regression. (Even if we know batting average isn’t all that indicative of player performance, it still matters for MVP voters.) His .483 xwOBA is second in the majors and 62 points above his wOBA. His defense has been below average so far, but if Trout keeps hitting like this, his glove won’t matter much for his MVP case. The narrative would certainly be in his favor.

I just answered two of my own questions from Friday in this mailbag, so I guess it’s time to get to yours. What if the Astros blow it all up? How might the Pirates benefit from a Houston fire sale? Why don’t teams develop bench players to be knuckleballers? What the heck was Austin Warren doing in the game with the bases loaded in the Mets’ 12th straight loss? We answer all these questions and more in this week’s mailbag. Plus, Jay Jaffe remembers Garret Anderson. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, please visit our Patreon.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about whether JR Ritchie should want to keep the ball that was hit for a homer on his first major league pitch, José Soriano’s season-starting hot streak, and the Yankees’ new alternate uniforms, plus follow-ups on accidental challenges, player pecks on the cheek, jersey numbers, and Nolan McLean’s apology, and a mini-Blast about the Rockies’ historically hot start (compared to last year). Then (50:36) they take a break from interviewing octagenarian former players to interview a youthful, quadragenarian former player: former All-Star Brad Lidge. An infamous manager once proclaimed, “The closer is the closer because he’s the closer.” But what if the closer becomes an archaeologist? Ben and Meg talk to Lidge at length about his post-playing pivot to archaeology: what drew him to the field, how he’s pursued a second profession (and how it differs from his first one), ancient Etruscans, misconceptions about archaeology, what he could learn from excavating a ballpark, discovering dice (note: not a gambling ad), discussing his career reinvention at cocktail parties, the pleasures and procedures of communing with the past, archaeology’s moneyball, and much more, followed by his thoughts on fellow fastball-slider artist Mason Miller.

Audio intro: PJ Harding, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to The Only Rule closer line
Link to line’s EW wiki entry
Link to Lidge’s SABR bio
Link to postseason saves leaders
Link to best post-’88 RP seasons
Link to Pujols homer
Link to 2008 WS victory
Link to Episode 2323
Link to Wood’s HR
Link to Ritchie game story
Link to Yankees jerseys report 1
Link to Yankees jerseys report 2
Link to Yankees jerseys report 3
Link to jersey number history
Link to Gilbert “catch”
Link to Gilbert “catch” rules
Link to Vargas “accidental” challenge
Link to Gonzales “accidental” challenge
Link to Martin-Davis smooch
Link to Soriano’s six-start stretches
Link to Soriano’s 2025 stretch
Link to Soriano’s 2026 stretch
Link to exit velo responsibility
Link to Soriano article 1
Link to Betteridge’s law 1
Link to Soriano article 2
Link to follow-up McLean report
Link to fastest team improvements data
Link to 2018 archaeoLidgey article
Link to 2026 archaeoLidgey article
Link to Lidge Explorers Club
Link to Poggio Civitate wiki
Link to Under the Tuscan Sun wiki
Link to Etruscan civilization wiki
Link to Roman Empire meme
Link to Lidge’s publications
Link to Lidge’s dice paper
Link to North American dice article 1
Link to North American dice article 2
Link to Ben on Detectorists

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Welcome to the latest FanGraphs Changelog, where we update you on some of the recent improvements we’ve made to the site as we work to build a better FanGraphs.

First, here are some important updates we’ve already announced over the past month, in case you missed them:

• We added three new tools to the FanGraphs Lab, rolling out the Paired Pitches tool, the Power Rankings Board, and the Baseball Simulator.
• We also added Home Field Advantage to the Baseball Simulator.
• Lastly, we added ABS strike zone, arm angle, and spin rate related stats to our player pages and leaderboards.

We’ve worked hard to get our tools updated for the new strike zone and the ABS challenge system. In addition to the new plate discipline metrics added to player page season stats and leaderboards, those stats were also added to the game logs and spark graphs cards. To see how successful players have been when they make ABS challenges, we added an ABS Challenges leaderboard.

We also made a significant update to the FanGraphs mobile app, which can be download here: App Store (iOS) or Play Store (Android).

• We’ve added the full Major League Leaderboards to the app, including your custom reports. The custom report features are the same on the app as they are on the website. You have to be a FanGraphs Member to have more than 10 player or custom stat columns:
  
• You can also set the default for all leaderboards in the app to show you the left edge of the data grid or the right edge. We put some of the most important stats on the right side and default sort data grids by the right column on the website, so we are giving users the option to change this. This can be found under More >> App Settings:
  
• We also updated the RosterResource Closer Depth Charts in the app to reflect the updates on the site:
  

Speaking of RosterResource, the Closer Depth Charts now have more stats:

• The Results section has most of the stats that were previously there, and we’ve added SwStr%, K%, BB%, Shutdowns, and Meltdowns.
• The Arsenal section has individual pitch metrics, including Stuff+.
• We also added the number of pitches thrown and innings pitched over the last six days for each pitcher.
• There’s now a tooltip that has game-level information including innings pitched, total batters faced, innings appeared in, and leverage when the pitcher entered game.

We also made a small Member update. You are now able to download or copy a .png image of many of our graphs and charts, so you no longer have to screenshot them:

If you have questions, please leave them in the comments below, and if you have any suggestions for site features, be sure to let us know. And lastly, a thank you to our Members! Membership is the best way to ensure that we are able to continue to grow and improve the site, and support our staff. We couldn’t do any of this without you.

The Washington Nationals are starting out strong, but not strong enough.

They weren’t supposed to be good in 2026. They weren’t good last year, or the year before, or the year before, or the — they haven’t been good since they won the World Series in 2019. Our preseason positional power rankings had them 29th by overall projected WAR. Justin Klugh led the Nationals essay in the 2026 Baseball Prospectus annual with the story of an enema given to George Washington just before his death. And no, the parallel was not a particularly happy one.

Indeed, the Nationals have not been good. They’re 11-15 with a -18 run differential and a bottom-five WAR. They’re not yet last in the NL East because of whatever is going on in New York and Philadelphia. But our projections assume they’ll find their way there eventually.

Still, it’s the way they’ve gotten to “not good” that’s been frustrating, entertaining, and perhaps even a bit encouraging. Let’s start with a plot: Read the rest of this entry »