The Blue Jays have lost another key player to injury.

Alejandro Kirk left Friday’s game against the White Sox in the 10th inning after a foul tip glanced off his glove hand. He immediately dropped his glove, grabbed his thumb, and hustled into the clubhouse with trainers. The team after the game announced Kirk had fractured his thumb. No timeline for a return was given. Our injury log suggests batters with thumb fractures typically return in about four to eight weeks, although Kirk fractured the thumb on his catching hand, which could require a longer recovery.

It’s the latest significant injury for the reigning AL champs, who lost Cody Ponce last week while fielding a grounder in his first start in the majors since 2021. Trey Yesavage, José Berríos, and Shane Bieber are on the injured list, as well, though each is in the “throwing” process of his rehab. Read the rest of this entry »

“Gee, Michael Soroka has been pretty good,” is the kind of statement that tells you more about the calendar than Soroka himself, but the point remains: Michael Soroka has been pretty good. The big Canadian steamrolled the Tigers (my pick for the AL pennant) with 10 strikeouts in five scoreless innings in his first start of the year. He followed that up with a solitary earned run over five innings against his former team, the Atlanta Braves.

The total bill, so far, is 13 strikeouts and 13 baserunners allowed (eight hits, four walks, one hit batter) in 10 innings, with a 0.90 ERA and 2.10 FIP. And against reasonably tough competition. So do the Diamondbacks, currently in dire need of pitching with seven big league arms currently on the IL, have something here? Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Dan Szymborski looked at how much a team’s fortunes can change in the first month of the season. That old truism – you can’t win the World Series in April, but you can lose it – turns out to, in fact, be true. Dan’s research found that even teams we think are good – those projected to win 90 or more games – had meaningfully worse results after a bad April, even if their actual talent remained the same.

In other words, those early losses really do count. But I like to look at things from a glass-half-full perspective, so my takeaway was that there’s still plenty of time to fix a bad start, because it’s still early in the season. But how to fix it? That’s a trickier question. Luckily, “that’s a tricky question” is just FanGraphs for “that’s a fun thing to write an article about,” so I’ve got answers for you. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re less than two weeks into the regular season, which means we have less than a dozen games for each team to overanalyze. Even though we should hold off on jumping to any conclusions about an individual’s performance during the first week and half, the wins and losses at the team level count the same as they do in September. Logic tells us that it’s too early to get too worried about a slow start, but as Dan Szymborski wrote on Friday, “Yes, Pennants Can Be Lost in April.”

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 throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

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.

…

The Dodgers started off this season with a pair of sweeps sandwiching a series loss to the Guardians. They’ve got the hitter with the longest active on-base streak and the starting pitcher with the longest active scoreless inning streak — as you probably guessed, the hitter and the pitcher are the same guy! Unfortunately, Mookie Betts was placed on the IL on Sunday with an oblique strain, stretching an already thin middle infield group. Both Tommy Edman and Enrique Hernández are on track to return from the IL sometime in May, which means the Dodgers will have to turn to some combination of Hyeseong Kim, Miguel Rojas, Alex Freeland, and Santiago Espinal to cover the two middle infield positions for now.

For the most part, Yankees pitchers have been utterly dominant to begin the year. They hadn’t allowed more than three runs in any of their first seven games, before they surrendered seven to the Marlins on both Saturday and Sunday. Their rotation, specifically, has been tremendous, allowing a total of 10 runs in 49 2/3 innings. Max Fried has pitched into the seventh inning in each of his three starts, and he didn’t allow a run until the first inning on Sunday; he’s given up three runs total across his 20 innings of work. Cam Schlittler, too, has been nearly immaculate, tossing two scoreless outings while striking out 15 and walking none in 11 2/3 innings. The offense hasn’t had much need to shine behind such great pitching, but Ben Rice has been the early stand out; he blasted his third home run of the season on Sunday and is now sporting a 275 wRC+.

The Pirates had an eventful start to the season. It began with the worst start of Paul Skenes’ career on Opening Day — he didn’t even manage to make it out of the first inning against the Mets. Bubba Chandler and Carmen Mlodzinski both had noteworthy outings during that first week, too. Of course, the big news was the debut of Konnor Griffin on Friday. Pittsburgh had sent him to Triple-A to start the season, but called him up just in time for the team’s home opener — and with enough space between calling him up and officially signing him to what’s reportedly going to be a record-breaking nine-year contract extension. In order for the Pirates to remain eligible for the prospect promotion incentive draft pick, which they’ll receive if Griffin wins Rookie of the Year or finishes top three in the NL MVP voting, they cannot extend him until after his major league debut. It seems they are waiting to finalize the extension to maintain plausible deniability that the terms were agreed upon after his debut, not while he was still in the minors. Does the timing here seem a bit suspect? Sure, but that hardly matters to Pirates fans, who now get to witness two top-shelf talents for the rest of the season — and maybe even carry the team back to the playoffs for the first time in 10 years. Pittsburgh was immediately rewarded with a weekend sweep of the Orioles and a modest five-game win streak.

The Brewers are well on their way toward proving their doubters wrong — again. They’ve won all three of their series so far, possess the best run differential in baseball, and are tied with the Dodgers for the best record in the NL. Jacob Misiorowski has been brilliant, striking out 40% of the batters he’s faced across his first two starts of the year. Brice Turang has been leading the offense with a 178 wRC+ in nine games. Most importantly, the offense has been humming along without the services of Jackson Chourio; he was placed on the IL just before Opening Day with a hairline fracture in his left hand. Andrew Vaughn quickly joined Chourio on the shelf with a hamate fracture after playing just a single game. Despite those missing pieces, Milwaukee has scored the most runs in the NL through the first week and a half.

It’s been an up-and-down start to the season for the Mariners. They haven’t won a series yet after splitting a four-game set against the Guardians and then losing back-to-back series against the Yankees and Angels. The bats have been slow to wake up; Cal Raleigh has collected just five hits — none of them homers — and has struck out in nearly 50% of his plate appearances. Julio Rodríguez, known for his slow starts, hasn’t been much better than Raleigh. Seattle needs both of its superstars to start producing, but for now, the pitching staff will have to carry the load. The team has allowed the second fewest runs in the AL so far, and a big reason is the breakout of Emerson Hancock; he’s allowed just one run in his first two starts of the year and has struck out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced. Oh, and the team signed top prospect Colt Emerson to an eight-year contract extension, a record for a minor league player. He’ll be pushing for playing time in the majors as soon as this summer.

It was a mix of good news and bad news for the Astros to start this season. The good news is that their offense looks completely rejuvenated, leading all of baseball in runs and nearly every important offensive category. Yordan Alvarez is healthy and showing us why he should be considered one of the most dangerous hitters when he’s on the field; he’s already blasted four home runs this year and is slashing .400/.578/.900, good for a 285 wRC+. Jose Altuve isn’t too far behind, with a 220 wRC+ in the early going. Unfortunately, the team placed Hunter Brown on the IL with a shoulder injury over the weekend, thinning out an already shaky starting rotation.

The Cubs suffered a major blow when Cade Horton exited his second start of the season with a forearm injury. While ominous sounding, no determination has been made yet about the severity of the strain. Justin Steele is still about a month away from returning from his own elbow surgery, so Chicago will have to make do without two key members of its starting rotation for now. The offense has been producing in fits and starts; Alex Bregman (78 wRC+), Michael Busch (76), and Pete Crow-Armstrong (60) have all struggled. It’s good news, then, that Seiya Suzuki is close to being activated off the IL to give the Cubs a boost.

It’s been a solid start to the season for the Guardians, with a couple of series wins over the Dodgers and Cubs and a four-game split with the Mariners. Their pitching has been solid, but the offense has scored the second-fewest runs in the AL. If it weren’t for Chase DeLauter, that total would be significantly lower. The rookie outfielder homered in his first three games of the season and added his fifth in his first nine games on Friday. The rest of the offense has been pretty slow to start this year, including José Ramírez, who currently has a 43 wRC+.

The Marlins won five of their first six games before running into the juggernaut Yankees last weekend. They managed to salvage a win on Sunday in that series, plating four runs in the eighth inning to pull off a comeback victory. Offense was supposed to be this team’s great weakness, but Miami scored 16 runs off the dominant New York pitchers, who had allowed just six runs over their first six games. With Xavier Edwards (227 wRC+), Liam Hicks (214), and Owen Caissie (153) leading the way, the Marlins enter this week with a 125 wRC+, fourth in the majors. It’s also encouraging that Sandy Alcantara looks like his old self again; he’s thrown two scoreless starts, the second of which was a complete game win on Wednesday.

It was an inauspicious start to the Tony Vitello era in San Francisco; the Giants weren’t able to score a run until the third inning of the third game of the season. The spotlight is shining a little brighter on the new manager — Vitello is the first to jump directly from the college ranks to a major league managerial position since 1980 — but the sloppy play on the field hasn’t made his job any easier. Things got a little better after that ugly season-opening sweep at the hands of the Yankees, as the Giants won their next series against the Padres. But then they dropped a four-game series to the Mets over the weekend. They’re tied with the Reds for the fewest runs scored in baseball through the first week and a half, and have the worst run differential in baseball.

For a brief moment during the opening weekend of the season, Mike Trout led all of baseball in WAR; he blasted two home runs, collected six hits, and even stole a bag in the Angels’ first series in Houston. He went hitless over his next five games, though he’s still managing to get on base thanks to a walk rate near 30%. Unfortunately, he departed Sunday’s game after getting hit by a pitch on his left wrist. X-rays came back negative, according to MLB.com’s Rhett Bollinger, and Trout is listed as day to day. The real star for the Angels this weekend was Jo Adell, who robbed three home runs in a single game on Saturday.

Munetaka Murakami homered in each of his first three games and added a fourth on Friday. The strikeout rate is pretty high, but he’s taking walks and is obviously hitting for power. The White Sox are a long way from really caring about early-season wins and losses, but they did manage to sweep the Blue Jays over the weekend. Chicago held the reigning AL champs to just seven runs in three games, and the offense came through with some clutch hitting against Toronto’s bullpen. Hope is still deferred for this year, but that doesn’t mean the South Siders can’t enjoy a bit of fun while they have something to celebrate. Even if what they’re celebrating won’t amount to much in a few weeks.

Jo Adell performed a miracle. Let’s turn it into math.

Adell robbed the Mariners of three home runs on Saturday. He got Cal Raleigh in the first inning, Josh Naylor in the eighth, and J.P. Crawford in the ninth. Sports Info Solutions has tracked home run robberies since 2004 and only twice had an outfielder robbed even two home runs in a game — nobody had ever robbed three.

Each catch was crucial. The Angels wound up winning 1-0, with Zach Neto’s leadoff solo shot in the first inning being the only run of the game. That means Adell was thrice the difference in the Angels’ narrow victory.

Win Probability Added doesn’t agree. It suggests Adell overall hurt the Angels’ chances of winning by about 3%. Position players only gain WPA on offense — Adell went 1-for-3 with an irrelevant single — so he didn’t get credit for any of these catches. WPA instead gives all the glory to the pitcher, with the assumption that an out is an out on defense, and the only thing that can be known about an out is who threw the ball (in this case, Jack Kochanowicz, Sam Bachman, and Jordan Romano).

While this assumption makes sense for nearly all plays and scenarios, home run robberies are a bit different. They’re definitive. We know what the outcome was, and we know what the outcome would have been had Adell not intervened.

How much was each catch worth? And how much credit does Adell deserve? Let’s take a look. Read the rest of this entry »

Going into yesterday, Mason Miller had thrown 37 pitches on the season, 19 of them fastballs averaging 101 mph, while another 17 were sliders that elicited a 60.0% whiff rate. There was also one changeup. Delivered to Luis Arraez on a 1-1 count, the ninth-inning offering was wide outside and taken for a ball.

Why did the San Diego Padres closer throw his seldom-used changeup to the three-time batting champ on Wednesday night? Low leverage was certainly a factor; the Friars had scored four times in the bottom of the eighth to turn a 3-1 lead into a far safer 7-1 advantage. It nonetheless represented an outlier for the 27-year-old flamethrower. Over the previous two seasons, only 2.3% of his pitches were changeups.

I asked him about it when the Padres visited Fenway Park on Friday,

“A changeup is a good pitch, but I’m not going to feel comfortable with it if I’m not throwing it,” Miller told me. “I’m picking my spots. There are certain guys it matches up well against. [Arraez] is a guy who isn’t going to swing and miss, so I’m not going to be hunting a strikeout. If I can get softer contact on it… any time you have a guy who isn’t fast and he puts it on the ground, that’s an opportunity for an out.”

Arraez didn’t kill any worms in his matchup with Miller, instead lining a 2-1 fastball to right field for a single. Not that it mattered. The righty proceeded to fan the next three batters, one on a 101.5-mph heater, and two on nasty sliders. While those pitches were pristine, the execution on his lone changeup was another story. Read the rest of this entry »

It took all of a week for the Pirates to call up shortstop Konnor Griffin, the top prospect in all of baseball, to make his debut in their home opener Friday afternoon. Batting seventh, Griffin went 1-for-3 with a walk in Pittsburgh’s 5-4 win over the Orioles, with the highlight coming in the second inning. He stepped in with a runner on second and one out against Baltimore right-hander Kyle Bradish. The first pitch was a slider well off the plate that Griffin chased and missed. He took the next pitch, a slider even farther away, for a ball, whiffed at yet another slider low and away for strike two, and barely got a piece of a fourth-straight slider outside the zone to stay alive. Then, finally, he got a pitch to hit, a curveball on the black away. He scorched it into the left-center gap for a double to drive in the first Pirates run of the game. Two pitches later, he showed off his 70-grade speed, blazing around third to score on a single to shallow right field.

If you’re reading this Members only mailbag, you almost certainly know all about Griffin and his tantalizing, franchise-altering potential. Our prospect team described him as a “freaky five-tool player” when they ranked him no. 1 on our preseason Top 100 list and assigned him a 70 FV. He doesn’t turn 20 until the end of this month and immediately raises the floor of this Pirates team significantly, even if he struggles some out of the gate. Michael Baumann wrote about Griffin on Thursday afternoon, and I’d encourage you to read it if you want to learn more about what Griffin brings to the Pirates and why, after just five games at Triple-A, they decided it was the right time for his big league career to begin.

That’s the last you’ll read about Griffin’s debut in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll answer yours questions on the World Series teams with the most and least WAR on their rosters at the time of their Fall Classic, the dropped third strike rule, and players with the same name. 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 »

When looking at most April stats, especially the basic ones, I spend a lot of time issuing disclaimers about small sample sizes. After all, any player can do just about anything in 25 or 50 or 100 plate appearances. I’m pretty confident that Joey Wiemer is not going to end the season as the NL MVP, and that Hunter Barco won’t finish the season with the worst WAR in major league history. But conversely, when we’re talking about standings, even if bad/good starts shouldn’t necessarily overconcern us about a player’s future, when it comes to teams, playoffs are determined by wins, which are cumulative numbers with razor-sharp margins. It’s not the end of the world if Cal Raleigh, because of his slow start, finishes with 38 homers instead of his projected 41 (ZiPS DC), but it may doom the Mariners if they underperform their projections by three wins.

The season is just a week old, but there are already sizable impacts in playoff probabilities around the league. To demonstrate this, I ran ZiPS overnight to get the updated playoff odds, so I could compare them to the preseason projections. Six teams have seen their playoff odds change by at least five percentage points. Here’s the full table, as things stand on Friday morning.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »