I’ve been fascinated by Caleb Kilian for quite a while. Since 2021, to be precise, when he put together a dazzling 80 innings of minor league work for the Giants and then got traded to the Cubs in a deal for Kris Bryant. At the time, Kilian was essentially a lottery ticket, an eighth-round pick in 2019 who was old for his level. But man, those 80 innings were just the kind of innings I like – great command fueling both a pristine walk rate and a ton of strikeouts. I filed a mental note to keep my eye on him: Low-stuff high-command guys sometimes pop with a change of scenery, at least in my head.

That didn’t transpire in Chicago. Kilian got a cup of coffee in 2022 and another one in 2023, but his walk rate ballooned as he reached back for more velo against tougher competition, both at Triple-A and in the majors. And then a shoulder strain cost him half of the 2024 season. He returned for 2025 and found himself in minor league limbo as he transitioned to the bullpen; the Cubs released and then re-signed him due to roster considerations, and he hit minor league free agency after the season. He signed a minor league deal with the Giants over the winter, now as a full-fledged reliever. And that’s where the meat of this article begins.

The early book on Kilian was a standard one: plus command, wide arsenal, but no true out pitch and below-average velocity. In his time with the Cubs, however, that changed. By 2024, Kilian was touching 100 at times, but we graded his command as only average. In other words, his results and scouting report matched: He was throwing harder, but it wasn’t working better.
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Rob Thomson, the unlikely skipper of the 2022 National League Champion Philadelphia Phillies, has fulfilled his most important function as manager. The Phillies are 9-19, tied for last place not only in the division, but also in the entire league. That’s unacceptable for a team with championship aspirations. So overboard Thomson goes. Bench coach Don Mattingly, father of Phillies GM Preston Mattingly and an experienced big league manager in his own right, will take the tiller for the foreseeable future.

This is the second managerial firing in four days, after Alex Cora’s ouster in Boston. Both cases involved a well-regarded and successful bench boss paying for the sins of a flawed roster. And just as some wondered why Cora lost his job when Craig Breslow had put a losing team together, fingers across the Delaware Valley are pointing to president of baseball ops Dave Dombrowski as much as Thomson. Read the rest of this entry »

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Brant Hurter is a reliable reliever who largely flies under the radar. Since debuting with the Detroit Tigers in August 2024, the 6-foot-6, 250-pound southpaw has fashioned a 2.49 ERA and a 3.41 FIP over 64 appearances comprising 119 1/3 innings. Moreover, he has registered a pair of saves and a 13-4 won-loss record.

He is off to a solid start in the current campaign. Hurter has come out of the ‘pen 11 times and allowed just three earned runs over 11 frames. His outings have been timely. The 2021 seventh-round pick out of Georgia Tech has wins in all three of his decisions.

Befitting his low profile, Hurter wasn’t highly regarded coming out of college, nor was he viewed as a future star while down on the farm. That doesn’t mean our lead prospect analyst didn’t see a big league future. Ranked 17th with a 40 FV on our 2024 Tigers Top Prospects list, Hurter was described by Eric Longenhagen as a pitcher he could “see in an important bulk relief role.” Read the rest of this entry »

The AL West is a bit of a mess right now. For the first time in a decade, the Astros are nonfactor. The Mariners — defending champion and heavy preseason favorite — got out of the blocks slowly and are just now kicking into gear. So almost by default, Major League Baseball’s only mononymous franchise is in first place.

I don’t think anyone would accuse Carlos Cortes of driving the Athletics’ offense; his 67 plate appearances are only about half what full-time starters like Shea Langeliers, Nick Kurtz, and Tyler Soderstrom have recorded. But in that limited playing time, Cortes is hitting .377/.433/.689 with four home runs and only four strikeouts.

That’s right, Cortes is DiMiaggioing. Read the rest of this entry »

With the advent of the ABS challenge system, the definition of the strike zone has been laid out with new precision. MLB defines the new ABS zone as follows: “The strike zone will be a two-dimensional rectangle that is set in the middle of home plate with the edges of the zone set to the width of home plate (17 inches) and the top and bottom adjusted based on each individual player’s height (53.5% of the batter’s height at the top and 27% at the bottom).” That’s a change from the way that the strike zone had been understood since 1996. Per MLB.com, that zone was “the area over home plate from the midpoint between a batter’s shoulders and the top of the uniform pants – when the batter is in his stance and prepared to swing at a pitched ball – and a point just below the kneecap. In order to get a strike call, part of the ball must cross over part of home plate while in the aforementioned area.” Those two zones are different, clearly, and it’s reasonable to assume that they would have different sizes and shapes. But how different?

Before the season, estimates of how the zone might change ball and strike calls abounded. We’ve heard anecdotally that pitchers think it’s smaller, and that hitters think it’s taller. But I haven’t seen any studies that attempt to measure it empirically, so I set out to do so.

I’m going to bore you with plenty of math in this article, so let’s start with a few pictures before we dive into the details. I measured a 50% called strike probability border, normalized by player height, using 2025 and 2026 data. The zone has gotten lower and smaller:

That zone considers righties and lefties together. Break it down by handedness, and you get a similar result:

The upshot is that the strike zone has shrunk by around 14 square inches for a 6-foot tall batter, from roughly 454 square inches to 439 square inches. This finding matches the direction of the result that MLB expected to see before the season, if not the precise magnitude. In their ABS explainer, they approximated the strike zone in 2-2 counts as being 449 square inches with the old human-called strike zone and 443 square inches with the new ABS zone.

Now that I’ve given you my top-line findings, let’s get into the methodology. First, I took all the pitches that were called balls or strikes during the 2025 and 2026 seasons. I only considered batters who appeared in both seasons so that I could use their official measured height; I used their official height in 2026 for both years to ensure a consistent sample. Then, for each pitch in each year, I normalized vertical location by height. In other words, a 3-foot high pitch thrown to a 6-foot tall batter would receive a value of 3/6 or 0.5, while a 3-foot high pitch thrown to a 7-foot tall batter would receive a value of 3/7. In this way, I produced a height-normalized form of measurement that is consistent between the past two years, rather than using relative distance from a rulebook defined strike zone. This let me compare like for like — not the area of the strike zone relative to the rulebook in each year, but the true (height-normalized) size of the zone in each year. This is especially important because the exact definition of the zone and the way the zone is called have not always correlated perfectly; in fact, despite no change in the rulebook zone, changes in umpire evaluation have moved the strike zone borders around in recent years.

I took all the normalized pitch locations in my remaining sample, and then I further restricted it by time. I used only pitches that were thrown through April 25, 2025 last season, and through April 25, 2026 this season. I’m not sure whether there are any hidden calendar effects to strike zone size, but I didn’t want to take any chances; this methodology relies on comparing a like zone, and this time restriction still gave me plenty of data. After all, the limiting factor here is the fact that the 2026 season is still incomplete, and I haven’t dropped any of that data.

With these called balls and strikes in hand, I transformed the individual calls into a probability distribution using Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression. In layman’s terms, this is a bin-and-smooth technique. It works by creating a grid, 121×121 in this case, and then placing each pitch into those bins. It then smooths each pitch’s location using a Gaussian filter and calculates the smoothed called-strike probability in each zone. Those called-strike probabilities are used to create the frontier of the 50% called-strike-probability zone, which I’m using to define “the strike zone” for this study. I used the 50% called-strike rate as the border because that matches the on-field experience of the strike zone. For everything inside this border, an umpire is more likely than not to call a strike. For everything outside it, they’re more likely than not to call a ball. Given the inherent uncertainty of the zone as called by humans with occasional robot assistance, I think this is a definition that comes closest to matching how the zone feels to players. As a bonus, it’s also the standard definition used by many seminal studies of the strike zone.

Using this method, I estimated the size and shape of the strike zone in the past two seasons. For example, the top of the strike zone for a 6-foot batter in 2025 was roughly three feet, 5.5 inches. The top of the strike zone for a 6-foot batter in 2026 has been roughly three feet, 4.5 inches. The bottom of the zone for that 6-foot batter was roughly one foot, six inches in 2025; it’s been roughly one foot, 5.5 inches in 2026. There was no meaningful change in the width of the strike zone, as you’d expect; that’s defined by the width of home plate, which has not changed.

To determine whether these changes were statistically significant, I calculated bootstrapped confidence intervals. To do this, I broke my sample out by game and then picked games at random, with replacement, to form new samples for both years. I repeated this process 100 times. I took the 2.5th-percentile and 97.5th-percentile results of the bootstrap to form confidence intervals, both for the size of the zone and the change in the size of the zone. Those results are as follows (reported for a 6-foot batter):

I interpret this as saying the following: The top of the strike zone is lower. The bottom of the strike zone is also lower, though by less. The width of the zone may be very slightly smaller, though it’s hard to say. The total area of the strike zone has declined, likely by between eight and 22 square inches, somewhere between 2% and 5% of the total strike zone area.

Another form of analysis proved more difficult: determining the changing shape of the zone in different counts. There’s a two-fold problem here. First, the sample sizes of the raw pitches thrown in each count are far smaller than they are for the overall population. Second, we’re looking for zones of the plate where strikes are called roughly 50% of the time so that we can perform boundary analysis, but batters don’t take a lot of 50/50 balls in certain counts. Look for a cluster of pitches in a 1-2 count that didn’t produce a swing and yet had a 50% chance of being called a strike, and you’re going to be looking for a while. Batters don’t take those pitches.

However, I was able to cobble something together with a little help from our extensive library. The PitchingBot model produces estimates of the likelihood of a swing for every pitch. I used those estimates to create an inverse probability weighting for each pitch. The less likely a given count/location/pitch type combination was to lead to a take, the more I weighted it in our sample. This statistical method corrects for the sampling bias inherent in looking at only pitches that a batter took.

This method produced two interesting takeaways. First, the strike zone in three-ball counts hasn’t really changed, even while everything else has shrunk. Umpires are in fact calling a slightly larger strike zone in counts with three balls, though it’s statistically indistinguishable from the 2025 zone in the same counts. Second, the old effect of umpires tightening the strike zone in two-strike counts is vanishing. In zero-strike counts, the 2026 strike zone is 8% smaller than the 2025 strike zone. In two-strike counts, the 2026 zone is 1% smaller than the 2025 zone. I’m not confident in this effect size, thanks to the fact that I cut sample sizes down significantly by bucketing by count, but I am confident that an effect exists.

I do not feel confident in making any strong claims about the downstream effects of these changes. This study was set up particularly to measure the size of the zone, not to consider how pitcher and batter behavior have changed as a result. That said, it’s certainly suggestive that walk rates have increased. It’s even more suggestive that the called strike rate for fastballs just above the borders of the ABS strike zone, 53.5% of a batter’s height, has declined markedly. In 2025, fastballs thrown within the width of home plate and between zero and four inches above that 53.5% cutoff were called strikes 54.3% of the time. So far in 2026, pitches thrown to that area have been called strikes 40.8% of the time.

Another interesting effect: ABS challenges themselves aren’t having much effect on the size of the zone. I took all challenged calls and reverted them to the original umpire call, then re-ran the entire model. The difference was minimal; using pre-challenge calls, the zone has shrunk ever so slightly more than the measured effect reported in this study, though not by a statistically significant amount. The net effect of challenges is quite small. Here’s a graphical representation of the difference between the as-called zone (using the final result, post-challenges) and the zone assuming no challenges were allowed:

None of this is settled science. The zone will continue to evolve as batters, pitchers, catchers, and umpires adjust to the new rules. The definition of the strike zone isn’t set in stone – obviously so, given that the zone was called in three dimensions last year and is called in two dimensions in 2026. There are meaningful downstream behavioral implications, too, and I expect league-wide walk rates to decline as pitchers adjust to the new strike zone. But so far, pitchers’ reports of the zone are correct: The strike zone, as called by umpires and the ABS challenge system in 2026, covers less area than it did in 2025.

Appendix A: Data
The data and Python code used to prepare the principal analysis in this article are available here. This code covers the method for normalizing pitch locations, constructing normalized pitch plots, measuring the difference between the two, bootstrapping confidence intervals, and separating results by handedness. A markdown document explaining the function and design of the Python code is also available at that link. Further documentation is available as needed. I’ve left out anything that uses internal-only data, like PitchingBot model values, but I’m happy to discuss specific methodology further on a one-off basis.

Appendix B: Further Reading
I linked to several articles about the changing shape of the strike zone in 2026 at the top of this article. The following is a more complete bibliography of sources who have written about the size of the zone in the ABS era:

• “How MLB’s Ball-Strike Challenge Will Change Baseball,” Peter Abraham, Tim Healey, Alex Speier, John Hancock, and Daigo Fujiwara-Smith, The Boston Globe
• “Players Say Robot Umpires Are Shrinking MLB’s Strike Zone,” David Brandt, Jay Cohen, et al., The Associated Press
• “Everything You Need To Know About The New ABS Challenge System,” Anthony Castrovince, MLB.com
• “MLB’s Switch to ABS Shrunk Nearly Every Hitter’s Strike Zone,” Mike Emeigh and Reddit
• “Jose Altuve’s New Strike Zone,” Jarrett Seidler, Baseball Prospectus
• “MLB Made a Change That Players Say Shrank the Strike Zone,” Jayson Stark, Ken Rosenthal, and Eno Sarris, The Athletic
• “ABS Has Shrunk The Strike Zone; Walks Are Spiking As Hitters Try To Adjust,” Cody Stavenhagen, The Athletic
• “ABS Challenge Rates By Proximity to Border of Strike Zone,” Tom Tango
• “Lefties Eat Hot Dogs, Righties Eat Burgers,” Matthew Trueblood, Baseball Prospectus
• “Yes, MLB’s Strike Zone Is Shrinking. But Baseball Will Be Better For It,” Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated
• “This is Not Even The Strike Zone’s Final Form,” Bradley Woodrum, Baseball Prospectus

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Red Sox suddenly sweeping their coaching staff clean, projected contenders off to even worse starts than the Sox, MLB offense in Mexico City, a double ball-strike challenge, Kyle Harrison as the new Quinn Priester, and Kevin McGonigle out-phenoming Konnor Griffin, then Stat Blast (38:37) about Brandon Phillips and major league afterlives, teams hitting for the homer cycle in a single inning, and individual net five-homer games. Then (53:38) they talk to The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier about how and why the Red Sox fired Alex Cora and Co. and whether there’s more house-cleaning to come.

Audio intro: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: The Spaghettis, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to FG post on Sox firings
Link to MLBTR on Sox firings
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Link to original Cronin wiki
Link to van photo
Link to Four Seasons Total Landscaping
Link to Whitlock quote
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Link to Sportradar firing fact
Link to “Chad” wiki
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Link to Cora text
Link to Cora tweet
Link to fired coaches photo 1
Link to fired coaches photo 2
Link to Paine’s Sox analysis 1
Link to Paine’s Sox analysis 2
Link to playoff odds changes
Link to Diamondbacks Mexico City win
Link to Mexico games
Link to Ben on Mexico City scoring
Link to Monterrey stadium
Link to Mexico City stadium
Link to run-scoring comparison
Link to Vancouver expansion story
Link to double challenge clip
Link to double challenge story
Link to Refsnyder challenge story
Link to Baty challenge story
Link to Harrison’s five-start averages
Link to FG on-pace leaders
Link to Griffin’s first dinger
Link to Phillips contract story
Link to EW on delayed retirements
Link to major league afterlives data
Link to Kenny Jackelen
Link to Phillips B-Ref page
Link to PCL wiki
Link to SIS Cameron story
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Link to Red Sox preview pod
Link to team HR leaderboard
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Link to Sheehan on the Sox offense
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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 »

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