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The normal flow of a baseball season inevitably includes injuries. The dog days of summer usually come with a star or two on the shelf. It’s a long year, and roster depth matters more and more as the months advance. But sometimes, injuries don’t occur at predictable intervals. Sometimes it’s April 14 and half your roster is on the IL. Just ask the Astros.

On Monday, Houston placed Tatsuya Imai and Jeremy Peña on the IL. That followed two moves from last Friday, when Cristian Javier and Jake Meyers both hit the IL. Five days before that, staff ace Hunter Brown landed on the IL himself with a shoulder strain that will keep him from throwing for at least two weeks, and likely prevent him from appearing for far longer than that. And that’s just the in-season injuries. Josh Hader, Zach Dezenzo, Bennett Sousa, and Nate Pearson all started the year on the IL. Brandon Walter, Ronel Blanco, and Hayden Wesneski are still working their way back from elbow injuries sustained in 2025. That’s 12 players on the IL if you’re counting at home, and a number of stars among them.

It’s not like every injury matters the same. Pearson has never appeared for the Astros and has a negative career WAR. Dezenzo is a fifth outfielder. The core missing names for Houston are Brown, Imai, Peña, Hader, Javier, and, to a lesser extent, Meyers. If the Astros can’t replace the production from those five, all of whom are key parts of their roster, 2026 will be a long year. So let’s consider how each affects Houston’s prognosis in isolation, and then consider them all in concert.

Peña’s injury is the one the Astros are best-equipped to deal with. Thanks to last season’s Carlos Correa trade and a quiet offseason, Houston came into this year with an infield logjam. Peña, Correa, Isaac Paredes, and Jose Altuve gave the team four good players for only three spots. None could reliably flex to DH because of the presence of Yordan Alvarez. Altuve spent some time in the outfield last year, even before Correa arrived. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon! Welcome to my first chat of April

12:02

Jay Jaffe: I was out of town last week, traveling in Austria with my family, retracing some ancestral roots and testing out my newly-acquired dual citizenship. It’s very weird to drop in on baseball when there’s a 6-hour time difference in that direction, to say the least

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about Andy Pages, whose hot start I followed from afar https://blogs.fangraphs.com/with-a-hot-start-andy-pages-has-turned-the…

12:04

Jay Jaffe: For tomorrow I’ll be writing about Davey Lopes, my first favorite ballplayer, who passed away last week.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: if I’ve learned one thing, it’s never take the Brewers lightly. They always seem to find a way to contend, and in that division, that’s often more than enough

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I made it out to Everett a couple of times last week, drawn by the chance to watch three of our Top 100 prospects and a couple of other notable farmhands. My thoughts on seven of the standouts are below.

Tyler Bremner, RHP, Angels
Bremner was as advertised. He’s a loose athlete with, odd front leg swing as he starts his motion aside, a clean and easy delivery. He ticked every number on the gun from 93-98 mph, flashed an above-average slider, and most importantly, missed a half dozen bats with his 70-FV changeup. On the night, he struck out four, walked three, allowed one hit, and only one or two hard-hit balls. It’s what an early first-round pick should do against a decent High-A lineup.

If we’re going to pick nits, I wouldn’t focus on the walks too much, as Bremner was battling a muddy mound on a cold night. He nibbles a bit and likes to entice hitters off the plate. He does this on the changeup especially, and it’s fair to wonder if big leaguers will bite to the same degree college and low minors hitters have thus far. Despite the velo, he only missed two bats with the fastball and none with the slider, which raises questions about where he’ll turn on days when hitters aren’t chasing the cambio. Ultimately, I don’t have long-term concerns. He still projects as a no. 3 or 4 starter, but the night underscored the importance of continuing to develop his slider and fastball command. Whether that’s a job best done at this level or a rung up is above my pay grade.

Jonny Farmelo, CF, Mariners
Farmelo put together two solid at-bats against Bremner. He didn’t reach base, but managed to turn around an upper-90s fastball up and in and line it to right in his first trip up, and then hit a hard line drive to left in his second plate appearance. He got out in front of fastballs a couple times this week and showed enough barrel manipulation to stay competitive on pitches up, even with his fairly long bat path. Perhaps most encouragingly for a player who has battled a lot of injuries as a pro, he still looks like a 70 runner, and he also made a nice read and leaping catch at the wall in center. Read the rest of this entry »

I live in Mercer County, New Jersey, which has a lot going for it. If there’s a place on Earth with more great hoagie shops per capita, I’ve yet to encounter it. We’re the world capital of passive-aggressive bridge architecture, and it was here that George Washington gave the United States of America its first great Christmas gift: A big pile of dead Hessian mercenaries.

But a college baseball hotbed it is not. Rider and Penn are nearby, and both schools are frequent pesky no. 4 seeds in the NCAA Tournament. Which is fun, but it’s not too interesting to a national baseball writer who focuses primarily on the major leagues.

Last weekend was different. Several rounds of Big Ten expansion led to an unusual event: UCLA, the no. 1 team in the country, with presumptive no. 1 overall pick Roch Cholowsky in tow, was obliged to visit Rutgers. I’ve had this series circled on my calendar since last year, and here’s what I learned. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Mariners actually sort of sacrificing Humpy, the historically compressed standings at the start of the season, top prospects (and veteran relievers) pushing for promotions, the solution to a Kutter Crawford mystery, a faux-froyo con, Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s rules confusion, Cade Winquest’s quest, and more. Then (57:18) they talk to Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick about Jackie Robinson Day, the importance of telling stories about Black baseball in an anti-diversity climate, Bob’s work on MLB The Show, the MLB pipeline for African American players, showcasing the surviving Negro Leagues ballparks, the NLBM’s expansion plans, baseball in Kansas City, Ichiro Suzuki’s visits to the Museum, and more.

Audio intro: Josh Busman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian Phillips, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to “Jack Robinson” idiom
Link to Humpy clip
Link to Humpy plushy
Link to MLBTR on Imai
Link to standings data
Link to leaguewide offensive stats
Link to baseball drag graph
Link to previous Crawford banter
Link to 2025 Crawford story
Link to new Crawford scoop
Link to “hose” baseball slang
Link to FG top prospects
Link to Parker collision story
Link to froyo feature
Link to Jazz story
Link to Jazz clip
Link to Jazz play
Link to Boone story
Link to Kobayashi Maru wiki
Link to Brebbia post
Link to MLBTR on Kimbrel
Link to Yankees/Mets losses stat
Link to Emanski drills video
Link to frequency illusion wiki
Link to MLBTR on Winquest
Link to phantom ballplayer wiki
Link to Jackie Robinson Day wiki
Link to Robinson story removal
Link to MLB “diversity” story
Link to new MLB The Show mode
Link to MLB at Rickwood Field wiki
Link to surviving ballparks story
Link to East-West Classic news
Link to % of Black players data
Link to NLBM expansion page
Link to sportswriters/Marriott story
Link to Chiefs stadium story
Link to Royals stadium story
Link to John Donaldson EW episode
Link to donate to the NLBM
Link to Swanson quote
Link to Episode 305 wiki
Link to Lorenzen note
Link to MLBTR on Pham

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It seems like every team is dealing with serious injuries to start the season. Maybe that’s why there isn’t much daylight in the standings yet. Every team has won at least six games so far, with most clubs huddled right around .500.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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My puny mortal brain is having trouble making sense of the numbers coming out of San Diego right now. It’s an uncanny valley thing. Mason Miller’s statistics just don’t quite seem like they’re numbers that you can put up in the majors. Oh, they’re all in the right columns. They’re not impossible or anything. It’s just that no one else has numbers that look quite like this, and even more so than that, if you think about what they all mean together, it doesn’t seem like the performance they describe can possibly be real.

Let’s start with the most striking statistic: 19 strikeouts in 24 batters faced. That 79.2% strikeout rate is obviously technically feasible, but I keep saying it in my head and it keeps not making sense. I look at strikeout rates a lot, particularly early in the season. But even for very good pitchers, they tend to top out around 40%, maybe 50% if they’re performing especially well. I can fit those numbers into my head. That means that about half the batters they face are going to strike out – easy enough. Face four batters in an inning? Two punchouts.

But 79% doesn’t work so easily. In a four-batter inning, that’s three strikeouts! But you don’t get a lot of four-batter innings if you’re striking out three batters an inning. Another way of thinking about that: Batters reach base safely about 40% of the time when they don’t strike out. But if they’re striking out 80% of the time, they’re already making outs in 80% of their plate appearances right off the top, and then add another 12% from in-play outs (60% times 20%). That’s an out rate of 92%! I can’t wrap my head around 92% outs. That’s the ratio of outs in your average two-hit complete game. But your average two-hit complete game includes a ton of batted-ball luck. Miller’s dominance doesn’t involve a lot of batted-ball luck – or a lot of batted balls.

That leads me to my next point of cognitive dissonance: all the swinging strikes. Right now, Miller is running a 39.6% swinging-strike rate on his slider. That means that batters swing at – and miss – 39.6% of the sliders he throws them. But they only swing half the time! That means they’re coming up empty 79.2% of the time when they offer at that pitch. Likewise, his four-seam fastball carries a 24.4% swinging-strike rate, off of a 43.5% whiff rate. These numbers are all ludicrous if you stop to think about them. Read the rest of this entry »