In 2024, the White Sox set a single-season record by losing 121 games, and last year, they went 60-102 under rookie manager Will Venable — their third straight season with at least 100 losses. Yet now, more than a third of the way into the 2026 season, the White Sox are one of only five AL teams with a record of .500 or better. At 34-31, they currently occupy the second Wild Card spot and are just 1.5 games behind the Guardians in the AL Central race.

Our projection systems certainly didn’t see this turnaround coming, as the White Sox were forecast for a 67-95 record — worst in the AL by almost five full wins — with just a 1.1% chance of making the playoffs. In our preseason Positional Power Rankings, their starting pitching, all three outfield spots, and designated hitter all ranked among the majors’ bottom three. As of mid-April, the Sox appeared to be fulfilling their destiny of another forgettable season, having skidded to a 6-13 start while scoring just 3.16 runs per game and hitting a cringeworthy .195/.286/.316 (71 wRC+), worst in the majors across the board. Even newcomer Munetaka Murakami was hitting just .167/.346/.417 (111 wRC+) with five home runs and a 21.8% walk rate but not much else. However, since that point, the team has hit .260/.343/.451 (121 wRC+) with 73 homers, leading either the AL or the majors in all of those categories while going 28-18 (.609) for the league’s second-best record over that span, behind only the Yankees (29-17, .630). Unfortunately, the last eight of those games have been without Murakami, who suffered a Grade 2 hamstring strain running out an infield grounder on May 29 and landed on the injured list; more on him below.

While there’s a long way to go in the 2026 season, at their current pace the White Sox could post this century’s second-largest improvement in winning percentage among the teams that lost at least 108 games two years prior:

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I don’t know how much attention Braxton Ashcraft wants in his life, but he must be either fuming at his lack of recognition or thrilled to be left alone. As much ink has been spilled on the Pirates this year, only some of it has gone to their starting rotation, as opposed to Konnor Griffin or the team’s new cadre of veteran bats. Of that fraction, Paul Skenes dominates the headlines, followed by the talented but frustrating Bubba Chandler, the newly returned Jared Jones, and the occasionally truant Carmen Mlodzinski.

But as of this writing, Ashcraft is in the top 10 in baseball in pitcher WAR, trailing Skenes by only a tenth of a win. And this on the heels of Saturday’s loss to the Braves, in which Ashcraft surrendered nine hits and six earned runs in five innings. I wouldn’t be especially worried; it’s only Ashcraft’s second bad start out of 13, and the Braves will do worse to better pitchers before the season’s out.

Ashcraft was a pretty big prospect: A second-round pick out of a Waco, Texas-area high school in 2018, and the no. 60 overall prospect heading into last season. And he pitched quite well as a rookie in 2025, with a 2.71 ERA and 2.78 FIP in 69 2/3 innings, split more or less evenly between the rotation and the bullpen. So it’s not like he came out of nowhere, but he would’ve been third-favorite for the role of Skenes’ sidekick if you’d asked around a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it only took until my fifth Feature Focus to get to a site tool that I completely forgot we had! After Cristopher Sánchez’s fantastic (but scoreless-streak-ending) start last Wednesday, I saw this tweet from OnPattison’s Tim Kelly:

After his start tonight, Cristopher Sánchez leads all MLB starters in innings pitched (86 1/3), ERA (1.46), FIP (1.78) and WAR (3.6), per @fangraphs.

— Tim Kelly (@TimKellySports) June 4, 2026

Thanks to Tim for using and citing FanGraphs, a great website that amazingly pays me to read your tweets and turn them into articles. Anyway, that post got me wondering: Where the heck was Tim getting that live WAR figure? I knew you could find live stats on the player pages — I look at those all the time. Fittingly, yesterday was another start day for Sánchez. Here’s the top of his player page 17 outs into that start:

But WAR isn’t on that little table, so where, pray tell, was Tim finding that number? Well, I did some digging and learned we’ve had live stats on our leaderboards since 2013, as introduced by David Appelman in what has to be the shortest post in FanGraphs history.

Our leaderboards are among our most viewed pages, and for good reason: They’re awesome. What might not be readily apparent (and certainly wasn’t to me) is that we’ve got some basic splits available in the dropdown on the right side of the page:

I’m a power user of our splits leaderboards and tend to default to those whenever I need a bespoke leaderboard that incorporates filters. That means I haven’t made full use of the Splits dropdown on the main leaderboard, which has some fun ready-made options (with more beyond what’s shown here):

And behold, there it is: “Live Stats – Today” and “Live Stats – Full Season.” The “Live Stats – Today” option only shows you stats from today’s action:

“Live Stats – Full Season” gives you today’s stats combined with the rest of the campaign — note how Sánchez’s innings total here matches the 92 from my screenshot of the Live Stats table on his player page:

The “Yesterday” option gives you a quick look at the prior day, in case you didn’t looked at live stats upon the conclusion of the day’s games and want to know who performed the best. Here are Sunday’s top hitters by WAR, as I compose this piece on Monday:

You can also use the Custom Date Range option to see stats for any individual day you’d like, or any set of days. The presets within that dropdown are there for ease of use, but you aren’t limited to those date ranges:

All of the date toggles and split options on the leaderboards are available to all FanGraphs users, but as usual, I’ll remind you that exporting to Excel is a Member-only feature. To become a FanGraphs Member, click here.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my weekly chat. It’s a lovely day here in Brooklyn, but no, I don’t have Knicks fever. After 31 years running along the spectrum from antipathy to apathy towards the team, I’m indifferent at best to their run to the NBA Finals while my wife and daughter (who’s never rooted for a men’s basketball team before) are swept up in it.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, I’ve got a forthcoming piece on the White Sox’s turnaround today (2 PM ET). Most recently, I wrote about Roki Sasaki’s turnaround (https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/roki-sasaki-is-putting-it-all-together) and Aaron Judge’s injury (https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/tough-break-aaron-judge-will-miss-time…).

12:04

Jay Jaffe: and now, on with the show

12:07

Jay Jaffe: I think there’s a lot going on early in the season, with front offices focusing on the amateur draft as well as on the rosters they spent the previous months building, and on the earliest wave of players who might help from within (perhaps related to service time shenanigans but not necessarily)

12:07

Jay Jaffe: After the draft and the All-Star break, it’s easier to focus on the realities of what they’ve put together and where they fit with regards to the playoff races

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The homers have yet to arrive for Andrew Benintendi.

My great, big, bold prediction for FanGraphs this year was that Benintendi would hit 30 home runs. It’s now the second week of June, and he has six. If he keeps this pace, he’ll finish with 15. Somehow, I think that means I’m off by 100%.

My reasoning at the time was flawless, of course. Benintendi the last two seasons had quietly reinvented himself. He’d always hit the ball in the air, but rarely with oomf, and almost always to left or center field. He averaged just 12 home runs per 600 plate appearances over the first eight years of his career, with sometimes good, sometimes not-so-good results.

But he clubbed exactly 20 homers in each the last two seasons. How? He simply took his existing contact-in-the-air profile and changed its direction to the pull side. He wasn’t hitting the ball farther; he was simply aiming shallower. This is the thing to do in baseball right now, unless you’re the Rays. Read the rest of this entry »

In the summer of 1872, Martin Malone pitched three complete games in three days for the Brooklyn Eckfords of the National Association. In today’s game, a pitcher who threw three complete games in three days would be hailed as something of a miracle, but Malone’s accomplishment loses a bit of its luster when you consider the context of the era. According to the numbers in our database, starters went the distance 83% of the time that season. Another piece of context scrapes the rest of the shine off with a machete: Over his three games, Malone allowed 86 runs on 96 hits. You will not be shocked to learn that he went 0-3.

Nineteenth century record-keeping being what it is, those are Malone’s only three games in our database, and for several reasons, that’s not quite fair. First, those three games don’t represent anything like a complete picture of his total performance. Malone first suited up for the Eckfords five years earlier. “It is surprising that all of Malone’s vital statistics remain undiscovered,” wrote David Nemec in Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, “for he seems to have been an integral part of the Brooklyn baseball scene for more than a decade.”

Next, Malone’s pitching may not have turned out well, but he did go 5-for-16 with a walk, for a .313 batting average and 115 wRC+ at the plate. Last and most important, it’s hard to say how much credit Malone really deserves for all the runs he gave up. He only allowed one home run. He didn’t walk anybody and he didn’t strike anybody out. He did what so many pitchers have been implored to do over the course of baseball history: He let the offense put the ball in play and trusted the defense behind him. It was a catastrophic mistake. Read the rest of this entry »

Last season was the year of the left-handed pitcher. Southpaws combined for a record 142.3 WAR in 2025, and their collective 3.84 ERA was nearly half a run lower than right-handers’ 4.28 mark. That’s the largest difference between righty and lefty run prevention in recorded major league history, surpassing the gap from 1886, when lefties like Toad Ramsey, Lady Baldwin, and Cyclone Miller took the league by storm.

While the names might not have been quite as much fun to say in 2025, the pitchers were just as fun to watch. (I mean, I presume. I’m slightly too young to have seen Ramsey, Baldwin, or Miller in action.) Tarik Skubal took home his second straight Cy Young award, and Garrett Crochet made him earn it. Max Fried signed the richest contract a left-handed pitcher has ever seen, and wasted no time demonstrating why the Yankees thought him worthy of it. Cristopher Sánchez proved he belonged in the conversation with those bigger names, earning himself an extension on top of an extension this spring. And it wasn’t just the stars doing the heavy lifting. You could remove Skubal, Crochet, Fried, and Sánchez from the equation, and lefties still outperformed their right-handed counterparts by more than a third of an earned run. Simply put, left-handed pitchers dominated, and those of us watching couldn’t help but take notice.

A big reason left-handed pitchers were so successful in 2025 was how well they handled right-handed hitters. We expect lefty pitchers to dominate same-handed matchups, and they had no trouble doing so last year. Left-handed pitchers generally hold left-handed batters to a wOBA about 15 to 25 points below the overall league average. In 2025, they held them to a .292 wOBA, while the league average was .313. That’s a 21-point gap, perfectly within the typical range. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s no secret that I’m an obsessive chronicler of bunting in the big leagues. Very good and very bad bunts frequently populate my Five Things column. I’ve written about the best and worst bunts you’ll see in a season, the optimal strategy for bunting in extras, and any number of other interesting bunting-related things – or at least, bunting-related things that are interesting to me. And there’s another great bunting topic to write about right this instant. See, bunts are making a comeback, and for once, they’re doing it for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. So let’s celebrate the return of the bunt – and also think about why it’s back.

So far this year, batters have bunted the ball into play (or struck out by bunting the ball foul) 640 times. That’s 0.9% of all the plate appearances in the majors in 2026, and while that might not sound like much, it’s a new high in the universal DH era, 25% higher than the 2025 season, which was itself the bunt-heaviest year in that stretch at 0.7%. There were a lot more bunts in the days when pitchers batted in National League parks, of course. But if you limit the search to American League parks and reach into the past, a clear trend emerges. Bunting declined as teams thought more about how bad sacrificing an out is. But then it bottomed out, and now teams are starting to bunt more often:

This is just a chart of how many bunts there are, not how good those bunts have been. In fact, the reason the bunt started to decline in the first place is that many bunts were counterproductive. Sacrificing a runner from first to second at the cost of an out is usually a bad decision on the run-scoring front. It might be a fine fail case – if you fail to bunt for a hit and accidentally sacrifice, that’s not so bad – but pure surrender bunts only make sense in very limited circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »