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12:02

Dan Szymborski: And awaaaay we go!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I think you’ll be fine

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Pulitzer Prize for B- Snark

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Jeremiah Estrada’s path to big league success was bumpy. Drafted out of Palm Desert High School in California in 2017, the now-27-year-old right-hander battled multiple injuries, including one that required Tommy John surgery in 2019. There was non-health-related adversity as well. Estrada spent his first seven professional seasons in the Chicago Cubs organization, and he didn’t always see eye to eye with the club’s pitching coordinators and coaches. They were occasionally at cross purposes when it came to optimizing his repertoire.

Estrada reached the big leagues with Chicago in 2022, although it wasn’t until two years later that he found much success. Cast aside by the Cubs, with whom he’d thrown just 16 1/3 big league innings over parts of two seasons, he has thrived since being claimed off waivers by the San Diego Padres prior to the 2024 campaign. Over 145 appearances, Estrada has logged a 3.35 ERA, a 2.85 FIP, and a 36.1% strikeout rate over 139 2/3 frames. His Friars ledger also includes four saves and an 11-9 won-lost record.

Estrada discussed his nonlinear, and often frustrating, path to big league success over a pair of conversations. The first came in early March at the Padres’ spring training complex, while the second was conducted at Fenway Park this past weekend.

———

David Laurila: How much have you changed since coming to pro ball?

Jeremiah Estrada: “I’d say a lot, and not just what happens on the field. With the baseball side, you learn what’s important and what’s not important, but that’s pretty much like life. Right? Life starts to kick in. Even though many of our lives are different, we worry about the same things. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a fan of gallows humor, and I think that fans of the Pirates need to be as well. The Pirates have developed their share of stars over the years, but for fans, there’s always the slight bit of dread that once their young talent starts getting paid commensurate with their production, they’ll be swapping the black-and-gold for Dodger blue or pinstripes. So it’s a good time for Yinzers and the Allegheny-adjacent community, as shortstop Konnor Griffin and the team agreed to a nine-year, $140 million contract that would keep him in town until after the 2034 season.

As contracts go, this is a rather straightforward one. While MVP incentives can bring up the deal by a modest $10 million, to $150 million, that’s just about the only complexity present. There is no deferred money to eat away at the present value of the contract, no option years for the Pirates to lock in at the end, and no opt-out provision that could get Griffin to free agency a year or two early. The deal includes a $12 million signing bonus, which will be doled out over the next three years, certainly helpful to Griffin in that he’ll still get a nice chunk of cash even if the seemingly inevitable lockout drags into the 2027 season.

The Pirates have a real up-and-down history with contracts, so it’s always nice to see them spend on franchise talent rather than spread things around on third-tier free agents. They managed to keep Andrew McCutchen a few years past his free agent eligibility, but for the last 50 years, most of the stars who started out in Pittsburgh became better associated with other teams. Players ranging from Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla to Aramis Ramirez and Gerrit Cole, a group that could include Paul Skenes in a few years. Some of the deals the Pirates did sign haunt the dreams of Gen X and millennial Pirates fans (Pat Meares! Kevin Young! Derek Bell!). The Pirates signed Andy Van Slyke and paid him more than the Giants paid Bonds during the latter’s first years in San Francisco.

Griffin was basically everyone’s top-ranked prospect coming into this season, and it’s not hard to see why. He has more tools than can be found at a Florida spring break kegger, and in his first professional season, he terrorized minor league pitchers to the tune of a .333/.415/.527, 165 wRC+ line across three levels, including a 175 wRC+ in his month at Double-A. That would be a drool-worthy performance if he were a 23-year-old first baseman, but he did all of that as a teenage shortstop. He still doesn’t hit the big two-oh for a couple of weeks. Griffin’s one of the few prospects you can plausibly compare to A-Rod at a similar stage in his career without the listener rolling their eyes and saying, “Who, Aurelio?”

A few weeks ago, I did my annual look at contracts I’d like to will into existence, and ZiPS suggested an eight-year, $142 million contract for Griffin. So getting a ninth year is even better!

That ninth year is pretty darn valuable, and ZiPS would be quite happy to give Griffin $40 million more in order to secure the 2034 projection. ZiPS, like most projection systems, does not generally have fits of irrational exuberance, for the simple fact that it’s well aware about how risky players are. Griffin is not a 5-WAR player yet, so there is risk involved, but that’s true of all players, whether they’re elite prospects or superstars in the middle of their careers. Albert Pujols and Miguel Cabrera were obviously far more “proven” when they signed their biggest deals than Griffin is now, but the Angels and Tigers paid handsomely for that so-called proof, and as should be clear now, there was a lot of downside involved there, too.

A $140 million contract isn’t a mega-deal in the typical baseball sense, but for the Pirates, Griffin’s contract represents the biggest financial commitment they’ve ever made to a player. They’re all-in when it comes to the Konnor Griffin business. Both team and player are now spared things like years of speculation about future trades or service-time games should Griffin struggle in April. Remember the time the Pirates offered Gerrit Cole $538,000, and when he turned it down, they apparently wouldn’t budge past $541,000, and threatened to pay him the league minimum if he refused? Cheap-bush league shenanigans are now out of the question with Griffin, and the focus can be on the actual baseball.

Even if Griffin isn’t immediately a megastar, he makes the Pirates meaningfully better, and they know it. He really did look raw at times in the spring, to the level that sending him down was excusable, even understandable, unlike when the Chicago Cubs in 2015 decided they needed precisely 20 days some additional time to figure out if Kris Bryant was a better option at third base than Mike Olt. Griffin did get five games with the Triple-A Indianapolis Indians, and it certainly looked like, in a small sample size, that he wasn’t really anything new against minor league pitching. But that’s not the point. The Pirates are true NL Central or Wild Card contenders, and they are much better off with Griffin as their starting shortstop, even if it takes him some time to adjust to the majors, than a decent role player like Jared Triolo. (Triolo has since been placed on the injured list with a patellar tendon injury in his right knee.)

With the long-bubbling Griffin contract negotiations finally complete, now the Bucs can worry about the rest of the team, and making the Cubs and Brewers feel uncomfortable for the rest of 2026.

It would border on being grotesquely premature to talk in too-concrete terms about a 19-year-old Griffin and the possibility of him one day having a Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown. But at least if such an object should ever come into existence, there’s now a realistic chance that it could have a “P” on the cap. That’s enough to make this a good week for Pirates fans.

Last week, I did a radio hit in Baltimore to talk about the Orioles’ five-year extension for right-handed starter Shane Baz. As you might expect, I got asked for my general impressions of the Orioles’ rotation, and I gave an answer I did not expect to be controversial: I like Baltimore’s rotation, and I’m quite fond of Trevor Rogers and Kyle Bradish, the top two starting pitchers. That said, the Orioles don’t have a clear no. 1-quality starter, which could end up as a weakness in a playoff series.

“Ace” and its synonyms are fuzzy in meaning, so I’ll define my terms as clearly as I can: I meant that the Orioles don’t have a starting pitcher who can be expected to go up against one of the top pitchers in the league and fight him to a draw for six innings. I’ll give an example from last year’s World Series: I think Yoshinobu Yamamoto is a better pitcher than Kevin Gausman — and sure enough, Yamamoto beat Gausman twice in as many attempts — but the difference isn’t so great that you’d be able to tell over one start.

I got some pushback on social media — some of it quite intense — from Orioles fans who like their chances with Rogers against Tarik Skubal. Every sports fan thinks they’re the center of the universe these days, and accordingly that everything about their team is better than the biased national media will give them credit for. (Except White Sox and Twins fans, who think everything about their team is even worse than the biased national media realizes.) Even if that weren’t true, I would ordinarily never admit to treating randos on X, the Everything App, like an assignment editor. That way lies madness. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve released a new tool in the FanGraphs Lab. The Paired Pitches tool is a visualizer that shows how the different pitches that a pitcher throws interact with each other. It measures how much gravity, speed, and movement make each pitch diverge from a common center point. It’s probably easiest to start with a picture. This is Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s pitch mix as shown in the Paired Pitches tool:

To use the tool, you pick a pitcher, pick a pitch, and then click anywhere on or around the strike zone to locate that pitch. The tool then locates every other pitch the pitcher throws in relation to that pitch. You can drag any pitch in the resulting graphic to move the locations around, and they’ll remain paired with each other, with the same relative movement distribution:

If you’re wondering why a hitter might swing over a Yamamoto slider in the dirt, it’s because its initial trajectory looks a lot like a middle-middle fastball. If you’re wondering why they might take a cutter on the corner, well, it’s because it looks a lot like a slider in the dirt.

Now for a quick math interlude: The way this tool works is by assuming that each pitch is released from a distinct release point, but aimed so that they would intersect at the same point on the two-dimensional plane of the strike zone if they continued traveling from their release point to home plate with no effects from spin or gravity. Think of it as where a pitch would “go” if you just drew a straight line in the direction the ball is moving immediately upon leaving the pitcher’s hand.

Conveniently enough, that idea of measuring movement in comparison to an imaginary, no-acceleration world and plotting intersect points at home plate is exactly how the math of pitch movement already works. The Paired Pitches tool just does the math for every pitch as though they were “aimed” at a point that puts the anchor pitch wherever you want it.

In practice, that’s sometimes but not always how pitchers use their pitches. Pitchers pair some of their pitches, some of the time, and in different combinations. Take Garrett Crochet. He can pair an in-zone fastball with a diving changeup against righties:

Against lefties, he works off of his sinker, turning the zone into a horizontal nightmare for batters. His sinker lives inside, his sweeper dives away, and he can even use the cutter/sinker pairing to get called strikes on the inner half. The same pitches, paired in different locations, have different effects, which is why you can drag them around in the tool and change anchors:

Now that I’ve shown you how much fun it is to pair pitches and think along with pitchers and catchers, it’s time for a few caveats. This shorthand way of explaining how pitches diverge on their path home isn’t going to explain everything about pitching overnight. Curveballs, in particular, don’t fit into this paradigm well. Pitchers don’t “aim” them, in terms of initial trajectory, at the same spot as their fastballs. Curveballs are so slow that they’d just fall too far on the way home. Instead, pitchers aim at a higher point, which helps explain the distinctive “hump” out of the hand that sometimes helps batters pick them up.

We don’t claim that this tool captures everything about pitch interaction. Pitchers can and do select pitches for how they look compared to one another, but they also employ plenty of other tactics. They might want to throw a pitch on a completely different trajectory than the previous one to change the batter’s eye level. They might want to throw a slider that doesn’t tunnel with anything to take advantage of a batter who doesn’t swing at spin early. But frequently, they want to pair a fastball in with a sweeper away and get batters to swing at both of them:

Below, I’ve compiled a list of tips, tricks, and frequently asked questions from some early testing of this tool:

• Bubble sizes are proportional to the movement variation of each pitch. Pitches with variable movement profiles like splitters and changeups have larger bubbles because their movement is less certain from one pitch to the next. Fastballs tend to have smaller variations in their movement. You can change the bubbles to be baseball-sized in the settings.
• If a pitch isn’t showing up, it’s probably because that pitcher hasn’t thrown enough of them in the filter/time frame you’re looking at. You can lower the minimums in the dropdown.
• This tool, and all Lab tools, now have copy and download options. If you want to share a picture of it, we want you to be able to.
• I think the separation lines look pretty sharp, but they can be toggled off in settings.
• If you’re using this to think like a pitcher, remember that fastballs pair best with different pitches depending on where they’re located.
• Since we’re calculating a lot of pitch metrics and also location, we dynamically calculate vertical approach angle in the Pitch Metrics tab. It’s a great interactive lesson in how much plate location influences approach angle.
• Go look at Nolan McLean’s arsenal. It’s so fun – and this tool explains why he has a hell of a time commanding his curveball.

Sean and I expect to make feature updates to the Paired Pitches tool in the coming weeks and months. This version was good enough to release, but we’re still making improvements of our own. We also want to hear what improvements you’d make, so please give us feedback via the menu that pops up on every Lab page.

Batters swing slower in the cold, but I’m not sure that it matters.

Bat speed goes down when it’s cold, and it goes up when it’s hot. This is something that’s both literally true and curiously linear. We can see in the plot below that bat speed climbs bit by bit as temperature rises from chilly to toasty:

My first thought is this makes sense. It’s reasonable to assume batters don’t swing as fast when their muscles are stiff and their hands are numb. I’ve been cold before, and yeah, it’s difficult to perform tasks requiring fine motor skills.

My second thought is I’m skeptical. Notice the scale of the plot. All that movement amounts to about 0.6 mph from the coldest games to the warmest games. Lots of things other than temperature could be driving this relationship. Bat speed goes down with velocity. Velocity goes up with relievers. Relievers enter games late. Temperature goes down at night. You can see how this could get tricky.

Let’s build a model. Read the rest of this entry »

Mostly, we treat the Los Angeles Angels like the friend whose life is a wreck but there’s nothing you can do about it because they’ll never ask for help and won’t take advice. So you just check in on the AL West standings every so often and feel a combination of pity and helplessness.

Well, you can take your pity and shove it, because as I write this the Angels are in first place in the division. Tied for first place, at one game over .500, but it still counts. Much as Jo Adell’s three-robbery night on Saturday won fawning headlines, and much as Zach Neto’s four home runs are leading the offense, there is one man driving this train: José Soriano. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Carter Jensen’s several (inadequate) alarms and why big leaguers don’t oversleep more often, Artemis II, Daniel Susac as the sequel to Andrew Susac, the timing of Konnor Griffin’s call-up, the many ways to marvel at (and value) Jo Adell’s home-run-robbery spree, Patrick Corbin the Blue Jay, a quintessentially 2026 half-inning, and follow-up emails, plus (1:40:47) a postscript featuring an Afterball by Ben about national announcer stats.

Audio intro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Sean .P, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to “It’s Been Awhile”
Link to Jensen oversleeping story
Link to Pasquantino quote
Link to Jensen TikTok clip
Link to Russell on young baseball brains
Link to overview effect wiki
Link to Yankees/Marlins Artemis story
Link to Artemis wholesomeness
Link to Apollo and baseball story
Link to Susac’s nephew
Link to Baumann on Griffin
Link to MLBTR on Griffin
Link to Olney’s deleted tweet
Link to info on extensions and PPI
Link to Adell catch 1
Link to Adell catch 2
Link to Adell catch 3
Link to 2026 OF FRV laggardboard
Link to Adell’s DRS
Link to SIS on HR robberies
Link to Ben on HR robberies
Link to Ben on Trout’s 2011
Link to Ben on pre-WAR valuations
Link to Adell’s 2020 FARTBAT
Link to FARTBAT naming
Link to Angels-M’s box score
Link to FG post on Adell
Link to win probability tweet
Link to Tango on wall balls
Link to Tango on catch probability
Link to Adell photo
Link to article about Adell catch
Link to Trout’s Twitter reply
Link to Hunter on Adell
Link to “wallowing” wiki
Link to MLBTR on Corbin
Link to Jays SP projections
Link to Jays RR depth chart
Link to BP on Corbin
Link to BP on ATL-AZ inning
Link to Albies challenge
Link to 2016 Young quotes
Link to Grifol on the eclipse
Link to Theo “trade”
Link to Stokes-Lyon match
Link to Snicko wiki
Link to EW Episode 1875
Link to Calcaterra on Dirks
Link to Dirks Pull%
Link to Dirks HR spray chart
Link to HUAL episode
Link to USR broadcast database

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Until this weekend, baseball’s injured list was noticeably bare to start the 2026 season. Then, beginning with Blue Jays catcher Alejandro Kirk on Friday, the stars went down in rapid succession. The Cubs lost two of their top starting pitchers, Cade Horton and Matthew Boyd, in consecutive days. Joining them on the IL are two of the top players in the National League, Mets left fielder Juan Soto and Dodgers shortstop Mookie Betts, and one of the best pitchers in the American League, Astros ace Hunter Brown. Each of those three teams has a share of first place at the moment, making these especially high-leverage injuries. Read the rest of this entry »