Going 0-for-3 with two strikeouts is not typically a line in a boxscore that is hailed as a grand success for the batter or the team. In this case, however, it represented Aaron Judge’s return to the Yankees’ lineup, the first time he appeared in a game in more than three months. With the Tampa Bay Rays proving to be stubbornly intransigent about complying with the whole regression toward the mean thing, getting Judge back is incredibly important for the Yankees as they try to challenge for the AL East crown.

Up until the team announced on Monday that it was activating Judge, it was difficult to pinpoint an exact timeline for when he might return from the rib injury that plopped him onto the IL in early June. After an initial hope that he’d only miss a few days, that expected recovery window was extended to maybe August, and then to an emoji shrug followed up by a crossed-fingers emoji. While the Yankees have been used to this over the years with Giancarlo Stanton, whose return from his litany of injuries is always imminent, like Krusty the Clown’s supposed arrival at Kamp Krusty to save the children, it was different to go through it with Judge. And yes, I’m an aging Xennial so of course there’s a Simpsons reference.

With Judge out, the Yankees have combined for a wRC+ of 90, second worst in baseball, ahead of only the Los Angeles Angels. New York’s ranking of 26th in runs scored does not paint a sunnier overall picture. It’s only thanks to superb pitching that the Yankees have stayed afloat. The Judge-less Yankees were the disaster scenario I specifically outlined in the preseason projections, so their putrid performance at the plate without him was not a surprise. But because they continued to win in his absence, it would take an extremely unlikely collapse of epic proportions to push them out of a playoff spot.

However, just making the playoffs was never the goal. As always, New York’s ambition is to win the World Series, and securing a first-round bye would put the club in a much better position to do that. That means the Yankees need to run down the Rays, because even if they finish with the second-best record in the AL, if they don’t win the AL East, the best they’ll get is home-field advantage in the Wild Card round. Bringing him back now, without sending him on a rehab assignment or giving him more live-BP reps before activating him, is an indication of how important the Yankees consider their captain to be. They believe that having even a rusty version of Judge in their lineup gives them their best shot to win the division.

As noted at the top, Judge’s performance itself did not look like a triumphal return to the lineup. The Yankees beat the Rockies, as you’re supposed to do most of the time, but Judge got rung up on strikeouts on fastballs from Gabriel Hughes and Mark Manfredi, one of them swinging, and his only ball in play was a fairly routine fly out to Cole Carrigg. Judge was also not particularly happy about being pulled for Heliot Ramos after the sixth inning. (Ramos hit a three-run homer later that proved to be decisive.)

Meh game aside, let’s crunch some numbers on the divisional race, both with and without Judge.

Having a nearly one-in-five projected chance at winning the division is actually quite a positive prognosis for the Yankees. After all, remember, the four-game lead the Rays have over the Yankees is, for all intents and purposes, a five-game lead. Since Major League Baseball is frequently a thief of joy, we no longer have tiebreaking Game 163s. The Yankees need to sweep the Rays in their four-game series at home during the final week of the season to get the tiebreaker.

But the Yankees have other advantages. ZiPS at least believes that the Yankees are the strongest team in the AL with Judge back in the lineup, and the computer has always been lukewarm on the Rays. There are also scheduling advantages, in that ZiPS has the Yanks with a significantly easier remaining schedule than Tampa, with games against the Rockies, Mets, Twins, and Orioles still to come.

Just having Judge in the lineup is, of course, the biggest impact of his return, but there are downstream effects as well. Spencer Jones has hit as well as ZiPS — the most positive projection system on him in March — expected, and he ought to remain a part of the lineup even with Judge back. A Judge-Jones-Cody Bellinger starting lineup with Ben Rice ar DH leaves Ramos and Jasson Domínguez as quite solid role players the team can mix-and-match depending on the game.

Now, let’s cruelly re-injure Judge. Theoretically, of course, for science; do not, I repeat, do not follow Judge around after games driving a cartoon steamroller.

You’ll notice it doesn’t move the projected standings by a full win — the Yankees are at least better equipped to handle a Judge absence now, for the remainder of the regular season, than they were a few months ago — but there are significant changes in the standings. Because of those upside scenarios, losing Judge knocks a good 40% off their shot at their last chance comeback against the Rays and slices a similar chunk off their World Series championship odds.

Monday night’s game featured an unremarkable game from a remarkable player, in a win the Yankees were supposed to snatch up anyway. But since it was Judge’s return, it may have been one of the most productive hitless games you’ll ever see. New York doesn’t need to see its franchise icon immediately resume vaporizing baseballs to make the postseason, but it certainly would be convenient. The Rays have spent a whole year rejecting ZiPS’ suggestions that they stop being quite so good, and the calendar is rapidly running out of opportunities for the Yankees to punish Tampa Bay’s obstinacy. With Aaron Judge back in the lineup and four games left to play against the Rays, the Yankees have just enough mathematical daylight to cause trouble.

The WPBL’s first ever regular season is complete, making this the final weekly recap before the playoffs. Next week’s edition will cover the semifinal round of the postseason. As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to run through each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors section typically discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week, because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress, but my gripes are fairly minimal this week, so in a season already awash in firsts, we’ll add one more to the pile and make this the first recap without an Unforced Errors list.

And on the topic of firsts, rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into a new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN. Read the rest of this entry »

With the passing of Labor Day, the 2026 regular season has less than three weeks remaining. While neither league’s playoff races are as turbulent as the AL Wild Card race appeared to be just a couple of weeks ago — to say nothing of the Before Times, when Major League Baseball used actual tiebreaker games instead of math to settle ties, and rooting for end-of-season chaos was a whole lot more fun — it’s time for a check-in to outline what’s at stake.

Right now, in four of the six division races — all but the NL Central and NL West, where the Brewers and Dodgers both have comfortable margins — the first-place team leads by four games or less. That said, the hill that the Phillies (81-64) have to climb to catch the Braves (85-60) is steeper than it appears, because Atlanta clinched the season series with a 5-4 win this past Sunday and owns a 7-3 advantage, with the two teams set to play their final three games starting on Friday at Truist Park. Thus, if the two teams finish the regular season tied, the Braves would be the division winner and the Phillies a Wild Card team. Philadelphia has to overtake Atlanta to claim the NL East flag, something our Playoff Odds suggest has just an 8.2% chance of happening. Read the rest of this entry »

Once a year, the baseball statistics world converges on Chicago for a weekend of presentations, discussions, networking, and a frankly shocking number of job interviews. I’m talking about Saberseminar, if you’re not familiar. The conference has long been a source of baseball learning, where a mixture of leading analysts and up-and-coming students present their latest research. Every time I go, I leave with my head overflowing with new avenues of study, new things I’m curious about, and a bunch of cool knowledge that I won’t expand on but am nevertheless happy to have learned. I went two weeks ago, and I have a notebook full of ideas to investigate now. I can’t tell you everything that I learned – if you want that, you’ll just have to go to Saberseminar yourself. But there were five talks in particular that I loved. They weren’t the only good presentations by any means. But I have a column for highlighting five things, and it felt only appropriate to highlight five of my favorites from the weekend.

1. Injury Research by Scott Powers et al
The first presentation of the weekend is usually a good one, and this year didn’t disappoint. Scott Powers is a professor at Rice University who has a long history of good presentations at analytical conferences. His past research runs the gamut from batted-ball modeling to volleyball serve optimization. This year, his presentation focused on injury prevention. Powers, Rose Graves, Marina Vannucci, James Buffi, Daniel Barrueco, John D’Angelo, and Amanda K. Glazer set out to come up with some realistic injury guidance based on pitch characteristics and biomechanical data from the major leagues. As the name of the talk implies, they took a central idea into their work: Don’t pitch an injury prevention plan that boils down to “stop throwing so dang hard.”

The first part of their work focused on what they could glean from Statcast data. They identified a number of characteristics that are correlated with increased likelihood of elbow injury. Most of those won’t surprise you: fastball velocity, fastball break, and slider usage were the top culprits. Interestingly, they also included some measures of effort – the ratio between average and 90th-percentile fastball velo, for example – and found no linkage there. That’s a great proof of concept for the idea, but unfortunately it doesn’t really present a workable plan for pitching coaches. “Hey, just, uh, make your fastball slower and give it less movement.” As the title of the pitch implies, that’s no good, so they went deeper by using biomechanical data to look for more granular data. Read the rest of this entry »

As special and precious as Shohei Ohtani is, it makes sense that he’s delicate. Both the Dodgers and the Angels before them have handled Ohtani with padded tongs: six-man rotations, pitch counts, a full-time DH role. Ohtani has played just 8 1/3 career innings in the outfield, even though he clearly has the legs and arms to play center.

It hasn’t mattered. For spurts lasting a season or two at most, Ohtani has held up, but he’s needed two UCL surgeries in an American pro career of nine seasons and only 644 1/3 innings on the mound, including the playoffs and the World Baseball Classic. Nolan Ryan has an innings-to-ligaments ratio more than 25 times Ohtani’s. It’s not great. Read the rest of this entry »

With Meg Rowley on vacation, Ben Lindbergh brings a few dearly departed baseball podcasts (briefly) back to life. First up: The Roundtable, featuring EW cofounder (and Pebble Hunting author) Sam Miller and The Athletic’s Grant Brisbee and Andy McCullough. Ben, Sam, Grant, and Andy discuss the worst and best ballpark promotions, Doug Eddings’s cap decree and bid to become MLB’s new infamous umpire, what 2026 taught us about ump importance, whether umps uphold unwritten rules, future revelations about the Astros’ banging scheme, a trivia question in a new movie about the number of ways to reach base, Ketel Marte and the mountains teams try to climb, Sam’s recent writing about the boundaries of baseball performance, Andy’s ace updates, and Shohei Ohtani’s pitching outlook.

Audio intro: Daniel Leckie, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to The Roundtable archive
Link to Roundtable cancellation post
Link to Pebble Hunting
Link to Grant’s author archive
Link to Andy’s author archive
Link to Jelly Roll wiki
Link to Ben on baseball pizza discounts
Link to Taco Bell promotion wiki
Link to Jessica Simpson quote
Link to Zoolander clip
Link to Eddings wiki
Link to Eddings article 1
Link to Eddings article 2
Link to Eddings article 3
Link to Eddings article 4
Link to umpire retirements
Link to Ben on ABS
Link to Gattis on Kershaw
Link to banging-scheme site
Link to banging-scheme research 1
Link to banging-scheme research 2
Link to banging-scheme research 3
Link to banging-scheme research 4
Link to Noggin Boss
Link to MLB Isoblox cap
Link to “dadhat” definition
Link to The Sun Never Sets wiki
Link to Joe Swanberg wiki
Link to mumblecore wiki
Link to Fennessey on mumblecore
Link to automatic double wiki
Link to Snapple on reaching base
Link to SABR on reaching base
Link to Enders on reaching base
Link to Marte article 1
Link to Marte article 2
Link to Marte article 3
Link to Marte article 4
Link to double summit wiki
Link to Sam on bad challenges
Link to Sam on pitcher mistakes
Link to Sam on strike rates
Link to Tango on miss distance
Link to Sam on Kershaw mistakes
Link to Andy on aces
Link to Ohtani pitching update
Link to Sam on two-way Ohtani
Link to Beyond the Scrum
Link to Sportswriters Blues
Link to “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover”

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Labor Day has come and gone, and with just three weeks left in the regular season, the playoff pictures have become a little more clear. There are still a couple of division races up for grabs and a handful of teams in both leagues vying for the final Wild Card spots.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, 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.

All power rankings stats, including team records, are updated through Sunday’s games. The rest of the information below is current as of Tuesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Every September, there are three different versions of baseball being played in the majors. For a number of teams, the year is all but over, and the last month is about hitting some personal milestones, playing spoiler, and working on next year. For another group – seemingly half of the American League this year – September is about fighting for a spot in the playoffs. And then there’s a final group, teams that are already headed to the postseason. For them, the last month of the season is about jockeying for seeding and hoping like crazy that none of their pitchers gets hurt.

With 100.0% odds to make the playoffs, the Rays fall into that final group this year. Sure, the AL East race isn’t over, but we give them an 80% chance of winning the division, and that title would come with a first-round bye. That “jockeying for seeding” part is going very well so far, in other words. But hoping for pitcher health? That ship has unfortunately already sailed. On September 4, the team placed co-ace Shane McClanahan on the 15-day IL with forearm tightness. A day later, middle reliever Garrett Cleavinger hit the same IL with the same injury.

The Rays have felt approximately one starter short for the majority of the 2026 season. Though they’ve put up excellent numbers as a group, the composition of that group has varied massively. Nick Martinez has provided enviable bulk. Drew Rasmussen is in the middle of the best season of his already very good career; he’s set a career high in innings pitched, and he’s on course to flirt with a top-three Cy Young finish. McClanahan, on the other hand, had been atop the starting hierarchy in Tampa Bay for years, health permitting — a caveat that is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

After missing the entirety of the 2024 and 2025 seasons, McClanahan returned with no ill effects and was one of the best pitchers in the AL during the first half of this season. He hit the IL on July 31 with lower back tightness, but truthfully, the team probably wasn’t terribly broken up about it. His workload was already in question given the aforementioned two years of injury recovery, and a back injury notably isn’t an arm ailment. McClanahan returned only days after the minimum stint and made four starts on a normal schedule. Read the rest of this entry »

The long weekend was a particularly rough one for center fielders in the AL East. On Saturday, the Yankees’ Trent Grisham landed on the injured list with a Grade 2 strain of his right hamstring, and then on Sunday, both Luis Robert Jr. of the Orioles and Ceddanne Rafaela of the Red Sox joined him on the sidelines, the former due to a low-grade left hamstring strain and the latter because of a right quad strain. Their absences could have some impact as the teams jockey for position in the AL Wild Card race, where Baltimore’s chances have taken a major hit due to a recent six-game losing streak.

The most serious injury is that of the 29-year-old Grisham, who left Friday’s game against the Padres at Petco Park in the middle of the third inning. Reportedly, he initially felt tightness in his hamstring while being thrown out trying to steal second base in the top of the second, after drawing a leadoff walk against Padres starter Walker Buehler. In the bottom of the frame, he got a very late jump on a bloop by Xander Bogaerts that landed for a two-out RBI single, the game’s first run. After the inning, the YES Network broadcast showed Grisham in the dugout talking to Michael Schuk, the team’s director of sports medicine and rehabilitation, who then followed him into the clubhouse.

Right fielder Spencer Jones shifted over to center to replace Grisham, with Heliot Ramos entering the game in right. Both wound up figuring in the Yankees’ 3-2 defeat, when Jones led off the top of the 10th inning with an RBI single but was thrown out trying to steal third base as Ramos swung through an 88-mph slider from Mason Miller for strike three. The Yankees ended up losing when Luis Campusano hit a walk-off two-run homer off Paul Blackburn in the bottom of the 10th. Read the rest of this entry »