Ben Lindbergh and R.J. Anderson of CBS Sports debate whether Jackson Holliday, Jackson Chourio, or Jackson Merrill will be the best player long term, discuss the addition of ads to batting helmets and continued MLB ad creep, and ponder the possibility of publicly owned ballclubs. Then (55:52) Ben talks to Mojo Hill about covering Derek Bender, the Twins minor league catcher who was released for telling opposing hitters which pitches were coming. Finally (1:27:09), Ben brings on Frequent Stat Blast Correspondent Ryan Nelson for Blasts about runs scoring on three consecutive wild pitches, players who faced the same opponent with the most teams in a single season, the most and least consistent start lengths, team games with the same number of hits, walks, and runs, and bad bullpen support.

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Even in an age in which baseball – and most sports to an extent – has become an extremely data-driven enterprise, the stew of conventional wisdom, mythology, and storylines could still feed a pretty large family. That’s not to say that this is a bad thing; even an old, jaded stat nerd like me gets excited to enjoy such a stew from time to time. But at the end of the day, an analyst has to focus on what’s true and what is not, and very few bits of baseball orthodoxy are more persistent than that of the sophomore slump. Coined for underperforming second-year high school or college athletes, the meaning in baseball is roughly parallel it: After a successful rookie season, a player finds it difficult to maintain the performance from their debut and are weighed down by the greatly increased expectations. As an analyst, the inevitable follow-up question is whether the sophomore slump is actually real.

While I entered this article with some rather developed skepticism, there’s no denying that high-performing rookies do occasionally have pretty wretched follow-up campaigns. Every longtime baseball fan can probably rattle off a dozen or so names instantly after reading the title of the article. For me, visions of Joe Charboneau, Pat Listach, Mark Fidrych, Jerome Walton, and Chris Coghlan dance in my head. And the list goes on and on. However, a second-year skid doesn’t mean there’s a special effect that causes it. The fact of the matter is that you should expect a lot of regression toward the mean for any player in baseball who can be optioned freely to the minors. The way baseball’s minor league system works accentuates the selection bias; underperforming rookies are typically demoted while the ones crushing reasonable expectations get to stay.

Looking at the sophomore slumpers, the story is typically more complicated than the cautionary tale. ZiPS has minor league translations going back to 1950 at this point, and while Super Joe (Charboneau) hit very well in the season before his debut (.352/.422/.597 for Double-A Chattanooga), at 24, he wasn’t young for the level, and ZiPS takes enough air out of that line to drop his translated OPS below .800. ZiPS thought he’d be an OK lefty-masher, but not much more than that.

Charboneau had a solid offensive rookie season, winning the AL Rookie of the Year award, but in his case, the fates didn’t really give him a fair opportunity to repeat that season. He injured his back in spring training and played through the injury, as was the style of the time. Across a couple of stints in the majors after his rookie breakout, he combined to bat .210/.247/.362 over 147 at-bats, and he was never healthy or trusted enough to make good. He didn’t hit again in the minors, either, with the only exception a walk-heavy .791 OPS as a 29-year-old in A-Ball (!).

As quick as Charboneau’s fall from grace was, it was far from the biggest rookie WAR drop-off. Using the definition of rookie in our leaderboards, which doesn’t know about roster service time days but is suitable for the approach of identifying rookies rather than specific Rookie of the Year eligibility, here are the biggest sophomore slides by WAR since 1901.

Some of these players recovered to have solid major league careers and some of these slumps resulted from serious injury, such as Kerry Wood’s, but for some of the players, that was the end of the road for them in the big leagues. As for Super Joe, his skid was the 100th worst in history among hitters!

So, how do we extract a sophomore-slump effect from simple sophomore slumps? At this point, I’ve been running projections for two decades, so I have a decent-sized database of projections calculated contemporaneously (as opposed to backfilling before ZiPS existed). I certainly haven’t told ZiPS to give a special penalty to solid rookies having bad follow-up campaigns, so I went back and looked at the projections vs. realities for every hitter with a two-WAR rookie season and every pitcher who eclipsed 1.5 WAR. (Rookie pitchers tend to have more trouble grabbing playing time.) That gave me 166 hitters and 207 pitchers. Let’s start with the hitters.

The 26 players in the top bucket averaged 5.1 WAR in their rookie seasons and 3.7 WAR in their sophomore seasons. That’s a pretty significant drop-off, but they were projected for an even steeper decline. The next group — 44 players who accumulated 3-4 WAR as rookies — underperformed its projection by about two runs per player, while the 96 rookies who finished with 2-3 WAR slightly overperformed their projections, but it was very close. As for the entire sample of 166 hitters, ZiPS projected a decline from an average 3.1 WAR as rookies to 2.3 in their sophomore seasons. Their actual average in their second year was… 2.3 WAR. Let’s look at the pitchers.

This is the same story, with the decline for pitchers being about as predictable as it was for hitters: ZiPS underestimated their second-year WAR by about 0.08 wins on average.

That’s not the end of it, however. I wanted to see if ZiPS has projected a similar decline for players who were coming off their second through fifth seasons, because that would determine whether ZiPS was capturing a sophomore-slump effect or if this was just a more general regression to the mean for players with less major league experience.

In sum, ZiPS didn’t knock more performance off high-performing rookies than it did for sophomores, juniors, seniors, and guys who stayed a fifth year because they had to drop too many 8 a.m. classes that they slept through. That’s because the sophomore-slump effect doesn’t exist.

So yes, projections will likely project fewer WAR next season from this year’s standout rookies, such as Jackson Merrill, Jackson Chourio, and Masyn Winn. But that dip is likely to be the result of the typical regression toward the mean that any high performer with a limited track record is expected to experience.

If I’ve learned anything from the new Statcast bat tracking data, it’s that bat speed alone isn’t sufficient to produce a high-quality major league hitter. Johnathan Rodriguez, Trey Cabbage, Zach Dezenzo, Jerar Encarnacion — all of these guys, at this early stage of their major league careers, swing hard but miss harder. Bat speed only matters when you make contact.

When you do hit the ball, however, it’s nice when your swing is as fast as possible. Swinging fast while making good contact most of the time — it’s hard to do, but if you can do it, you’re probably one of the best hitters in baseball.

The reason it’s rare is because these two variables — swinging hard and making solid contact — are negatively correlated. As some probably remember from when these stats originally dropped, Luis Arraez swings the slowest and squares up everything, while Giancarlo Stanton swings the fastest but seldom connects. A slow swing is a more precise swing, and so the group of hitters who can swing precisely while letting it rip are uncommon.

In order to determine who these rare hitters are, it is necessary to select some arbitrary cutoffs. I’ve picked hitters who have roughly 80th percentile bat speeds and 50th percentile squared-up per swing rates. (A “squared-up” swing is one where a hitter maximizes their exit velocity.) Here is the whole list of hitters who average over 74 mph of bat speed and have at least a league-average squared-up rate: Yordan Alvarez, Gunnar Henderson, Manny Machado, William Contreras, Juan Soto, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., and… Lawrence Butler??? Read the rest of this entry »

A ballplayer who grabs a bat and steps up to the plate aims to hit. The point of the sport is to go around the bases, and the most efficient way to do that is to put wood on the ball and hope for the best. But it’s far from the only way to go around the bases.

Sometimes you hit the ball, and sometimes the ball hits you. I’ve long been fascinated by players who use their own bodies as a means of advancement, dating back to when I, as a child, read a George Vecsey feature on the single-season hit-by-pitch leader in an old anthology of baseball writing. “Ron Hunt, Loner,” painted a broadly ambivalent portrait of a second baseman with modest physical gifts. But Hunt made two All-Star teams and retired with the same career OBP as Shohei Ohtani, despite playing in the most pitcher-friendly era of the past 100 years.

Those who are able to systematize the hit-by pitch can transform their careers. Read the rest of this entry »

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Unfortunately, we’re still very much reliant on programmatic advertising dollars, which you may remember being the focus of a post of mine earlier this year. Whether because of the 2020 pandemic, the 2022 lockout, 2023 search engine changes, or 2024 changes in ad tech, advertising revenue is unpredictable and unreliable. It makes business planning and hiring challenging, and leaves us vulnerable to revenue fluctuations that have nothing to do with the quality of our content or site tools. It isn’t transparent, its presence on the site creates a poor user experience that’s difficult for us to quality control, and it exploits your data to take revenue out of the hands of small publishers and put it in the coffers of the largest, most profitable companies in the world.

FanGraphs turns 20 years old next year. It has taken decades of work from dozens of people who have given their days, nights, weekends, and vacation time to build this site. For an independent single-sport site, the range and depth of content available at FanGraphs is truly special. We hope that these changes will help us further secure the site’s future long-term. Thank you to all of our Members for helping us get this far. Every time we have faced a decline in advertising revenue over the last five years, it has been our Members who have sustained FanGraphs and helped it grow. And if you aren’t yet a Member, there’s no need to wait until you hit your 10 article limit — you can become one now and help us continue to improve the site, just as we have these past 19 years.

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Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. September is a magical time for baseball. Half of the games are mostly for fun, with teams playing out the string and competing for bragging rights. Those games produce some delightful nonsense, because teams are often more willing to engage in tomfoolery when the stakes are low. The other half of the games (using half very broadly here, of course) are far more important than any games from earlier in the season; they determine playoff berths, home field advantage, and statistical milestones. Those games have all the intensity missing from the other half, right down to electric crowds and locked-in benches. That duality is a ton of fun. This year, we’ve even got a truly historic statistical chase going on to add to the excitement. Zach Lowe’s NBA column, which inspired this series, always hits its stride when teams are building up for the playoffs. I think that baseball trends in the same direction. Let’s get right to it.

1. When the Ball Doesn’t Lie

This is just outrageous:

The umpire is part of the field of play. That’s just how the rule works. Umpires do their best to get out of the way of batted balls, both for self-preservation and for the integrity of the game. John Bacon wasn’t trying to insert himself into the play; he was in foul territory and focused on getting the fair/foul call right, and there was simply no way to avoid this rip. Bryson Stott couldn’t believe it:

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

Tight playoff races, milestone and award chases, and looking ahead to the offseason — these are the things I love about September baseball. One of the first decisions to be made after the World Series is determining who will receive qualifying offers, which currently projects to be valued at $21.2 million.

As a quick reminder before we continue, the qualifying offer is set at a price of the mean average annual value of the 125 highest-AAV players in the league. Once it’s offered to a player, he has 10 days to decide whether to accept or decline the offer. If the player accepts, he’s locked into 2025 at that salary, though he can always negotiate a contract extension that may override the qualifying offer. If the player declines and signs with a new team, his new team will forfeit at least one 2025 draft pick, and his old team will receive exactly one ’25 draft pick.

With less than three weeks left in the regular season, let’s run through which pending free agents could be getting qualifying offers come November.

Locks to Receive Qualifying Offers

These decisions are all straightforward. Juan Soto, Corbin Burnes, Alex Bregman, Max Fried, Willy Adames, Pete Alonso, Anthony Santander, Jurickson Profar, Teoscar Hernández, and Sean Manaea (once he exercises his opt out) are all having seasons somewhere between strong and elite. They’re all sure to reject the offer in favor of longer-term deals.

Likely to Receive, Plausible to Accept

Paul Goldschmidt is a tough act to follow, but Christian Walker has done well since taking over for him after the Diamondbacks traded Goldschmidt to the Cardinals in December 2018. Walker has been especially great the last three years, with 10.9 WAR, a 122 wRC+, and excellent defense at first base. He’s not spectacular, but he’s very good, and if the Diamondbacks are fine with running a record payroll again, they’d be wise to keep him around.

Walker’s got one big drawback, though: his age. Next year will be his age-34 season, and while he’d certainly like to earn a multi-year deal in free agency, the qualifying offer might tamp down his market to the point that accepting it would net him more money in 2025. He also might not want to risk rejecting it, hanging out on the open market for months, and then having to sign a prove-it deal. He’s a core member of a team that went to the World Series last year, is almost certainly going to return to the playoffs again this season, and is built to contend next year, too. Additionally, he seems comfortable in the desert. For all of these reasons, he is probably the player most likely to return to his team on a qualifying offer.

Likely to Receive, Likely to Reject

Tyler O’Neill has popped 30 home runs in his best and healthiest season since 2021, with his wRC+ just one point away from tying that career year. On the surface, that makes him seem like a slam dunk to receive the qualifying offer, and a slam dunk to reject it. He’s entering his age-30 season, and coming off his strong performance this year, he could look to get a three- or four-year deal on the open market. The one thing that gives me pause, though, is O’Neill’s injury history and how that might influence teams’ willingness to offer him a multi-year deal worth an average annual value of roughly $20 million. Understanding this, if the Red Sox give O’Neill the qualifying offer, he could decide it’s in his best interest to accept it. Meanwhile, Boston might not want to pay him $22.1 million next year, instead opting to use that money to bolster other areas of its roster. I still think the Red Sox will extend him a qualifying offer, and that he will turn it down, but it’s not a sure thing.

There’s an argument to be made that Michael Wacha is having the best season of his career; it’s definitely his healthiest since 2017. Provided he avoids injury the rest of the way, he’ll eschew his $16 million player option in favor of hitting the open market once again, leaving the Royals with a tough decision. On the one hand, this version of Wacha is worth $22.1 million; on the other, the injury concerns don’t just go away just because he’s been mostly healthy this year. As unlikely as Wacha would be to accept, the Royals might also prefer to eliminate any chance that he’d do so and instead allocate that money to lengthen their lineup. Having a rotation anchored by Cole Ragans and Seth Lugo would make losing Wacha an easier pill to swallow.

Total Toss-Ups

If Ha-Seong Kim had reached free agency before this season instead of after it, he probably would have earned a deal of at least $100 million following his 4.3 WAR, 110 wRC+ campaign in 2023. But right shoulder inflammation could keep him on the sidelines for the rest of the season, and his run values as a hitter, fielder, and baserunner have all gone down considerably in 2024. That said, even in this down year, he’s put up 2.6 WAR and is still only 28; that is probably worth $22.1 million. However, considering the Padres have a glut of infielders already, they may not want to give Kim the option to accept a qualifying offer.

Luis Severino is having his healthiest season since 2018, when he put up 5.4 WAR across 191 1/3 innings, made the All-Star team, and received Cy Young votes as the ace of the Yankees. But he’s a completely different pitcher now than he was then. His velocity is still there, but he no longer has the swing-and-miss stuff to anchor a rotation. Even with the Mets expected to lose two other starters to free agency, I don’t think they’d want to pay him the salary of a no. 2 starter when, at this point, he profiles more like a no. 3 or 4.

There may be no starter in the league more enigmatic than Nick Pivetta. The stuff has always been great, but the command has been … less so. I’m of the opinion that he’d do surprisingly well on the open market, and in my head I’m comparing him to Yusei Kikuchi, who got three years and $36 million from the Blue Jays coming off a similarly uneven (and probably worse) few years. But the Red Sox already have Brayan Bello, Tanner Houck, Kutter Crawford, and Lucas Giolito (assuming he recovers well from internal brace surgery) locked into next year’s rotation, and they may invest the $22.1 million elsewhere.

Unlikely to Receive

For other teams, I’d say that it would be a no-brainer to extend Shane Bieber a qualifying offer, but $22.1 million is a lot of money for the Guardians. If Bieber were to accept it, he could represent 20% or more of their payroll for 2025, and he might not be available until the second half of the season anyway after undergoing Tommy John surgery in April. Considering his track record and how well he pitched in his first couple starts of the season, a multi-year deal at a lower average annual value — with the cash backloaded pretty heavily — should be easy for Bieber to secure.

There aren’t any pending free agent relievers with the pedigree of Josh Hader, who was an obvious qualifying offer recipient and rejector last offseason. Clay Holmes started his season pitching like he’d end up receiving one, but he’s lost his closer job and has probably worn out his welcome in New York, frankly. On the other side of the coin is Jeff Hoffman, who’s been nothing short of excellent for two seasons in Philadelphia. But he’s entering his age-32 season and doesn’t have nearly the track record of other relievers who have received qualifying offers in the past. I’d be shocked if he gets one.

Ineligible to Receive

As a reminder, players who’ve appeared for multiple teams in the same season are ineligible to be tendered a qualifying offer. That eliminates Kikuchi and Jack Flaherty. Also ineligible are players who’ve received one in the past, so that rules out Joc Pederson, Max Scherzer, Nathan Eovaldi (assuming he declines his player option), Cody Bellinger (ditto), and, should he opt out, Gerrit Cole.

Ben Lindbergh and FanGraphs’ Michael Baumann play a game of “College Baseball Player or Vuelta a España Stage Winner?”, discuss Kumar Rocker’s potential and path to the majors, and (17:38) meet major leaguers Tyler Jay and Richard Fitts, before talking (39:33) to *checks notes* Marlins reliever Big Mike Baumann about becoming the second major leaguer ever to play for five teams in one season. After that (1:05:10), Ben chats with Baumann’s teammate Declan Cronin about how he’s held hitters homerless all season, the high-BABIP blues, the latest trends in pitching development, player paperwork, and more. Then (1:39:52) Ben brings on writer Lakshmi Gandhi to discuss Rocker’s significance as the first MLB player of Indian descent, before finishing (1:55:39) with several follow-ups.

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On Tuesday night, while much of the country tuned in to see Kamala Harris debate Donald Trump, I watched an even more lopsided performance from the upper deck at Yankee Stadium, where the Royals’ Seth Lugo utterly dominated the Yankees, holding them to just three hits, walking none and striking out 10 over seven innings in a 5-0 Kansas City win. Through six innings, the only Yankee to reach base was Gleyber Torres, who blooped soft singles into center field on Lugo’s fifth pitch of the game and then, roughly an hour and 20 minutes later, on his 86th pitch; in between, Lugo retired 17 straight hitters. It was the latest in a season full of great outings from the righty, who at 34 years old is having a career year while pushing the Royals toward their first postseason berth since 2015.

Lugo’s seven scoreless frames ran his total to a major league-leading 193 innings while lowering his ERA to 2.94, second in the AL behind only Tarik Skubal. Meanwhile, he’s third in WAR with 4.4, 0.2 behind teammate Cole Ragans, fifth in FIP (3.27), seventh in walk rate (5.8%), and eighth in strikeouts (169) despite punching out hitters at a modest 21.7% rate. He’s also tied with Skubal for the league lead in wins (16), and so by our Cy Young Projection model and its multiple variants, his suite of stats puts him second in the AL to Skubal and a comfortable margin ahead of Ragans, Logan Gilbert, and Framber Valdez. All of this is happening in the first year of a three-year, $45 million contract he signed with the Royals last December, and in just his third season as a starter after largely being typecast as a workhorse reliever during his seven seasons with the Mets (2016–22).

Knocking back a couple of beers from my partial season ticket group’s usual perch in Section 422 affords a different perspective than in the press box or at home. So when Sports Reference’s Katie Sharp noted that the game was the first time the Yankees had ever been held to zero walks and zero extra-base hits while striking out at least 14 times, I decided to take a closer look at Lugo’s night to gain a fuller appreciation of what’s made him so successful lately. Read the rest of this entry »