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Hello and welcome to the final installment of the 2026 pitching superlatives. I’ve been spending the entire week tracking down all the pitches at the first and 100th percentiles. The fastest pitches, the ones that move the most, earn the most whiffs, hit the middle of the zone or the corners the most often, or end up getting pounded into the dirt most often. I’d love it if you read the four previous entires, but today we’re going back to where all this started. As I mentioned on Monday, the idea for this series came about because I had been wondering for long time who throws the pitch that moves the least.

Here’s Baseball Savant’s movement chart for Jacob Misiorowski. I picked him simply because I decided I needed an example, and as the best pitcher in the game this year, his was the first name to come to mind.

Misiorowski’s slider averages just 1.8 inches of rise and 3.4 inches of glove-side break. That’s in part because he throws it so damn hard that it doesn’t have much time to move, but it’s also simply the nature of the pitch. The average Misiorowski slider features a total of just 3.8 inches of induced movement. If you glance at just about any pitcher’s movement chart these days, you’re more likely to see a pitch right near the center. Read the rest of this entry »

Braylon Doughty and Joey Oakie profile as future members of the Cleveland Guardians pitching staff. The former boasts a 50 FV and ranks as the organization’s top prospect, while the latter is graded as a 40+ FV who ranks 16th. Each is 20-year-old right-hander who was drafted out of the prep ranks — Doughty 36th overall in 2024, Oakie in the third round that same summer. Their ceilings are high. As Eric Longenhagen and Brendan Gawlowski teamed up to write last winter, “Doughty was arguably the most polished high school pitcher in the 2024 draft,” and “Oakie signed for first-round money [as] a power pitcher with enviable traits.”

Eric Binder knows them as well as anyone. A member of the Guardians’ front office for more than a decade, the now-assistant general manager plays a prominent role in one of baseball’s most well-regarded pitching programs. He has previously shared thoughts on the promising youngsters here at FanGraphs, doing so for a Sunday Notes column in September of last year.

An update was in order when the AL Central champions visited Fenway Park during the final week of this year’s regular season. Binder was in attendance — ditto other members of the organization’s brain trust, as clinching the division title was imminent — so I took the opportunity to learn where the duo stood in terms of their development paths. To wit, how did their seasons unfold, and what are their primary focuses going forward? Read the rest of this entry »

I have a problem. During the broadcast of Game 1 of the World Series, John Smoltz made an offhand comment that contact hitters do a better job of handling long layoffs between series than power hitters. “The eight to nine days off would… cause havoc on most offenses. But this offense is different, it’s not built on slug,” he said before quickly moving on. His partner in the booth, Joe Davis, didn’t even respond; he just pivoted back to the first inning’s action. Smart move – it’s the World Series, no one wants to debate truisms. But while Nick Martinez faced off against Jake Bauers, I was sitting there turning over that pearl of analyst wisdom in my head.

So do contact hitters handle rust better than power hitters? You could tell an intuitive story in the affirmative. They don’t need to connect perfectly with the ball to get to their good results, so they’re less affected by losing their timing thanks to a long gap between games. But you could tell the opposite story using intuition as well: Contact hitters rely on feel and placement. Tiny margins make the difference between flailing at bad pitches and punching them the other way, so being out of sorts might really hurt.

Some quick Googling didn’t settle things; AI mode told me that contact hitters really do suffer less from rust than power hitters. But when I asked to see the statistical evidence, the AI helpfully told me that it could find none and that it had relied on anecdotal evidence to reach its conclusions. Sounds like a job for Mathemadage, my column that investigates conventional wisdom using numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re anything like us here at FanGraphs HQ, you also spent days agonizing over our annual list of the top 50 free agents on the market this winter. Arguing whether Carson Kelly or Tyler Stephenson should be ranked higher is our unalienable right as sovereign citizens, and it’s also a whole lot of harmless fun. But you may have also noticed, unlike the 2022 ultra-free-agent class that included Corey Seager, Carlos Correa, and Trevor Story, the pickings are quite slim at shortstop this year. Mauricio Dubón and J.P. Crawford — useful, but not building-block players — are the best the position has to offer.

As such, any team with a shortstop-sized hole on its roster would be wiser to peruse the trade market, where two young players with immense talent but without long-term contracts could aptly fill in: Gunnar Henderson of the Orioles and Elly De La Cruz of the Reds.

Let’s begin Henderson. The onetime wunderkind has had an alarming decline in production since putting up 7.9 WAR and a 154 wRC+ as a 23-year-old in 2024. That season — which also came with a .281 batting average, 21 stolen bases, and a fourth-place MVP finish — serves as a reminder of what he is capable of. But a quick check of both his traditional stats and the peripherals shows that he has not been the same hitter since. Part of that, as Henderson revealed after this season, Baltimore’s second straight below .500, has been the result of shoulder and wrist injuries. Diving for a ball in 2025 caused a shoulder impingement that Henderson said negatively influenced his bat plane, and he spent half of 2026 playing with a barking wrist. Davy Andrews covered Henderson’s ailments in depth at the beginning of October, and a fully healed Henderson could certainly bounce back in 2027, but as he tried to grit his way through the last two campaigns, his performance has not been commensurate with that of a superstar player. In the two seasons since his peak, the home run totals have sagged from 37 to 17 and 24, respectively, and his collective slugging percentage is over 100 points lower, going from .529 in 2024 to a lethargic .420 across ’25 and ’26. However you slice the advanced numbers, too, they’re unappetizing. By wRC+, wOBA, xwOBA, xSLG — and perhaps most indicative of physical troubles, average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and barrel rate — Henderson has taken a noticeable step back. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series covering the 2027 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Umpires/Executives ballot, which includes candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. You’ll find an introduction to the ballot here. The eight candidates will be voted on in San Diego on December 6, and anyone receiving at least 75% of the vote from the 16 committee members will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 25, 2027 along with any candidates elected by the BBWAA.

In the rules for Era Committee voting published on the Hall of Fame’s website, the provision regarding eligible candidates reads in part, “Those whose careers entailed involvement in multiple categories will be considered for their overall contribution to the game of Baseball; however, the specific category in which these individuals shall be considered will be determined by the role in which they were most prominent.” In theory, this makes sense, but in practice, the various Era Committees have produced rather inconsistent results when it comes to weighing candidates with contributions in multiple areas.

For example, the elections of Gil Hodges and Jim Kaat as players on the 2022 Golden Days ballot suggest an additive effect of their additional contributions — the former as a manager, the latter as a broadcaster — atop long, good-to-great playing careers that didn’t quite measure up as Hall-worthy in the eyes of BBWAA voters or previous committees (to say nothing of JAWS). Yet managers haven’t been treated similarly in the recent past, with Davey Johnson and Lou Piniella each falling short twice and seeming to get less credit for solid playing careers atop stronger (but hardly unassailable) qualifications as skippers. Those careers didn’t put them ahead of similarly qualified managers with no major league playing experience, such as Jim Leyland, who was elected on a 2024 ballot that contained both Johnson and Piniella. Meanwhile, Felipe Alou, whose career WAR is greater than those of Johnson and Piniella combined but whose managerial record is limited by years spent with the impoverished Expos, has never been on an Era Committee ballot. This quickly gets messy. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to our 2026 pitching superlatives series. We discussed velocity in part one, movement in part two, and location in part three. Today we’re talking about results. That means which pitches created the most whiffs or balls in play, which pitches produced certain kinds of batted balls, and which pitches made batters look the silliest.

We have to start with the best result a pitcher can get, and that’s a swinging strike. The top of the list features tons of pitches you’d expect: breaking balls from Mason Miller, Adrian Morejon, and Chase Burns. Aaron Ashby’s slider and curveball are both in the top six! But the Whiffiest Pitch in baseball belonged to Luis Medina of the Athletics, whose changeup ran a 59.8% whiff rate. Should we watch every single whiff Medina’s changeup earned this year? Yes, I agree. It’s the only responsible thing to do.

If you’re not familiar with Medina’s game, that’s understandable. He spent the 2023 and 2024 seasons as a starter, ran an ERA above 5.00 in each of them, and missed 2025 due to Tommy John surgery. But he transitioned to the bullpen this year, and he threw 73 innings over 60 appearances, running a 3.08 ERA and a 29.3% strikeout rate. He also had lots of problems. He posted a 12.3% walk rate, a 90-mph average exit velocity, didn’t earn any chases, and didn’t do a great job of keeping the ball on the ground. Basically, whiffs were the only thing keeping Medina afloat. But he seems ripe for an overhaul. He’s got a starter’s repertoire, with a four-seamer, sinker, slider, change, and curve. He led with the four-seamer even though it got shelled. If he shelved it in favor of the sinker and some more sliders and that unhittable changeup, he could be a real weapon. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’m quite certain you’re aware if you’re reading this article on FanGraphs.com, the Milwaukee Brewers just won their first World Series championship in franchise history. They didn’t limp their way to the alcohol showers either, winning 103 games during the regular season before an 11-2 playoff run that never felt as if they were in serious jeopardy. When you’ve already snatched up the full scholarship to an elite school, it probably doesn’t matter whether you got an A or a B in your senior year electives. But as Mr. Barr reminded me when he gave me a D in English in my final quarter of high school, something which I managed to conceal from my mom for 20 years, there are still report cards to fill out.

Grading the manager of a team that dominated in the playoffs is always a bit tricky to pull off. After all, whether moves were good ideas or poor ones, they mostly worked out, or the Brewers wouldn’t have dominated so consistently. But we evaluate the process here, not just the results, and hopefully I have just the right combination of objectivity and natural unlikability to grade Brewers manager Pat Murphy fairly. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley welcome two old friends back to the show to discuss their teams’ recent Fall Classic matchup: former Effectively Wild co-host/FanGraphs writer (and current Rays Senior Analyst, Baseball Process & Strategy) Jeff Sullivan, and former FanGraphs writer (and current Brewers Senior Director—Player Information and Personnel) August Fagerstrom, the latter of whom just became the first FanGraphs alum to earn a World Series ring, at the former’s expense. They talk about playoff anxiety, the feeling of winning (and losing) the World Series, scouting each others’ teams and the similarities between the Brewers and Rays, tailoring team tactics to personnel vs. the other way around, how responsible they feel for their clubs’ successes, the differences between internal and external projections, ABS strategy, front-office turnover and continuity, internal team podcasts, and more.

Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Jeff’s FG author archive
Link to August’s FG author archive
Link to Episode 901
Link to EW guests sheet
Link to Vogelbach’s song
Link to Ben on Brewers/Rays similarities
Link to Ball on the Brewers/Rays
Link to MLBTR on Castro
Link to MLB.com on Roffe
Link to Kleine report
Link to Brewers index cards
Link to Dave/Jeff/Williamson story

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For my final Postseason Manager Report Card of the 2026 season, I’m here to evaluate Kevin Cash, Rays manager and World Series loser. While Tampa Bay fell short of its first World Series championship in franchise history and ended the year with something of a whimper, Cash did a commendable job steering his club during its a deep postseason run.

As both Ben Clemens and I have mentioned before each of our previous manager report cards this postseason, I care about process and not results here. It’s easy to say, “That was a great move because it worked,” or “That was a bad move because it failed,” but managers obviously can’t know the results of their decisions as they’re making them. I’ve tried my best to transport myself back to the moment of each decision — taking into account the pitches, innings, and plate appearances that led up to it — while ignoring the outcome.

Lastly, before we get into the grades, I’ll also reiterate that while these are ostensibly manager report cards, there’s a much larger group of people behind the skipper that helps to inform his decisions. Before the game, that includes discussions with the front office, which provides the reams of data that every manager has at his disposal during play. During the game, he’s getting feedback from his coaching staff and players on their levels of health and readiness. It really does take a village to get through a baseball game, and realistically, the praise and scorn doesn’t belong to the manager alone. Read the rest of this entry »