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Last week, Dan Szymborski looked at how much a team’s fortunes can change in the first month of the season. That old truism – you can’t win the World Series in April, but you can lose it – turns out to, in fact, be true. Dan’s research found that even teams we think are good – those projected to win 90 or more games – had meaningfully worse results after a bad April, even if their actual talent remained the same.

In other words, those early losses really do count. But I like to look at things from a glass-half-full perspective, so my takeaway was that there’s still plenty of time to fix a bad start, because it’s still early in the season. But how to fix it? That’s a trickier question. Luckily, “that’s a tricky question” is just FanGraphs for “that’s a fun thing to write an article about,” so I’ve got answers for you. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me tell you a story about a 34-year-old baseball player. Seven games into the new season, there are some worrying signs about his performance. His swing speed is down half a tick, and two full ticks from 2024. His fast-swing rate has declined precipitously. He’s squaring the ball up less frequently than ever, the opposite of what’s supposed to happen when you rein in your swing. He’s never run a lower hard-hit rate. He’s never run a higher infield fly ball rate. Somebody call an ambulance.

… But not for him. The hitter in question is Mike Trout, and he’s off to a scorching start. He’s slashing an absurd .261/.485/.522, good for a 192 wRC+. Whenever process statistics and result statistics diverge this much, this early in the season, I’m tempted to yell “April” in my best Dan Szymborski voice and move on. But when it’s Trout, one of the best players of all time, I’m willing to be more open-minded. Let’s take a quick peek into what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what’s too early to tell.

The most obvious change in Trout’s statistics this year is that he’s walking 30% of the time. Walks have always been a part of Trout’s game, of course. He has a keen eye at the plate, annually notching one of the lowest chase rates in the game, and he makes enough contact that he can grind his way back into at-bats even after falling behind. But 30% is double his career rate. What gives? Read the rest of this entry »

In Bubba Chandler’s first start of the 2026 season, he didn’t allow a single hit. Oh yeah, and he struck out more than 30% of the batters he faced. Spectacular! Just, um, don’t look over at the walk column. Oh, you did? Yeah, fine, he walked more than 30% of the batters he faced, too. Oh, and he allowed a run, and didn’t get out of the fifth inning. To understand what Chandler was up to, and what it might mean for the rest of his year, we’ll have to dig a little deeper.

Chandler leaned heavily on his fastball to start his year, as many pitchers do in their first appearance of the season. He breezed through the first inning with 11 straight fastballs, eclipsing 100 mph on the radar gun four times and essentially daring the Reds to hit it. TJ Friedl waved feebly at 100 above the zone. Matt McLain did the same. Chandler’s fastball is dynamite, particularly when he’s locating it high. It explodes upwards, and some offseason tweaks have it moving less arm side than before, making it even harder to square up.

I could watch a montage of Chandler overpowering Reds hitters all day. In fact, you can too:

You can see how difficult it is to track Chandler’s fastball by watching the check swings. The pitch that Jose Trevino, the last batter in that loop, offered at was more than a foot above the zone. The combination of velo, movement, and Chandler’s loping delivery means that hitters have a lot of trouble figuring out where the ball is going. Read the rest of this entry »

In the new season’s early going, the challenge system has been all the rage across the majors. If you don’t believe me, you can read ESPN’s coverage of it, or The Athletic’s, or MLB.com’s, or … well, you get the idea. The coverage has been extensive and positive, and I couldn’t agree with its enthusiasm more. I love the new system, and I’m also really excited to think about challenges in general. There are so many fun angles to consider. So here’s the math nerd’s take on what challenges have looked like so far, and what I’m most interested to learn about them moving forward.

How I’m Thinking About Challenges
Every time a strike or ball is called, there’s an opportunity for a challenge, at least so long as the relevant team has one remaining. That makes it easy to measure the prospective value of a challenge on any given pitch: It’s worth however much flipping the result of that particular pitch would change the game situation in the challenging player’s favor. All we have to do is figure out how many runs were likely to score in the inning in each case and compare the two. Read the rest of this entry »

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A week ago, the Cubs roster was light on long-term commitments. Only Alex Bregman and Dansby Swanson held guaranteed contracts that extended past 2027, and only two others – Phil Maton and Shelby Miller – even had guaranteed years in 2027. But as it turns out, Chicago payroll commitments abhor a vacuum. On Tuesday, Pete Crow-Armstrong signed a six-year extension. On Thursday, Nico Hoerner followed suit with a six-year pact of his own, as Michael Cerami first reported. The deal starts in 2027 and is worth $141 million, with minor deferrals that drop the total present value to the mid-130s.

If you don’t catch many Cubs games, it’s easy to overlook Hoerner. His offensive game is most notable for its lack of extremes. He doesn’t walk much. He doesn’t strike out much. He doesn’t hit for a ton of power. He’s not excessively swing happy like so many contact hitters. He doesn’t pound the ball into the ground, but he equally doesn’t sell out to lift and pull. He’s produced low-power, solid-OBP seasons for four years running, and they’ve been almost metronomically consistent: his seasonal wRC+ marks of 108, 103, 102, and 109 work out to a 105 average.

That’s the 105th-best batting line among hitters over that span. That doesn’t sound particularly impressive. Hoerner is wedged between Jake Cronenworth and Mike Yastrzemski, solidly in nice-but-forgettable territory. He’s 57th in OBP over that span, which is a little bit more exciting, but truthfully, he is not a star at the plate.

The fun starts when you get into the rest of his game. Over that same time frame, from 2022-2025, Hoerner is the sixth-best baserunner in the majors. The guys in front of him – Corbin Carroll, Bobby Witt Jr., Trea Turner, Jarren Duran, and Elly De La Cruz – are famed for their exploits on the bases. Hoerner is the slowest of that group by a fair margin, but he makes up for it with excellent instincts and great reads. He’s fifth in the bigs in steals during that span, and his 85% success rate is better than everyone in front of him on the list. When he gets on base, he’s a threat to steal, and yet he almost never gets thrown out. Read the rest of this entry »

Here at FanGraphs, we make a lot of bold predictions. The entire staff makes them in a site-wide exercise that will come out tomorrow. I made 10 more of my own on Effectively Wild. Historically, I made five bold predictions about the season in this space as well. But I’ve been crowded out! Bold predictions are everywhere now. Meg and I came up with a substitute last year, and I enjoyed it enough that I’m bringing it back again: Five big questions about the season. These aren’t the only big questions I have. They aren’t necessarily the biggest questions in baseball. I don’t know the answers to any of them. But all five of these are unresolved questions that will help to shape the 2026 season, and all five fascinate me.

1. Do the Brewers Still Know Best?
The kinds of nerdy fans who read (and write for) FanGraphs have always had a data-driven team to root for. The Moneyball A’s predate this website. The Rays took that blueprint and ran with it. Before the Astros went full banging scheme, they revolutionized player development. The Guardians develop pitchers better than almost everyone else. The Brewers are the latest model; they do things a little bit differently than the rest of the league, according to some internal blueprint, and their plan works. They have the third-most wins in the league over the last five years despite running one of the lowest payrolls. It looks like their run atop the NL Central might continue indefinitely.

Of course, it felt like the previous analytical darling teams would keep their runs going forever, too. The A’s fell off hard after their peak. The Rays look a lot less magical today than they did four years ago. No advantage lasts forever; if you have some kind of secret sauce that truly does work, every other team in baseball will be trying to figure out the recipe.

From the outside, it’s clear that the Brewers do at least three things very well: They develop good pitchers, find fast and athletic position players who deliver plenty of WAR without gaudy batting statistics, and proactively trade established players for prospects who fit their preferred pitching and hitting archetypes. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking at the best rotations in baseball is a great way to learn about how the best teams in baseball build their staffs. Recently, they’re coalescing around a common plan. It’s hard to get through a 162-game season these days. Five pitchers certainly won’t do it. Every team used at least eight starters last year. Only five teams used fewer than 10 starters, even. You can’t just fill your rotation with five great pitchers and move on with life.

Many of the best teams in the game have solved that issue by building a rotation in two parts. At the top, you’ve got your elite starters, as many as you can get. The top four teams in our rankings have all gone out and proactively added aces in recent years, whether they had some homegrown ones to start with or not. These are the guys who, health willing, have guaranteed spots in a potential playoff rotation.

That said, it usually isn’t possible to assemble an entire playoff rotation out of elite starters, even though you only need four guys instead of five thanks to the postseason schedule. The Dodgers managed it by a) having more money than Croesus and b) signing a unicorn who moonlights as a playoff-caliber starter when he isn’t busy being the best DH in baseball. Everyone else has to solve for two constraints: having enough innings to fill an entire season, and having enough upside that at least one or two of your mid-pack starters will be good enough to pitch in October. Read the rest of this entry »

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