There are a lot of great statistics in baseball these days. They measure everything! Swing path tilt? Contact point against center of mass? Exit velocity? Hard-hit rate on opposite field line drives? You can get a report on any of those things at the wave of a few fingers. Expected wOBA? Barrel rate? There are acronyms and stat blends and projection aggregates for days. It’s analysis paralysis; the hard part isn’t finding stats to describe hitters, but figuring out which ones not to use.

I don’t have a foolproof method for seeing through all the noise for you. But I do have a fun experiment in how to work with statistics in such an overwhelming environment. I want to suggest a method that I call, These Things Are Good. Basically, it boils down to this: Come up with some statistics that you think are good without pre-determining which players you’re looking for, measure how good the entire league is at your statistics in question, and see what shakes out.

How should we do this in practice? I started by saying that I think pulling the ball when you hit it in the air is good. That gives me the first statistic I care about: air pull rate. I turned that into standard deviations for every player in baseball so that we could compare apples to apples across multiple statistics, then started looking for who the standouts were across all categories.

Air pull rate is nice, but it’s certainly not the only statistic that I’m interested in. Next, I wanted guys who hit the ball hard when they put it in the air. After all, exit velocity matters far more when batters can elevate. I did the same thing and put that in z-score terms via standard deviations. If you’re wondering what kinds of hitters these two categories identify, Kyle Schwarber, Griffin Conine, and Junior Caminero are the top three. Read the rest of this entry »

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I might have a thing for guys who throw a lot of different fastballs. Earlier this week, I looked into Drew Rasmussen’s novel approach to pitching: just make the entire arsenal out of fastballs. Rasmussen used to mix four-seamers and cutters, but then he added a sinker and kicked things up a notch. The multi-fastball approach has swept baseball in recent years, in fact, to the point where pitchers with only one option in their toolkit now stand out to me. But I think I’ve seen a new variation. Ben Joyce throws two fastballs, and one of them is an offspeed pitch.

You probably think of Joyce as one of the hardest throwers in baseball, if you think of him at all. He was a standout at Tennessee, showing big league velocity while closing games for the Vols. He threw a pitch 105.5 mph in 2024, still one of the five fastest pitches recorded in the Statcast era. He’s always been a little wild. He reaches back for everything he possibly has. It’s the kind of profile that makes you wonder what he’s going to pair with that absurd fastball.

In 2024, Joyce started experimenting with a splinker, a splitter/sinker hybrid. He turned to that pitch partway through the year after discussing sinker grips with some of the other Angels pitchers, and he spent a lot of that season playing with the different ways he could throw it. It was very much still a work in progress – he changed the shape and velocity of it quite a lot as he learned the grip – but adding something that sat between his fastball and slider was a great success, so much so that Michael Baumann blogged about his two fastballs way back in January 2025. Then Joyce got hurt five games into the year, had shoulder surgery, and missed the rest of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

The Detroit Tigers are one of the hottest teams in baseball. Since the calendar flipped to August, they’ve gone 7-3, scoring more than six runs per game in the process. In a muddled American League, that puts them right in the thick of the AL Central and Wild Card races. That, in turn, means they’re back in the hunt for a World Series ring. This burst of activity has them about as likely to make the playoffs (and win a ring) as they’ve been in the last few months, in fact; they’re back above 30% to reach October after dropping as low as 18% the day they traded Tarik Skubal.

That feels weird! Less than two weeks ago, the Tigers traded their best player, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, for three prospects. They followed that up by trading Casey Mize, who had briefly inherited the title of top Tigers pitcher. It was a classic deadline sale – not a thread-the-needle plan with some additions and some subtractions, but a declaration that the plan was to get ‘em next year, and the years after that.

Does this mean the Tigers shouldn’t have traded Skubal and Mize? I’m not here to opine on that (OK, fine I’ll opine at the end of the article, but you have to read it first). But they did make those trades, and they did go on that hot streak, so here we are. The Tigers can’t un-trade those guys. MLB doesn’t have a takebacks rule. But I can’t help but wonder how the Tigers would look if they hadn’t made any moves at the deadline, and so I decided to write about it.
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I generally find discussions of the most underrated player in baseball to be tedious. Whose rating are we using? Relative to what? Does being the most underrated player in the game two years in a row imply something uncomfortable about our own ability to update our priors? Heck, does repeatedly earning the mantel of “most underrated” render you ineligible for the title? How underrated can José Ramírez be when every single FanGraphs reader knows how underrated he is? Anyway, today’s article is a case of “do what I say, not what I do.” Because I’ll just say it: Drew Rasmussen is the most underrated player in baseball.

I know, I know! That whole intro paragraph tells you how silly this formulation is. But I was moved to look more closely at Rasmussen for two reasons. First, there was this tweet from Tom Tango:

Since 2021, among pitchers with 500+ IP, there are 10 pitchers in the top 15 in each of ERA, FIP and Statcast ERA (xERA)

From highest to lowest career WAR:

Kershaw
Sale
Cole
Wheeler
Fried
Skubal
Burnes
Woodruff
Ohtani
Rasmussen

Sale + Ohtani are only ones in top 5 in all 3 pic.twitter.com/jF7ZVUWmDs

— Tangotiger ? (@tangotiger) August 9, 2026

Not a list I expected to find him on. Second, this interview he did with our own David Laurila fascinated me. Rasmussen doesn’t look much like he did when the Brewers traded him to the Rays for Willy Adames back in 2021. This guy has remade his entire arsenal and approach, and he’s become one of the best pitchers in baseball by doing so. Read the rest of this entry »

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Every year, baseball teams cram a whole season of trade activity and rumors into about four days of mayhem. This year was no exception, and there was an even bigger prize than normal. The best player available at the deadline isn’t always one of the best players in baseball; it’s often merely the best player nearing free agency on a team that isn’t competing. But this year, one of the best few pitchers on the planet fell into that category, and a broad cast of would-be contenders saw opportunities to add some juice to their rosters too. This isn’t a comprehensive list. Give me another few weeks, and I’ll have more nuanced opinions about everyone’s actions. But one day after the sound and the fury, here are the trends that most stood out to me.

Winner: The Dodgers
Duh. They got Tarik Skubal. Analysis doesn’t always have to be complicated. The Dodgers gave up two Top 100 prospects in the deal, but they’re accumulating top prospects through good drafting and development faster than they can spend them in trades and major league playing time, so that’s not a huge cost. They even get the ancillary benefit of preventing their opponents from trading for Skubal, which is non-neglible.

The Dodgers have made three big acquisitions in the past year: Skubal, Kyle Tucker, and Edwin Díaz. That’s the top available starter, hitter, and reliever (in expectation, at least) over that time period, whether in free agency or trade. The Dodgers know that they’re good now, and they’re pressing the advantage at every turn. That killer instinct puts them in great position to add a third straight championship. Not that they’re favorites, because the baseball playoffs are fueled by randomness, but they’re about as favored as it’s possible to be. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals have the misfortune of playing in the wrong league. At 55-58, they’re absolutely buried in the National League Wild Card race, 4.5 games out with four teams between them and the last spot. Meanwhile, the Guardians have the fortune of playing in the American League, where their 57-56 record not only has them in a playoff spot at the moment, but a mere three games back of the division lead. So while these two teams have played to nearly identical records (the Nats have better Pythagorean and BaseRuns records, but it’s close), Washington is selling and Cleveland is buying. More specifically, Cleveland acquired Nats ace Foster Griffin in exchange for a four-prospect sampler platter, as first reported by Mark Feinsand.

It seems like Cleveland is always hanging around the playoff race. They’ve won the AL Central six times in the last decade and finished in second place another three. Of late, they’ve done it with great bullpens and blah starters, with a contact-and-defense approach to hitters. But this year, the defense isn’t clicking like it normally does, the offense is scoring less than four runs a game, and the bullpen is outside of the top 10 in WAR for the first time since 2023, the only year since 2012 where they’ve finished below .500. In other words, the rotation has been shouldering a much heavier workload this year.

Parker Messick and Gavin Williams have been the straws stirring the drink for the Guardians so far in 2026. Joey Cantillo has been better than advertised as well. Heck, Tanner Bibee isn’t missing bats like he used to, but he’s provided valuable innings. But there just wasn’t enough there for Cleveland to feel comfortable – not enough depth, not enough certainty about who would start in the playoffs, not enough margin for error. And so they acquired not the best pitcher on the market – that’d be Tarik Skubal – but perhaps the most Guardians-y pitcher on the market, a pitchability-and-command lefty who doesn’t throw hard but still gets outs. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s trade deadline season, which means that it’s time for an annual tradition: the Astros somehow scraping together enough interesting young talent to trade for some much-needed major league improvements. This time around, they’re acquiring Daulton Varsho from the Blue Jays in exchange for Spencer Arrighetti, as Mitch Bannon of The Athletic first reported.

Varsho has a delightful positional history. He came up as a catcher, was one of the more fun multi-positional players in the league for a stretch, and then became one of the best defensive outfielders on the planet. He’s now a plus defender in center or an elite one in a corner; he’ll play center most of the time in Houston, stabilizing a position that’s been one of the worst in the majors this year. Jake Meyers was the presumptive starter, but he missed more than a month with an oblique strain and flirted with the Mendoza Line when healthy. The ‘Stros finally optioned him to the minors at the start of July, and in his place, they’ve run out a sampler platter of backup plans: Brice Matthews, who’s posted a 61 wRC+ and is currently on the IL, Taylor Trammell, a fourth outfielder type and not really a center fielder defensively, and even Lucas Spence, a fringe prospect who definitely does not look ready for the big leagues.

In other words, acquiring Varsho is mostly about not having a sinkhole of a position in the middle of the outfield. From that perspective, just by showing up he’s going to fulfill his end of the bargain. He’s Houston’s best outfield defender right away, and unless Yordan Alvarez is getting a rare day in the field, he’s probably their best-hitting outfielder too. Cam Smith has scuffled offensively for his whole big league career at this point, and the LaMonte Wade Jr./Zach Dezenzo platoon in left field isn’t exactly fearsome. Read the rest of this entry »

I know, I know. I, too, wish the Tampa Bay Rays had traded for Tarik Skubal. But they didn’t, and it’s not in their nature if we’re being honest. The Rays aren’t the type to trade for one big hammer. They prefer to one-red-paperclip it, and that’s exactly what they’ve done this deadline. First, they traded for Freddy Peralta. Now, they’ve added some sorely needed offensive help by acquiring Liam Hicks from the Marlins in exchange for prospects Jacob Kisting, Adrian Santana, and Brayden Taylor, as Jeff Passan first reported.

The Tampa Bay side of this equation is pretty simple. Their catching duo of Hunter Feduccia and Nick Fortes hasn’t been good enough. Fortes has been reasonable as the righty half of a platoon, but Feduccia has scuffled to an 82 wRC+ even getting good platoon matchups. Catcher probably wasn’t the weakest part of their lineup – frankly, there are a lot of holes to patch here – but it was definitely an area of need. If the Rays are going to keep a hold on the AL East, they’ll have to score more runs in addition to continuing to pitch well, and playing a good hitter at catcher is a good way to start.

Hicks was a late bloomer who didn’t debut until last year at age 26, but he has a long track record of plus offense from behind the plate. He hit throughout his minor league tenure but never received a call-up because of questions about his defense. The Marlins took him in the Rule 5 draft in December 2024, plugged him in as the big half of a platoon, and let him cook. His defense was predictably weak – so weak that he ended up rotating between catcher, first base, and DH – but the bat played right away. Read the rest of this entry »