I got my start in baseball writing as a Cardinals blogger. That’s only natural – I’m a Cardinals fan. My dad grew up in St. Louis and passed it on to me. I’m still a fan, though certainly less than I was before I started writing about the sport as my full-time job. But whether you’re looking at it through the lens of a fan or just as an analyst, the trajectory of this always-competing, never-quite-dominant team has been fascinating to watch.

I had a strange feeling while watching the Redbirds last year. I kept wondering, “Why is this team full of old guys?” Ever since the 2011 World Series win, Albert Pujols’ first finale in St. Louis, the team always seemed full of young, devil-magicky contributors. An average Cards roster had a few recognizable stars plus a bunch of young guys you’d never heard of who were way better than you initially realized. Matt Carpenter and Michael Wacha were unexpected stars in 2013. Carlos Martínez and Kolten Wong came on strong. After a few years of missing the playoffs despite interesting young contributors (Tommy Pham, Randal Grichuk, Luke Weaver), the 2019 Cards coalesced around Jack Flaherty, Tommy Edman, and Paul DeJong.

You’ve heard of all of those players, of course, but at the time, they were young up-and-comers. The Cardinals never seemed to be old despite running out Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright year after year. Those guys were a key veteran core, helping to spread the team gospel to the young horde backing them up. But even with those old hands running things, my view of the Cards as a youthful outfit was correct. From 2013 through 2018, St. Louis’ roster was younger than average every year. Then they were ever so slightly older than league average in 2019 and again in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

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They’ve changed the rules to make it easier to steal bases. That’s not my conjecture. That’s just the truth. By limiting the number of pickoffs and setting a timer that baserunners can use to establish a rhythm, the game has changed completely. Obviously, it has. You knew this. There were 158 baserunners who tried to steal 10 or more times last season, up from 115 in the final year before the rule changes. Most of them were incredibly successful, too: Those 158 stole at an aggregate 80.4% clip.

That’s not all that interesting, to be honest. You knew it already. But what you might not know? Three baserunners apparently didn’t get the memo. Ryan McMahon, Nicky Lopez, and Vidal Bruján all attempted double digit steals and got thrown out more than half the time. I had to know more, so I tried to see what had gone wrong for these three would-be thieves. Read the rest of this entry »

Catcher is a thankless job. If you do it successfully, perfectly even, that means that you’re letting highly paid professionals whip projectiles at you as hard as they can hundreds of times a day. Sometimes, other highly paid professionals will divert these projectiles toward you at the last second, or inadvertently hit you with the giant wooden sticks they’re carrying. You have to dive around and flail your limbs, because the only thing worse than getting hit by one of these balls is not getting hit by them; letting them fly by hurts your team. People try to steal from you constantly, so while you’re trying to catch a rock-hard 100-mph pellet, you also have to scan your peripherals. And if all of that isn’t bad enough, here’s the worst part: Sometimes your manager chooses to start Martín Maldonado ahead of you.

I kid, of course, but I’m writing about Yainer Diaz today, and his gradual phase-in to the major leagues is a key part of his major league career so far. Diaz burst onto the big league scene in 2023 with the kind of approach that makes hitting instructors wince, then shrug their shoulders and nod. He swung early and often, took big hacks, and generally acted like he was allergic to taking walks or hitting singles. It worked. He clobbered 23 homers in only 377 plate appearances, spraying loud contact to all fields. He played better-than-expected defense, too, belying his early scouting reports.

Despite that excellent rookie season, Diaz couldn’t displace an aging Maldonado as the team’s primary catcher; he took some reps at DH, but lost those as well when the team got healthy. By the playoffs, he was an afterthought, a pure backup catcher. But when Maldonado (and manager Dusty Baker) departed in the offseason, Diaz ascended to a starting job. Then he struggled – through the All-Star break, he was hitting a so-so .284/.308/.409 with iffy defense. If you’re more of a WAR person, that’s 1.1 WAR, not great. Here’s one story you could tell about Yainer Diaz: a prospect who struggled to break through with regular playing time.
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You have to hand it to the Mets. There really does seem to be something ineffable that brings drama to Queens. No, I don’t mean the LOLMets meme, the belief that things will find a way to break every year, because I don’t really think it’s true. The Mets aren’t cursed. But they do have a way of making things interesting. It’s never all smooth sailing, but they’re never completely down and out either. There’s always a little more to explore at Citi Field, and this offseason is no exception. The Mets are on top of the world, because they signed Juan Soto, one of the biggest free agent prizes of all time. And they have their backs to the wall, because two pitchers they signed to assemble a playoff rotation are already injured.

Frankie Montas was the first casualty. He felt discomfort after his very first bullpen session of spring training, and a lat sprain means that he won’t be able to throw for another 5-7 weeks. Given that the regular season is five weeks away, and that Montas had done essentially no buildup before his injury, we’re talking about multiple months of absence.

The good news is the Mets built their rotation this offseason to withstand injuries. After all, Montas wasn’t the most prominent starting pitcher they signed this winter. Sean Manaea holds that distinction; he was the best pitcher on last year’s team, and though he hit free agency, he signed a three-year deal worth $75 million to come back. That’s not quite ace money in today’s game, which is perfect: Manaea’s not quite an ace, just a solid playoff starter with upside. Except, he’s also hurt now. After feeling some discomfort of his own, an MRI revealed a right oblique strain.
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The first baseball cap I remember buying was a gorgeous Orioles throwback. I’m not sure what exactly drew me to it. Maybe it was my mom’s lifelong Orioles fandom. Maybe it had to do with the crisp colors. Maybe I’d just listened to noted ornithological transporter Jay-Z on the drive to West Town Mall. “Before Mitchel and Ness did it/I was moving birds like an Oriole fitted/I’m Cal Ripken Jr., let’s get it” always got me excited to watch some baseball. Whatever the reason was, though, that hat called out to me, so I paid an exorbitant price for something I ended up not wearing very frequently.

I’m telling you this story for a few reasons. First, I want to establish my bona fides as someone who has always had a soft spot for the O’s. Second, I get to show my age a bit — I was in high school when The Blueprint 2 came out. Third, who doesn’t like telling stories? But the main reason is that ledes are hard to write, and I want to talk about the O’s today. To quote Jay-Z: Let’s get it.

A recent Ken Rosenthal article had me double-checking payroll lists and salary tables. The Orioles – the Orioles!! – were listed as the team who increased its payroll by the most from 2024 to 2025. I looked at that for a little bit, looked at the data to confirm that the never-errant Rosenthal had, in fact, not erred, and then I let out a long puzzled sigh. It’s true! The O’s have opened the purse strings this winter. There are a few ways to calculate payroll, but based on the yearly expenditures listed in RosterResource, here are the top five payroll increases across the majors:

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The biggest remaining free agent of the 2024-25 offseason is off the board. In a splashy signing Wednesday night, the Boston Red Sox and Alex Bregman agreed to a three-year, $120 million deal. There’s no shortage of things I want to say about this match of team and player, so let’s stop with this boring introduction already and get right into it.

The Team

The Red Sox needed Bregman, or someone like him, badly. Just one problem – there was no one else like him. When Dan Szymborski ran the numbers last week, he found that the Sox were one of the teams who would receive the greatest boost in playoff odds from signing Houston’s long-time third baseman. Per Dan, Bregman adds 10.8 percentage points to Boston’s chances of reaching October.

The Red Sox play in the toughest division in baseball. They have some holes in their lineup, particularly a decided lack of juice at the bottom of the order. Their bullpen projects well but is packed with uncertainty. A sure thing was just what they needed. Bregman is just that. Since his 2016 debut, he’s been the 10th-best hitter in baseball according to our measure of WAR. “Oh, but Ben, he’s old, he’s faded, he’s past his prime, no one cares about 2019.” Yeah, well, over the last four years, Bregman has been the 11th-best position player in baseball. So much for a decline phase.
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In the middle of the 2024 season, MLB released bat tracking data for the current year. It was a huge revolution in publicly available data, taking something previously observable but not measurable and turning it into numbers. You can see how hard Giancarlo Stanton swings, but now you can also quantify how different that is from other large hitters. Luis Arraez’s superhuman coordination is obvious from watching him play. But in terms of getting his barrel on the ball, relative to the rest of the league, how superhuman is he? Now we know. I think that public research on this front is likely to deliver more and more insights in the coming years.

Of course, what we all wanted to know about bat speed wasn’t available right away. Namely: How does it change? Was Ronald Acuña Jr.’s disappointing start to the season related to an inability to impact the ball with force? Did Matt Olson’s decline have more to do with bat speed or plate discipline? Also, plenty of non-Braves questions, presumably. In any case, we couldn’t say much about that because all we had were the 2024 numbers.

Guess what: Now we have some 2023 data. MLB and Statcast released 2023 data starting after the All-Star break, the earliest data we’ll ever get because that’s when the bat tracking infrastructure got going. Obviously, we’re also going to get more year-over-year data when the 2025 season starts. But our first crack at multiple seasons of data is still noteworthy, so I set out to look through the numbers and came to a few conclusions. I don’t intend for these to be comprehensive, and I’m sure that a measured and careful approach is going to tease out some new insights that I don’t have. But the data came out yesterday, and here are a few highlights.
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Pulled fly balls, to me, are hitter highlights. Just as strikeouts showcase the nastiness of pitchers, and groundballs allow infielders to demonstrate what they can do, balls in the air promote the powerful sluggers who hit them.

I’m including “pulled” in the description because plenty of research over the past decade has established that pulled fly balls are more productive than their straightaway and opposite-field counterparts. We here at FanGraphs have certainly jumped on that trend. Even if you ignore all my articles about Isaac Paredes, our writing about hitters who either pull the ball a lot or should pull the ball a lot is voluminous.

With that introduction in mind: This article is about pitchers. Bear with me for just a minute, and I’ll explain to you how I got here. It took me a while to wrap my head around why pulled fly balls perform so well. It’s not like the wall is much closer to that side, at least not consistently, and given that both lefties and righties display this trend, that clearly can’t be the thing. But thinking about how it actually feels to swing helped clue me in.

To broadly generalize, hitters make contact with the ball out in front of the plate when they pull it. The angle of the bat starts pointing toward the pull side as soon as it crosses the plane running parallel with the front of home plate. For the most part, because bat speed and “attack angle” — the vertical angle of the bat path — increase throughout a swing, batters tend to hit the ball harder when they catch the ball out in front and put in in the air. As a result, pretty much every hitter produces better on pulled air balls. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to Prospect Week! (Well, closer to Prospect Fortnight — as you can probably tell from the navigation widget above, the fun will continue well into next week, including the launch of our Top 100.) I’m not your regular host – that’d be Eric Longenhagen – but not to worry, you’ll get all the Eric you can handle as he and the team break down all things minor leagues, college baseball, and MLB draft. I’m just here to set the stage, and in support of that goal, I have some research to present on prospect grades and eventual major league equivalency.

When reading coverage of the minor leagues, I often find myself wondering what it all means. The Future Value scale does a great job of capturing the essence of a prospect in a single number, but it doesn’t translate neatly to what you see when you watch a big league game. Craig Edwards previously investigated how prospect grades have translated into surplus value, but I wanted to update things from an on-field value perspective. Rather than look at what it would cost to replace prospect production in free agency, I decided to measure the distribution in potential outcomes at each Future Value tier.

To do that, I first gathered my data. I took our prospect lists from four seasons, 2019-22, and looked at all of the prospects with a grade of 45 FV or higher. I separated them into two groups — hitters and pitchers — then took projections for every player in baseball three years down the line. For example, I paired the 2019 prospect list with 2022 projections and the 2022 prospect list with 2025 projections. In this way, I came up with a future expectation for each player.

I chose to use projections for one key reason: They let us get to an answer more quickly. In Craig’s previous study, he looked at results over the next nine years of major league play. I don’t have that kind of time – I’m trying to use recent prospect grades to get at the way our team analyzes the game today. If I used that methodology, the last year of prospect lists I could use would be 2015, in Kiley McDaniel’s first term as FanGraphs’ prospect analyst.

Another benefit of using projections is that they’re naturally resistant to the sample-size-related issues that always crop up in exercises like this. A few injuries, one weird season, a relatively small prospect cohort, and you could be looking at some strange results. Should we knock a prospect if his playing time got blocked, or if his team gamed his service time? I don’t think so, and projections let us ignore all that. I normalized all batters to a 600 plate appearance projection and all pitchers to a 200 innings pitched projection.

I decided to break future outcomes down into tiers. More specifically, I grouped WAR outcomes as follows. I counted everything below 0.5 WAR per season as a “washout,” including those players who didn’t have major league projections three years later. Given that we project pretty much everyone, that’s mostly players who had either officially retired or never appeared in full-season ball. I graded results between 0.5 and 1.5 WAR as “backup.” I classified seasons between 1.5 and 2.5 WAR as “regular,” as in a major league regular. Finally, 2.5-4 WAR merited an “above average” mark, while 4-plus WAR got a grade of “star.” You could set these breakpoints differently without too much argument from me; they’re just a convenient way of showing the distribution. There’s nothing particularly magical about the cutoff lines, but you have to pick something to display the data, and a simple average of WAR projections probably isn’t right.

With that said, let’s get to the results. My sample included 685 hitters from 45-80 FV. Allowing for some noise at the top end due to small sample size, the distribution looks exactly like you’d hope:

Consider the 55 FV line for an explanation. Of the players we graded as 55 FV prospects, 17% look washed three years later – Jeter Downs, a 2020 55 FV, for example. Another 17% have proven to be backup-caliber, like 2022 55 FV Curtis Mead, or 2019 55 FV Taylor Trammell if you don’t think Mead’s trajectory is set just yet. Continuing down the line, 30% look like big league regulars – 2021 55 FV Alek Thomas, perhaps. A full 31% appear to be above-average major league contributors three years later, like 2019 55 FV Sean Murphy or 2021 55 FV Royce Lewis. Finally, 6% project as stars three years later – Jackson Merrill, a 55 FV in 2022, feels appropriate as an example.

Two things immediately jump out to me when looking at this data. First, the “above average” and “star” columns increase at every tier break, and the “washout” column decreases at every tier break. In other words, the better a player’s grade, the more likely they are to be excellent, while the worse their grade, the more likely they are to bust. That’s a great sign for the reliability of our grades; they’re doing what they purport to do, essentially.

Second, each row feels logically consistent. The 45 FV prospects are most likely to bust, next-most-likely to end up as backups, and so on. The 45+ FVs look like the 45 FVs, only with a better top end; their chances of ending up above average are meaningfully better. The 50 FVs are a grab bag; their outcomes vary widely, and plenty of those outcomes involve being a viable major leaguer. By the time you hit the 55 and 60 FV prospects, you’re looking at players who end up as above-average contributors a lot of the time. The gap between 55 and 60 seems clear, too; the 60 FVs are far more likely to turn into stars, more or less. Finally, there are only six data points above 60 FV, so that’s mostly a stab in the dark.

This outcome pleases me greatly. Looking at that chart correlates strongly with how I already perceived the grades. For a refresher, roughly 30 prospects in a given year grade out as a 55 FV or above, give or take a few. Something like three quarters of those tend to be hitters. That means that in a given year, 20-ish prospects look like good bets to deliver average-regular-or-better performance. The rest of the Top 100? They’re riskier, with a greater chance of ending up in a part-time role and a meaningfully lower chance of becoming a star. But don’t mistake likelihood for certainty – plenty of 55 and 60 FVs still end up at or below replacement level, and 45 FVs turn into stars sometimes. Projecting prospect performance is hard!

How should you use this table? I like to think of Future Value in terms of outcome distributions, and I think that this does a good job of it. Should a team prefer to receive two 50 FV prospects in a trade, or a 55 FV and a 45 FV? You can add up the outcome distributions and get an idea of what each combination of prospects looks like. Here are the summed probabilities of those two groups:

Another way of saying that: If you go with the two-player package that has the 55 and 45 FV prospects, you’re looking at a higher chance of developing a star. You’re also looking at a greater chance of ending up with at least one complete miss, and therefore lower odds of ending up with two contributors. Adding isn’t exactly the right way to handle this, but it’s a good shorthand for quick comparisons. If you want to get more in depth, I built this little calculator, which lets you answer a simple question: For a given set of prospects, what are the odds of ending up with at least X major leaguers of Y quality or better? You can make a copy of this sheet, define X and Y for yourself, and get an answer. In our case, the odds of ending up with at least one above-average player (or better) are 40.7% for the two 50s and 41.4% for the 45/55 split. The odds of ending up with two players who are at least big league regulars? That’d be 28.1% for the two 50 FVs, and 16.1% for the 45/55 pairing. Odds of at least one star? That’s 4% for the two 50 FVs and 6% for the 45/55 group. In other words, the total value is similar, but the shape is meaningfully different.

For example, you’d have to add together a ton of 50 FV prospects to get as high of a chance of finding a star as you would from one 60 FV. On the other hand, if you have three 50 FVs, the odds of ending up with at least a solid contributor are quite high. Meanwhile, even 60 FV prospects end up as backups or worse around a quarter of the time. That description of the relative risks and rewards makes more sense to me than converting players into some nebulous surplus value. Prospects are all about possibility, so representing them that way tracks analytically for me.

Take another look at the beautiful cascade of probabilities in that table of outcomes for hitting prospects, because we’re about to get meaningfully less pretty. Let’s talk about pitching prospects. Here, the outcomes are less predictable:

I have tons of takeaways here. First, there are substantially fewer pitching prospects ranked, particularly as 50 FVs and above. Clearly, that’s a good decision by the prospect team, because even the highest-ranked pitchers turn into backups at a reasonable clip. Pitching prospects just turn into major league pitchers in a less predictable way, or so it would appear from the data.

Second, there are fewer stars among the pitchers than the hitters. That’s true if you look at 2025 projections, too. There are only six pitchers projected for 4 WAR or higher, while 42 hitters meet that cutoff. It’s also true if you look at the results on the field in 2024; 36 hitters and 12 pitchers (22 by RA9-WAR) eclipsed the four-win mark. You should feel free to apply some modifiers to your view of pitcher value if you think that WAR treats them differently than hitters, but within the framework, the relative paucity of truly outstanding outcomes is noticeable.

Another thing worth mentioning here is that pitchers don’t develop the same way that hitters do. Sometimes one new pitch or an offseason of velocity training leads to a sudden change in talent level in a way that just doesn’t happen as frequently with hitters. Tarik Skubal was unmemorable in his major league debut (29 starts, with a 4.34 ERA and 5.09 FIP). Then he made just 36 (very good) starts over the next two years due to injuries. Then he was the best pitcher in baseball in 2024. Good luck projecting that trajectory. Perhaps three-year-out windows of pitcher performance just aren’t enough thanks to the way they continue to develop even after reaching the majors.

There’s one other limitation of measuring pitchers this way: I don’t have a good method for dealing with the differential between reliever and starter valuation. Normalizing relievers to 200 innings pitched doesn’t make a ton of sense, but handling them on their own also feels strange, and I don’t have a good way of converting reliever WAR to the backup/regular/star scale that I’m using here. A 3-WAR reliever wouldn’t be an above-average player, they’d be the best reliever in baseball. I settled for putting them up to 200 innings and letting that over-allocaiton of playing time handle the different measures of success. For example, a reliever projected for 3.6 WAR in 200 innings would check in around 1.2 for a full season of bullpen work. That’s a very good relief pitcher projection; only 20 players meet that bar in our 2025 Depth Charts projections.

In other words, the tier names still mostly work for relievers, but you should apply your own relative positional value adjustments just like normal. A star reliever is less valuable than a star outfielder. A star starting pitcher might be more valuable than a star outfielder, depending on the degree of luminosity, but that one’s much closer. This outcome table can guide you in terms of what a player might turn into. It can’t tell you how to value each of those outcomes, because that’s context-specific and open to interpretation.

This study isn’t meant to be the definitive word on what prospects are “worth.” Grades aren’t innate things, they’re just our team’s best attempt at capturing the relative upside and risk of yet-to-debut players. Being a 60 FV prospect doesn’t make you 17% likely to turn into a star; rather, our team is trying to identify players with s relatively good chance of stardom by throwing a big FV on them. And teams aren’t beholden to our grades, either. They might have better (or worse!) internal prospect evaluation systems.

With those caveats in mind, I still find this extremely useful in my own consumption of minor league content. The usual language you hear when people discuss prospect trades – are they on a Top 100, where do they rank on a team list, what grade are they – can feel arcane, impenetrable even. Breaking it down in terms of likelihood of outcome just works better for me, and I hope that it also provides valuable information to you when you’re reading the team’s excellent breakdown of all things prospect-related this week.