Seven years ago, Craig Edwards published a landmark study on prospect valuation. Craig’s work built on previous studies by Victor Wang, Scott McKinney, Kevin Creagh, Steve DiMiceli, and our own Jeff Zimmerman, as well as a few prior ad hoc attempts here at FanGraphs; subsequent work on the subject was done by the team at Driveline Baseball. These studies have been hugely important both for FanGraphs’ own evaluation of prospects — among other things, Craig’s work has helped to feed the Farm System Rankings over on The Board — and for the broader public study of the minor leagues.

The reasoning behind these studies is clear and simple. If you want to evaluate a prospect-for-big-leaguer trade, you’ll need to know the expected value of the prospect in the trade. If you want to evaluate how much help is waiting in a given team’s farm system, a quantitative assessment of the talent there is necessary. Even if you’re just wondering how likely your team is to find the next big thing, again, you’ll need some type of framework to understand how often that’s happened in the past.

The previous studies of prospect valuation are still excellent, but they’re all very much of their time. Since Craig published his study in November 2018, the league has changed significantly. The COVID-abbreviated 2020 season changed minor league timelines across the board. The league contracted the number of minor league franchises significantly in 2021. A new CBA, signed before the 2022 season, changed compensation structures and competitive balance tax levels, and introduced the Prospect Promotion Incentive. The cost of a win in free agency has skyrocketed; league-wide payrolls are up more than 30%, and free agent salaries are up by more than that. Read the rest of this entry »

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Right off the bat, I have to tell you that I don’t love the name I gave the statistic I created last week. RE-RA9 doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. The concept – adjusting run-scoring statistics to account for inherited runners – is easy to get your head around, and I think it’s clearly interesting. But while I had fun writing that article, I wasn’t quite happy with where I left off, either on the name front or on the analysis front.

The name thing probably can’t be fixed. I’m not a great namer of things, historically, and I don’t think that’s going to change today. But while I can’t do anything about that, I quickly expanded my coverage from 2026 to, well, as much of baseball as I could. If this statistic is interesting, it’s interesting as much for its application throughout history as for who’s good and bad at it this year. So with the help of the FanGraphs play-by-play database, which stretches back to 1974, I built RE-RA9 for the vast majority of the era where there were enough relief appearances for this statistic to even make sense. Forget Grant Anderson and Chase Silseth, the two poster boys from my first article. Let’s get some famous guys and seasons in here.

For example, here are the 10 pitchers who have done the most to prevent inherited runners from scoring (RE-RA9 lower than actual RA9), minimum 1,000 innings pitched:

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To repurpose an old quote about the weather, if you don’t like the identity of the best catcher in baseball, just wait a year and you’ll have a new best catcher in baseball. It’s almost uncanny. Every year, there are two contenders for best catcher in baseball. And every year, one of them falls to the wayside, to be replaced by someone new. It’s like clockwork:

Last year was an exception to the rule in that Cal Raleigh was a lot better than Alejandro Kirk, but for the most part, the top two catchers in the game have put up similar WAR. It’s hard to stand out all the way at catcher, and it’s also hard to stay near the top for long. Truthfully, that isn’t all that surprising. Catching is phenomenally difficult on the body, and WAR is a counting stat. The best catchers play a lot, and they wear down. Before long, they’re either playing less often or playing less effectively.

With that backdrop, you might expect one of Kirk or Raleigh to be clinging to the top spot while a new contender appears. But that hasn’t happened. They’ve both been hurt – Raleigh missed a month on the IL, and Kirk missed more than two. And they’ve both played poorly when healthy – both are off to the worst offensive starts of their careers, though Kirk’s is in a tiny sample. There’s still more than half a season to play, and it’s reasonable to think that the two of them might end up posting solid numbers the rest of the way, but they’ve racked up a combined 0.5 WAR so far this year. It’s safe to say that there will be some new faces at the top. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 21, Grant Anderson inherited a hot mess. With the Brewers ahead 3-0 in the fourth inning, starter Kyle Harrison lost his feel. He walked Riley Greene and Spencer Torkelson in two uncompetitive plate appearances, then gave up a rifled line drive on one of his slowest fastballs of the day, a center-cut cookie to Hao-Yu Lee. Pat Murphy called Anderson in from the bullpen to face the bases loaded with no one out.

Anderson delivered nearly flawlessly. He got Javier Báez to ground into a first-pitch double play, then struck out pinch-hitter Kerry Carpenter to escape the inning with only a single run allowed. That run, of course, went on Harrison’s ledger. Anderson got credit for a scoreless inning, no more or less.

On May 16, Chase Silseth tried to pull off the same trick. José Soriano fought through five strong innings against the Dodgers, but he didn’t have it in the sixth. After an inning-opening groundout, he walked four of the next five batters and hit the fifth, driving in two runs and leaving the bases loaded. Silseth came in to put out the fire – but he might as well have poured kerosene on it. He hit the first batter he faced, then gave up a two-run single immediately after, pushing the score to 6-0. He finally got the last two batters of the inning – which meant that in the game’s official log, he pitched two-thirds of an inning and didn’t allow a run.

These two pitching performances went quite differently. Anderson had a tougher task and performed better. But the two of them each got credit for a clean sheet. This is far from the only problem with the way we calculate ERA, but it’s one that stands out to anyone following. Anderson and Silseth didn’t deserve the same counting statistics there. Likewise, Soriano got tagged for three runs, while Harrison got tagged with only one. But that didn’t reflect what happened to them – both of them lost it and had to be removed from the game because of all the runners they’d allowed. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s a busy time for sports right now. The NBA Finals have been incredible. The Stanley Cup Finals have been nearly as good. The World Cup just started; Team USA is playing tonight. With this embarrassment of entertainment riches, regular season baseball might seem to temporarily lose a little bit of its luster. But even if you want to watch those other great spectacles, I implore you to set aside a few hours of your life this weekend for baseball. For a limited time only, they’re playing on the moon.

OK, fine, maybe not the actual moon. There are any number of logistical and physical challenges involved in that. But the first half of the six-game Las Vegas series has been the next best thing, and before the A’s play the Rockies this weekend, I’m hoping to convince you to watch it. I wouldn’t want my baseball to always look like this, but in small doses, it’s absolutely captivating.

The Athletics, currently playing in the minor league stadium of the Sacramento River Cats, have taken up an even briefer temporary residence in the stadium of their Triple-A affiliate, the Las Vegas Aviators. It’s a preview of sorts – in advance of their scheduled 2028 move to Sin City, the team is playing a six-game series there. And boy, does the ball carry in the desert.

Las Vegas sits only 2,000 feet above sea level. That sounds like nothing – Coors Field, the archetypical high-altitude ballpark, is famously a mile high. But the major league stadium at the second-highest altitude is Chase Field in Arizona, and it’s only 1,000 feet above sea level. That elevation helps the ball carry, but it’s only one of the many reasons that offense is high here. For one thing, it’s hot. High temperatures are forecast to exceed 100 degrees this weekend, with lows in the mid-80s providing little respite even at night. The air is as dry as it gets; Las Vegas has a lower average relative humidity than any big league city, and it’s particularly dry in the middle of summer. It’s an outdoor park, so there’s no escaping the hot, arid conditions. The PCL was the homer-happiest minor league in 2025, and Vegas was the homer-happiest park in the PCL. Read the rest of this entry »

Taylor Ward has made a big league career out of lifting and pulling the ball. Drafted in the first round in 2015, he didn’t find a full-time role in the majors until 2022, but he ran with the job as soon as he got it. Despite unexciting bat speed, Ward consistently ambushed fastballs and tucked them over the left field fence. He clobbered 98 home runs from 2022-25 for the Angels, posted a 119 wRC+, and racked up 11 WAR over the span, one of the team’s best players. Then he got traded to the Orioles this winter with only one year left until free agency, and decided to completely remake his game.

I’m only partially kidding. See, Ward might have made his name as a 25-homer-a-year type, but he’s abandoned that style completely in Baltimore. He’s launched only three long balls this season, and his barrel rate, average exit velocity, and fly ball rate are all career lows. His average bat speed is down 1.5 miles an hour, now in the fifth percentile league-wide. Even when he does get the ball in the air, he’s pulling it at a career-low rate; only 19.4% of his elevated contact goes to left field. That’s why his isolated power has declined from .192 as an Angel to .103 as an Oriole. And oh yeah, he’s having one of the best seasons of his career.

That’s right – Ward might not be hitting for power, but he’s getting on base at a preposterous clip. His 18.8% walk rate is third in baseball. His .403 OBP is fifth. He’s not barely surviving on some weird BABIP spike or doing anything visibly unsustainable. He just started swinging slower and making more contact, more or less, and the results have been downright incredible; his 126 wRC+ would be the second-best mark of his career if he can sustain it the rest of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s no secret that I’m an obsessive chronicler of bunting in the big leagues. Very good and very bad bunts frequently populate my Five Things column. I’ve written about the best and worst bunts you’ll see in a season, the optimal strategy for bunting in extras, and any number of other interesting bunting-related things – or at least, bunting-related things that are interesting to me. And there’s another great bunting topic to write about right this instant. See, bunts are making a comeback, and for once, they’re doing it for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. So let’s celebrate the return of the bunt – and also think about why it’s back.

So far this year, batters have bunted the ball into play (or struck out by bunting the ball foul) 640 times. That’s 0.9% of all the plate appearances in the majors in 2026, and while that might not sound like much, it’s a new high in the universal DH era, 25% higher than the 2025 season, which was itself the bunt-heaviest year in that stretch at 0.7%. There were a lot more bunts in the days when pitchers batted in National League parks, of course. But if you limit the search to American League parks and reach into the past, a clear trend emerges. Bunting declined as teams thought more about how bad sacrificing an out is. But then it bottomed out, and now teams are starting to bunt more often:

This is just a chart of how many bunts there are, not how good those bunts have been. In fact, the reason the bunt started to decline in the first place is that many bunts were counterproductive. Sacrificing a runner from first to second at the cost of an out is usually a bad decision on the run-scoring front. It might be a fine fail case – if you fail to bunt for a hit and accidentally sacrifice, that’s not so bad – but pure surrender bunts only make sense in very limited circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »