Author Archive

The Ongoing Battle for the Top of the Strike Zone

Michael McLoone, Eric Canha, and Brian Fluharty-Imagn Images

There’s a war going on across major league baseball. It’s been waged over decades, in fact, between two opposing factions of the game. Pitchers, at times aided by their catchers, want to own the top of the strike zone, the place where their fastballs have the easiest time missing bats. Hitters want to hit home runs, and the top of the zone is an ideal launching pad. But while both sides would dearly love to own the territory, they can’t both win at once. What follows are some dispatches from the front, the latest moves and counter-moves by some of the game’s best in this contested space.

Chad Patrick lives at the top of the zone. No pitcher in baseball throws upstairs fastballs more frequently. He might not seem like the type. He’s a soft tosser in the context of the modern major leagues, sitting in the low 90s with his four-seamer and sinker, and the high 80s with his cutter. But for Patrick, shape is more important than velocity.

As Alex Chamberlain has extensively explained, the plane of a pitch when it reaches home plate is a key determinant of its success. That’s most true at the top of the zone for four-seamers. Pitches that come in high and flat act like optical illusions – the average fastball thrown to that area falls more, because it’s falling at a steeper angle. Read the rest of this entry »


Luis Torrens Has Arrived, Just a Few Years Late

Brad Mills-Imagn Images

If, like me, you’re a weird baseball transactions sicko, you probably first heard of Luis Torrens at the tail end of 2016. That’s when the Padres, in the midst of an A.J. Preller-led teardown, shocked baseball by taking three low-minors players in the Rule 5 Draft and putting them all on the major league roster for 2017. It was a bold, unheard of tactic. The three players – Allen Córdoba, Miguel Díaz, and Torrens – were clearly not ready for the majors. Torrens, the most advanced of the trio, was 21 and had around 200 plate appearances of full-season minor league ball under his belt, and he was still learning his new position of catcher.

That trio was famously overmatched in 2017. Torrens racked up -1.3 WAR in 139 plate appearances, Córdoba -1.0 WAR in 227 of his own, and Diaz -0.7 WAR in 41 2/3 innings pitched. The whole experiment was an embarrassment for the league, and no one has since tried similar chicanery. The Padres sent them down after the season, as soon as they were eligible to do so without having to return them to their previous organizations; Torrens and Córdoba spent all of 2018 in the minors, and both struggled in A Ball. Torrens did finally return to the majors as a backup in 2019, but Preller flipped him to Seattle a year later and he slid into journeyman status. From 2019 through 2023, he bounced around, rarely getting consistent playing time, ending up with 668 plate appearances, a 92 wRC+, and -0.4 WAR thanks to iffy defense.

I’ve used what San Diego did in this particular Rule 5 Draft as a cautionary tale when people ask me about the risks of rushing low-level minor leaguers to The Show. I firmly believe that this Rule 5 manipulation interrupted each of their career arcs – they just weren’t ready for the challenge, which is hardly unexpected given where they’d been playing. Each was a promising prospect, but in the six years after the Padres selected them, the amount of time you’d expect them to be under team control, they combined for -3.2 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »


Can the Diamondbacks Survive Their Rotation Troubles?

Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

The Diamondbacks did things the “right way,” to the extent that the right way means anything. After making the World Series unexpectedly in 2023, they went into the offseason with an exciting group of hitters and an unsettled rotation, so they opened the vault and signed two of the top-10 free agents that year — Eduardo Rodriguez and Jordan Montgomery — both starting pitchers. When those two flamed out in 2024 but the hitters kept producing, they went back to the well and signed Corbin Burnes, another marquee option. They refused to include top starting prospects in trades. They already had Zac Gallen and Merrill Kelly in the fold. This is how you build a top rotation.

Er, well, this is a way that you can build a top rotation, but this particular iteration hasn’t panned out. In Phoenix, things are falling apart on the mound. Let’s look through Arizona’s problem rotation spots (read: everyone other than Kelly) and see if we can find a solution for each before it’s too late for the team’s 2025 season.

Corbin Burnes

The Problem: Injury
Burnes got off to a slow start in the desert, but like the weather in his new place of work, he was heating up as the year wore on. His cutter isn’t quite the devastating weapon it was during his 2021 Cy Young season, but it’s still a menace. He’s still one of the best in the business when it comes to spinning breaking balls. A well-located Burnes curveball is an absolute masterpiece, a pitch that will make you question the very basics of physics and reality.

In Burnes’ most recent four starts, he’s gone nuclear: 31% strikeout rate, 2.19 ERA, 2.67 FIP. He’d also been stacking up volume: Three of his past five starts lasted seven innings. But the most recent start ended prematurely in the fifth inning, when Burnes felt sharp tightness in his elbow, saw his velocity drop, and left the game. Burnes said after the game that he didn’t know the severity of the injury, telling reporters, “I’ve never had anything like it before, so I really have nothing to compare it to.”
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Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 6/2/25

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Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, May 30

Tim Heitman-Imagn Images

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Memorial Day marks the point at which we’re a third of the way through the season, a great time to take stock of how preseason story lines have fared in the light of the regular season day. The Orioles might be bad. The Phillies and Tigers might be great. The Rockies might be the worst team of all time. Aaron Judge might be an alien. We’ve learned a lot so far – but none of those things affect the day-to-day experience of watching baseball. That’s what I like about it so much – you can turn on a random game, completely ignore any of those overarching narratives, and still see something delightful. So this week, let’s celebrate the little things that don’t necessarily win games but do consistently bring a smile to my face. With my customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer for his basketball column that inspired this one, let’s dive in.

1. Determination
I’ve always been fascinated by Nick Allen, who blends elite shortstop defense with a completely powerless approach to offense. That combination got him traded to the Braves this winter to play a utility infielder role, but he outplayed Orlando Arcia in spring training to claim the starting job, and he’s been running with it. Not on offense – his 68 wRC+ is both mortifying and a career high – but on defense, he’s never been better.

Allen’s defense is many things, but most importantly to me, it’s kinetic. He doesn’t give up on plays. He’s always moving. He’ll throw from any platform, any arm angle, jump or twist or slide to get more force behind it. He’s graceful around second base, but it’s a nervous kind of grace, a ballet dancer after four shots of espresso. And if something gets in his way, he’ll just run through it:

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The Run Expectancy Matrix, Reloaded for the 2020s

Gary A. Vasquez-Imagn Images

This is a public service post of sorts. If you’re like me, when you type “Run Ex” into Google, it will auto-complete to “Run Expectancy Matrix.” It knows what I want – a mathematical description of how likely teams are to score in a given situation, in aggregate. I use this extensively in analysis, and I also use it in my head when I’m watching a game. First and third, down a run? That’s pretty good with no outs, but isn’t amazing with two.

There’s just one problem with that Google search: It’s all old data. Oh, you can find tables from The Book. You can find charts that are current through 2019. There’s a Pitcher List article that I use a lot — shout out to Dylan Drummey, great work — but that’s only current through 2022. And baseball is changing so dang much. Rather than keep using old information, I thought I’d update it for 2025 and give you some charts from past years while I’m at it, so that you can understand the changing run environment and use them for your own purposes if you so desire.

First things first: Let’s talk methodology. I downloaded play-by-play logs for all regular season games played between 2021 and 2025. For each play, I noted the runners on base, the number of outs, and then how many runs scored between that moment and the end of the inning. I did this for the first eight innings of each game, excluding the ninth and extras, because those innings don’t offer unbiased estimates of how many runs might score. Teams sometimes play to the score, and the home team stops scoring after the winning run. If you have the bases loaded and no one out in the bottom of the ninth, one run will usually end it, and that provides an inaccurate picture of run scoring. That’s also why I skipped 2020; the seven-inning doubleheaders and new extra innings rules produced a pile of crazy results, and the season was quite short anyway. No point in trying to wade through that maze. Read the rest of this entry »


The Math Behind the Extra Innings Home Field Disadvantage

Joe Nicholson-USA TODAY Sports

Home teams don’t win enough in extra innings. It’s one of the most persistent mysteries of the last five years of baseball. Before the 2020 season, MLB changed the extra innings rules to start each half of each extra frame with a runner on second base. (This only occurs during the regular season, which means the 18-inning ALDS tilt between the Mariners and the Astros in the picture above didn’t actually feature zombie runners, but the shot was too good to pass up.) They did so to lessen the wear and tear on pitchers, and keep games to a manageable length. Almost certainly, though, they weren’t planning on diminishing home field advantage while they were at it.

In recent years, Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus has extensively documented the plight of the home team. Connelly Doan measured the incidence of bunts in extra innings and compared the observed rate to a theoretical optimum. Earlier this month, Jay Jaffe dove into the details and noted that strikeouts and walks are a key point of difference between regulation frames and bonus baseball. These all explain the differing dynamics present in extras. But there’s one question I haven’t seen answered: How exactly does this work in practice? Are home teams scoring too little? Are away teams scoring too much? Do home teams play the situations improperly? I set out to answer these questions empirically, using all the data we have on extra innings, to get a sense of where theory and practice diverge.

The theory of extra inning scoring is relatively simple. I laid it out in 2020, and the math still works. You can take a run expectancy chart, start with a runner on second and no one out, and figure out how many runs teams score in that situation in general. If you want to get fancy, you can even find a distribution: how often they score one run, two runs, no runs, and so on. For example, I can tell you that from 2020 to 2025, excluding the ninth inning and extra innings, teams that put a runner on second base with no one out went on to score 0.99 runs per inning. Read the rest of this entry »


The Multifaceted Tarik Skubal

Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images

In 2024, Tarik Skubal won the American League Cy Young. It was unanimous, and deservedly so. However many superlatives you can think of for his production, he probably deserved them. He shouldered a heavy workload, combined devastating movement and velocity with great command, and led the Tigers to the playoffs in the bargain. It’s the kind of year that stands as the best season of many players’ careers.

That might sound like I’m calling Skubal a one hit wonder, but I’m absolutely not. We projected him to be the best pitcher in baseball before the season started. We also projected him to strike out fewer batters, walk more, allow more home runs, and post a higher ERA and FIP than he did in 2024. You can be great and still worse than Skubal was in 2024. In fact, almost all great pitchers are worse than he was last year. It’s hard to be that good!

You’ll note that I didn’t say it’s impossible to be that good. That’s because, uh, have you seen Tarik Skubal pitch this year? His statistics sound almost made up. He’s the class of baseball, very clearly the best pitcher in the game this year. Of course, if you’ve kept up with our leaderboards and watched highlights, I’m not telling you anything new. But on the occasion of the best game of Skubal’s career, I thought it would be fun to dig into his marvelous season and just admire it for a bit. Tarik Skubal is everything, everywhere, all at once. His 2025 is the best in every way it’s possible to be the best. We don’t always have to wonder whether something is sustainable. Sometimes we can just appreciate it. Read the rest of this entry »


Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week, May 23

D. Ross Cameron-Imagn Images

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I’ll keep the introduction short today, because I’m getting ready to travel to St. Louis for a game with my dad and uncle. There’s a Masyn Winn bobblehead ticketed for my memorabilia shelf – and a pile of enjoyable plays to recap before I can go get it. So, of course, thank you to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose NBA columns of likes and dislikes inspired this one, and let’s get started.

1. The Weekend of Wilmer
I have a soft spot for Wilmer Flores through a sheer fluke of geography. I lived in New York during his Mets tenure, and I moved to San Francisco around the same time he did. His walk-up music has been the same for the last decade: the Friends theme song. It’s a fan favorite and even comes with a good story. He’s the quintessential role player, a guy that most teams would love to have but no team needs to have. He’s been pitching in across the diamond, albeit in decreasingly difficult defensive roles, that whole time. With the exception of a down 2024, he’s been consistently valuable, but he’s never been a star – the closest thing I know to a Wilmer Flores highlight is his charming sadness when he thought he was getting traded.

For just one weekend, though, that all changed. Flores has been improbably dueling with Aaron Judge for the major league RBI lead throughout the first eight weeks of the season. RBI might not be a great predictive stat, and it might not be a great stat overall, but it definitely matters to players. Fancier versions of measuring contextual offense – WPA, RE24, and so on – all think that Flores has been a top 10 run producer this year, too. He’d fallen behind Judge by just a hair in those races – and probably has no chance at keeping up all season. I mean, have you seen Aaron Judge? But none of that mattered when the Giants played the A’s last weekend.
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Isaac Paredes Is Out in Front

Thomas Shea-Imagn Images

Everyone should have one weird player they love. If I were commissioner of baseball, this would be part of my pitch to fans. There are a million different ways to succeed in this sport we all love, and if you only like the guys who swing hard, throw fast, and run well, you’d miss the splashes of color that dot the sport. Tyler Rogers pitches upside down. Jose Altuve is small but mighty. Luis Arraez swings slowly on purpose. Then you’ve got my personal favorite, Isaac Paredes, who is among the league leaders in WAR thanks to his one weird trick.

That weird trick is incredibly valuable: pulling the ball in the air. Take a look at the distribution of his aerial contact this year:

Paredes isn’t going to wow you with barrels. His hard-hit rate is among the league’s lowest. Many of those home runs look farcical. This one would be out of only five parks:

I know, I know, this isn’t news. I’ve been writing about Paredes’ pull-only power for years, marveling at his ability to rack up star-level production with journeyman-level raw tools. Since the start of the 2022 season, when he first became an everyday regular, he’s been worth about as much WAR as Bryce Harper (11.9 to Harper’s 12.4) in about as many plate appearances (1,798 to Harper’s 1,818). Some of that is defense, but even if you want to compare him on the offensive end, he’s matched Carlos Correa, Anthony Santander, and Corbin Carroll at the plate. Read the rest of this entry »