David Hamilton doesn’t wait casually at first base. He lurks, waiting for the slightest opening to take off. Watch an at-bat where Hamilton is on the bases, and he’s often as much a point of discussion as the man at the plate. Take the game between the Red Sox and Guardians on September 1, for example. Hamilton pinch-ran for Carlos Narváez with Connor Wong at the plate. Wong fouled off a bunt for strike one with the entire defense focused on Hamilton at first base. Then Hamilton stole second on the next pitch even with the catcher, pitcher, and infielders all fixed on his every move.

Hamilton isn’t the most prolific basestealer in the majors. He isn’t the most successful. But he is the baserunner who tries to steal most frequently, after adjusting for opportunities, and so he’s a great poster boy for what I’d like to talk about today: stolen base opportunities and takeoff rate.

It doesn’t take much to make a stolen base possible, just a runner and an open base. You do need both of those, though. Draw a walk to load the bases, and you’re not attempting a steal without something very strange going on. Stolen base opportunities aren’t easy to find in a box score or a game recap. They’re the negative space of baseball – no one’s counting them, and it’s easier to see where they aren’t than where they are. So, uh, I counted them. Read the rest of this entry »

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Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. You might think that this September is a poor one for baseball drama. The playoff spots in both leagues are fairly decided, give or take a bit of wobbliness from the perpetually star-crossed Mariners and Mets. Few division titles are in play – maybe the NL West or AL East, but neither feels all that likely to flip. But that’s okay, because even the teams that are probably out of it can be fun to watch, and even the teams that are already in it still have seeding to vie for. This week, I’ve turned my eye to a few teams with intriguing storylines in the month to come. I’m focusing my baseball viewing on playoff hopefuls, and there’s plenty to like. So with our customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, let’s talk baseball.

1. McLean (and Horton and Waldrep and…) Fever
One of my favorite baseball archetypes is the shooting star rookie ace. You know what I’m talking about if it’s happened to your team. Some rookie, often a heralded prospect, makes a mid-season debut and just has it. Their fastball? Unbeatable. Their breaking stuff? It just disappears! And that poise – it’s like they’ve been pitching in the majors for years, not weeks.

Whether you want to harken back to Fernando Valenzuela or rely on a more personally resonant example – 2013 Michael Wacha is my touchstone here – there’s just something special about these meteoric talents. At some point, they’re due for a downturn. How could they not be? It happens to everyone eventually. But until then, we might as well enjoy the ride. Read the rest of this entry »

I was doing some research on hitting the ball in the air the other way when I came across this striking leaderboard:

The five guys who hit the ball hardest the other way when they lift it? Four enormous sluggers and Brice Turang. I was overjoyed by this result at first. I wanted to find a hitter who gets to more power to the opposite field than to the pull side. If Turang is hitting the ball this hard to the opposite side, hard enough to number among the top sluggers in the game, surely it’s because of some particular feature of his swing that manifests only to the opposite field. Let’s just add in pull-side average exit velocity and…

Wait, what the?! Turang hits the ball as hard as Alonso? He has more pull power than Kurtz? This merits further investigation. Luckily, FanGraphs has already been all over it. Esteban Rivera wrote about Turang’s increased bat speed all the way back in May. Michael Baumann highlighted Turang as a potential elevate-and-celebrate candidate. Over at Baseball Prospectus, Timothy Jackson noted that Turang’s bat speed gains have stuck. In fact, his 4.2-mph increase in average swing speed is the largest improvement in the sport. All those gains have brought his swing speed all the way up to… the 22nd percentile. Huh? The guys on that leaderboard with him are in the 94th, 94th, 98th, and 92nd percentiles, respectively. Clearly, swinging harder can’t be the only explanation for Turang’s breakout performance. Let’s go a little deeper than “bat faster ball go far,” shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

I’d like to present the meatball-iest pitch thrown so far in 2025:

I know, I know! I said that, but it’s just a foul ball. Hear me out, though, because I can put some data behind my claim. Here at FanGraphs, PitchingBot, our in-house pitch modeling system, looks at every single pitch thrown, regresses it against a huge database of past pitches, and uses some mathematical ingenuity to turn that into the expected outcomes of the pitch. That’s not the same as knowing which pitch is most likely to turn into a home run, but luckily, a good bit of mathematical wrangling can turn pitch grades into home run percentages.

Last year, I worked out the rough contours of converting PitchingBot grades into home run likelihood. This year, I’ve expanded that methodology to try to learn a little bit more about the pitchers doing the meatballing. If you’d like to skip through the how, you can head right down to the table labeled “Meatball Mongers.” If you’re here for the nitty gritty of turning pitch metrics into home run likelihood, though, here’s how I did it.

That Trent Thornton fastball had a lot of things working against it, and those things help explain how PitchingBot estimates the chances that a pitch will be hit for a home run. PitchingBot has a flowchart that explains how the model works. Here’s how the system assesses every pitch it grades:

Hey, a convenient “start here” label! How great! The “swing model” takes location, count, pitch type, movement, platoon matchups, and pretty much everything else you can imagine into account and guesses at the likelihood of a batter swinging at each pitch. That Thornton fastball was down the middle in an 0-1 count, and it’s not a particularly deceptive offering. In other words, hitters often swing at fastballs like that – 92.7% of the time, per PitchingBot’s model. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Verlander’s 2025 season isn’t going to be one for the history books. After his second stint with the Astros ended with a whimper (17 starts and a 5.48 ERA in 2024), he signed a one-year deal with the Giants that felt like a potential career capstone. At 42 and with a résumé that’s already a stone cold lock for Cooperstown, this year was never going to be about accumulating more statistics. When he started the year 0-8 with a 4.99 ERA, it felt like the final act of his career. No one fights off time forever, not even the seemingly ageless Verlander.

Anyway, here’s a leaderboard of the pitchers with the most WAR in the last 30 days:

Now, did I leave ERA out of this table on purpose? I sure did – ERA is noisy in small samples anyway, but mostly Verlander’s is just less impressive than the rest of this group. He’s at 4.18 in that span and 4.55 for the season, despite solid strikeout, walk, and home run numbers. He’s certainly not one of the best 10 starters in baseball, regardless of what that leaderboard says. But he’s been a solid big league starter, undoubtedly, and that in itself is pretty remarkable given how things looked a few months ago. Read the rest of this entry »

A warning up top: This article is about seeking and not finding, about the unique ways that data can mislead you. The hero doesn’t win in the end – unless the hero is stochastic randomness and I’m the villain, but I don’t like that telling of the tale. It all started with an innocuous question: Can we tell which types of hitters are streaky?

I approached this question in an article about Michael Harris II’s rampage through July and August. I took a cursory look at it and set it aside for future investigation after not finding any obvious effects right away. To delve more deeply, I had to come up with a definition of streakiness to test, and so I set about doing so.

My chosen method was to look at 20-game stretches to determine hot and cold streaks, then look at performance in the following 20 games to see which types of players were more prone to “stay hot” or “stay cold.” I started throwing out definitions and samples: 2021-2024, minimum 400 plate appearances on the season as a whole, overlapping sampling (so check games 1-20 vs. 21-40, 2-21 vs. 22-41, and so on), wOBA as my relevant offensive statistic, 50 points of wOBA deviation against seasonal average to convey hot or cold, 40-PA minimum per 20-game set to avoid weird pinch-hitting anomalies, throw out games with no plate appearances to skip defensive replacements — the list goes on and on. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets are the best Rorschach test in baseball right now. You can see almost anything you want to when you look at them. A band of high-paid underachievers? Sure. A great team in a rough stretch? Yup. A triumph of pitching development? Sure thing, but also a cautionary tale about what happens when you don’t have enough starters to get through the season. Each of those topics – and plenty more – are worth a closer look. But in watching the Mets in recent weeks, I’ve been struck by the same observation every time I watch a game. That observation? Man, Francisco Lindor is good.

Lindor has been right at the center of the Mets’ mid-summer meltdown. After starting the season as hot as he ever has, he posted two straight abysmal months in June and July while the team swooned in sympathy. I’m not sure you understand quite how bad it was, so let’s look at the numbers. He hit a desultory .205/.258/.371 over those two months, good for a 77 wRC+. So imagine my surprise when I looked at this year’s hitting leaderboard and saw Lindor’s 4.7 WAR in 11th place.

Now, am I writing an article to tell you that Francisco Lindor is good? I mean, kind of. More than that, though, I’m thinking of this as an appreciation post. Lindor’s year-to-year consistency is otherworldly. He’s putting the finishing touches on his fourth straight five-win campaign, all with wRC+ marks between 121 and 137. He’s doing it without it ever feeling like it’s unsustainable. So let’s appreciate that greatness and take a look at what this year’s roller coaster says about Lindor’s time in Queens more broadly. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Baltimore Orioles came into this year with a few goals. Foremost among them: reach the playoffs, find reliable pitching, and sign some of their young core to contract extensions. Goal one is out of the question. Goal two is up in the air. But goal three? Goal three is going strong after the Orioles and Samuel Basallo agreed to an eight-year, $67 million contract extension, with a team option and escalators that could push the total value to $88.5 million. Andy Kostka of The Baltimore Banner first reported the deal.

Basallo, currently the third overall prospect in baseball, debuted in the majors last week after a whirlwind tour of the minor leagues. He overpowered A-ball at 18 in 2023, mastered Double-A in 2024, and was hitting .270/.377/.589, good for a 150 wRC+, in Triple-A before the O’s called him up. He’s been far younger than his opposition at every level, and it just hasn’t mattered; his colossal raw power has papered over any weaknesses or growing pains again and again.

Throughout his ascension through the prospect ranks, the biggest question about Basallo has been whether he’ll stick behind home plate or have to move to a less demanding defensive position, likely first base. While Basallo’s offensive performance has been consistently excellent, his defense hasn’t been quite so exciting. A stress fracture in his elbow has slowed him, costing him valuable reps at catcher. He played DH about as frequently as he caught in Triple-A this year, and the same was true in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »