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Cal Raleigh has a lot of power. That’s always been his calling card, at least on offense. In each of his three full major league seasons, he’s posted a below-average OBP and an above-average offensive line. In cavernous T-Mobile Park, the hardest place to hit in baseball, his 34 home runs and .436 slugging percentage in 2024 were downright titanic. This year, though, he’s tapped into something new.

Or, well, his results are absolutely something new. One very interesting thing about Raleigh’s spectacular 2025: It hasn’t come from more raw power. Maximum exit velocity? Nothing new for Raleigh. Neither is his average exit velocity, nor his hard-hit rate, both of which are broadly in line with 2024. His bat speed is the same. When he’s trying to hit a home run, he’s doing it the way he always has.

But while his ability to hit baseballs hard might be the same as it’s always been, he’s demonstrating that ability more often than ever before. He’s both putting the ball in the air and pulling his elevated contact more frequently, and more of his batted balls are barrels, too. He’s striking out less frequently, with a career-high contact rate and career-low swinging strike rate.

Nothing is ever so simple that it’s driven by one thing, but I think there’s one important change driving Raleigh’s surge. It’s something he’s been working toward for a few years, in fact. When Raleigh is ahead in the count and pitchers throw him meatballs over the heart of the plate, he’s swinging less than ever before:

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Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Actually, the title is a misnomer today. A week of baseball is great, but you know what else is great? A single game of baseball. Monday night, Paul Skenes and the Pirates took on the scalding-hot Mets. It was one of the most exciting matchups we’ll get all regular season, pitting my pick for the best pitcher in baseball against one of the top offenses in the game. This being baseball, the best pregame matchups don’t always lead to the most exciting events. This time, however, the hype was warranted, and the game was both delightful and delightfully weird. So with apologies to Zach Lowe for changing the format he created, let’s try this again: Welcome to Five Things I Liked During The Mets Pirates Game From Monday.

1. My Skenes vs. Your Team
It’s downright crazy how good Skenes is. He’s so fun to watch, at least as long as he isn’t making your team look silly. He throws everything, and all of it is nasty. He drew swinging strikes on five different pitch types, and some of them left batters baffled:

Juan Soto doesn’t look like that very often. But that’s because pitchers like Skenes also don’t come around very often. Seriously, this pitch was 94 miles an hour?! This is unfair:

The Mets hassled Skenes repeatedly throughout his six innings. He surrendered six hits, tying a career high, and walked three. But when there were runners on base, Skenes found another gear. Five of his six strikeouts came with men on. He threw harder, pitched for whiffs, and generally flummoxed his opponents. He’s not always going to allow only one run, but despite the Mets finding occasional cracks in his armor, one earned run felt like a fair result. When Skenes is on the mound, the other team starts at a disadvantage. Read the rest of this entry »

They say that the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have one. In that spirit, I’d like to start today’s article with a confession: I have a Trent Grisham evaluation problem. It feels good to say it! I’ve had this problem for years. Ever since he burst onto the scene in San Diego with two straight seasons of good hitting and great fielding, I’ve consistently overestimated his future trajectory. I put him on the first cut of my trade value list every year. I think of him as a starter even when the teams that employ him don’t.

I know all of this. When I’ve looked at Grisham in the past, I’ve seen an excellent player even when others haven’t, and I understand that this bias shades my evaluation. But just when I thought I was kicking the habit, Grisham goes and does something like this and pulls me right back in. Through Monday’s action, the first quarter of the season, he’s hitting a ludicrous .288/.373/.663, and while that’s not any reasonable hitter’s slugging percentage, he’s absolutely tattooing the ball, posting career high marks in barrel rate, hard-hit rate, xwOBACON, xSLG, average exit velocity… You get the idea, he’s just hitting everything very hard at the moment.

Now, as a reformed Grishamite, I have to tell you that hitting the ball hard isn’t one of Grisham’s shortcomings. Not quite like this, of course, because the only person who regularly hits like this is Aaron Judge, but he’s always been a threat to go deep. Grisham might have a low-ish wRC+ over the past three years, but the problem has been the quantity of his hits rather than the quality. Even while he scuffled mightily, he slugged roughly 20 homers per 600 plate appearances. He doesn’t always put the ball in play, but when he does, he makes it count.

Grisham also forces pitchers to come to him. He’s among the league’s best when it comes to chase rate, and he’s walking at a double digit clip. Again, though, I have to tell you that this isn’t new. Grisham’s chase rate is higher than it was last year, and his walk rate is below his career average. Unlike your typical outfielder with a below-average batting line, this isn’t an issue of Grisham never seeing a slider he doesn’t like. He’s quite willing to work a count if pitchers won’t challenge him in the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever struck up a conversation with a stranger at the ballpark, you might have noticed that the FanGraphs readers are easy to spot. Let’s say you find yourself discussing the Yankees. A FanGraphs reader might ponder whether the 30-point gap between Paul Goldschmidt’s wOBA and xwOBA will catch up to him, while a non-reader is more likely to fret over whether Brian Cashman is too reliant on analytics when constructing the team’s roster. But sometimes, the two groups ask the same thing. So today, let’s consider one of those broad questions: Should teams be intentionally walking Aaron Judge more often?

Admit it. You’ve wondered. If you’re a Yankees fan, you’ve wondered just how long Judge is going to be allowed to hit in big spots. If you’re a fan of the team the Yankees are playing, you’ve wondered how your team’s manager ought to solve this impossible puzzle. And if you’re a neutral fan, well, Aaron Judge is the biggest story in baseball right now. He’s having one of the best offensive stretches in the history of the game. Don’t you want to know if there’s anything that can be done about it?

Ever since Barry Bonds broke the sport in the early 2000s, every hot streak in baseball comes with questions about the “Bonds treatment.” Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean 120 intentional walks, Bonds’ tally in 2004 and the single-season record. (It’s the single-season record by 52 walks. Second place? Barry Bonds. Third place? Barry Bonds.) The best non-Bonds total was Willie McCovey’s 45 in 1969. The most Judge has ever racked up in a single season is a measly 20. So the question isn’t whether teams should treat him like Bonds, because no, they shouldn’t. But should they treat him like McCovey? And more importantly, how should opposing managers handle Judge in a playoff game, when all the chips are on the table? Let’s do some math. 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. For once, I don’t have a fistful of double plays to show you. I don’t even have that many great catches. The baseball I watched this week was disjointed and messy, the regular season at its finest. Making the easy plays tough? We’ve got that. Bringing in your lefty to face their righty slugger? Got that too. Doubles that weren’t? Collisions between out-of-position players? Yes and yes. So thanks Zach Lowe for the wonderful article format, and let’s get started.

1. Tell ‘Em, Wash
I mean, how hard could first base be? Incredibly hard, of course. The Red Sox and Rangers are both on to their respective Plan Bs at first base after Triston Casas ruptured his patellar tendon and Jake Burger got sent down to Triple-A. No big deal defensively, right? Each team plugged in a utility player — Romy Gonzalez for Boston and Josh Smith for Texas — and moved on with life. Look how easy first is:

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Jackson Chourio is a star. You can see it the second he steps to the plate. He looks like he’s always been in a batter’s box, like hitting comes as easily as breathing. He has easy power and shockingly good contact skills for someone who swings so hard. So, uh, why can’t he take a walk?

Fine, that’s hyperbole. It’s May 8, 38 games into the season, and he’s walked three times in 165 plate appearances. That works out to a 1.8% walk rate, the third lowest among qualified hitters. Jacob Wilson? He’s walked six times already. Michael Harris II? Four walks in fewer games. Name a guy you think can’t walk, with the exception of platoon players Kerry Carpenter and Michael Massey, and you can be sure that Chourio is walking meaningfully less than they are. Chourio didn’t walk a ton in 2024 – his 6.8% walk rate was in the 31st percentile – but this is something different entirely.

Naturally, when I started writing this piece before Tuesday’s game, Chourio had two walks in 161 plate appearances for the lowest walk rate in baseball, but then he walked his second time up in the Brewers’ 9-1 loss to the Astros. (For the rest of this article, I’ll be using stats as of the start of play on Tuesday.) Anyway, the point still stands: Chourio isn’t walking. What’s going on here? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I investigated the increasing divergence between the way pitchers approach same-handed and opposite-handed batters. I learned that pitchers across the league are varying their arsenals more and more every year. But that was a broad look, and I had some follow-up questions. Mainly, who specifically? Which teams? Which players? And how? Today, I’ll provide some answers.

As a refresher, I calculated what I’m calling “adaptation score” by comparing how frequently a pitcher uses his top-two offerings, both against same-handed and opposite-handed batters. Adaptation score is simply the difference between how frequently a pitcher throws his two best pitches when he has the platoon advantage and how often he throws those same two pitches when the batter has the edge. I split the data up by teams to see who was driving the move. First, we’ve got the five most and least adaptable teams in 2025:

Not much to see here. The Dodgers’ being on the bottom might suggest that adaptation is bad, even. But truthfully, there’s a big element we’re missing in looking at the data this way: personnel. Changing who’s on your team, even if you have the same philosophy, can change how you score in this metric. The Dodgers were in the middle of the pack last year when it came to adaptation score. Then they overhauled their pitching staff and ended up here.
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It isn’t supposed to be this easy. When the Phillies traded for Jesús Luzardo over the winter, they did so with the understanding that he wouldn’t be an ace right from the jump. He was coming off a rough and injured 2024, he’d only hit 20 starts in a season once in his career, and every warning light you could possibly imagine was flashing – worst stuff model grades of his career, lowest strikeout rate, lowest whiff rate, highest hard-hit rate.

Those warning signs explain why the Phillies were able to acquire Luzardo for relative peanuts. It also explains why our projection systems were unenthused by him heading into this year, projecting a 4.19 ERA, a distant fifth among Philadelphia’s starters. No one doubts Luzardo’s potential, but after six seasons and 500 innings (itself not a great sign) of roughly league-average work, well, at some point you are what you are.

Right, yeah, Luzardo’s been the best pitcher on the Phillies this year and one of the best pitchers in baseball. I’m not as surprised as I thought I’d be. But given that we’re a quarter of the way through the season and his ERA and FIP are both below 2.00, I think it’s time to take a closer look at what he’s doing differently.
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