Every time I watch Oneil Cruz hit, I end up thinking about pull rate. It seems like he’s always using his long arms to yank a ball into right field even though the pitch came in all the way on the outside corner. I’m not quite right, though. According to our leaderboards, Cruz ranks 35th among all qualified players in pull rate. According to Statcast, he’s at 55th, not even in the top third. Maybe it’s just that seeing someone do something as bonkers as this can warp your perspective:

But there is more than one way to think about pull rate. Sometimes you get jammed. Sometimes you have to hit the ball where it’s pitched. Sometimes the situation demands that you shorten up and sell out for contact. Those three examples might tell us a bit less about the intent behind your swing, because you didn’t get to execute your plan. We have ways to throw them out. Today, we’ll look into players whose overall pull rate is notably different from their pull rate when they square up the ball. As a refresher, Statcast plugs the respective speeds of the ball and the bat into a formula to determine the maximum possible exit velocity, and if the actual EV is at least 80% of that number, it’s considered squared up.

I pulled numbers from 2023 through 2025 for each player who has squared up at least 250 balls during that stretch. As you’d expect, the numbers are mostly pretty similar. Of the 219 players in the sample, 165 of them have a difference between their overall pull rate and their squared-up pull rate that’s below three percentage points. No player has a pull rate when squaring the ball up that’s more than 6.5 percentage points off their overall pull rate, but there are a few interesting names here. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, the Rocket City Trash Pandas shut out Pensacola, 9-0, in the Southern League. In the Midwest League, the Quad Cities River Bandits eked out a 7-6 win over the Dayton Dragons. And in the big leagues, television cameras captured an enormous raccoon traipsing through the Citi Field seats during the seventh inning of the Mets-Pirates game. It was a good day for raccoons at the ballpark.

The major league raccoon went down one row of seats in center field, then back across the next row up, looking for all the world like it was just searching for its seat. “I’m scared of raccoons,” said SNY broadcaster Ron Darling, stammering slightly. The brief clip makes it look like the Citi Field raccoon was simply out for a late-night stroll, not bothering anybody. It turns out there’s more to the story. Read the rest of this entry »

Rich Hill has a chance. On Tuesday, the Royals announced they had agreed to a minor league deal with the 45-year-old left-handed starter. He began his professional career in 2002 with the Boise Hawks, who are no longer part of affiliated baseball. Hill’s journey from the majors to independent ball, then back to a career renaissance in his late 30s is one of the game’s true feel-good stories, and it’s not over yet. If he makes it to Kansas City, he’ll tie Edwin Jackson as the most useful player on Immaculate Grid, with appearances for 14 different major league teams. However, that’s by no means a sure thing.

Hill started the 2015 season – yes, this historical overview section is skipping over the first 13 years of Hill’s professional career – with the Long Island Ducks of the Atlantic League. The Red Sox signed him that August, and from 2015 to 2020, he went 43-22 with a 2.92 ERA and 3.48 FIP. Over that stretch, relying (sometimes exclusively) on a four-seamer that averaged under 90 mph and a loopy curveball, Hill put up 10.7 WAR, struck out nearly 29% of the batters he faced, and pitched in two World Series to a 1.80 ERA.

The 2021 season, when Hill was 41, marks a dividing line. Over the past four seasons, he owns a 4.51 ERA with a 4.42 FIP and a 4.52 xFIP. His strikeout rate has fallen to 21.1%. In 2023, Hill posted a 4.76 ERA with the Pirates, then imploded after being traded to the Padres at the deadline, running an 8.23 ERA and 6.77 FIP over 10 appearances. He sat out the beginning of the 2024 season to spend time with his family, then joined the Red Sox in August, putting up a 4.91 ERA with ugly peripherals over four appearances and 3 2/3 innings. For the first time, his fastball didn’t reach 90 mph even once. The team released him in early September. Read the rest of this entry »

When I go jogging, I wrap a rubber band around my keys so they don’t jingle in my pocket. I put my phone in a different pocket, an extra one I sewed into the front of my shorts so it’s close enough that it won’t tug on the headphone cord. I tuck the ends of my shoelaces in above the tongue so they don’t flop all over the place. I go to all this trouble for two reasons. First, I’m a sensitive soul. Second, I don’t really love running. I love the feeling of having run, but every step is a fight against the voice in my head telling me that I should just stop because running is for suckers. After a mile or so, any one of those slight annoyances – jangling keys, slight tugging on my earbuds, shoelaces flapping against my shoes – will start to bother me so much that I’ll give in to that very obvious truth.

I’m sharing this preamble with you because although I normally write about small, obscure subjects, what I’m writing about today is so small and so obscure that I feel like I owe you an explanation as to why I noticed it at all. As I hope I’ve made clear, I noticed it because I’m weird. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2019, Rafael Devers has put up 25.2 WAR for the Red Sox. Over that span, only one other player has even reached 10.0; it was Xander Bogaerts, who is no longer with the team. With the exception of the shortened 2020 season, Devers has never finished worse than second on the team in WAR. That includes last season, when he recorded 4.1 WAR despite playing through injuries to both shoulders. He was arguably the worst defensive third baseman in baseball, but he hit so well that he was inarguably the best player on the team, the face of the franchise, and one of the most productive third basemen in the game.

The Red Sox traded away Mookie Betts. They let Bogaerts walk. They kept Devers. When erstwhile chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom signed Devers to a 10-year, $313.5 million contract extension in January 2023, Michael Baumann’s headline read, “The Red Sox Have Finally Extended Rafael Devers.” He’s the longest-tenured member of the team, and only Kristian Campbell, whose extension contains team options for 2033 and 2034, is under contract further into the future. The Red made Devers the cornerstone, but in something straight out of a Suzy Eddie Izzard bit, they have spent the past couple months trying to dig him up and plop him down in different spots. The moves make baseball sense. That’s not the problem. The problem is communication. The team seems to be doing its level best to alienate its biggest star, repeatedly saying one thing in public, and then another to Devers in private. Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t expect this from Wilyer Abreu. Don’t get me wrong. I love Abreu and I spent much of the offseason writing about him. I even developed a (literal) sliding scale to tabulate just how often and how intensely he dirtied his uniform. Abreu is a high-effort player who absolutely deserved the Rookie of the Year votes and Gold Glove he got last season. But I worried about him too. Abreu has done nothing but hit and play great defense since his 2023 debut, but he’s a lefty who’s been strictly platooned, and he only recently reached a full season’s worth of big league plate appearances. He seemed like a regression candidate, and that was before a gastrointestinal illness cost him a chunk of spring training and several pounds. The Red Sox weren’t even sure he’d be ready to start the season, but he was and he’s raked from day one. After this hot start, should we be all-in on Abreu?

First, I was worried a bit about Abreu’s defense. I didn’t expect him to turn into a pumpkin. He really was the best right fielder in baseball last season by pretty much any measure you can think of, and I expected him to remain great. Although he’s not a speedster, his instincts and effort have allowed him to make three three-star catches, two four-star catches, and one five-star catch this season. However, a ton of his value last year came from nine assists, and as I wrote in the Positional Power Rankings, that’s a volatile stat. You can’t just expect someone to rack up assists year after year, if for no other reason than the fact that word gets out about a rocket arm like Abreu’s. Those gaudy out totals would turn into smaller credits for keeping runners from taking extra bases. Or so I thought. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s rough being a reliever. Your whole career is a small sample. Emmanuel Clase has been one of the best pitchers in baseball since pretty much the moment he set foot on a major league mound in 2019, but over his entire career, he’s thrown just 338 innings. Our leaderboard says that total has been bested in 534 different player-seasons. That’s 534 times that one single player in one single season threw more innings than Clase has over his whole career. Clase set a personal best by throwing 74 1/3 innings last season, and on the individual season leaderboard, that total put him in a 79-way tie for 20,484th place. A small sample size means high variance. Over his entire career, Clase has never finished a season with an xFIP below 2.18 or above 3.42, which is pretty stable for a reliever. But after running a microscopic 0.61 ERA last season, his ERA is currently a so-big-you-can-see-it-from-space 5.51. Five-run swings are decidedly less stable.

When things go wrong to this degree, it’s usually because a combination of factors have conspired to make it happen. When you’re as good a pitcher as Clase, it takes both luck and skill to get results this bad. Our focus today will be on the extraneous factors. You know what else is subject to wild variations in short samples? Defense. And defense is letting Clase down in a big way. We’re here today because Mike Petriello asked me to look into something. Petriello is Major League Baseball’s Director of Stats and Research, and it’s my understanding that as such, I am legally required to investigate any statistical anomalies he assigns me. Here’s what he sent my way:

When Clase was on the mound in 2024, the Guardians racked up 5 Outs Above Average. They were great defensively. This season, even though he’s only pitched roughly one-fifth of the innings he did last year, Guardians fielders are already all the way down at -4. That’s an absurdly big swing. How is that even possible? Is it just luck? Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, James Fegan wrote a great story at Sox Machine about how Chase Meidroth became one of the most patient players in baseball. The White Sox want Meidroth to be more aggressive, but after a recent call-up, he’s running a minuscule 17.3% chase rate. He ran that exact same chase rate last season in Triple-A, and it ranked fifth lowest among the 381 players who saw at least 500 pitches outside the zone. Here at FanGraphs, Michael Baumann also covered Meidroth’s overabundance of patience a couple weeks ago. Unsurprisingly, Baumann’s article featured something Fegan’s didn’t: a paragraph about nominative determinism. The defining characteristic of Meidroth’s profile is that he’s a Chase who doesn’t chase. But Meidroth isn’t the only Chase in baseball. Maybe he’s an outlier. Maybe the other players named Chase rack up chases, if only out of a sincere desire to obey the fifth commandment.

Chase Utley was the first major league Chase. He debuted in 2003, conveniently just a year after Sports Info Solutions started tracking pitches. That means that we can track the chase rate of every Chase who’s ever played. I went through his year-by-year chase rates in order to calculate a league-adjusted figure, which we’ll call Chase Rate Plus for the remainder of this article. Utley’s Chase Rate Plus was 88, 12% below the league average, and it helped him run a walk rate that was 6% above the league average. In other words, the first Chase in history didn’t chase much either. What about the rest of the bunch? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been writing about the strike zone for a few years now, and if there’s been one overarching theme to my work so far, it’s the inescapable takeaway that umpires are excellent at what they do. When Major League Baseball introduced PITCHf/x in 2008, umpires got 84.1% of ball-strike calls right according to the Statcast strike zone. Over the intervening years, while ever-nastier stuff and a revolution in pitch framing had made their jobs harder and harder, umpires did nothing but get better. Accuracy broke 92% in 2021 and inched its way toward 93% over the next two seasons. That trend of improving every year finally changed in 2024.

As I wrote yesterday, last season marked the first time that umpires got worse rather than better. That’s interesting enough on its own, but right when it was time to wonder whether they’d gotten as good as they could get, the rules of the game changed. Over the offseason, a new labor agreement included a change to the way that umpires are assessed by the league. The grading got much tighter, reducing the buffer around the edges of the strike zone from two inches on the outside of the zone to three-quarters of an inch on either side. The strike zone is the same, but umpires are being judged much more tightly. Let’s dive into the numbers and see what looks different so far this season. Here’s a graph that shows overall accuracy in every season of the pitch tracking era.

The yellow line shows overall accuracy, and it’s ticked back up from 2024. Even though it’s early in the season, a time when umpires are at their least accurate, they’re still doing better than they did last year. Accuracy fell from 92.81% in 2023 to 92.53% in 2024, and is now back up to 92.63%. In fact, if you look only at March and April stats – which is more fair, because umpires are worse earlier in the season – you’ll find that umpires just had their best opening month of the season ever. They called 82% of pitches in the shadow zone correctly. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in January, I wrote an article called “Unfuzzing the Strike Zone.” The premise was pretty simple. As umpires have grown more accurate, as the edges of the strike zone have gotten clearer and more distinct, the strike zone has effectively gotten smaller. Misses go both ways, but there’s a big difference between an incorrectly called ball and an incorrectly called strike. Calling a pitch inside the zone a ball doesn’t shrink the effective size of the zone, but calling a pitch outside the zone a strike does make it bigger. As long as a pitcher knows it’s possible to get a strike call out there, they’ll consider it part of the zone. Little did I know that as I was writing that article, Major League Baseball was preparing to test its exact premise.

The strike zone has steadily shed its fuzz over the past 23 seasons, but on Thursday, Jayson Stark and Ken Rosenthal reported in The Athletic that the league has decided to break out a sweater shaver. Over the offseason, the Major League Umpires Association came to a new agreement with MLB. Part of the agreement included tightening the standards by which ball-strike calls are graded.

Umpires used to have a two-inch buffer around the edge of the strike zone, meaning that if they’d missed a call by fewer than two inches outside the zone, the call would still go down as correct in their assessments. Having that buffer is necessary because calling balls and strikes is extraordinarily difficult. It’s extremely rare for an umpire to get every call right even in a single game. The new border is just three-quarters of an inch on either side. The league is demanding a less fuzzy strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »