Yesterday, I wrote up the news that David Robertson had signed with the Phillies. In my (and, I assume, everyone else’s) favorite paragraph, I mentioned that several teams had reportedly been in on the veteran right-hander. Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman combined to mention interest from the Mets, Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, and “many others.” Depending on your perspective, this marked either the last We Tried of the 2025 free agency period or the first of the trade deadline period. As a quick refresher, We Tried is a catch-all term for any time we find out, after a player has ended up with one team, that another team also tried to land them. In its purest form, the We Tried is a front office’s bid for partial credit, an attempt to curry favor with the fans by demonstrating that it is trying to build a winner for them. I spent the offseason documenting each and every one in a disturbingly comprehensive spreadsheet.
I didn’t make a meal of this yesterday, mainly because Robertson’s free agency was a real outlier. The offseason ended months ago. He’s a 40-year-old reliever who didn’t get an offer he loved, so he stayed in shape and spent the spring hanging out with his family, then held a workout for teams on Saturday in order to sign before the deadline. Lots of teams were in on him and lots of teams showed up to watch him pitch, so word of who was there was bound to come out at some point. It definitely represented a We Tried, but it didn’t seem earth-shattering, and it was by no means a typical one. Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve finally done it, friends. Everybody take a bow. It took until July 20, but we’ve finally found a home for the last holdout on Ben Clemens’ 2025 edition of the Top 50 Free Agents. On Sunday, the Phillies took their shot on lucky no. 46, agreeing to sign veteran reliever David Robertson to a $16 million contract. Prorated for the late start date, the contract will actually pay the right-hander somewhere around $6 million. Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic broke the news, while MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand reported the contract details. According to Matt Gelb, also of The Athletic, Robertson will need a ramp-up period, which means he’ll need to agree to an assignment in the minors.
So why the hell did this take so long? Here’s my best answer: Uhh… ageism?
Let’s start with Robertson’s blurb from the top 50, which I don’t feel bad about plagiarizing here because I wrote it:
Over the past three seasons, Robertson has a 2.82 ERA and a 3.24 FIP. Over 188 appearances and 201 innings, he’s accrued 3.8 WAR, 12th most among all relievers. As he enters his age-40 season, Robertson is coming off his best FIP since 2017. His cutter averaged 93.3 mph in both 2023 and 2024, the fastest it’s been since Obama’s first term. According to Statcast’s run values, that cutter was worth 19 runs this season, making it the sixth-most valuable pitch in all of baseball. Knowing what it knows about aging curves and the volatility of relief arms, ZiPS projects Robertson for 0.5 WAR, but we humans should at the very least be open to the possibility that he’ll live forever. Until we see him fall apart with our own eyes, there’s no reason in particular to believe that he won’t just keep serving as an effective bullpen arm until sometime in the middle of the next decade. Robertson’s fourth straight one-year contract with a playoff hopeful would do quite nicely.
On Friday, Ben Clemens laid out five fun things to watch during the second half of the 2025 season. The one that caught my eye was the race to lead the league in bunts for base hits. The contestants all make plenty of sense. The group of Kyle Isbel, Jacob Young, TJ Friedl, Victor Scott II, and Xavier Edwards includes four light-hitting, fleet-footed center fielders and one light-hitting, fleet-footed shortstop. But there’s another bunting race going on, and in it, these four speedsters – along with everyone else in baseball – are getting dusted by Jose Herrera, the Diamondbacks backup catcher whom Statcast rates as the 491st fastest out of 510 qualified players this season. It’s the race to lead the league in sacrifice bunts, and no one in baseball is quite so eager to choose the greater good over their own personal gratification than Herrera.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. Herrera is tied for fourth in attempted sac bunts. He just leads the league because he’s batting a thousand on his attempts. (Not literally, of course; a successful sac bunt doesn’t count toward your batting average at all.) The other players I’ve mentioned have failed, fouled, or whiffed on their bunts a lot, but not Herrera. We’re going to put Herrera’s proclivity for the sacrifice into context a little later, but let’s start with the obvious question. Why does Herrera bunt so much? It can’t just be because he’s good at it. It’s certainly not because he thinks he can beat out a hit with his third-percentile sprint speed. Often enough, he’s not even pretending to run hard. On this play, it’s not so much that he’s sacrificing himself as it is that he’s just kind of surrendering. Read the rest of this entry »
Ceddanne Rafaela’s breakout 2025 season has truly been a surprise. It wasn’t just that he ran a wRC+ of 80 in his first full big league campaign in 2024. It was how he got there. He ran the worst chase and strikeout rates of all qualified players. His contact rate and exit velocity ranked right near the bottom as well. He still looked like he could be a very good player by way of excellent defense in center field, but even though he was just 23, it raised real concerns about his potential at the plate. Beyond the fact that players haven’t historically improved their chase rates much after their rookie seasons, Rafaela’s chase rate was so extreme that it was hard to find someone to compare him to. A young player would be expected to refine his plate discipline some, but even if he had literally knocked an unheard of 10 percentage points off his chase rate, he still would’ve had the 12th-highest chase rate among all qualified players. And yet here he is now.
Rafaela has a 115 wRC+ and is on pace for 5.6 WAR this season. He has been the most valuable position player on the Red Sox. It’s probably helped that Rafaela has a year of experience under his belt and has been allowed to stick in center field all season, but this is a huge turnaround nonetheless. How did it happen? Let’s start at the beginning. Read the rest of this entry »
The rumblings have started. On Tuesday night in the unincorporated territory north of Atlanta, the American League clawed its way back from a 6-0 deficit in the late innings, wrestling the All-Star Game into its first ever swing-off. The problem with the swing-off, the reason for the rumblings, was apparent even before the ninth inning ended: It might be too much fun. Too much fun could result in disaster, an eruption that would reshape the landscape of baseball for all time to come, killing extra innings once and for all and replacing them with something that smacked suspiciously of soccer.
The protectors of baseball’s sovereign dignity chewed their fingernails to the quick as Brent Rooker readied himself in the batter’s box to the opening strains of “Hotel California.” They wailed when he launched two baseballs into the left-center field seats, thrilling everyone with eyes to see or ears to hear. Steven Kwan leapt into the air with the innocent delight of a child. It was a dark omen.
“Will no one think of the children?” moaned the traditionalists when Kyle Stowers punched one over the hulking brick wall in right center and jubilation reigned near Atlanta. Their fear reached a crescendo when Kyle Schwarber duck-walked into the box, leaned back, and shook his bat in all directions as if to ward off any evil, defense-minded spirits. Schwarber, who has spent his entire career smacking monstrous, momentous home runs as casually as the rest of us put our socks on in the morning, had the potential to alter baseball’s future, cementing the swing-off as a consummation devoutly to be wished, a future too fun to avoid. If any player could turn his three swings into three signature homers, it was Schwarber. Read the rest of this entry »
When you think of Garrett Crochet, you probably think of a lanky lefty flinging filthy fastballs past flummoxed hitters. Nearly half the pitches Crochet threw last year were four-seamers. The pitch averaged 97.1 mph, and according to Statcast’s run values, it was worth 21 runs, making it the fifth-most valuable pitch in the game, trailing estimable offerings like Emmanuel Clase’s cutter and the sliders of Dylan Cease and Chris Sale. Crochet’s other pitches were worth a combined -2 runs. Although he ran a 3.58 ERA while pitching in front of a porous White Sox defense, the four-seamer led him to a 2.38 xFIP and 2.75 DRA. Both marks were the best among all starters. Crochet has kept right on rolling in 2025. He’s running a 2.23 ERA with a 2.40 FIP, and his 4.3 WAR ranks second among all pitchers. It would be easy to glance at the top line numbers and assume that Crochet is the same pitcher he was last year, just in front of a better defense. But there have been some subtle changes under the hood, and his relationship with his fastball now looks very different.
When a trade brought Crochet to Boston in December, the reasonable assumption was that he’d back off the four-seamer at least a little. Under Craig Breslow and Andrew Bailey, the Red Sox became the most fastball-averse team in the history of the game, throwing four-seamers and sinkers just 36.8% of the time in 2024. No one expected Crochet to ditch one of the game’s greatest weapons, but it stood to reason that the Red Sox might tweak his usage just a little bit in favor of his sweeper, his cutter, and his new sinker, all of which looked like excellent pitches. Read the rest of this entry »
Happy Derby Day! At 8:00 p.m. tonight at Truist Park in Cobb County, Georgia, some of the largest human beings Major League Baseball has to offer will be hitting some of the longest home runs imaginable, and we get to watch. The cool kids will be tuned into the Statcast broadcast on ESPN 2, hosted by Kevin Brown (the current Orioles play-by-play man, not the former Orioles pitcher), Jessica Mendoza, and erstwhile FanGraphs contributor Mike Petriello. Petriello told me that he spent Friday crunching first-half stats and Derby results from 2016 to 2024 in order to create a prediction model, so if you want to see a baseball nerd being baseball nerdy on national television, make sure you catch the opening.
Although we never get to see all the stars we’d like in the Derby, this year may feel particularly bereft. We are missing out on A-listers like Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, and Derby legends like Pete Alonso and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. We’re also going to be without most of the most prolific home run hitters of the season. Cal Raleigh and James Wood are the only participants who rank within the top nine in home runs. Only half the Derby contestants are even in the top 30. We have no repeat participants from the 2024 season. In fact, Matt Olson is the only one who has ever participated in the Derby before, and he lost in the first round in 2021. On the other hand, Raleigh leads the majors in home runs, and based purely on how far and hard these eight sluggers hit the ball, we may well have the most powerful field ever assembled. Read the rest of this entry »
Toward the end of May, I wrote about Pete Crow-Armstrong’s crimes of passion. When the Cubs win a game on a walk-off, Crow-Armstrong isn’t just the first one out onto the field to celebrate. He’s out on the field before the winning run has even scored. The game is still in progress, the ball is still in play, but there’s Crow-Armstrong sprinting across the third base line like a heat-seeking missile, breaking the rules and pulling the hero who just knocked in the game-winning run into the tightest hug imaginable. It’s a pattern; a jubilant, sensuous, illegal-but-not-actionable pattern that plays out over the rising strains of “Go Cubs Go.”
Well, in the past five weeks, the Cubs have walked off their opponents two more times, and Crow-Armstrong has not disappointed. In the bottom of the 10th inning on June 15, Ian Happ walked off the Pirates with a line drive single into right field. Crow-Armstrong was on deck at the time, which meant that he was busy warming up and thinking about hitting. It also meant that he was right next to home plate, so he ended up shadowing Vidal Bruján as he scored the winning run, and only then changing course and sprinting out onto the field to congratulate Happ. For these reasons, he didn’t actually enter the field of play until nearly a full second after the game had ended, but don’t worry. He was still the first Cub on the field and the first to wrap Happ in a big, shaggy hug. His love was so powerful that the energy surge temporarily overloaded the Marquee Sports broadcast system. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, we received a mailbag question from a Jacob Young fan named David. Actually, it was a multi-part question, and the third sub-question was particularly fun: Are we now in an era of Peak Centerfield Defense? It seems like every team has a centerfielder that can go get it.
My gut reaction to this question was simple: Yes, we’re probably in an era of peak center field defense. I suspect the game has probably been in that era more often than not ever since integration, and that peak has kept on rising. I saved David’s other sub-questions for this Saturday’s mailbag, but for this particular one, I thought it might be fun to think it through and dig deeper than I could in the mailbag.
First, let me explain my gut reaction. More than any other position, center field rewards pure athleticism, and the athletes keep getting better. The player pool keeps expanding, and players (and humans in general) keep getting bigger, stronger, and faster. All of this means the bar to make it to the majors at all is that much higher. I’ve got baseball-specific reasons, too. The league keeps getting better at positioning defenders where the ball is more likely to go, allowing them to make even more of their superlative talents. And because we keep getting better at accurately measuring defensive contributions, we’re able to recognize and reward defensive value better than ever.
After saying all that, though, I have to admit the obvious: There’s no way to know the answer definitively. We have precious little Statcast data about Ty Cobb’s sprint speed or Duke Snider’s reaction time. Up until this century, play-by-play data is all we have to go on in evaluating defenders. Sean Smith analyzed that data to create a defensive metric called Total Zone, which is what informs the defensive grades on our leaderboards up until 2002, when more advanced defensive metrics like UZR, DRS, and FRV take over. Today’s metrics are nowhere near perfect, but take a moment to stop and think about how far we’ve come. Statcast can tell you exactly how much time every outfielder had to reach every ball, how far they traveled, how fast they ran, how efficient their route was, and how quickly they reacted as the ball came off the bat. That’s a long way from extrapolating from play-by-play data.
I realize that David wasn’t necessarily asking about the overall quality of center field play, but whether we’re living in a time when we’ve got a particularly high number of excellent defenders. It feels that way, right? Think of all the center fielders right now whom you’d classify as extremely good defenders. My list would definitely include Young, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Denzel Clarke, Ceddanne Rafaela, Victor Scott II, and Jose Siri, and I wouldn’t argue with anybody who also included Byron Buxton, Julio Rodríguez, Jake Meyers, Kyle Isbel, Michael Harris II, Daulton Varsho, Harrison Bader, or Myles Straw. I’m not sure what’s happened to Brenton Doyle, but before the season we would have put him on this list, as well. All of a sudden, we’ve got half the teams in baseball with an elite center field defender.
Now maybe it’s always felt that way. Just to pick a date out of a hat, if you go back to 1999, you’ve got defensive standouts like Andruw Jones, Mike Cameron, Carlos Beltrán, Steve Finley, Darren Lewis, and Kenny Lofton. If you go back to the 1950s, you’ve got Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Duke Snider all in the same city. For that reason, I decided to see what I could do with the numbers available to me.
Even if we can’t know the answer definitively, we can have some fun with the data at our disposal. We have all these different numbers – TZ, UZR, DRS, DRP, OAA, FRV – but none of them matches up perfectly. They’re all working off different data sources. They’re all using different methods based on different philosophies. They’re looking at different eras with different styles of play. They’re all grading on different curves, judging players according to the league average in their particular year, which makes it very hard to compare players from different eras. It’s a glorious mess, but it means that we need to think of some other ways to analyze things.
Let’s start by considering how center fielders are earning their playing time. If you’re not hitting well and you’re not fielding well, you’re probably not going to stay on the field. If you’re doing one well, you can get away with doing a worse job at the other. Now take a look at how center fielders have hit since 1900.
That graph is going nowhere but down, and it’s been on that trajectory since the beginning. This season, the league has a combined wRC+ of 92 at center field. If it holds, it would be the lowest mark ever recorded. However, center fielders aren’t worse players than ever. Here’s a graph that shows defensive run value per 600 plate appearances. This is just the Def column that you see all the way on the right of our main leaderboard. Before you look at it, let me warn you that I’m cheating a little bit by showing it to you.
Here’s how I’m cheating. Not everybody is playing center field all the time. It just shows players whose primary position is listed as center field. We stopped using total zone for these numbers in 2002, so the more recent numbers are based on an entirely different formula. But the overall trend is about as unambiguous as it gets. For the first half of baseball history, the numbers say that center fielders weren’t necessarily great defenders, but that changed in the late 1950s, then cemented itself in the late 1980s.
The big reason why this is cheating, though, is because these numbers include a positional adjustment. As you likely know if you’ve made it this far, positional adjustments give more credit to tougher defensive spots and take credit from easier ones. If you look at center field defensive metrics for any one year, they should be right around zero more often than not. However high the bar is, there will be good, average, and bad center fielders, and they’ll cancel each other out. This graph is saying that the bar has gotten higher over time, compared to other positions on the field. That’s all the more apparent if you look at the same graph with the corners included.
This shouldn’t necessarily be my persuasive argument. After all, I didn’t crunch the numbers and decide on the positional adjustments myself. I’m just showing you their effect on the way we value outfielder defense. However, when you view this alongside the decreasing wRC+ of center fielders, the conclusion is obvious. Defense has never been a more important part of the job, and the gap between defense in center field and the corners has never been higher.
Knowing all this, what makes me say that this very moment could be peak center field defense? For starters, players are just plain faster these days – and I don’t just mean faster than they were in the 1950s. We have 11 years of Statcast data tracking every player’s average sprint speed. For each year, I calculated the sprint speed of the average center fielder, prorating it by innings played (and ignoring any player who didn’t play enough to register a sprint speed). In the first three years, from 2015 to 2017, the average center fielder had a sprint speed of 28.4 feet per second. In the last three years, from 2023 to 2025, the average is 28.6. That may seem like a small change, but it’s also taking place over an awfully short timeframe. We can honestly say that center fielders are measurably faster today than they were just 10 years ago! It’s not hard to extrapolate further back in time.
If we extend our gaze a bit to take in the entirety of the pitch-tracking era, we can see that balls just aren’t falling in the way they used to. The graph below goes back to 2008, and it shows the batting average for every ball classified as either a line drive or a fly ball hit straightaway (not including home runs). It starts at .393 and ends at .346. Nearly 50 points of average just disappeared into the gloves of center fielders.
This is pretty stark, but even this graph is underselling the difference a bit. Here’s the same graph, but now it includes wOBA, too. The new red wOBA line falls even steeper than the blue line. Center fielders aren’t just robbing batters of more hits. They’re also better at holding batters to singles and preventing extra-base hits. That drop-off is nearly 60 points.
I think this is about as definitive as it gets. Since 2008, there’s never been a worse time to hit the ball to center field. So far as we can tell, defense has never been a more important part of a center fielder’s job, and center fielders have never been so much better than corner outfielders. In all, we’re probably at peak center field defense right now. And we’ll probably stay there.
A month ago, I checked in on Spencer Strider’s worrisome return from internal brace surgery. After four starts, Strider was 0-4 with a 5.68 ERA and a 6.40 FIP. His fastball had lost two ticks. His arm angle had fallen by seven degrees. He wasn’t getting chases. He wasn’t missing bats. In short, he didn’t look like Spencer Strider. “There’s no way for us to know how long it might take Strider to get back up to speed,” I wrote, “but the longer he looks like this, the more reason there is to worry.” One month later, I return to you with good news. Strider has made six more starts, and over the last five, he is starting to look different. He’s run a 2.70 ERA and a 2.35 FIP. His strikeout rate is up and his walk rate is down. You might even say that Strider is halfway back.
Once again, the velocity is the big ticket item, so let’s not waste any time:
