A lot has happened since we launched the 2026 version of the We Tried tracker a few weeks ago. With the Winter Meetings about to kick off, we’ve seen 14 We Trieds from 10 different teams concerning eight different free agents. (As always, you can keep track of them all at this link.) That may sound like a lot this early in free agency, but it’s worth noting that 10 of our Top 50 free agents are already off the board (though three of those players accepted the qualifying offer, which means nobody had the chance to try). I suspect we’re a bit behind last year’s pace. Hopefully more news about teams’ pursuits will leak out in the coming months. The big number we’re shooting for here is 100: Last year, the offseason closed with 99 We Trieds. Let’s make it to triple digits!

More will certainly come. Raisel Iglesias is currently leading the pack with four We Trieds, but don’t be surprised if Ryan Helsley overtakes him. Multiple reports said that fully half the teams in the league were interested in Helsley, but we only have two actual We Trieds so far, and one came from Helsley himself. Helsley told reporters that the Tigers were particularly interested in signing him as a starting pitcher, which isn’t a surprise, but his phrasing was particularly fun. He said the Tigers were “in on me heavy.” Honestly, I don’t have any jokes here. It’s just a slightly odd grammatical construction that I will probably think about twice a day for the next few years of my life. Before this week, you could be in on something. You could maybe even be heavily in on it. But now you can be in on it…heavy. Sometimes language evolves just like lifeforms, one mutation at a time. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Red Sox traded for Sonny Gray, they knew they were getting an old-school starter with seven pitches. He’s got a sinker and a four-seamer. He’s got a cutter, a traditional slider, and a sweeper. He’s got a curveball and a changeup. The traditional slider is the only one of the seven that Gray doesn’t throw regularly; the others all saw at least 15% usage against righties or lefties in 2025. Gray is 36 years old. He’s a three-time All-Star with 330 starts and 125 wins under his belt, and a career ERA of 3.58. At this point, you might assume that he’s about as finished a product as you could find, but you’d be wrong, and that seems to be part of the reason he’ll be pitching in Boston next year.

In 2024, the Red Sox made waves for throwing fastballs just 36.6% of the time, the lowest mark ever recorded and almost certainly the lowest mark of all time. That number went up in 2025, in large part because they added Garrett Crochet, who owned a brand-new sinker to go with a four-seamer that was one of the very best pitches in baseball 2024. But it wasn’t just Crochet. Brayan Bello brought back the four-seamer he’d ditched in 2024. A finally-healthy Lucas Giolito threw four-seamers at his highest rate since 2020. With Aroldis Chapman replacing Kenley Jansen, the closer role saw fastballs replace cutters. In all, the Red Sox finished the season with a fastball rate of 48.3%, the 11th-highest in the league. That’s quite a bounce-back. The Red Sox were very explicitly trying to get away from fastballs, but as the 2025 season showed us, the broader goal was to have their pitchers throw their best pitches more often.

That brings us to Gray, who throws the kitchen sink but still throws fastballs 40% of the time. In 2025, he led with his four-seamer against lefties and his sinker against righties, throwing both pitches 29% of the time in those situations. Shortly after the trade went through, Boston’s chief baseball officer Craig Breslow discussed it with reporters. MLB.com’s Ian Brown published a quote: “It will be a great match for Bails [pitching coach Andrew Bailey] and the rest of the pitching group and the philosophies they have in terms of leaning into strength and potentially away from slug and pitching away from fastballs when you have secondaries as your best pitch.” Read the rest of this entry »

Up and in, low and away. That’s how you attack hitters. That’s always been how you attack hitters. There are exceptions, of course. Some hitters struggle with low-inside pitches, so they see more of them. Some hitters are so feeble that pitchers just pump fastballs down the middle and dare them to do their worst. Some pitchers just throw their best pitch and don’t bother worrying about the hitter at all. But most of the time, it’s up and in, low and away. Ben Clemens wrote about a version of this yesterday, in a piece that focused on the data behind why pitchers throw inside fastballs. And the toughest inside fastballs to hit are those thrown up and in.

Pitchers have been throwing hard stuff up and in for as long as they’ve been throwing hard stuff, but Statcast’s new bat tracking data allowed us a new peek at why that’s such a successful game plan. The heat map for bat speed below is extra red because it belongs to Aaron Judge, but insofar as the least red spot is the high-inside strike, it might as well belong to any hitter.

It’s harder to get your bat around up there. It requires a stiffer, more rotational (as opposed to linear) swing. You can’t get your arms extended. You can’t drop your bat head on the ball. Bust somebody up and in with something hard, and they’ll have a tough time catching up to it; now confirmed by science.

Because we are not Ben Clemens, we’re going to focus on down and away today, and we’re going to focus on batters. As you can see from Judge’s heat map, bat speed tends to be slower down there too. We’re no longer just talking about getting your arms extended. You have to modify your swing to reach pitches that far away, bending and reaching, slowing down your bat because the optimal contact point is deeper. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from bat tracking data, it’s that those kinds of adjustments make you hemorrhage bat speed. Low and away is also where trickier pitches like offspeed and breaking balls tend to end up. Nobody is good against those pitches, and I do mean nobody.

See the spot in the heat map that says 77.0 mph, inside the strike zone, but on the outer third and in the bottom third? Since 2008, 225 left-handed batters and 297 right-handed batters have seen at least 500 pitches in that low-and-outside box. According to Baseball Savant’s run values, not one of those players has a positive run value against those pitches. Not one! Every single player has been below average in that particular box, and that’s not true of any of the other 12 boxes. The two players who have come closest to breaking even on those low-and-outside strikes are Hall of Famer David Ortiz, who has been worth -0.08 runs per 100 pitches, and future Hall of Famer Mike Trout, who has been worth -0.4. It’s just not possible to perform well against that pitch (at least not without eschewing the rest of the strike zone, but no one would ever do that), even if you’re literally Mike Trout.

So we’ve established that the low-outside strike is hard to hit. It took 500 words, but we’re here now. The heat map below belongs to James Wood, and it’s part of the reason we’re talking about pitching people low and away. The numbers in this heat map show run value per 100 pitches, and they show why Wood is the poster boy for difficulty down and away.

After a season and a half in the majors, Wood is the proud owner of 4.6 WAR, a 125 wRC+, and one of the most explosive swings in the game. That’s amazing. He’s just 23 years old. He looks like he will be great for at least another decade. He’s also the owner of this particularly lopsided heat map. He’s patient to a fault, which means that he’s excellent on pitches outside the strike zone. He’s great when he can get his long arms extended or when he can drop his bat head on the ball. But throw him something, anything down and away but still inside the zone, and he turns into a (very imposing) pumpkin.

If you’re a regular FanGraphs reader or just a fan of the Nationals (or Padres), you’ve likely known the book on Wood since long before he actually debuted in Washington. He’s really big. He hits the ball really hard. He hits it on the ground. He whiffs a lot too. Major league pitchers knew the book as well, and they most definitely saw some earlier version of that heat map the second the Nationals called Wood up in July 2024.

I can say that for certain because even though he was just a 21-year-old rookie, 24.2% of the pitches Wood saw were located in those three blue boxes. Among players who saw at least 1,000 pitches, that was the highest rate in baseball (switching the side of the plate around for right-handers, of course). In 2025, that rate fell to 23.8% and Wood fell to third place, behind Dansby Swanson (24.5%) and Tommy Pham (24.2%). What those numbers mean is that from the moment he debuted, pitchers have known that the only way to attack Wood was to stay the hell away from his gigantic bat. Aim for the outside corner, keep it low, and hope for the best.

In a narrow sense, that strategy has been wildly successful, as those three blue boxes can attest. In 2025, 457 players saw at least 100 pitches within those boxes. Wood’s 50% swing rate ranked 376th, meaning he took way more called strikes than the average player. When he did swing, his 28.7% whiff rate was tied for 426th place, meaning that he ended up with way more swinging strikes than the average player. When Wood put the ball in play, he was more successful than the average player, because of course he was. Even though that’s the spot where he has his lowest bat speed, lowest exit velocity, and lowest launch angle, he still hits the ball so hard that it can’t help but find grass. He ran a .418 wOBACON on those pitches. But that’s not enough to mitigate all those extra strikes.

In a broader sense, that plan has its limits. Aiming for the corner against a player as patient as Wood means that when you miss, you’ve got a higher chance of missing the zone entirely, and Wood is so patient that he’ll make you pay for it. Once you’re behind, you have to hit the heart of the zone. More importantly, this is something of a desperation move. For years now, the trend across the league has been toward throwing the ball right over the middle and trusting your stuff to do the rest. The fear of grooving a pitch to Wood is driving pitchers toward an older, less successful game plan. Wood is bad at handling that pitch, but so is every hitter on earth. He’s seeing so many pitches there because against a hitter like him, all the options are suboptimal. Wood may not get to the next level as a hitter until he can find a way to cover more of the strike zone, but he’s young and he’s still learning. He may well get there. In the meantime, he’s still striking fear into the hearts of pitchers, and they’re doing their best to stay away from him.

Devin Williams, the lights-out reliever with the M. Night Shyamalan changeup, has agreed to a three-year deal with the Mets. A two-time All-Star, Williams earned NL Rookie of the Year honors in 2020 and scored a down-ballot MVP vote as recently as 2023. Even after a disastrous 2025 season kicked his career ERA all the way up from 1.83 to 2.45, he still has a career ERA of – you guessed it – 2.45. Here’s my first piece of analysis: That’s so good, you guys! Assuming he won’t keep running a 55% strand rate from here on out, the Mets just signed up for three years of one of the best relievers in baseball; meanwhile, Williams just signed up for a quick ride from the Bronx to Flushing, but it’s important to note that the ride is always going to be longer than Google Maps predicts, because the odds of actually catching an express 7 train rather than the local are vanishingly small.

Let’s start with the terms of the deal and the credit for who reported which parts of those terms, and then we’ll take a nap and perform some more light analysis. Cool? Cool. Read the rest of this entry »

So I had this brilliant theory. My brilliant theory was that Elly De La Cruz wasn’t as bad a defender as the numbers would have us think. De La Cruz finished the 2025 season with 11 fielding errors, the second most in baseball, and 15 throwing errors, also the second most in baseball. Put those two together and you get 26 total errors, the most in baseball. I thought those totals might be shortchanging De La Cruz a bit. My brilliant theory was wrong, but before I get to why, let me explain my thinking.

We should start with the fact the advanced numbers do not say that De La Cruz is a bad shortstop. He makes up for most of his errors with length, speed, and the Mega Man cannon where his right arm should be. Statcast’s FRV loved De La Cruz’s defense in 2024, and it pegged him as perfectly average as he battled through a quad strain in 2025. Baseball Prospectus’ DRP, which tends to skew more conservative than the other advanced metrics, had him at 0.8 runs in 2024 and -0.4 runs in 2025. Sports Info Solutions’ DRS has always liked De La Cruz’s defense the least, pegging him at -2 in 2024 and -5 in 2025. So it’s not as if De La Cruz is grading out as a catastrophe. I just thought he deserved even more credit, and with that credit, we might have started seeing him as an above-average shortstop rather than a good-enough shortstop. Read the rest of this entry »

You just had to take in a ballgame. The sky was blue. The birds were chirping. On a day like today, even you couldn’t resist the siren song of the ballpark. You headed into the city and bought yourself a ticket, but now you’re in trouble. The zombie apocalypse began sometime after the third inning. The epicenter was right nearby, and the undead were drawn to the stadium in droves by the irresistible aroma of thousands of delicious humans. Maybe the churros too. It’s entirely possible that even the undead love the smell of churros. Whatever the reason, they (the zombies, not the churros) are flooding through the concourse and out into the stands. They’re climbing over the façade from every direction. You’re trapped.

You spent years telling anyone who would listen that the world was coming to an end. You told your family to prepare themselves the way you had been preparing yourself. You gave that speech every Thanksgiving, right up until you stopped getting invited to Thanksgiving. You built your bunker. You stocked it with food and batteries and flashlights and Twinkies. For reasons that you can’t quite recall, you’ve even got several cases of diapers down there. Most importantly, you stocked it with weaponry. You procured all kinds of weapons: big ones, small ones, stabby ones, shooty ones, explodey ones, poisony ones. You built a shrine to all the different ways a human being can inflict damage on any and all kinds of matter, and then you left it all behind, just hours before the apocalypse.

Here you are in your seat, and the zombies have got you surrounded. They want your sweet, sweet brains. The good news is that even without your arsenal, you’re ready to fight. You’ve been preparing for this moment your whole life. You reach back under your seat for the novelty helmet you discarded back in the third inning, scrape out as much nacho cheese as you can, and settle it onto your head. It may not be much good against a major league fastball, but as long as you can find some way to keep it in place, it should be strong enough to resist the teeth of the undead. Read the rest of this entry »

How much will the ABS challenge system hurt the ability of catchers to frame pitches? That question has been bouncing around my brain for quite a while now. I’d been waiting for the offseason to really dive into the numbers, and, well, we’re here. It’s the offseason. But now that I’ve dug into all the data I could find, I think the entire premise of that question might be flawed. I thought that correcting a couple of ball-strike calls a game would erase a couple of well-framed pitches. This would no doubt hurt the better framers more than it hurt the worse ones, simply because they earn more strikes and would have more to lose. At the same time, the lesser framers would have juicier pitches to challenge, boosting their numbers a bit. As a result, the gap between good and bad framers would shrink, furthering a trend that’s been going on since we first gained the ability to quantify the value of pitch framing. It would still be valuable, just not quite as valuable as it used to be. But I’m not so sure anymore. Let’s start with the data.

I pulled all the major league framing data I could. I pulled league-wide and individual catcher called strike rates both inside and outside the strike zone for the majors and for Triple-A, which in 2025 used the same challenge system we’ll see in 2026. I can tell you that 26 catchers got a significant amount of playing time in both Triple-A and the majors last season, and their called strike rate on pitches in the shadow zone in the majors fell by an average of 1.4 percentage points within the zone and 1.7 percentage points outside it relative to what it was in the minors. So while the Triple-A strike zone may be tighter, pitch framing is still harder in the majors. But the only data about how the challenge system has actually worked in the minors and in spring training of 2025 comes from MLB press releases, and it’s extremely sparse.

Of course, that data definitely exists. Baseball Savant guru Tom Tango wrote up a bunch of interesting takeaways from it on his blog a month ago. As you’d expect, players are more likely to challenge calls in higher-leverage moments, in the later innings, and on pitches that decide the outcome of an at-bat. For that reason, they tend to be less successful in those situations; they’re not challenging because they’re sure they’re right, but because they really want the call to go the other way. Tango also broke down some catchers and batters who were particularly good or bad at challenging. Not only did he provide their stats – poor Zac Veen challenged 24 pitches and got just three overturned – but Tango showed that Savant will be rolling out challenge probability numbers next year, using the distance from the edge of the strike zone to calculate the likelihood that any particular pitch will get challenged, and that any particular challenge will be successful. From there, it’s easy to calculate how much challenge value each batter or catcher creates above the average player. Read the rest of this entry »

For four years now, I’ve been updating you on the changing contours of the strike zone. By my count, this is the 10th installment in that series and the sixth specifically about the accuracy of ball-strike calls on the edges of the zone. With the implementation of the ABS challenge system in 2026, these updates will no doubt start to look a bit different. This is our last umpire accuracy update of the pre-ABS era, so let’s take stock of where we are at the end.

After a tiny dip in 2024, umpires were back on track in 2025, posting a record-high accuracy rate of 92.83% overall. In fact, 2024 was the only year in the pitch-tracking era in which umpires didn’t set a record for accuracy. However, this latest record came with a bit of controversy. Early in the season, pitchers and catchers picked up on the fact that the strike zone seemed to have shrunk. The league tightened up the standards that it used to grade umpires, reducing the size of the buffer zone around the edges of the zone. As a result, accuracy shot up specifically on pitches outside the zone, even more specifically, on pitches just above the top of the zone, causing pitchers and catchers to complain that they were losing the high strike.

This graph reminds us of a couple facts that might just be so obvious that we rarely think about them. First, the vast majority of takes come on pitches outside the strike zone. Of course they do; those are the pitches you’re not supposed to swing at. This year, for example, 68% of the calls umpires had to make came on pitches outside the strike zone. Second, it’s easier to identify balls than it is to identify strikes. Of course it is; the area outside the zone is a lot bigger than the area inside the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

Well sports fans, it’s that time again. We Tried season is officially upon us, and for the second offseason in a row, I will be keeping my eye fixed firmly on the periphery of the action. For the uninitiated, We Tried is a noun in this context. It’s the name for the phenomenon of reporters announcing, once a player has signed with a team, that another team was interested in signing that player too. Team A might have succeeded in landing the player in question, but Team B wants to make sure the public knows that they failed to sign him because they want credit for that failure. It is both our duty and great honor to award that credit. The illustrious Jon Becker has once again graciously offered to host the We Tried Tracker on his maniacally comprehensive MLB Matrices spreadsheet, so be sure to check there for all the latest in major league effort.

Jeff Passan, ESPN’s officially-licensed baseball bombardier, kicked off the real offseason bright and early on Tuesday morning (Becker tipped me off to the news not long after). At 7:00 AM, Passan published an offseason preview that featured a key piece of information about Josh Naylor, who agreed to return to the Mariners this past weekend:

The largest free agent contract the Pirates have ever handed out was more than a decade ago: three years and $39 million to Francisco Liriano. They are consistently a bottom-five payroll team. And yet the Pirates were primed to spend more than twice that on Josh Naylor before he re-upped with Seattle for five years and $92.5 million in the first signing of the winter on Sunday night — and they’re considering other possibilities to supplement Paul Skenes and a rotation that was among the five best in MLB in the second half.

Read the rest of this entry »

During the playoffs, when it felt like every game involved at least one close play that everyone would be talking about the next day, I tried my hand at breaking down replays. I captured screen recordings of all the replay angles, dragged them into iMovie, and had a ball figuring out the exact moment when a cleat grazed the plate or a glove caught the runner’s elbow. I’d like to think I even got pretty good at it, so if anybody in the Replay Command Center over on Sixth Avenue ever needs a weekend off, I will gladly cover a shift or two. When you break down footage that way, you learn that close plays happen all the time and they’re so much closer than you realize. I’ve started to believe that we could do a better job of handling the closest of those plays. On tags and force plays, which make up roughly three-quarters of all replay challenges, I think it’s time we change the replay rules so that the tie goes to the runner.

Before we get too deep into my reasoning, we need to start by addressing whether or not the tie goes to the runner according to the current letter of the law. While we all learned that rule as children, it’s not how the game operates at the highest level. As David Wade wrote in The Hardball Times in 2010, umpires don’t believe the tie goes to the runner. They’re taught that there’s no such thing as a tie. Either the runner beat the ball or they didn’t, and that’s that. “There are no ties and there is no rule that says the tie goes to the runner,” said now retired umpire Tim McClelland in a 2007 interview. “But the rule book does say that the runner must beat the ball to first base, and so if he doesn’t beat the ball, then he is out.” That’s a major league umpire declaring that the rules say unambiguously the tie goes to the fielder. While it’s true that the Official Baseball Rules don’t mention ties, the rest of the quote is misleading.

Let’s establish that, logically, whenever a runner touches a base, we can split the time into three distinct categories: before, during, and after. That’s what McClelland was saying. The rule he was referring to was 5.06(a)(1), which leads off the section about what it means to occupy a base. It says: “A runner acquires the right to an unoccupied base when he touches it before he is out.” The onus is on the runner to touch the base first before he’s out. But how does the runner become out? Read the rest of this entry »