For four years now, I’ve been updatingyouonthechangingcontoursofthestrikezone. 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.
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 »
This is the time of year when people start telling me that my job must be so hard now that there’s no baseball to write about. It happens every offseason. I always protest. While it’s true that without major league games to watch, one particularly fun and fruitful source of article ideas has dried up, I actually love writing in November. The truth about who was dealing with an injury all year starts trickling out. The free agent market is shaping up. General managers are hinting at their plans. Scott Boras is unveiling a fresh batch of the worst puns imaginable. I get to dig into my notes app, where I’ve been stashing weirdideas for a rainy day. More importantly, it’s a great time to reflect on the season that was. Everything is still somewhat fresh in your mind, but you’re working with a full season’s worth of numbers. You don’t have to worry that a player’s going to dive into the world’s worst slump the moment after you write about their hot streak. You can write about players who perhaps aren’t changing the course of the season, but are interesting in their own way. It’s a great time to check the leaderboards for a surprise.
Today’s surprise appeared on the SEAGER leaderboard. That’s Robert Orr’s metric for SElective AGression, and players find their way to the top by swinging at hittable pitches and laying off bad ones. Corey Seager, forever on brand, finished the season in second place (and first in an unpublished updated version). Aaron Judge and Ronald Acuña Jr. finished first and fourth, respectively, which makes plenty of sense since they finished first and fourth in walk rate and also mashed the ball. It was third place that held the name that surprised me: Joey Bart. The 6-foot-3, 235-pound Bart has seen his numbers turn around a bit in the past two seasons. Because he’s a catcher who splits time, his numbers represent a smaller sample with more room for fluctuation, but it was still eye-opening to see him in that kind of company.
Once a Johnny Bench Award winner at Georgia Tech, the second overall pick in the 2018 draft, and the heir apparent to Buster Posey, Bart debuted in San Francisco during the shortened 2020 season and struggled with injuries and underperformance from the get-go. Over 162 games from 2020 to 2023, he batted .219 with just 11 home runs. To that point in his career, his wRC+ in the minors was 123, compared to 77 in the majors. In April 2024, after Bart had exhausted his minor league options and Patrick Bailey had impressed in his own 2023 debut, the Giants traded Bart to the Pirates. Our preseason projections saw him putting up below-average numbers both at the plate and behind it. Instead, he had a career year. Splitting time with Yasmani Grandal and 2021 first overall pick Henry Davis, Bart ran a 121 wRC+, the fourth-highest mark among catchers with at least 200 plate appearances. He bested his career total with 13 home runs. Read the rest of this entry »
In just about any sport you can name, offense is king. If you’re the one who scores the goals, the points, the runs, the whatever they call it in polo – the biscuits, maybe? – you’re going to get the plaudits. Who’s the greatest defenseman in the history of hockey? It’s Bobby Orr, of course, because he was the first great offensive defenseman. This pattern very much holds when it comes to baseball.
Among other things, the sabermetric revolution helped us codify the value of hitting relative to the other facets of the game. To wit, according to weighted runs above average – and we’re using that particular stat because, like standard baserunning and defensive metrics, it’s a counting stat that compares a player to the performance of an average player – the most valuable hitter during the 2025 season was one Aaron Judge. Judge created 82.5 more runs than the average hitter. That’s 21 runs more than any other player, and an astonishing 36 more than any other player not named Shohei Ohtani. Judge was the best offensive performer in the game by a mile, which makes him the frontrunner for the American League MVP award, even though he put up negative value as a baserunner and, depending on which metric you trust, his defense graded out somewhere between pretty good (DRS, FRV) and really bad (DRP). The best defender was Patrick Bailey, who put up 30 fielding runs, and the best baserunner was Corbin Carroll, who finished with a measly 10.3 baserunning runs. Offense is just more valuable than defense and baserunning. Here’s the distribution of values for the three portions of the game:
I found this in my notes last week. I have no idea how long it’s been there. It says: “How many times this season has an infielder let the ball go right between their legs?” I had no idea whatsoever. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen it. Probably in a highlight from the 1986 World Series.
Baseball is the ultimate scorekeeping sport, and thanks to sites like ours, when you ask how many times any particular event has happened, the answer is usually easy to find. How often does a righty hit a home run off a lefty in the top of the eighth inning with the tying run in the on-deck circle? It took me twice as long to type that question out as it did to look up the answer: It has happened five times in each of the last three years. Easy. But so far as I know, nobody keeps a count of grounders that go right through the wickets.
Errors get classified in certain ways. Our leaderboard tracks fielding and throwing errors. The play-by-play notes on Baseball Savant add in missed-catch errors. Other sources differentiate between reached-on-error errors and runner-advanced errors. But that’s about it. Because they represent arguably the most embarrassing way to commit an error, between-the-legs errors are special in a human sense, but nobody splits them out into their own column because there’s nothing particularly special about them in a baseball sense. At least, you wouldn’t think so initially. Read the rest of this entry »
I love a complicated contract. I love any excuse to use the word byzantine really, so once we’re into stair-step incentive clauses, cascading conditional extensions, and the finer points of Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement, I’m having the most convoluted kind of fun imaginable. Today, I’m going to take you step by step through the complex world of Shota Imanaga’s current contract situation. As you likely know, the Cubs offered him a qualifying offer on Thursday. All we’re going to do here is break down as simply as we can how he got to that point and what it means. We’re not going to leave anything out. To be clear, Imanaga’s contract situation isn’t anywhere near the most complex one, but even so, it’s dizzying. We’re going to lose ourselves in the minutia. For fun.
I also love the logistics. I love following a chain of what happens when and why so precisely that you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation. And even before you dive in, free agent contracts are inherently absurd. They’re iron-clad agreements negotiated within the framework of an already-negotiated-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life CBA. They’re insured, and in recent years their conditionality has exploded to the point where they contain as many branches as a choose-your-own-adventure novel. But in the end, they just boil down to figuring out how much somebody’s going to get paid at their job. They just happen to be agreements about how much the most obscenely wealthy people in the entire world are going to pay people who are about to become generationally wealthy. Almost no one involved will ever have to worry about money for the rest of their lives. The people who really need the elaborate safeguards in the CBA and uniform player contracts are the ones who don’t make millions of dollars. But this is still a job; a high-pressure, high-stakes job negotiated between bitter rivals, and one side has a history of financial malfeasance that dates back to the 19th century. Of course, lawyers have to be involved. Everything needs to be spelled out, and my goodness is it spelled out.
The details in the CBA are there for very good reasons, but they’re mind-bogglingly specific. The title on the PDF calls it the basic agreement, and like any basic document, it’s 426 pages long. I just scrolled to a random page in the middle, and the topic at hand was who exactly gets photocopies of team financial documents so that the players can determine whether the owners are actually following the rules of the basic agreement. We’re 209 pages in, and we’re still talking about the logistics of the document itself.
One section stipulates what happens if a player gets called up for the National Guard. Another explains that all visiting clubhouses must contain a hydroculator. The last page is a full-page table that establishes an agreed-upon figure for how long it takes to fly from every city in the league to every other city in the league. Did you have a blast watching the swing-off that decided this year’s All-Star Game? Well, its format was codified in the CBA, which brings to the mind’s eye two teams of lawyers, red-eyed, ties loosed and collars mangled, monologuing 12 Angry Men-style in a conference room strewn with stale donuts and half-empty coffee cups about whether each player really needs unlimited pitches for their three swings when 10 pitches should really be enough to cover it.
Here’s a good-faith offer: I will personally bake a batch of cookies and mail them to the first FanGraphs reader who reaches out to me with some sort of honest-to-goodness proof that they’ve read the entire CBA. (Cookie variety of your choosing, but please be aware that my macaron game is rusty.)
Just think how wrong it would’ve felt. Two years from now, watching Salvador Perez, who signed with the Royals as a 16-year-old in 2006, squatting behind the plate in Miami blue. Salvador Perez, who put the “everyday” in “Kansas City Royals everyday catcher” starting in 2012, launching dingers through the thin mountain air in Rockies purple. It’s enough to make you cry, but luckily, this dystopian future has been avoided. According to Anne Rogers of MLB.com, the 35-year-old backstop has signed an two-year extension that will keep in him in Royals Blue through the 2027 season. It’s better this way. The deal is for $25 million, with some deferrals and a $7 million signing bonus.
To be clear, Perez wasn’t at risk of leaving anytime soon. His previous four-year, $82 million deal that started in 2022 had a $13.5 million option for 2026, and general manager J.J. Picollo told reporters in September that the catcher would be returning one way or another. Anthony Franco of MLB Trade Rumors explained the reasons for the deal: “While the specific salary structure and deferrals have yet to be reported, it stands to reason [the Royals will] negotiate a lower ’26 salary than the option value while giving Perez the security of the second guaranteed year.” So it’s the classic extension trade-off. The Royals get a discount and Perez gets an extra year of job security. It also allows him to avoid free agency amid whatever shenanigans occur when the collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season.
That extra year is a big one in terms of increasing the likelihood that Perez retires as a lifelong Royal. One day in the not-too-distant future, we’ll endure a knock-down-drag-out battle about Perez’s worthiness for enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, and we’ll be lucky to live through it. In the meantime, he’s improved his shot at wading into the fray wielding single-team bona fides. As for why the Royals would feel the need to get out in front of things and lock down the age-37 season of a catcher who has exceeded 0.8 WAR just once in the past four years, well, it makes more sense than you think. Read the rest of this entry »
At the conclusion of the ALDS, I wrote an article about Aaron Judge’s postseason. Across seven games and 31 plate appearances, the Brobdingnagian slugger ran a 253 wRC+ with a slash line of .500/.581/.692. If you set a minimum of 30 plate appearances, then that 253 wRC+ ranks 14th among all postseason performances. That last sentence contains a good bit of statistical misdirection; that 30-PA cutoff eliminates most of the players in postseason history, but it’s still low enough to let an outlier like Judge shine. Still, my goal was to highlight how brilliant Judge had been while also trying to create a framework for putting postseason numbers in context. The tiny sample sizes make that really hard to do, and that was part of the point. But Judge wasn’t the only player who excelled this postseason. In that same Divisional Series, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. got 20 plate appearances and batted .529 with a 324 wRC+. Ernie Clement put up the exact same 324 mark with a .643 batting average over 16 plate appearances. I didn’t mention them in the article because of those smaller sample sizes, but I planned to keep my eye on them. They didn’t disappoint.
Guerrero batted .385 with three home runs in the ALCS, running a 250 wRC+. As you may have heard, he had a pretty good World Series, too. He batted .333 with two homers and a 192 wRC+. Put it all together, and Guerrero slashed .397/.494/.795 with eight homers, 18 runs scored, and 15 RBI in the playoffs. He got intentionally walked six times. Should we watch all eight of those homers? Of course we should. There is no excuse too slight to watch all eight of those homers.
Over the entire postseason, Guerrero posted a wRC+ of 241, leaving him just 14 points behind Judge. Going back to our minimum of 30 plate appearances, that’s the 25th-highest mark of all time. But Guerrero didn’t just leave Judge’s 31 plate appearances in the dust, he set an all-time record with 89. His sample was nearly three times bigger, and he was still just 14 points behind!
As we established, over those extra 69 plate appearances in the ALCS and World Series, Guerrero continued his excellent play, so it’s time for an update. Let me show you the graph I made a few weeks ago to show you how much of an outlier Judge was. The red circle is Judge. The green dot is Barry Bonds’ absurd 259 wRC+ performance from the Giants’ 2002 World Series run. I’ve added an orange dot to highlight where Guerrero was at that point.
“This certainly makes Judge look a bit less spectacular,” I wrote at the time. “He’s up toward the top of the heap for a player around 30 plate appearances, but he’s not standing out from the pack the way Bonds did. According to this chart, the most impressive performance in postseason history is undoubtedly Randy Arozarena’s magical, homer-filled 2020 run with the Rays, all the way to the right.” At that point, Guerrero was higher than Judge in raw wRC+, but he was at roughly the same place on the trendline. He was right near the top, but at the 20-PA mark rather than the 30-PA mark, which made it a bit less impressive. Well three sublime weeks later, we can now update this graph. Judge, Bonds, and Arozarena are no longer highlighted. The only dot I’ve highlighted is Guerrero’s and it’s not hard to see why. He stands alone. There’s a brand new dot in town.
What we’re essentially illustrating with this graph is weighted runs created – removing the plus from weighted runs created plus. The higher and further to the right you are, the more runs you’ve created. We’re turning this back into a counting stat in order to look at the players who have put up the most offensive value in a single postseason, and Guerrero just set the record. Here’s the top 10:
If you want to argue about the best single-season playoff hitting performance of all time, you have plenty of metrics to choose from. Without a PA minimum, the highest postseason wRC+ of all time belongs to Jim Mason, who homered in his one postseason plate appearance with the Yankees in the 1976 World Series. Because the league had a paltry .681 OPS that year, his home run was weighted more heavily than the three other players who homered in their only postseason plate appearance. He has a career postseason wRC+ of 1,432, quite a bit better than his regular season mark of 53.
If you set a minimum of 15 plate appearances in order to include players from the time when the World Series constituted the entirety of the postseason, then you’ve got Lou Gehrig’s 419 wRC+ when the Yankees swept the Cardinals in 1928. Gehrig went 6-for-11 with a double, four home runs, six walks! He made just five outs in four games and ran a slash line of .545/.706/1.727.
If you’re interested in win probability added, then the Cardinals get their revenge in the form of David Freese’s absurd 2011 run. His 1.91 WPA puts him on top. He was impossible to retire, and because he was batting behind the triumvirate of Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday, and Lance Berkman, who combined for an on-base percentage of .444, he was always coming to the plate with runners on base in high-leverage situations.
But if you’re just talking about sustained excellence, then the answer is clear. The crown once belonged to Bonds, then Arozarena. It now belongs to Guerrero.
“I mean, we get that there’s extra time kind of baked in there when he’s either on the plate – when he’s either at the plate – JORDAN!”
That’s how it started. If you’ve ever wondered how a standard manager-umpire interaction goes down, well, now you know. It starts with the manager screaming the umpire’s name at the top of his lungs and waving an arm. In the bottom of the fourth inning, as John Schneider attempted to manage the Blue Jays to victory in Game 7 of the World Series while enduring an in-game interview, Justin Wrobleski started Andrés Giménez off with a fastball high and tight. It both looked and sounded like the ball might have clipped Giménez’s elbow, so midway through a measured critique of home plate umpire Jordan Baker for pausing the game while Shohei Ohtani switched from hitter mode to pitcher mode, Schneider signaled to Baker that he wanted to pause the game for a moment to check the video.
The video room told the Blue Jays not to challenge. The ball had missed Giménez. A ball and a strike later, Wrobleski lost control of yet another fastball, and Schneider once again asked Baker to pause the game. Visibly upset, the manager crossed his arms and stuck out his chin while he waited on word from the replay room. This pitch was more high than inside, and despite Giménez’s best efforts, it had once again missed him. He had tried the classic move of earning a hit-by-pitch by letting his elbow drift out over the plate in the process of turning back toward the catcher and (ostensibly) away from the pitch. Then, realizing that he’d still be a few inches shy of the ball, he just stuck his arm out artlessly. Well, it was only artless in the respect that he’d dispensed with subterfuge. The ball was slightly above his arm, so he tried to close the distance by raising first his shoulder, then his elbow, then his wrist, and finally his fingers. He was popping and locking, artfully, and when that didn’t get him high enough, he hopped a few inches into the air. Had he made contact with the ball that way, Baker would have been forced to keep him at the plate, just as James Hoye did when Aledmys Díazleaned into an inside pitch in Game 1 of the 2022 World Series. Giménez looked into the dugout with a frown, and Schneider followed suit. Read the rest of this entry »
