By all rights, this should be a lost season for Daulton Varsho. The Toronto center fielder missed the first month of 2025 while rehabbing from offseason rotator cuff surgery. He started his year with a seven-game minor league rehab stint during which he batted .129 with no walks and no extra-base hits, good for a wRC+ of -29. Varsho got one month in Toronto, and then a strained hamstring stole another two months from him. After seven more games in the minors, Varsho returned on August 1 and now has 20 more games under his belt. So just to recap, Varsho’s season has gone: rehab for a month, play for a month, injured for two months, play for another month. He’s seen a grand total of 44 games of action.

That’s not exactly enough time to get your bearings, especially after a major surgery. At least, that wouldn’t be enough time for most people. Varsho is putting up the best numbers of his career. He’d never topped a wRC+ of 106 in a single season, but he’s currently at 127. He’s already posted 1.5 WAR, and although he can only get into a maximum of 74 games, he’s almost certain to put up the third-most WAR of his career. What makes all this even wilder is that Varsho only heated up during this most recent stint. He ran a 102 wRC+ before the hamstring injury, and he’s at 161 since he returned. As the cliché goes, getting Varsho back from the IL was Toronto’s best trade deadline acquisition. In fact, on a per-PA basis, Varsho has been a top-25 position player, on pace for 4.3 WAR over a normal, 150-game season.

So what is Varsho doing differently in this weird, bifurcated season? I’ll go over a few changes later on, but honestly, not that much. He’s just being himself, but his traits have been intensified over this short timeframe. Varsho has always been an extreme lift-and-pull hitter with a very steep swing. He piles up home runs and strikeouts, and he runs low BABIPs despite his speed because of that homer-or-bust approach. This season, he’s striking out more than ever, hitting more homers than ever, and running a career-low BABIP. Varsho has always been one of the game’s true elite outfielders despite below-average arm strength. This season, he’s putting up bonkers defensive numbers even though his arm has been one of the weakest in baseball so far. It’s like we got the from-concentrate version of Daulton Varsho, but somebody forgot to add water. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, you don’t really have to squeeze your glove when you catch the ball. At least, you don’t have to think about squeezing it. It’s an instinctual thing, and while it’s different if you’re a catcher, the whole point of the glove is to corral the baseball. It was designed just for that. The ball tends to stick in there.

That’s most of the time. Sometimes you really do have to think about squeezing the ball, though. Sometimes there’s geometry involved. I love the geometry.

I love thinking about the angles. How do I position myself so I can catch this throw and apply the tag in one motion? Should I wait on this ball, or should I circle around it so I can charge it and field it on a short hop? At what point do I give up on picking this throw and step back to catch it on the long hop? Read the rest of this entry »

We spend a lot of time here at FanGraphs writing about breakouts. A player who’s suddenly figured it out represents both an exciting piece of news and a chance to dive into the nuances of pitching or hitting. Reading and writing about that subject so often makes you pick up on certain patterns. Today, our subject is Mets infielder Brett Baty, who hasn’t played enough to qualify and who hasn’t broken out in a big way, yet who is fascinating because his breakout doesn’t quite match the patterns we’re used to seeing.

A former 55 FV prospect who ranked 19th on our 2023 Top 100 list, Baty came into the season with a 71 wRC+ over three seasons and 602 total plate appearances. He’s 25, and he’s had an up-and-down career, mashing his way up the Mets system and then struggling upon his promotion to Flushing. He’s got an .889 OPS in the minors and .654 in the majors. If you were to ask a Mets fan what Baty needed to do in order to succeed this season, they probably would have said he needed to put the ball in the air more and he needed to stop striking out so much.

Over 326 plate appearances this season entering play Thursday, Baty has 15 home runs, matching his career total from the start of the year, and a 107 wRC+. These are huge improvements. But he’s done that despite continuing to strike out too much and running a career-low launch angle. That’s not the only mystery. Baty is hitting the ball harder, going from an average exit velocity of 88.8 mph from 2022-24 to 90.8 mph in 2025. Adding two ticks of EV is huge. His hard-hit rate has also jumped from 40% to nearly 47%. But once again, his increased contact quality doesn’t fit the patterns we’re used to seeing. Read the rest of this entry »

We thought we knew what to expect from Maikel Garcia. Coming into his third full season in the majors, the Royals third baseman had a career wRC+ of 77, but thanks to his 17 OAA, he’d put up 3.4 WAR. That added up to a story as old as time – or at least as old as Ke’Bryan Hayes – a good-not-great, all-glove everyday third baseman. This season, Garcia is blowing up that narrative.

Garcia came up as a shortstop, but with Bobby Witt Jr. set to lock that position down for the next decade or two, he quickly settled in as one of the best defensive third basemen in the game. As for the bat, well, he didn’t chase, he made tons of contact, and he hit the ball hard. He just couldn’t get it in the air. A total of 303 batters made at least 1,000 plate appearances between 2021 and 2024. Garcia’s 45.7% hard-hit rate ranked 60th among them, but his average launch angle of 6.2 degrees ranked 285th. As a result, his .344 slugging percentage ranked 293rd. The package worked, especially after Garcia became one of the best baserunners in the game in 2024, but it was hard to look at him without fixating on that one big thing he couldn’t seem to do.

Hayes is just three years older than Garcia, but after spending so much time waiting for him to start lifting the ball, maybe it was a little too easy to write off Garcia’s offensive potential too. The high groundball rate wasn’t his only flaw. Garcia didn’t just have a low chase rate; he was one of the most passive players in all of baseball. With little fear that he’d swing at all, much less somehow turn a groundball into a home run, pitchers absolutely pounded the zone, racking up called strikes and keeping Garcia from turning all that patience into walks. Then 2025 happened. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the sound of a batter not getting hit by a pitch? I ask because as hit-by-pitch rates climbed over the years (and kept climbing), we writers have made lots of noise about them. In 2007, Steve Treder published an article called “The HBP Explosion (That Almost Nobody Seems to Have Noticed)” in The Hardball Times. After that, everybody noticed. We’ve seen articles about rising hit-by-pitch rates here at FanGraphs, Baseball Prospectus, the Baseball Research Journal, MLB.com, The Athletic, SportsNet, FiveThirtyEight, the Wall Street Journal — even the Clinical Journal of Sports Medicine. The venerable Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus has been writing about it (and writing about it and writing about) ever since he was the promising Rob Mains of the FanGraphs Community Blog. Tom Verducci wrote about the “hit-by-pitch epidemic” for Sports Illustrated in 2021, then wrote a different article with a nearly identical title just two months ago. There’s good reason for all this noise, and in order to show it to you, I’ll reproduce the graph Devan Fink made when he wrote about this topic in 2018:

Hit-by-pitches have been rising since the early 1980s, and despite a decline in the 1970s, you could argue that they’ve been rising ever since World War II. Devan’s graph ends in 2018, but the numbers kept on going up — for a while, anyway. Here’s a graph that shows the HBP rate in recent years. After a couple decades of sounding the HBP alarm, it’s time for us to unring that bell (which I assume, without having looked it up, is an easy thing to do):

Congratulations everybody, we’ve done it! We’ve ended the epidemic. The HBP rate has fallen in four of the last five seasons. It’s safe to leave your home again. You can enter a public space without fear that you’ll be bombarded with stray baseballs. Rob Mains can finally take a vacation. Tom Verducci can finally take a deep breath. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in late June, I wrote about something weird happening in Flushing. In spite of being slow, and in spite of not being great at the other parts of baserunning, the Mets were threatening to become the most efficient base-stealing team of all time.

Well, exactly seven weeks later, the Mets are still slow. According to Statcast, they’ve got an average sprint speed of 27 feet per second, which puts them in a five-way tie for the slowest team in baseball. And they are also still not good at taking the extra base: Statcast ranks them 20th, while Baseball Prospectus has them at 15th. But if you’ve been watching the Mets for the last couple months, you know very well that they can still steal bases.

This week, I took another look at the numbers because a reader named Kevin submitted a mailbag question about Juan Soto’s newfound proclivity for stealing bases. We’ll get to Soto a bit later, but let’s start with the team as a whole. I wrote that article on June 26. At the time, the Mets had 62 stolen bases, which ranked 11th in the majors, and they’d been caught just 10 times. That was a lot of baseball ago, so now seems like a good time to give you an update. The Mets have 93 stolen bases, the 11th-most swipes in the game, and they’ve been caught just 10 times. They haven’t been caught since June 17! They’re 34 for their last 34! Read the rest of this entry »

We haven’t written much about Vladimir Guerrero Jr. since he signed his half-billion-dollar contract extension back in April. That’s understandable, in that we tend to write about new and exciting developments. Of course, the downside of that is sometimes it can lead us to neglect exciting players who aren’t necessarily doing anything new. On the surface, Guerrero very much falls into that category. He’s having a typical Vladimir Guerrero Jr. season.

Those numbers are nearly identical! Guerrero is doing his thing, which consists of hitting the ball hard, hitting it on the ground, and putting up an overall batting line that should nab him a smattering of MVP votes. The Blue Jays promised Guerrero all the money in Canada in the hope that he would just keep on being himself for the next decade and a half, and he’s off to a great start. Just 14 more seasons like this to go. He’s on pace for 5.0 WAR, the third-best mark of his career. That’s certainly worth writing about, especially when Guerrero is doing it for the team with the best record in the American League. But also, I mostly want to write about this new thing he’s doing.

Here’s the new thing: Guerrero has stopped swinging. Not entirely – that would be silly – but he’s dropped his overall swing rate from 48.5% in 2024 all the way to 40.9% in 2025. That’s the third-largest decrease among all qualified players. It represents a huge departure for Guerrero (and an even bigger departure from the ways of his swing-happy father). Read the rest of this entry »

I owe Luke Keaschall an apology. Last night, the 22-year-old second baseman put up the first oh-fer of his brief and brilliant major league career, the predictable result of my decision to write about him today. In the series opener in the Bronx, the Yankees beat the Twins, 6-2, and Keaschall watched from the on-deck circle with an 11-game hitting streak on the line as Ryan Jeffers struck out to end the game. This is my fault. I knew that by pitching an article about Keaschall, I was condemning him to this fate. I really do feel bad about jinxing him, but it was time to highlight just how impressive his start has been. Keaschall will turn 23 on Friday, which makes him exactly three years older than FanGraphs.

Permit me to exclude Monday’s stats momentarily for the sake of painting a picture. Through the first 12 games of his career, Keaschall ran a 234 wRC+, slashing .415/.500/.707, homering twice, and stealing five bases. He’s one of just 10 players in the last 30 years – a list that also includes his manager, Rocco Baldelli – to start his career with an 11-game hitting streak. Keaschall also started his career with a 12-game on-base streak. Yes, that is possible; I’ll explain in a moment. With a nice round 1.0 WAR (which dropped to 0.9 on Monday; again, I’m so sorry, Luke), he ranks eighth among Minnesota’s position players. He has five multi-hit games. He was just named AL Player of the Week in his second week as a big leaguer. On Sunday, he achieved his first three-hit game with a walk-off homer against the Royals in the 11th inning. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitching analyst Lance Brozdowski has been on Brandon Woodruff since the Brewers right-hander returned from a 2023 shoulder surgery on July 6. Brozdowski has written about Woodruff twice, first breaking down the ways that he looks like a different pitcher this season. His second piece was titled “How Is Brandon Woodruff Doing This?” I’d like to really dig in and answer that question, both because when Brozdowski asks a question it’s usually a good one and because Woodruff’s numbers really are confusing. As Michael Baumann noted a few weeks ago, Woodruff’s return coincided almost exactly with Milwaukee’s recent unbeatable stretch. “If Woodruff is well and truly back,” Baumann wrote, “for my money he’s a bigger add than any starter who’s likely to get moved at the deadline.” Woodruff has gone 4-0 with a 2.29 ERA, a 3.73 FIP, and a 34.9% strikeout rate over his six starts, and he’ll likely be a huge part of the team’s playoff rotation, but whether he’s back is still very much an open question.

Before we get into everything, we should talk about Woodruff’s arsenal, which at least for a little while looked pretty different this season. A month ago at Brewer Fanatic, Matthew Trueblood analyzed Woodruff’s repertoire during his minor league rehab assignment, and wrote that in order to be successful, “Woodruff will need to reinvent himself.” The pitcher seemed to agree, at least at first. This season in the majors, he has thrown a four-seamer, sinker, changeup, cutter, curve, and sweeper. The cutter is new, with the sweeper replacing his traditional slider. However, he hasn’t thrown the sweeper since his second start (likely because it was the second game in a row the other team homered on the pitch), and he’s also drastically reduced his cutter usage over his last two starts. He’s also nearly evened out his fastball usage. In recent years, Woodruff led with his four-seamer, but now he’s throwing it 34% of the time and his sinker 31%, leading with the sinker against righties and the four-seamer against lefties. His curveball is down to 5% and his changeup has held steady at 17%. In other words, Woodruff is throwing a fastball 65% of the time, and that number jumps to 77% of the time if you count the cutter:

Let’s start with the reasons for suspicion, and please note that this section makes up five full paragraphs. Luck is a big component here. Woodruff is currently running a .143 BABIP and a 100% strand rate. Eight of the nine earned runs he’s allowed have come on home runs. Those are massively unsustainable numbers. The league averages a .289 BABIP and 72.5% strand rate. Even though he’s spent his entire career pitching in front of an excellent Milwaukee defense, Woodruff has never run a BABIP below .269 or a strand rate above 82% (except in 2023, when he only made 11 starts). No matter what else happens, we should expect his BABIP to add at least 100 points and his strand rate to drop by at least 20% going forward. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re 10 years or so into the launch angle revolution, and the reasoning behind it hasn’t changed much. Groundballs have a .228 wOBA this season, while all other balls in play are at .462. Hit the ball on the ground, and you’re Christian Vázquez. Hit it in the air, and you’re Aaron Judge. Players are gearing their swings for damage in the air. They’re optimizing their bat path for an upward trajectory. They’re meeting the ball farther out in front. They’re looking to hit the bottom third of the ball. Knowing all this, I doubt you’d be surprised to learn that 2025 is shaping up to set the record for lowest groundball rate since 2002, when Sports Info Solutions first started tracking such things. But you might be surprised to learn just how extreme the shift has been.

So far, I’ve talked about all the reasons that batters have tried to put the ball in the air more, but that’s only half the story. Five years ago, Ben Clemens wrote a great article in which he tried to determine whether batters or pitchers exert more control over groundball rates. After separating the batters from the pitchers, he split each group into quartiles based on their 2018 groundball rates and then looked at the results when each group faced off in 2019. He found that the effect was nearly identical. When you moved the batter up one quadrant, the groundball rate of the new pairing went up by an average of 5.2 percentage points. When the pairing moved up a quadrant in the pitcher pool, the groundball rate went up by 4.8 percentage points. Knowing that, let’s not blame this all on the batters. Are pitchers as responsible as batters for the shrinking groundball rate across the majors? Let’s start by updating my 2023 league-wide update on pitch mix.

Read the rest of this entry »