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 »

I never thought I’d get to use the transit method. If that phrase rings a bell but you can’t quite place it, let me remind you about NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which spent nine years pointed out into space, observing stars. By measuring tiny dips in the brightness of those stars, scientists were able to detect the existence of thousands upon thousands of planets that orbited them. Those exoplanets blocked out some of the light when their orbit brought them between their star and Earth, and Kepler was attuned to interpret the minuscule effect of those shadows. Anyway, this is as close as I’ll ever come.

It happened in Seattle on Wednesday, and it started in the bottom of the seventh inning. The score was knotted at three at the beginning of the frame, but the Mariners quickly broke things wide open. J.P. Crawford knocked in two runs with a single past the third baseman, then Julio Rodríguez knocked in Crawford with a double to the deepest part of the ballpark. That brought Cal Raleigh to the plate with Rodríguez, briefly, on second. In the dugout, tuckered out from his 270-foot journey, Crawford did exactly what a high-performance athlete is supposed to do. He focused on recovery.

Raleigh took a Reid Detmers curve for a ball, then another for a strike. Rodríguez took off as soon as Detmers raised his right foot for the 1-1 pitch. The slider hit the outside corner and Raleigh was out in front of it, chopping it down toward the third baseman. Or rather, toward where third baseman Luis Rengifo would have been standing were he not covering third base. The steal attempt forced him over to the bag and he watched helplessly as the world’s easiest chopper floated right toward the vacancy he’d created. But that vacancy was soon to be filled. Rodríguez bore down on the base, putting him on a collision course with the ball. Or not. Read the rest of this entry »

It can be difficult to contextualize just how unusual James Wood’s offensive profile really is. He hits the ball so very hard. He hits the ball in the air so very never. In his major league debut last season, the Nationals outfielder put 198 balls into play. Only five of them were fly balls to the pull side. Of the 403 batters who put at least 100 balls in play last season, that 2.5% rate put Wood in 385th place. As for those five pulled fly balls, they turned into two home runs, two doubles, and one very loud flyout.

That seems like a promising avenue for further investigation, doesn’t it? The kind of batted ball that turns into an extra-base hit at roughly the same rate that dentists recommend, you know, brushing? If Wood could figure out how to pull the ball in the air with any sort of regularity, he’d be one of the game’s great sluggers. And yet here we are a month into the season: Wood has not at all figured that out, and somehow he’s one of the game’s great sluggers anyway. He’s running a 153 wRC+ and a top-10 isolated slugging percentage because his prodigious power allows him to get the absolute most out of one of the least optimized profiles in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you know how many leaderboards we have here at FanGraphs? I don’t. I genuinely don’t. Just in our main offense, defense, and pitching leaderboards, I counted 78. That’s before you get into team stats, league stats, splits, spring training, the postseason, combined WAR leaderboards, NPB, KBO, the minors, college, the BOARD, and on and on. We have hundreds of leaderboards because you, the citizens of planet baseball, deserve them. If you want to know who’s leading the Florida State League in groundball-to-fly ball rate, it is your right to learn that Kyle Henley of my beloved Daytona Tortugas is somehow hitting a mind-boggling seven grounders for every ball he hits in the air. I didn’t think it was possible for a baseball player’s offensive profile to suffer from acrophobia, but here we are learning new things from the leaderboards every day.

We have three plate discipline leaderboards because we pull data from Sports Info Solutions, Pitch Info, and Statcast. The strike zone is (for now) three dimensional, and so is our coverage of it. I came to really appreciate this fact on Monday, when I got curious about which hitter was doing the best job of avoiding whiffs. According to SIS, Chicago Cubs second baseman Nico Hoerner is leading all of baseball with a perfect, shining 100% contact rate inside the strike zone. Let’s stop for a moment and reflect upon this achievement. We have been playing baseball for over a month now. Over more than 100 plate appearances and nearly 400 pitches, Hoerner has yet to swing at a strike and miss. He is the only player in baseball who can make such a claim, and yet that claim is disputed nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »

Jorge Polanco has always been a good hitter. He has a career 111 wRC+, and since he started getting regular playing time in 2016, he’s finished with a wRC+ below 100 only three times, one of which was the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. But he’s played 20 games so far this season, and he’s never had a 20-game stretch quite like this. He’s batting .377 with a 233 wRC+. How is Polanco – while injured – running the fifth-best xwOBA in baseball and second-best overall batting line?

As I mentioned, Polanco isn’t 100%. He underwent surgery in October to repair his left patellar tendon, and soreness in that knee has already cost him a couple of games this season. Polanco has also been dealing with a minor oblique strain, which has kept him from hitting right-handed since March 31. Polanco has a career 118 wRC+ as a lefty and a 95 wRC+ as a righty. That’s a legitimate platoon split, but it’s not big enough that we should have expected him to turn into Babe Ruth once he quit batting right-handed. Moreover, you have to imagine that the injury is slowing him down at least slightly, even from the left side. Maybe I’m wrong here, but it’s just hard to believe that any baseball swing could be completely unaffected by an oblique injury.

Just to recap, Polanco has a minor injury. He’s only batting left-handed and (with the exception of one plate appearance that ended with a strikeout) only facing righties. He’s also DHing and getting days off to protect the oblique. Oh, and he’s been the best hitter in baseball (non-Aaron Judge division). So let’s figure out what’s going on. We’ll start with the basics. Here are Polanco’s numbers from each of the five most recent seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

A certain joke has been making the rounds for a while now. It’s really simple. It goes, “Tommy Edman, power hitter? [Pause for laughter].” I made this joke myself during the Tokyo Series. If and when the joke is actually funny, it’s because Edman doesn’t have the traditional look or profile of a power hitter. That kind of incongruity makes a great premise both for jokes and for a startlingly high proportion of children’s movies. A switch-hitting, 5-foot-9 utility player who wants to be a power hitter is roughly as quirky as a rat who wants to be a gourmet chef, a robot who wants to find love, or a snail who wants to be a race car driver.

Edman never reached double-digit home runs until he got to the majors, and he has still never hit more than 13 in a season. However, I think it’s time we changed our inflection. Tommy Edman is a power hitter, or at the very least, he’s half a power hitter. That might come as a surprise, even to those of us who have been rooting for him (and thinking of him as Cousin Tommy) ever since his debut in 2019.

All three of those home runs are from this year, and all three were hit harder than 108 mph. Edman’s eight homers this season are tied for sixth in baseball. He also ranks 27th among qualified players in slugging percentage (.514) and 16th in isolated slugging percentage (.271). However, it goes without saying that a hot start like this won’t last forever. Edman is hitting the ball hard, but his bat speed is still well below average. He’s succeeding by pulling tons of balls in the air, and while I would love to see him hold onto those gains like high-contact guys Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner before him, we’ll have to wait and see where things settle. For that reason, I don’t necessarily want to focus on this power surge. I want to think bigger. Read the rest of this entry »

Over his first five starts, Aaron Nola is 0-5 with a 6.43 ERA. On Monday night against the Mets, Nola nearly put up his best performance of the season, allowing two earned runs over six innings before things went off the rails. In the seventh inning, the two runners that he bequeathed to the bullpen scored, leaving him with a final line of 6 1/3 innings and four earned runs. Still, it was an improvement.

No one has more losses or fewer wins than Nola this season. Only three qualified pitchers have a higher ERA. How much should we be panicking right now? I will tell you up front that I don’t know the answer. There’s plenty going on, and I don’t know how to make all the pieces fit neatly, so I’m just going to lay out what I’ve learned. Let’s start with a whole bunch of advanced ERA estimators. Read the rest of this entry »

We haven’t even reached May, but on Sunday, Elly De La Cruz made what will certainly go down as one of the best defensive plays of the 2025 season. In the bottom of the second inning in Baltimore, Reds opener Brent Suter clipped the outside corner with a slider and Jackson Holliday fought it off, sending a weak line drive up the middle off the end of his bat. The ball was ticketed for center field, but nobody told De La Cruz, who ranged to his left and did his best Superman impression. He seemed to hang in the air forever as he corralled what would have been the game-tying hit.

At this point, it’s possible that Superman is going to start doing an Elly De La Cruz impression. Truly, on this Easter Sunday, Elly was risen. De La Cruz got full extension, utilizing every inch of his 6-foot-5 frame. He sacrificed his face in the process, selling out for the catch so completely that he smacked his chin and the brim of his hat into the dirt when he finally landed. When the ball found leather, the Orioles fans who had started cheering in anticipation of an RBI single instead found their voices rising in both pitch and decibel level as their disparate vocalizations merged into one united “Awww!”

I spent a significant portion of my Monday morning watching this play on repeat, then searching for as many angles of it as I could. I wanted to see the catch, but even more than that, I wanted to see the reactions. You know how when you’ve watched your favorite movie enough times, you no longer need to keep your eyes on the focus of the frame at any given moment? You start to notice all the subtle things going on in the background, the way one extra covers their face to keep from laughing, or a tiny visual joke on a blackboard. After I’d marveled at De La Cruz’s athleticism until my eyes lost the ability to focus, I started watching everyone else marvel at it. Read the rest of this entry »

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

– Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

On Thursday, Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Nathan Lukes welcomed a baby named Jett into the world. That same day, teammate Daulton Varsho was expecting to welcome his own baby. When I read the news, I did what anyone would do. I thought, “How wonderful for the Blue Jays,” and then I asked the internet to do some math for me.

Well that’s fun. Nine months before Lukes and Varsho became fathers, it was July 16, 2024. That date may ring a bell, because it was also the date of the All-Star Game. Lukes wasn’t in the majors at the time, but clearly, both players had very productive All-Star breaks. I decided it was time for a full investigation. Do baseball players make all their babies during the All-Star break? Read the rest of this entry »