If you know a Mets fan, you’re probably familiar with the speech. The speech starts like this: “Francisco Lindor is the most underrated player in baseball.” The pronunciation is really important here. You have to pronounce the so that it rhymes with he, and you have to put a big long pause between under and rated. Those are the rules. From that starting point, the speech generally continues for somewhere between 30 seconds and six hours, touching on offense, defense, MLB Network rankings, and at least two versions of WAR. I’ve never been all that sure whether the speech was necessarily true. Lindor’s greatness has always struck me as impossible to ignore. As one of the game’s premier defenders, according to both the advanced metrics and the eye test, he’s always on the highlight reels. He’s received MVP votes in six different seasons and won two Gold Gloves, one Platinum Glove, and three Silver Sluggers. He’s just 30 years old, and he’s already got the 25th-best JAWS score among all shortstops. He’s still adding to his seven-year peak, too. When I started writing this article yesterday, he ranked 26th.

But maybe I’m part of the problem. Maybe while I’ve been taking it for granted that everyone knows about Lindor’s greatness, other people have actually been taking Lindor’s greatness for granted. That would be uncool. As such, this is your annual reminder of just how great Francisco Lindor is. Because we’ve done this before, we’ll take a different tack and focus on things Lindor hasn’t done.

Be an Average Hitter

Lindor is now in his 10th big league season, and he’s never once put up a wRC+ below 101. We’ve seen Lindor have a down year at the plate, but even at his worst, he’s still been an above-average hitter. He graced the pages of FanGraphs for the first time in 2012 in an article with a title that fit perfectly with the auspiciousness of the moment: Midwest League Prospect Update. In it, Mike Newman called Lindor “A gold glove shortstop in the making,” but also wrote, “Lindor may wind up being a bit BABIP dependent.” As it turns out, even in 2021, when Lindor’s BABIP fell all the way to .248, seventh lowest among all qualified players, he managed to be an above-average hitter. I don’t bring that up to rag on Mike. If you remember the beginning of Lindor’s career, you know that although he hit throughout the minors, the hype around his glove was understandably louder. But the consistency is remarkable, especially from a switch-hitter. His career wRC+ is 126 from the right side and 115 from the left side. He’s only put up a below-average wRC+ from either side of the plate twice: He had a 94 wRC+ from the right side in 2016, and a 96 mark in ’21. According to our database, there have been 549 primary shortstops who made at least a thousand plate appearances in the AL and NL since 1903. Lindor’s career 119 wRC+ ranks 19th.

This season, Lindor’s 125 wRC+ puts him on pace for his fifth career season above 120. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in February, I wrote (and sang) about the electric debut of Edouard Julien, which featured excellent plate discipline and extreme platoon splits. The rookie second baseman ran a 136 wRC+ and put up 2.8 WAR in just 109 games, then hit even better in the postseason. Facing a steady diet of righties, Julien balanced out a precipitously high strikeout rate with an even better walk rate. He also balanced out roughly average raw power by hitting the ball hard consistently. This season, however, his strikeout rate has gone from high to untenable and his contact quality has taken a significant step back. Julien was sent down to Triple-A St. Paul to figure things out in June. Let’s take a look at what’s going on and how he might be able to fix it.

We should start by making it clear that Julien’s season, while disappointing, has not been disastrous by any means. He has a 93 wRC+, including a much improved 98 wRC+ against left-handed pitching (though once again it’s an extremely small sample size). He’s also improved his defense, and as a result, he’s put up 0.8 WAR over his 63 games with Minnesota. Prorated out over a full 162-game season, he’s right around league average at 2.1 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Michael Baumann wrote about the enormous proportion of the Yankees’ offense that Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are responsible for. According to weighted runs created, those two sluggers have been responsible for just under 39% of the Bronx bombardment this season, a percentage that is unmatched not just in this cursed year of 2024, but in this entire cursed millennium. Today, I’d like to focus just on Judge. He’s having the best season of his career at the plate, which is a ludicrous thing to say about a player who hit 62 home runs just two years ago, and who, if not for an oddly situated concrete embankment in Dodger Stadium’s right field, might well have done so again last year. If we follow Baumann’s lead and look just at this century, the leaderboard for single-season wRC+ among qualified batters looks like this:

First of all, no, I didn’t make a mistake. As of Thursday morning, Judge was running a 212 wRC+, which makes him tied with a peak Barry Bonds season. Second of all, I lied just a moment ago. We don’t need to limit ourselves to the 2000s for the top six wRC+ marks to go to Bonds and Judge. If we start traveling back in time, the leaderboard looks exactly the same until we get all the way to 1957, when a couple of guys named Ted Williams (223) and Mickey Mantle (217) crash the party. Judge is hitting like an inner circle Hall of Famer, again. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe the Orioles just like shopping for pitchers in Florida. Days after Baltimore acquired Zach Eflin from Tampa Bay, Ken Rosenthal reported that the team has traded for Marlins left-handed starter Trevor Rogers in exchange for Connor Norby and Kyle Stowers. The Orioles have selected the contract of Terrin Vavra, who is running a 112 wRC+ with Triple-A Norfolk this season, to take Norby’s place on the big league roster. (Shortly after this article was filed, Jeff Passan reported that the Orioles have also acquired Eloy Jiménez from the White Sox, while C. Trent Rosecrans reported that Austin Slater is headed from the Reds to the land of Old Bay; Michael Baumann will write up those transactions shortly.)

On its face, this seems like either a great get for Miami, or a sign that the price for starting pitching is sky high. Last April, Rogers suffered a biceps strain that ended his season after just four starts. This season, he’s stayed healthy and thrown 105.1 innings, but the results haven’t exactly been there. Following his breakout rookie campaign in 2021, Rogers is 7-22 with a 4.92 ERA and 4.36 FIP. This season, those figures are 4.53 and 4.42. Read the rest of this entry »

Generally speaking, late Saturday night is not the time for rational decisions. Late Saturday night is when people make the kinds of decisions that they won’t even remember until halfway through their eggs on Sunday and whose logic they’ll struggle to puzzle out for years to come. But just before midnight on Saturday, Jeff Passan revealed that the Nationals and the Mets made a perfectly reasonable swap. The Mets, currently half a game ahead of the Diamondbacks for the final NL Wild Card spot, bolstered their outfield and added a much-needed left-handed bat by sending 24-year-old right-handed pitching prospect Tyler Stuart to the Nationals in exchange for half a season of the resurgent Jesse Winker. After putting up a dreadful -0.8 WAR in an injury-shortened 2023 campaign, Winker is running a 126 wRC+ and has put up 1.3 WAR, fourth-best among Washington’s position players. Winker also spent his early childhood in upstate New York and has been vocal about his appreciation for Mets fans.

Winker got into Sunday’s game with his new team, entering as a replacement and playing left field, though his ultimate destination might be in right. Winker hasn’t played more than 100 innings in right field since 2019, but with Starling Marte out since June 22 due to a knee injury, that seems like the most logical fit. The Mets are currently platooning Jeff McNeil and Tyrone Taylor out there. Against righties, Winker could allow McNeil to move second base, pushing Jose Iglesias, who started out red-hot but has just one hit over his past six games, back into a bench role. Read the rest of this entry »

“An egregious error of Umpire Hurst in construing the rules helped Boston to two runs and added to the confusion of the Orioles. In the fourth inning Boston had three men on bases and one out. Ryan came to the bat and scratched out a short fly over third base. Jennings ran for the ball, got under it and muffed it. According to Rule 45, Section 9, a batter is out ‘if he hits a fly ball that can be handled by an infielder while first base is occupied with only one out.’ Ryan should have been declared out whether the ball was muffed or not…

When seen at the club-house after the game he started in defense of his position by attempting a distinction between the outfield and infield, claiming that the ball was not hit to the infield, but when his attention was called to the wording of the rule, which does not state that the ball must be hit to the infield, but simply that it shall be such a ball as an infielder can handle, he abandoned that position, and argued that it was not a fly ball, but a line drive. He soon saw the absurdity of that argument, as a line drive which does not touch the ground is as much a fly ball as if it were hit 100 feet up into the air.”

– “Errors Lost the Game,” The Morning Herald, April 26, 1894

The graph below has been haunting me for weeks now. I made it, but there’s nothing unique about it. You can find an identical graph in this Alex Chamberlain piece, this Tom Tango blog post, or any number of other articles. It shows the batting average and wOBA for every batted ball, based on launch angle.

I cut off 20 degrees from either side, but you get the point. Worthless groundballs and popups are on the sides, and valuable line drives and fly balls make up a narrow sliver in the middle. It occurred to me a few weeks ago that we’ve been splitting batted balls into those same four categories for a very long time now. Moreover, one of those categories is suspect. If you’ve been reading FanGraphs for a while, you know that line drive rate is considered fluky rather than sticky. Only a handful of elite players – Luis Arraez, Freddie Freeman, maybe Steven Kwan – are capable of consistently putting up top-10 line drive rates. According to Baseball Savant, batters have a .639 wOBA on line drives this year. Hitting line drives is what every single batter is trying to do, and yet somehow what Russell Carleton wrote seven years ago still holds true: “There is some skill in hitting line drives, but it is hard to repeat, and how many line drives you hit seems to be unrelated to where you fall on the ground-ball/fly-ball spectrum.” I set out to find some new way to look at this old puzzle, figuring that with all of the tools as our disposal, there had to be a better way to slice this particular pie. I failed, but I came across some interesting things along the way, and that (I have decided after the fact) is what’s really important. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s start with a riddle: Team A and Team B have both played 98 games this season. Due to the vagaries of extra innings and unplayed bottoms of ninths, Team A’s pitchers have thrown four more innings than Team B’s pitchers. However, Team B’s pitchers have faced 259 more batters than Team A. How is this possible?

OK, yeah, so this was actually a pretty easy riddle. The answer is that Team B’s pitchers stink, while Team A’s pitchers are very good. Team A gets a higher percentage of batters out, which means that it faces fewer batters per inning. Let’s put some names and numbers to our hypothetical, shall we? Allow me to introduce you to the Mariners and the White Sox.

The Mariners have better pitchers and a better defense behind them. Consequently, the White Sox have allowed a whopping 130 more runs. But take a look at the last row of that table. The White Sox have thrown the most pitches in baseball, while the Mariners have thrown the second fewest. Having good pitching and good defense has allowed them to throw 1,477 fewer pitches than the South Siders. The average team throws 146 pitches per game, so we’re talking about 10 entire games’ worth of pitches. Ten games! That is a huge number, and these teams still have 64 games left to go. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the fun things about baseball (that’s also one of the fun things about life in general) is that at any moment you can look for and find something that you alone are seeing, that you alone are paying enough attention to notice, that you alone care about. Last Wednesday, the Twins finally lost to the White Sox. The Twins had won their first eight matchups with the South Siders, and they would beat the Sox again later that day. In fact, if not for the opportunity to pummel the White Sox at frequent intervals, Minnesota’s first half would look much different and much darker. But just this once, in the first game of Wednesday’s doubleheader, the Twins lost to the White Sox.

The bird showed up sometime during the first inning. It wasn’t there when Carlos Correa slapped the 11th pitch of the game through the right side for a single, but in the bottom of the inning, when Andrew Vaughn grounded into a 5-4-3 double play and the camera whipped around the horn to follow the ball, there it was — perched on a steel cable right above the on-deck circle as if it had been there forever.

Read the rest of this entry »

For those who enjoy the loudest, simplest, most dopamine-drenched form of baseball, today is a special day. It’s Derby day, and even better, the silly hats are not mandatory. The MLB Home Run Derby takes place at 8:00 p.m. ET at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. What the Costco-coded ballpark lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in bulk. According to Statcast’s park factors, Globe Life yields more home runs than the average park both for righties (120) and for lefties (110), so we should be in for a show. You can watch on ESPN, but if you’re a nerd – and you’re reading FanGraphs right now, so I’m sure you can do the math on this one – you’ll probably prefer the Statcast broadcast over on ESPN 2.

As in any year, there’s a laundry list of Derby-worthy players who won’t be participating, with Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, and Elly De La Cruz at the top. Still, this a solid sampling of swatters, and nearly every participant figures to have a legitimate shot at winning. Either we’ll have a first-time winner or Pete Alonso will take home his record-tying third title.

The field features three of the top six home run hitters in baseball this season — Gunnar Henderson, Marcell Ozuna, and José Ramírez — and two of the game’s brightest young shortstops: AL MVP candidates Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr.. It also includes three sluggers who take the Derby much more seriously than your average participant — Alonso, Henderson, and Teoscar Hernández — and two others who’ve won derbies at lower levels: Witt and Alec Bohm. Finally, there’s Adolis García, an electrifying slugger whose historic power display during the Rangers’ World Series run last season is sure to keep the crowd at full throat. In the sections below, I’ll break down all the new rules and I’ll try to make a case for why each candidate has a shot at the crown. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Ryan McMahon’s first stolen base of the season. McMahon, whose sprint speed was recently downgraded from the 19th percentile to the 18th, managed that first bag by way of a delayed steal. By completely dismissing McMahon as a threat, the Pirates presented him with a perfect storm of opportunity. He took an enormous lead off third base because no one bothered to hold him on, and he waited until catcher Yasmani Grandal unleashed a lollipop back to the pitcher, then waltzed home.

Where did McMahon, who had been caught stealing four times to that point in the season, get the idea for such a brazen daylight robbery? Probably from Garrett Stubbs, who had executed the same move just a few weeks prior, stealing third base right from under McMahon’s nose. Stubbs didn’t get the same gargantuan lead that McMahon did, nor did he get to take advantage of a catcher’s big, slow rainbow tosses back to the pitcher. He simply went because he saw that catcher Jacob Stallings was paying him no attention whatsoever.

On Monday, the Rockies were involved in yet another delayed steal. After walking in the bottom of the second inning, major league stolen base leader Elly De La Cruz somehow waited two whole pitches before taking off for second as Elias Díaz tossed the ball back to Ryan Feltner.

This latest delayed steal was very different from the first two. McMahon is extremely slow — and Stubbs, while not slow, is a catcher — but everyone in the ballpark was aware that De La Cruz would likely try to take second. Both broadcast crews were talking about the threat of a steal and both feeds made sure to cut to shots of De La Cruz’s lead. While Díaz has one of the quicker arms in the league, Feltner is extremely slow to the plate. He has allowed 20 stolen bases this season, second only to Corbin Burnes with 24. Díaz stared De La Cruz down before returning the ball to Feltner after the first pitch, and Feltner attempted a pickoff before delivering the second pitch. None of that mattered against a threat like De La Cruz, but I still found it surprising that he opted for a delayed steal considering that with a pitcher like Feltner on the mound, a conventional stolen base attempt was more or less a sure thing.

De La Cruz, being De La Cruz, stole third base four pitches later; then one pitch after that, he was caught stealing home on a first-and-third steal attempt because Díaz (legally) blocked home plate. Sam Miller wrote about the rise of first-and-third steals back in February and then again this weekend. “As long as I’ve been baseballing,” he wrote, “the first-and-third situation has been what separated the pros from the amateurs.” That’s no longer the case. Sam calculated that in May and June, the runner on first took off roughly 14% of the time, compared to 10.1% in 2023 and 6.6% in the 2010s. After watching all of those plays, he concluded that defenses still aren’t really sure how to handle that situation.

Much like first-and-third steals, delayed stealing has historically been reserved for amateur ball. Because it’s a difficult thing to search for, I’m not sure whether they’ve been happening more often too or whether I just happen to have noticed a cluster. Either way, this cluster made me wonder whether baserunners should be pulling this move more often. After all, the three that we’ve seen could not have been any easier. Only one of them even drew a throw, and that was a play when everyone knew a stolen base attempt was likely. It’s true that McMahon’s steal of home came when nobody was paying him the slightest attention and the catcher returned the ball to the pitcher like a grandfather pitching horseshoes, but Stubbs isn’t exactly a burner either, and his came on a normal throw from the catcher, following a pitch where both the pitcher and the shortstop were making a real effort to keep him from getting too big a lead. Maybe this is easier than we realize. Read the rest of this entry »