On Saturday night, I was at a wedding in Washington, DC. The bride was a Nationals fan and the groom was a Phillies fan. The band played “Dancing on My Own,” and the groom’s friends continued to sing the chorus well after the band had stopped playing. I had only met the happy couple a few times, but due to a last-second swap and a quirk of the venue’s layout, I ended up seated immediately in front of the spot from which everyone made their speeches. And I mean immediately in front of it. I was so close that I slouched down in my chair the whole time so that the back of my head wouldn’t ruin all the pictures. I was so close that I had to alternate between looking down at the table and looking past whoever was speaking and out the window, because I honestly thought that making eye contact from that distance would be too distracting for someone trying to deliver a heartfelt message of love. Otherwise, here’s what they would have seen whenever they looked down at their speech:

I’m aware that I bring some awkwardness with me every time I enter a room, but on Saturday, the room really met me halfway.

Not long after the father of the bride tearfully recounted the time, all those years ago, when he was away on a business trip and he called his pregnant wife from a payphone in the Atlanta airport and found out that they were going to have a little girl, I started vibrating. All of a sudden, my phone was blowing up.

Needless to say, I couldn’t exactly reach into my pocket and start scrolling at that moment. I had to wait until all of the wonderful people finished wishing the beautiful couple a long life filled with love, laughter, and happiness. The answer was worth the wait.

On June 5, I wrote about the Kutina Club for Insistently Unsuccessful Basestealers. This exclusive group is named after first baseman Joe Kutina, who stole zero bases on seven attempts in 1912. It welcomes all players who have been caught stealing at least four times in a season without successfully swiping a bag. At the time, McMahon was leading the big leagues with a sparkling 0-for-4 showing that featured one old-fashioned caught stealing, two pickoffs, and one stolen base that was overturned when a replay showed that his cleat came off the bag for a nanosecond. Not only was McMahon in line to join the Kutina Club, he was very nearly on pace to become its record-holder. Joe Coscarart went 0-for-11 in 1936, while McMahon was on pace to get caught 10.8 times.

Even if he didn’t want the record, all he needed to do to get his membership card and cool embroidered jacket was stay put for the rest of the season. Instead, McMahon not only stole his first base of the season, he stole home! That’s the hardest base to steal, since catchers like to squat right behind it on their big haunches, and pitchers like to throw their pitches right to the catchers, and when catchers are attempting to catch would-be basestealers at home plate, they often put up pop times in the neighborhood of 0.00 seconds. The next morning, I saw how McMahon pulled it off: With some help from Pittsburgh catcher Yasmani Grandal. Grandal, it turns out, is something of a soft-tosser.

We already have a term for when the defense concedes a stolen base: defensive indifference. We might need a new category for this play: indifferent defense, which describes when the team out on the field is indifferent not just to the advancement of the runner, but to the very concept of defense itself. Maybe defensive obliviousness would be more accurate, but either way, this is one of the easiest steals of home you’ll ever see. Grandal had been throwing the ball back to the pitcher like this all game. When McMahon reached third, Grandal started taking a quick peek at the runner before tossing it back, but his lollipops were as soft as ever. In fact, I went ahead and timed him.

From the time the ball left Grandal’s hand to the time it hit Jared Jones’s glove, 1.86 seconds elapsed. Even with 19th percentile sprint speed, that was slow enough that McMahon could time him up and waltz home. To be clear, this wasn’t entirely Grandal’s fault. McMahon was able to take an enormous lead with impunity because Ke’Bryan Hayes was shaded way over toward short and never made the slightest pretense of checking in on him. The side angle tells the story quite elegantly. Here’s the moment that the pitch hit Grandal’s mitt.

McMahon was a solid 20 to 25 feet from the bag, but he could have easily ventured much farther. Hayes was so far from the bag that he’s not even in the frame. McMahon’s lead was so enormous that both the home and away broadcasts cut to shots of it before Jones released the fateful pitch, but nobody on the Pirates showed the slightest concern. Maybe someone told them about the Kutina Club, or maybe McMahon just really wanted out of it. McMahon gave the slightest deke back toward third base when Grandal gave his cursory look down the baseline, but perhaps the most embarrassing part of the whole story is that he started running well before Grandal threw the ball. Here’s a still from the moment when it left the catcher’s hand.

McMahon is already in a full sprint. Hayes is walking even farther away from third base. Only the home plate umpire has noticed that the score is about to change.

In terms of effective velocity, ignoring the arc Grandal put on the ball and solely measuring how long it took for it to cover the 60-foot, 6-inch distance from home plate to the mound, it traveled at 22.2 mph. For reference, there have been only nine balls hit between 22 and 23 mph this season, and seven of them were bunts.

From the time Grandal released the ball, it took just McMahon just 2.43 seconds to touch home plate. Jones knew that home plate was McMahon’s long before he caught the world’s saddest successful Hail Mary pass. Here’s a GIF that shows moment of Grandal’s release, the moment the ball reaches its apex, and the moment it hits Jones’ glove. You can’t even call it a tragedy in three acts. It’s a play where the hero gets stabbed in the first act, and then acts two and three just consist of him slowly bleeding to death.

A few minutes later, the Pirates broadcast noted that third base coach Warren Schaeffer had sneaked over to McMahon right before the pitch, presumably to whisper that home plate was wide open. However, when they cut to a replay, he didn’t appear to say anything whatsoever. All the video showed was Schaeffer shuffling over toward McMahon while attempting to chew a wad of gum the size of a Jeep Cherokee.

I’m not sure Schaeffer could have said anything to McMahon if he wanted to. He looked exactly like my little brother did when he was 8 and he stuffed an entire pouch of Big League Chew in his mouth. Maybe Schaeffer’s stroll represented some sort of non-verbal signal — he was wearing a slight smirk at the end of the clip — but if Schaeffer did tip off McMahon by way of speaking, it probably came out something like, “Roo shud sfeel fome.”

The most amazing part of the whole ordeal is that the next time the Rockies got a man in scoring position — which was in the very next inning — Grandal hadn’t learned from his mistake at all. Here he is throwing the ball back to the pitcher. It’s still a lob! The ball still travels so high that it leaves the frame entirely! It’s one inning later! What are we doing here?

With that, McMahon was out of the Kutina club. What’s more, he led a mass exodus. The list below is from my original article on June 5. It shows all five players who had at least two caught stealings and zero steals at the time.

Jeimer Candelario stole two bases the very next day. Nick Senzel stole a base the day after that, and Brendan Donovan stole one a week later. That leaves Justin Turner and Nick Martini (who picked up his second caught stealing on Monday) as the last players standing to be caught twice without stealing a base. We’ll have to wait until the end of the year to find out whether they end up joining the club. However, McMahon is now in a club that’s only slightly less exclusive.

I was curious how many players ended the season in McMahon’s position, with their only stolen bases coming on a steal of home. This is a tricky thing to search for, so I reached out to Katie Sharp of Stathead, who graciously ran a query and found 183 players and 189 player seasons that met this criteria. The list includes legends like Joe DiMaggio, Roy Campanella, and Edgar Martinez, but I’ve decided to name this club after pitcher Ray Fisher. Five of the players managed to steal home twice in a season, and five players managed to make the list twice, but only Fisher made it three times, in 1915, 1916, and 1919.

So far this season, only McMahon and Andrew McCutchen are in line to join the Fisher Club of Exclusively Domiciliary Basestealers. McCutchen’s steal of home was even flukier than McMahon’s, only coming to pass because J.T. Realmuto threw the ball into center field when the runner at first took off for second. If either player finishes the season without stealing second or third, they’ll join Yordan Alvarez as the only player to enter the club this decade. If they do end up stealing second or third, I look forward to feeling my phone blow up at the most inopportune time possible.

Well, it’s Friday, and over the past couple weeks, I have crunched so, so many bat tracking numbers. I wrote about them last week and then again on Wednesday, and the effort required to write those two articles has worn me down into a smaller, duller baseball writer than I was back in May. Today, I’d like to look at the lighter side of bat tracking. In particular, I’m interested in the lower limits of squared-up rate. Before we get into it, though, I need to make a detour and speak directly to the industrious baseball savants over at Baseball Savant who made all of this pitch-, ball-, player-, and bat-tracking possible.

Dear Baseball Savant baseball savants,

I love you. You are doing God’s work. You are making known the unknown, shining the light of truth into the dark corners of the world, and I would gladly bake brownies for you any day of the week. However, after a month of bat tracking data, it’s time that we acknowledge a solemn truth: You probably need to shuffle around a few names. Here’s the big one: Squared-Up Rate should actually be called Barrel Rate.

I imagine you would have called it that had you not already given the name away. After all, it’s right in the definition: A squared-up swing “can only happen on the sweet spot of the bat.” That’s the barrel of the bat, though Sweet Spot Rate is taken too. You currently classify a Sweet Spot as any ball hit at an optimal launch angle, whereas a Barrel is a hard-hit ball hit at an optimal combination of velocity and launch angle. But neither of those terms implies a particular trajectory. Sweet Spot Rate should be shifted to Lift Rate and Barrel Rate should be shifted to Launch Rate. That makes them more accurate and allows Squared-Up Rate to shift over to Barrel Rate where it belongs. Everybody wins.

I understand that this would be confusing at first, but that’s ok, baseball savants. We’ll get used to it. We got used to xwOBACON. You just changed Best Speed to EV50 and nobody so much as batted an eye. Besides, it’s not as if you did anything wrong. It was totally reasonable for you to call those balls Barrels a few years ago. How could you have even imagined you’d get to this point, measuring bat speed with cameras that capture 500 frames per second? But now you know better.

Hugs and kisses,

Davy

PS: Please start tracking the sprint speed of turtles (and any other animals) that wander onto the field.

PPS: I was serious about the brownies.

Ok, end of detour. For each batted ball, the respective speeds of the pitch and the bat make for a maximum possible exit velocity. Statcast calculates the squared-up percentage by dividing the actual exit velocity by that maximum possible exit velocity. Ben Clemens published a rough version of the formula on Tuesday:

Squared-Up Percentage = EV / ((Bat Speed x 1.23) + (0.2116 x Pitch Speed))

Because it’s just a percentage, there’s no minimum bat speed or exit velocity required to square up a ball. You can square up a ball even if your bat is barely moving. In theory, you could square up a ball if your bat were moving backward. You can square up a bunt. Here’s Masyn Winn doing just that against the Brewers. Not only did he produce the slowest squared-up ball in recorded history, he also singled and loaded the bases for the Cardinals on the play.

The 94.6-mph pitch contacted Winn’s bat, which was moving at 4.8 mph, resulting in a 20.9-mph batted ball that was 81% squared up. More importantly, after Winn squared up the ball so beautifully, multiple people fell down. First, pitcher Freddy Peralta started to make a diving play, then thought better of it and awkwardly spiked his knee into the turf. He next attempted to snare the ball on a short hop, but with its strange combination of spin and velocity, the seemingly sentient sphere took a perpendicular bounce away from him. Next, Peralta unleashed an off-target throw to first, which understandably frightened first base umpire Alan Porter enough that he toppled backward, only to pop up and make the correct call like a champion.

I watched every squared-up ball that was hit below 70 mph. The best part of that exercise by far was admiring the swings. They are a truly gorgeous collection of excuse-me swings, and as it turns out, they can all be sorted out according to a spectrum. On the left is The Swing That Never Really Got Started. In the middle is The Swing That Got Interrupted Before It Was Finished. And on the right is The Swing That Wasn’t Supposed To Happen in the First Place. Those poles are roughly correlated to spray angle, and in the supercut below, I’ve tried to put them in order as they go from one end of the spectrum to the other.

To be sure, I saw plenty more silly squared-up balls. I’ve seen more players fall down or fire the ball wildly into the stands. I’ve seen a ball bounce off Jonathan India’s bat, then the gloves of two different fielders. I’ve seen Nick Madrigal get credit for squaring the ball up on a 63.6-mph groundout that looked for all the world like every other Nick Madrigal batted ball.

All the same, after watching all these squared-up squibbers and squared-up swinging bunts, I hope you can begin to see the beauty of the statistic that should be called barrels. There’s something moving about the idea that there’s no limit to pure contact. It’s possible to square up the ball perfectly while touching it as lightly as a feather. It’s possible to square up the ball perfectly even if that’s the last thing on earth you want to happen. No matter how mangled your swing, perfection is always attainable.

Sure, squaring up a baseball means Oneil Cruz stress testing a center-cut fastball’s 108 stitches in the most brutal fashion imaginable, and it means Steven Kwan reaching out and slapping a changeup into shallow left field. Why shouldn’t it also mean Patrick Wisdom trying and failing to lay off a high inside pitch from a position player in a 17-0 game, chipping the ball toward the first baseman at 41.7 mph, throwing his head back in frustration, and then trudging off toward first base like a 5-year-old who just got told that if he didn’t march upstairs and take a bath this very instant, then there would be no dessert tonight, mister?

Bunts aside, that is the weakest squared-up ball ever recorded and I love it. Wisdom squared it up at 92% and so, so wished he hadn’t, which just makes it all the more perfect. In this age of seemingly infinite velocity and Edgertronic pitch design, shouldn’t we celebrate anyone who manages to square up the baseball, even if they did so accidentally?

Luke Raley is a big, strong man. The Seattle outfielder stands 6-foot-4, weighs 235 pounds, and spent much of his childhood in Ohio felling trees with a chainsaw. He’s got a huge arm, and he’s boasted a maximum exit velocity at or above the 90th percentile in three of the last four seasons. Former teammates have called him “a big ball of muscle” and said, “He kind of plays like a monster.” Just last night he launched a moonshot home run that reached an altitude of 104 feet. And yet somehow, if you Google the phrase luke raley feats of strength, this is all that comes up:

First of all, yes, Raley is married. He found out that he got traded to Seattle during his honeymoon, while playing pool volleyball. Second, there’s a pretty good reason that Raley’s strength doesn’t headline his search results: He’s more than just a beef boy. Raley has finesse. In fact, he’s currently tied with Jacob Young for the major league lead with five bunts for a base hit. While Young has a 35.7% success rate on his bunts, Raley is the only player so far this decade to bunt for at least five hits in a season while maintaining a 1.000 batting average on those bunt attempts. Want to guess who’s in second place? That would be 2023 Luke Raley, who went 5-for-6 in his bunt attempts. The big, strong man has a big, strong bunt game. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past month, smart people have been deciphering the relationship between swing length and pitch location in MLB’s new bat tracking data. If you’re looking at raw data, it’s hard to know whether someone has a long swing because they like inside pitches (Isaac Paredes) or because their swing is actually long and loopy (Javier Báez). In order to make solid contact with an inside pitch, the barrel needs to meet the ball out in front of the plate, which means that it will take a longer journey to the point of contact than it would to meet a pitch over the middle of the plate. Below is a breakdown of Luis Arraez’s swing length against fastballs. As you can see, even the king of the short swing gets long when he has to reach pitches up-and-in or down-and-away.

Some of this is as old as the game itself. It’s the reason pitchers throw fastballs up and in, where a necessarily longer, slower swing makes them harder to catch up with. Bat tracking has given us numbers to back up another intuitive part of the game: Swing length is positively correlated with bat speed, confirming that players who are short to the ball sacrifice bat speed for bat control and contact ability. Those two correlations, pitch location to swing length and swing length to bat speed, got me thinking about the launch angle revolution.

The launch angle revolution really got its hooks into Major League Baseball in 2015. That’s the year Joey Gallo and Kris Bryant debuted, and the year Justin Turner and Daniel Murphy fully turned themselves from contact hitters into power threats. In The MVP Machine, Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchick documented what Turner was thinking in 2013, the very first time he tried out the new approach for which teammate Marlon Byrd had been proselytizing. “I was thinking, I’m just going to try and catch the ball as far out as I can in batting practice,” Turner said.

Catching the ball out front often means pulling it, especially in the air. The league’s overall pull rate is roughly the same as it was in 2011, but as you can see from the chart above, its pull rate on air balls — the line drives and fly balls where hitters do damage — hit an all-time high in 2017 and then again in four of the next five years. The exact approaches can differ. “I’m going to be on the fastball and drive it to right center, and if I’m a little early on the slider I’ll catch it out in front,” Austin Riley told Eno Sarris last year. And as Ben Clemens has noted, hitters have increased their pulled balls in the air simply by choosing to attack pitches that lend themselves to being launched in that direction. But strictly speaking, there isn’t a huge inherent advantage to pulling the baseball. If you’re going to hit a long fly ball, it’s better not to hit it to straightaway center, where the fence is deeper and the fielders are better, but that’s equally true for both pulling the ball and going the opposite way. In a sense, pulling the baseball is just a side effect of catching the ball out in front. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many other nerds, I have devoted a lot of time to slicing and dicing Baseball Savant’s new bat tracking data over the last few weeks. And like many other nerds, I’m not entirely sure how we’ll end up using this wealth of new information. More time, more data, and more brain power is needed to wring out whatever sweeping new truths it may hold. I’m going to write about bat tracking data in a more focused way next week. There are a couple things I think are really interesting; not necessarily new information, but ways that bat tracking data can give us hard numbers for things that we’ve already learned. In this article, I’ll be a bit more scattershot. I’d just like to take you through how I’ve processed all the information that has come out over the last few weeks.

First off, bat tracking will give us new stats that stabilize more quickly than existing ones, as that’s how granular metrics that separate underlying skills from results tend to work. In smaller samples, exit velocity turned out to be a better predictor of overall batting performance than wRC+ or wOBA. Now we have swing speed, which in smaller samples turns out to be a better predictor of exit velocity. To wit, I pulled data from the first week of bat tracking, April 3 to April 9, and compared it to each player’s overall numbers this season. I eliminated any player with fewer than five plate appearances during the first week or fewer than 100 PA during the entire season, which left me with a sample of 295 players. It was no contest. Full-season exit velocity had a much stronger correlation to first-week swing speed (R = .60) than it did to first-week exit velocity (R = .40). It also predicted full-season hard-hit rate better than first-week hard-hit rate (R = .66 for swing speed, compared to R = .46 for hard-hit rate). If, after the first week, you want to know who’s going to hit the ball hard for the rest of the season, don’t look at exit velocity. Look at swing speed:

Read the rest of this entry »

Today, we’re here to talk about Ryan McMahon, but before we can do that, we need to talk about Joe Kutina. Joe Kutina didn’t steal any bases in 1912. A 6-foot-2, power-hitting first baseman in his second season with the St. Louis Browns, that wasn’t necessarily his job. Kutina earned his spot in 1911, batting .374 with a .589 slugging percentage for the Saginaw Krazy Kats of the Class-C Southern Michigan League. He joined St. Louis at the end of the season, putting up a 96 wRC+ with three home runs in 26 games with the Browns. In 1912, his wRC+ dropped to 59 and he launched just one homer in 69 games. He also got caught stealing seven times.

I know that getting caught stealing seven times sounds like a lot, but things were a little different back then. In the 1912 season, 73 players got caught stealing at least seven times. Ty Cobb led the league with 34 unsuccessful steal attempts, and three other players also got nabbed at least 30 times. The difference is that Cobb and those three others combined for 203 successful steals. Kutina, once again, stole zero bases. That made him the first player in AL/NL history to get caught stealing at least four times without successfully stealing a single base in a season — or at least to be recorded doing so in that era of spottier record keeping. According to Stathead, over the last 112 years, just 216 players have replicated Kutina’s dubious accomplishment. Although that averages out to a bit below two per season, the distribution isn’t exactly even.

We’re only third of the way into this decade, but unless the pace picks up dramatically, we’ll end with the lowest total since the days when Joe Kutina was lumbering around the bases with reckless abandon. As it turns out, one of the changes wrought by the data revolution was an unwillingness to let players who were incapable of stealing a base keep trying and failing over and over again. This is why people don’t like analytics. Read the rest of this entry »

During most baseball games, there are eight people calling the action. Both the home and away teams have radio and television broadcasts, and most of those crews consist of a play-by-play announcer and a color commentator. If those teams have a Spanish language broadcast, the number is even higher. More often than you might think, something notable happens in the middle of a game and not one of those eight people notes it. Maybe a player will square around to bunt but end up taking the pitch, and that detail just goes unremarked upon by everyone. It’s a small detail, but it’s part of the story of the game. It tells you about the batting team’s strategy and their confidence in the hitter. It informs the defense’s pitch selection and positioning. Maybe the television crews figure you already saw it. Maybe the radio crews need to squeeze in a promo or the color guy’s in the middle of an anecdote about that one time he got to be an extra in Little Big League. There’s only so much time between pitches, and the announcers all have a decision to make on how best to fill it. Either way, if you’re listening on the radio, or if you’re looking away from your television for a moment, you’ll never know it happened at all.

Something happened on Wednesday, in the first game of a doubleheader between the Tigers and Pirates. I found it remarkable, but apparently I was alone. No one else mentioned it. The Pirates were starting Jared Jones and Paul Skenes that day, and I was watching Detroit’s television broadcast. I did so partly because Jason Benetti is a delight, but mostly because when Jones and Skenes are on the mound, it’s fun to hear the opposing announcers react with awe as they watch batter after batter on their own team get taken apart limb from limb. Unfortunately for both Jones and me, the Tigers avoided dismemberment, hanging five earned runs and two unearned runs on Jones en route to a breezy 8-0 victory. On the bright side, Benetti and Kirk Gibson, who was serving as color commentator, decided that for much of the game, the best way to spend their time was by bickering like an old married couple.

Benetti: Do they know you at your local donut shop?

Gibson: No.

Benetti: They know you as the guy who orders all the chocolate fry cakes.

Gibson: I don’t. I’m on the sugar free now, so I’m not doing it now. So nobody knows.

Benetti: Well, everybody knows you’re on the sugar free diet because you keep saying it. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the double-R that makes it tricky. In the name Victor Robles, all of the emphasis is front-loaded. Victor is spondaic and Robles is trochaic, which means three stressed syllables in a row followed by that one last unstressed syllable: VIC-TOR RO-bles. It’s a shout followed by a whisper, which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. But even if you cheat a little bit and turn the first name into a trochee — VIC-tor RO-bles, sing-songy like Mickey Mantle or Dr Pepper — you still can’t get it to flow because you need to pause between those two Rs, lest the two names get pressed together into one breathless pileup of syllables: victorrobles. No matter what you try, that emphatic start grinds to a halt.

After more than 10 years and nearly as many false starts, the center fielder’s time with the Washington Nationals has come to a complete stop. The team designated Robles for assignment on Monday, eight days after his 27th birthday. They now have a week to trade, waive, outright, or release him. Robles, who is in his eighth season as a big leaguer, would almost certainly opt for free agency rather than accept an outright assignment to the minors. Despite his struggles, he seems likely to garner another opportunity. To Washington fans who had been dreaming on him since 2015, Robles often seemed tantalizingly close to finally breaking out. Over the course of his career, Robles has a combined .725 OPS in his first 10 games of a season and a combined .576 OPS in his last 10. He has a career 93 wRC+ in March and April; May is the only other month when he’s within 10 points of that mark. Many of those hot starts were also marred by early-season injuries: a hyper-extended elbow in April 2018, a sprained ankle in May 2021, back spasms in May 2023, a strained hamstring this April. He just never found a way to keep it going. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last few years, I’ve been checking the accuracy rate of the ball-strike calls made by umpires, dividing the number of correct calls by the total number of takes. It’s a blunt approach, but because umpires make so many thousands of calls each year, it yields solid results. On Tuesday, I pulled the numbers for the 2024 season, and I found something I didn’t expect: Accuracy is going down rather than up. In every single season since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008, umpires have gotten better at calling balls and strikes according to the Statcast strike zone. This is the first time I’ve ever pulled the numbers and seen a lower accuracy rate. However, this is also the first time I’ve checked the numbers this early in the season, and it turns out umpires tend to make better calls as the season goes on. Since 2017, accuracy in March, April, and May has been 0.19 percentage points lower than accuracy over the full season (though the difference in 2023 was just 0.03 percentage points). Here’s what that looks like in a graph.

You know how at the beginning of every season, there are a couple blown calls during a nationally televised game (or at least, calls that appeared to be wrong according to the on-screen strike zone), and certain people start complaining that umpires are terrible and they’re getting worse? Those people always catch me off guard. I usually forget about the missed calls when the season ends, but those people somehow manage to keep their umpire anger at a high idle through the entirety of the offseason so that the instant baseball returns, they’re ready to shout about the umpires again without any need to ramp up. I don’t know how they do it without pulling an oblique, but in a sense, those angry people are right. Even though the umpires are always getting better year after year, they’re nearly always more accurate toward the end of the season than at the beginning — so much so that when the season starts, they’re worse than they were at the end of the previous season. For a month or two, the umpires really have gotten worse. We often say early in the season that pitchers are ahead of hitters. It turns out they’re ahead of umpires too.

For each season, I broke down the overall accuracy in two-month increments, essentially dividing the season into thirds. I also broke down the accuracy during spring training and the playoffs, although there are plenty of factors that make those numbers suspect. During spring training, the umpiring pool is much wider. Perhaps more importantly, there are far, far fewer tracked pitches during spring training, both because the number of games is so small and because not every stadium is set up for Statcast. That results in a much smaller, much less reliable sample. The playoffs are also a much smaller sample, but they’re also, at least in theory, selecting for better umpires. Working the playoffs is seen as an honor and a reward for performing well in the regular season. We should expect accuracy to be at its lowest during spring training and highest during the playoffs.

Generally speaking, the results fit our preconceptions. Spring training accuracy is very low and it features the volatility that we’d expect from a small dataset. Umpires are also more accurate in the playoffs. The red line is March, April and May, and as you can see, it’s nearly always below everything but the spring training line. Not only do umpires start getting better in June, but they keep getting better right through the end of the season, which is why the light blue line for August, September, and October is usually above the yellow line for June and July. The trend is a little bit easier to see if we focus just on pitches in the shadow zone, the area that’s one baseball’s width from the edge of the zone on either side.

In the graph above, the dotted line represents that season’s overall accuracy on calls in the shadow zone. Each data point represents the number of percentage points above or below that year’s average. Not only do the calls get better as the season goes on, there’s a definite gap between the first two months and the rest of the season. Umpires are decidedly worse in those first two months. However, 2023 was a real outlier. It was first time since 2008 that umpires were more accurate in the beginning of the season than the end.

With that, I want to bring you back to 2024. So far this season, umpires have gotten 92.46% of calls right, down from 92.81% in 2023 and just two thousandths of a percentage point higher than in 2022. Based on everything I’ve shown you, we should expect umpires to get better over the rest of the season. However, the drop-off from last year is noticeable. Accuracy over the first two months of the season has only fallen once before, from 2009 to 2010, when it dropped by 0.16 percentage points. So far this season, accuracy has fallen by twice that amount: 0.32 percentage points. That’s a tiny change, on the order of one call per game, but that doesn’t make it any less real. We’ll have to wait and see how the rest of the season goes, but perhaps this year really could end up being different. Or, if it follows the pattern of the past decade and a half, accuracy will soon be in its way up.

As I write this before the start of play on May 23, we’re just about a third of the way through the season, and I don’t think we can avoid it anymore. Jurickson Profar is batting .339 with a 178 wRC+. Jurickson Profar ranks 10th in baseball with 2.2 WAR. Jurickson Profar, who signed a one-year, $1 million contract on February 24. Jurickson Profar, who until this season averaged 0.8 WAR per 162 games over 10 seasons, and last season put up -1.7 WAR, making him literally the least valuable player in baseball. Jurickson Profar leads all qualified National League players in on-base percentage (.431) and ranks in the top 10 in batting average, slugging percentage (.517), RBI (32), and strikeout rate (13.7%). Jurickson Profar.

(I say qualified because LaMonte Wade Jr. and his .481 OBP did not have enough plate appearances to be among the league leaders. Naturally, between the time I wrote this post and now, Wade crossed the qualification threshold, so Profar now ranks second.)

Here’s something I wrote a couple months ago:

“I imagine that everybody here at FanGraphs generates ideas for articles in different ways. Looking at leaderboards is certainly a common method. You click around, sorting by different stats until someone looks out of place. ‘How did you get all the way up here?’ is what the start of a FanGraphs article sounds like.”

Well, here we are. How the name of Bip Roberts did Jurickson Profar get all the way up here?

I honestly don’t know what the Padres were expecting when they brought Profar back, but this couldn’t have been it. Let’s quickly establish just how out of character this run has been. Not only has Profar never had a 52-game stretch like this, he’s never come close. He’s running a .949 OPS. Before this season, his best 52-game span in a single season came in 2018, when he ran an .882 OPS. That’s a 67-point difference. Profar is batting .339, but until this season he’d never once had a span this long where he hit above .300. Here’s his 52-game rolling wRC+ for his entire career. His previous high came on August 2, 2022. It was 31 points lower.

Right off the bat, this graph tells us that after a horrible 2023 season, Profar was due for some regression of the good kind. He came into this season with a career wRC+ of 92, and that figure is 97 if we limit it to his last six seasons. The smart bet was that he was going to bounce back at least part of the way from last year’s 76 wRC+ clunker.

There’s also another obvious gimme: Luck. Profar has never finished a season with a BABIP above .300, but he’s currently at .371, tied for fourth highest in baseball. His .416 wOBA is 38 points above his .378 xwOBA, a differential that puts him in the top 10 percent of all batters. The 2.3-homer difference between Profar’s 4.7 expected home runs and 7 actual home runs is the seventh-largest gap in baseball. Profar’s line drive rate, which had never risen above 27.7% in a season, is currently at 32%. It’s fantastic that Profar is squaring the ball up so much, but line drive rate is also notoriously fickle. We can and should expect all of these numbers to come back down.

Profar is running career bests in both walk rate, 13.2%, and strikeout rate, 13.7%. In order to get a handle on how that has come about, I compared his plate discipline numbers from this year to his average the four previous seasons.

As you can see, he’s seeing fewer strikes, and he’s being a bit more aggressive, especially in the zone. He’s also making more contact inside the zone, but not outside the zone. That last part is unsustainable. People don’t usually get better at making contact specifically on the pitches that they want to hit anyway. When it does correct itself, it will result in lower walk and strikeout rates, and more weakly hit balls in play. Still, the numbers aren’t shouting anything particularly clear. According to Statcast, Profar’s swing/take decisions have been worth 21 runs, just the second time in his career that it’s been a positive number. That’s the fifth-highest mark in baseball, and it slots him right between Mookie Betts and Juan Soto. However, according to SEAGER, Profar’s swing decisions put him in the 19th percentile. Right now, I just want to see a bigger sample size.

Profar has always been good at making contact, but so far this season, he’s doing so while hitting the ball harder. This is where things get real. Even though it’s propped up by a line drive rate that’s too good to be true, a .378 xwOBA is a huge jump for Profar, whose career best of .338 came during the short 2020 season, when he put up a 113 wRC+. The switch-hitting Profar is also succeeding from both sides of the plate, running a 181 wRC+ as a lefty and a 172 wRC+ as a righty.

This season, Profar’s average exit velocity is a career-high 90.4 mph. More importantly, he’s seen a big jump in his 90th percentile exit velocity, going from 101.8 mph in both 2022 and 2023 to 104.5 this season. That moved him from the 25th percentile to the 58th. His 40.8% hard-hit rate is not just a career best, but it’s the first time he’s ever touched the 50th percentile. None of this is enough to make him a power hitter or make a .517 slugging percentage sustainable, but it is a serious jump, and those kinds of numbers are hard to fake. Moreover, they’re coming after some changes to Profar’s swing. From the left side of the plate, Profar has changed up his stance significantly, starting out much more open, with a bigger bat waggle at a steeper angle. From both sides of the plate, he’s gone from almost no leg kick whatsoever last year to bringing his foot several inches off the ground this year.

Adding a leg kick is a common way for a player to try to increase power, and it certainly seems to be working for Profar so far. According to Statcast’s new bat tracking metrics, Profar is slightly above average in terms of squaring the ball up and slightly below average in terms of bat speed. There’s no way to know where he ranked in previous seasons, but based on all of this, I don’t think it would be crazy to give him the benefit of the doubt and expect some of this new exit velocity to stick.

There’s one last thing I’d like to consider. It’s possible that Profar is just very happy to be home, or that he happens to see the ball particularly well in San Diego. Profar has a career 123 wRC+ in Petco Park. Over his time with the Padres from 2020 to 2023 (excluding his time with Colorado in 2023), he’s run a 113 wRC+ at home, compared to 96 on the road. Even this season, he’s at 212 at home, compared to a (somehow) relatively pedestrian 149 on the road. I wouldn’t put a ton of stock in that theory, but there’s a possibility that Profar just feels comfortable at Petco.

So where does all of this leave us? It definitely doesn’t leave us thinking that Profar is now a true-talent .300/.400/.500 hitter. He’s due for some regression in terms of BABIP, in terms of line drive rate, and in terms of contact rate outside the zone. On the other hand, it does seem like he might have found a way to hit for a bit more power without sacrificing much in the way of contact ability. We’ll have to wait and see where exactly that leaves him.