12:01

Dan Szymborski: The appointed time has arrived.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: It’s getting into low single digits now. There are enough contenders in the AL hovering around .500 that it’s likely that both the ALC and wild cards will now be marginally winning teams

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Luis Lara I believe

12:03

Dan Szymborski: if he had had had a 2026 projection, Eric Hartman would be up there too

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ZiPS has been generally one of the most positive projection systems in recent years regarding the Cleveland Guardians, but it has not been quite as excited about them when it comes to the postseason. The reason? Throughout the 2020s, their rotation has typically been thoroughly competent, but not very top-heavy, and the sprint of the playoffs is a different beast than the marathon of the regular season.

This season, Cleveland is hovering around the .500 mark, but that’s no fault of the starting pitching, where there’s an argument that it has now developed two aces, an ingredient that’s an important part of a recipe for making a deep postseason run. One is Parker Messick, who previously dominated in the upper minors and seemingly didn’t need an adjustment period when he debuted with the Guardians last August. He’s emerged as one of the top pitchers in the AL, and he’ll almost definitely get downballot Cy Young votes this season. Gavin Williams, on the other hand took a bit longer to really arrive in the majors, but I think he’s unambiguously there now. Read the rest of this entry »

Going 0-for-3 with two strikeouts is not typically a line in a boxscore that is hailed as a grand success for the batter or the team. In this case, however, it represented Aaron Judge’s return to the Yankees’ lineup, the first time he appeared in a game in more than three months. With the Tampa Bay Rays proving to be stubbornly intransigent about complying with the whole regression toward the mean thing, getting Judge back is incredibly important for the Yankees as they try to challenge for the AL East crown.

Up until the team announced on Monday that it was activating Judge, it was difficult to pinpoint an exact timeline for when he might return from the rib injury that plopped him onto the IL in early June. After an initial hope that he’d only miss a few days, that expected recovery window was extended to maybe August, and then to an emoji shrug followed up by a crossed-fingers emoji. While the Yankees have been used to this over the years with Giancarlo Stanton, whose return from his litany of injuries is always imminent, like Krusty the Clown’s supposed arrival at Kamp Krusty to save the children, it was different to go through it with Judge. And yes, I’m an aging Xennial so of course there’s a Simpsons reference.

With Judge out, the Yankees have combined for a wRC+ of 90, second worst in baseball, ahead of only the Los Angeles Angels. New York’s ranking of 26th in runs scored does not paint a sunnier overall picture. It’s only thanks to superb pitching that the Yankees have stayed afloat. The Judge-less Yankees were the disaster scenario I specifically outlined in the preseason projections, so their putrid performance at the plate without him was not a surprise. But because they continued to win in his absence, it would take an extremely unlikely collapse of epic proportions to push them out of a playoff spot.

However, just making the playoffs was never the goal. As always, New York’s ambition is to win the World Series, and securing a first-round bye would put the club in a much better position to do that. That means the Yankees need to run down the Rays, because even if they finish with the second-best record in the AL, if they don’t win the AL East, the best they’ll get is home-field advantage in the Wild Card round. Bringing him back now, without sending him on a rehab assignment or giving him more live-BP reps before activating him, is an indication of how important the Yankees consider their captain to be. They believe that having even a rusty version of Judge in their lineup gives them their best shot to win the division.

As noted at the top, Judge’s performance itself did not look like a triumphal return to the lineup. The Yankees beat the Rockies, as you’re supposed to do most of the time, but Judge got rung up on strikeouts on fastballs from Gabriel Hughes and Mark Manfredi, one of them swinging, and his only ball in play was a fairly routine fly out to Cole Carrigg. Judge was also not particularly happy about being pulled for Heliot Ramos after the sixth inning. (Ramos hit a three-run homer later that proved to be decisive.)

Meh game aside, let’s crunch some numbers on the divisional race, both with and without Judge.

Having a nearly one-in-five projected chance at winning the division is actually quite a positive prognosis for the Yankees. After all, remember, the four-game lead the Rays have over the Yankees is, for all intents and purposes, a five-game lead. Since Major League Baseball is frequently a thief of joy, we no longer have tiebreaking Game 163s. The Yankees need to sweep the Rays in their four-game series at home during the final week of the season to get the tiebreaker.

But the Yankees have other advantages. ZiPS at least believes that the Yankees are the strongest team in the AL with Judge back in the lineup, and the computer has always been lukewarm on the Rays. There are also scheduling advantages, in that ZiPS has the Yanks with a significantly easier remaining schedule than Tampa, with games against the Rockies, Mets, Twins, and Orioles still to come.

Just having Judge in the lineup is, of course, the biggest impact of his return, but there are downstream effects as well. Spencer Jones has hit as well as ZiPS — the most positive projection system on him in March — expected, and he ought to remain a part of the lineup even with Judge back. A Judge-Jones-Cody Bellinger starting lineup with Ben Rice ar DH leaves Ramos and Jasson Domínguez as quite solid role players the team can mix-and-match depending on the game.

Now, let’s cruelly re-injure Judge. Theoretically, of course, for science; do not, I repeat, do not follow Judge around after games driving a cartoon steamroller.

You’ll notice it doesn’t move the projected standings by a full win — the Yankees are at least better equipped to handle a Judge absence now, for the remainder of the regular season, than they were a few months ago — but there are significant changes in the standings. Because of those upside scenarios, losing Judge knocks a good 40% off their shot at their last chance comeback against the Rays and slices a similar chunk off their World Series championship odds.

Monday night’s game featured an unremarkable game from a remarkable player, in a win the Yankees were supposed to snatch up anyway. But since it was Judge’s return, it may have been one of the most productive hitless games you’ll ever see. New York doesn’t need to see its franchise icon immediately resume vaporizing baseballs to make the postseason, but it certainly would be convenient. The Rays have spent a whole year rejecting ZiPS’ suggestions that they stop being quite so good, and the calendar is rapidly running out of opportunities for the Yankees to punish Tampa Bay’s obstinacy. With Aaron Judge back in the lineup and four games left to play against the Rays, the Yankees have just enough mathematical daylight to cause trouble.

Baseball fans are often unhappy with projections, and they seem to enjoy sharing that unhappiness with me. That’s hardly surprising, of course — projections have large error bars (which we try to express when discussing them), and on some level, they represent a computer saying mean things about players you might like. You probably aren’t shocked by this, though you might be surprised to learn that the time of year I get the most complaints is during the stretch run rather than the preseason. And while some of the complaints I hear are about projections that missed the mark, the majority are about how little the in-season projections have changed since the start of the year. It can be frustrating when a player who is slugging .500 despite a preseason SLG projection of .350 only has a rest-of-season SLG projection of .400. Clearly, the conventional wisdom says, the projections are too slow to change.

Ben Clemens has written a number of pieces auditing our playoff odds, and while they aren’t as meticulously perfected as a 1996 Lexus, they’re pretty darn good. These calculations rely heavily on our in-season projections, which at their gooey, caramel center are an attempt to combine what we knew about a player or team before the season (in the form of preseason projections) with what we’ve learned since.

The relevant question then becomes how much a few months of performance should change what we thought about a player in March. And as it turns out, it’s less than the folks who find projections frustrating might think. When it comes to ZiPS, the preseason projections, both for teams and individual players, are more predictive of rest-of-season performance than season-to-date numbers. That holds true even very late in the season, when there’s been a lot of cumulative in-season performance to look at. I’ve tested preseason projections versus in-season performance as late as September 10 each year, and the preseason projections never clearly do worse than the in-season stats. Since we’re right at the start of September, I thought this would be a good opportunity to look at how the ZiPS preseason projections stack up against March-through-August performance when it comes to projecting what happens in the final month of the season.

And to be clear, I don’t think this preseason edge is exclusive to ZiPS; I expect that Steamer and PECOTA perform similarly well. It’s just that I have a rather unique level of access to ZiPS. But data is more important than a simple claim, so let’s dig in. Read the rest of this entry »

With Byron Buxton out with a hip impingement and no timetable for his return, the Twins were short one outfielder. Luckily for Minnesota, it just so happens that the team’s best prospect, Walker Jenkins, is a center fielder, and is looking a lot like a hitter who didn’t have much more to learn from facing Triple-A pitchers. The fifth pick in the 2023 draft, Jenkins was hitting .308/.407/.532 for a 142 wRC+ in 69 games for the St. Paul Saints when he got the call on Thursday. He started in center for all three games of the team’s weekend series against the White Sox.

Still just 21, Jenkins might have reached the majors even quicker than he actually did if not for sharing Buxton’s proclivity for landing on the injured list. Hamstring and quad injuries in 2024 held him to 82 games, while an ankle injury cost him two months of the 2025 season. An injured shoulder, earned by a collision with the Summit Beer advertisement on the right-center field wall, put him on the shelf for most of May. Since returning to the Saints in late June, Jenkins has been on a tear, hitting .335/.414/.603, topped off with an August line of .405/.484/.772 with eight of his 12 homers on the year.

While one could argue that the Twins should have called up Jenkins a month earlier — Minnesota right fielders have combined for 0.0 WAR — this is one case where I think the conservatism was warranted. With a long injury history, it made sense for Jenkins to get more time in the high minors, and his readiness only became glaringly obvious in recent weeks. His .252/.332/.394 translation through mid-July (by ZiPS) was certainly good enough to be playable, but his hot run has improved his Triple-A translation to a legitimately exciting .287/.364/.450 line on the season. Just to demonstrate what I mean by exciting, ZiPS was still on the fence with Jenkins when I published this season’s top 100 prospects list back in February; ZiPS ranked him outside the top 100, at 131st overall. But if ZiPS had known his 2026 numbers, it would have shot Jenkins all the way up to fourth on the list. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: The appointed time has arrived.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I imagine he *will* get time in 2027, should he keep hitting early next year

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Oh, they do generally change quite a bit, because no two players are truly the same, and paths vary a lot

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If you’ve been watching the Mariners the last couple of nights, you might feel like you’re back in the halcyon days of 2025. Seattle took the first two games of its series against one of baseball’s best teams, the Phillies, and Cal Raleigh launched four home runs over two nights, including a three-dinger outburst on Monday. Unfortunately, that feeling has been fleeting in 2026, as the Mariners are comfortably below .500 and have only remained in the divisional and Wild Card races because their competition has been exuberantly mediocre. As for Raleigh, after hitting 60 home runs and just missing out on the American League MVP award to Aaron Judge, he’s suffered through easily the worst season of his professional career. Raleigh’s collapse this year has been historic in its magnitude, yet both he and the M’s could still come out of this playing October baseball.

When you see a season like Raleigh’s 2025, it’s natural to expect some kind of regression toward the mean. Indeed, it’s so expected a phenomenon that a whole panoply of curses have been coined to explain it without having to get all mathy about it. Did you just have a horrible season after a great one? Well, you may have been cursed by the Sports Illustrated cover, the Madden NFL cover, a Wheaties box, a Heisman award, a sophomore slump, or an MLB the Show cover. Or maybe you just drank Jobu’s rum. Whatever you call it, Raleigh’s 2026 is well past regression to the mean and more like regression to the really frigging mean. I swear, that’s a technical term.

So just how bad a season has Raleigh had compared to expectations? You could probably just say “Austin Hedges has a wRC+ more than 20 points higher than Raleigh.” Or maybe graph Raleigh’s year-to-year home run totals, with the chart properly labeled so that people don’t think they’re viewing a win expectancy graph from a game where late-period Craig Kimbrel was the closer. But since we have a projection system handy, we can do better than that. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob deGrom tallied his 2,000th strikeout last week, providing another late-career achievement that might be engraved on a Cooperstown plaque sometime in the 2030s. That deGrom would reach 2,000 strikeouts seemed almost certain back at the end of the 2020 season, when he was 641 away. At that time, he’d struck out at least 200 batters in four of his six non-pandemic seasons. The first of those two other seasons was his 2014 NL Rookie of the Year campaign, when he didn’t debut until May 15, and in 2016, injuries limited him to just 24 starts. But since 2020, deGrom has been an example of Zeno’s paradox, seeming perpetually stuck in medias res. Achilles did eventually catch the tortoise, and deGrom and calculus won the day.

deGrom’s journey to 2,000 is a good reminder of why I like to occasionally harass ZiPS for milestone probabilities rather than simply dividing a player’s remaining distance by his most recent seasonal number and calling it a day. Whether or not there are infinite universes where every possibility happens, in this one, tendons tear and players age. A player can be on pace to finish with 500 home runs for a decade and never come particularly close, while another can sneak in the back door to a milestone that nobody saw coming, as Nick Markakis threatened to do late in his career.

The uncertainty is what makes baseball (and life) interesting. I can tell you that Aaron Judge needs 115 homers to make it to number 500; I have a calculator for that, and even if I didn’t, I was once a third-grader. But the road is hard to map, and the aging curve, performance models, and injury models in ZiPS give us a better idea as to the probability that Judge will hit 500 or 600 in this particular universe. It’s no fun to have such a tool and not deploy it, so it’s a good time to do an update on baseball’s search for pretty, round numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

For the New York Mets, the 2026 season has been an almost unmitigated disaster. Widely expected to compete for the NL East crown, the Mets got off to a brief hot start. And by brief, I mean brief, as the season’s high point was knocking out Paul Skenes in the first inning on Opening Day against the Pirates. From there, the season unraveled like the finances of Mike Campbell from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Gradually and then suddenly.

The Mets ambled around the .500 mark for another week or so, until a 12-game losing streak knocked them firmly into the league basement, where they have mostly stayed. By the time the calendar flipped to August, they had long come to terms with the idea that they would be sellers at the deadline. Recently, though, the Mets have gone on a tear, winning 11 of their 15 games since their deadline fire sale, giving some fans an excuse to dream on a miracle wild card run. That almost recently won’t happen, but their abysmal season doesn’t have to signify the start of a long rebuild. In fact, New York teams with massive payrolls aren’t generally extended much rope, with the hope being that the club will find its way back to contention quickly. Can the Mets do that in 2027? Read the rest of this entry »

11:59

Dan Szymborski: Frivolity may now commence.

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Morandini

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Votto wasn’t born the plate discipline god either

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Jose Bautista too, but it could also be the rushed nature of being rule 5

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I would suspect Sosa too, but we don’t really have out-of-zone data for him

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