The most exciting story as we approach the final week of the regular season is, at least by my accounting, the race for first place in the American League Central. On one side, we have the Chicago White Sox, a team that two years ago broke the modern record for the most losses in a season. Their outlook entering this season reflected their recent history. On Opening Day, Chicago had the worst playoff odds in the AL, with a 1.2% chance of making the playoffs, a 0.6% chance of winning the division, and a 0.1% chance of securing a first-round bye. And yet: The White Sox held at least a share of the division lead for 96 days this year, including a 73-day stretch from the start of play on July 5 until the end of the day Wednesday, when the Cleveland Guardians won the rubber match of a three-game set against the South Siders.

Unlike Chicago, Cleveland has seven playoff berths, including six division titles, in the past 10 years. The Guardians are winning the same way they always do, with excellent pitching, defense, and baserunning. Now, their lineup is deeper than it’s been at any point in the 2020s, though it’s still not exactly good.

In Wednesday’s game, the Sox had a one-run lead over the Guards, who were batting in the bottom of the sixth with a runner on first, two out, and Austin Hedges — he of the lifetime 54 wRC+ — at the plate against the left-handed Hagen Smith, who had relieved lefty starter Anthony Kay the previous inning. Hedges walked, prompting White Sox manager Will Venable to replace Smith with yet another lefty, Sean Newcomb. Up next for Cleveland was backup center fielder Petey Halpin, a left-handed hitter who was in the lineup for the injured lefty killer Angel Martínez. Halpin entered the game 1-for-35 on the season against southpaws, and though he did record a single in his first at-bat against Kay, what happened next still ranks among the most unexpected events of the 2026 campaign. Facing a 3-1 count, Halpin turned on a belt-high sinker and launched a no-doubt three-run homer to put the Guardians on top for good.

After an off day Thursday, Cleveland began a three-game series at home against the Athletics on Friday, while Chicago played the second of its four-game set against Detroit. As of Friday afternoon, our Playoff Odds gave the Sox a 50.9% chance to win the division and an 80.3% shot to make the postseason; for the Guards, those odds were, respectively, 49.1% and 77.0%.

We’ll talk a little bit more about the Guardians in this week’s mailbag, when we answer a question about shortstop Brayan Rocchio. We’ll also discuss a bonkers idea to get rid of batting lineups and the shortest season-long winning streak for a team that finished with the best record in baseball. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

In last week’s mailbag, I ran through the list of teams that posted losing seasons and finished with positive run differentials. The question was inspired by this year’s Tigers, who were 64-75 (.460) when I wrote my response the previous afternoon, despite outscoring their opponents by 0.34 runs per game. I wrapped up my answer by mentioning that the Tigers could become the first team ever to lose 90 or more games during a season in which they scored more runs than they allowed. So before we get to this week’s mailbag, I’d like to provide an update on Detroit’s chance at history.

As of Friday afternoon, the Tigers had gone 3-4 in their past seven games, bringing their overall record to 67-79 (.459) with a per-game run differential of 0.377. Fittingly, all four of their losses in that span were decided by one run, while their margin of victory in their three wins was +12. They are the worst team in the majors this season in one-run games, with a record of 14-27 (.341). Their .459 winning percentage on the season puts them on pace for between 87 and 88 losses this year.

This week, I’ll answer the inverse of that question and discuss teams that finished above .500 with negative run differentials. We’ll also see how different baseball would be if teams could use a DH for every position, find the teams that score the most runs on bases-loaded walks and hit-by-pitches, and look at how teams should deploy their relievers in the ninth and 10th innings of tie games. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Angels unexpectedly announced that longtime owner Arte Moreno had agreed to sell the organization to Stan Kroenke, the icositetra-billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL, the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, the Colorado Avalanche of the NHL, the Colorado Rapids of MLS, the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League, and Arsenal Football Club, both the men’s team of the English Premier League and the women’s team of the Super League. The deal is reportedly for $4 billion, a record price for the sale of a controlling stake in an MLB franchise, surpassing the $3.9 billion sale of the San Diego Padres to Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano earlier this summer.

Forbes estimates Kroenke’s net worth to be $24.3 billion, making him the new wealthiest MLB owner, ahead of Steve Cohen, who’s worth about $23 billion. Ben Clemens wrote about the sale on Wednesday, and I’d encourage you to check it out for everything that you need to know about the Angels under Moreno and the ever-increasing values of MLB franchises. That second part is what I want to stress, especially as it pertains to the seemingly inevitable lockout coming this offseason. Rob Manfred and the 30 team owners are going to push for a salary cap, and to support their case, many of them will both cite the need for competitive balance and claim that baseball is a bad business. When they do, think back on the two record-setting sales from this year and understand the real reason why management has shut down the sport. But let’s not get too caught up in the doom and gloom right now, because the upshot of the sale is the Angels’ future looks a whole lot more promising under Kroenke than it did under Moreno.

That’s the last we’ll talk about the business of baseball today. Instead, in this week’s mailbag, we’ll answer your questions about teams that finished the season below .500 with a positive run differential, the single-game feat most correlated with career success, the pitchers who had the longest careers while pitching their first and last games on the same field, and the ideal hot dog per game ratio. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Three months ago, when MLB and the MLB Players Association made their first proposals for baseball’s next collective bargaining agreement, I wrote about how these offers were designed to be rejected, and that they would continue to be until January at the earliest. For that reason, I haven’t devoted much space in these mailbags to the various rounds of bargaining that have taken place this summer. We have real baseball games to cover.

That said, I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw the most drastic change in MLB’s latest proposal: In the offer sent to the union on Thursday, the league proposed instituting two free agent signing periods during the offseason, the first stretching from the first day of the Winter Meetings until December 21, and the second beginning the first week of February. The first period of no free agent signings would allow teams to trade players and re-sign their own free agents, while the second would be a complete blackout of big league transactions. So why is that funny? Well, because the league made clear that the players wouldn’t be able to get these free agent signing periods unless they agreed to a salary cap, as if the transaction limitations would be enough of a sweetener to get the players to give in. The union doesn’t want free agent signing periods because they would give ownership greater leverage during negotiations, potentially resulting in unfavorable contracts. Bruce Meyer, the interim executive director of the MLBPA, called the proposal “unserious.” We’ve got a long way to go.

If you want to read more about the latest proposal, you should check out Michael Baumann’s writeup from Friday. Otherwise, let’s get on to this week’s mailbag. We’ll be answering your questions about Julio Rodríguez’s hitting, the greatest World Series ever, and what would happen if home runs became automatic triples. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

As you all probably know, at the start of every season, the FanGraphs staff puts together our bold predictions for the coming year. Each is, to varying degrees, plausible but unlikely, which is what makes it such a fun exercise. Anyway, entering the 2025 season, my bold prediction was: Corbin Carroll will become the fifth-ever 20/20/20/20 player — 20 doubles, 20 triples, 20 home runs, and 20 stolen bases in a single season — joining Frank Schulte in 1911, Willie Mays in 1957, and Curtis Granderson and Jimmy Rollins, who both did it in 2007. Carroll ultimately fell just three triples short of the threshold, while tallying 32 doubles, 31 homers, and 32 steals.

I decided not to run it back this year, figuring that wouldn’t be as fun, though I am very much still rooting for it to happen. The 20/20/20/20 Club is one of the most exclusive baseball has to offer. Pulling it off requires a precise combination of power, speed and instincts, and it has to happen at the exact right moment in a player’s career. As I wrote in my bold prediction: “A player needs to have enough pop to hit 20 homers, but not so much that the majority of his extra-base hits land in the seats. He also needs the speed to steal bases and stretch singles into doubles and doubles into triples. His instincts must be sharp, so he can know when to attempt the extra base without running into outs.”

Last Saturday, when I saw that Carroll had doubled and tripled in a 10-3 Diamondbacks win over the Braves, I pulled up his player page to check on his progress. He was up to 26 doubles, 15 triples, 18 homers, and 16 steals. He stole a base the next day, and after going without an extra-base hit in Arizona’s three-game series against the Red Sox, Carroll entered play Friday at 26 doubles, 15 triples, 18 homers, and 17 steals with 34 games left to play. This prompted my own question for this week’s mailbag, which I will get to momentarily. We’ll also answer your questions on the worst player to ever hit three home runs in a game, the biggest drop-off for a player in the season after finishing second in the MVP voting, and teams missing the playoffs despite leading the league in run differential. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

I made my first trip to Oracle Park earlier this week to catch the final two games of a three-game set between the Giants and Astros. I was in San Francisco reporting a different story, but I was eager talk about Yordan Alvarez with his teammates, his opponents, and pretty much anybody else who was interested. I’ve long compared him to Willie McCovey because of his overwhelming physical stature and profile at the plate — it helps that Alvarez, like McCovey, also bats left-handed and wears no. 44 — and I considered myself fortunate to get to see the Astros DH play in San Francisco. I hoped I’d get to witness him launch one into McCovey Cove. That didn’t happen, but it was still fun to watch him during what’s turning into a career year.

One of the players I talked to about Alvarez was Houston outfielder Taylor Trammell. His response, to a question about what makes Alvarez so good, is worth sharing. “He is the most efficient player I’ve ever seen,” Trammell said. “He does exactly what he needs to do to get himself ready to play well, and then does nothing more. His preparation seems so effortless because he has so much confidence in his routine. He’s shrunken it all into a box.” Trammell also bats left-handed, yet he said he can’t study Alvarez to figure out what to do in the box because “pitchers throw differently to him. They throw him the pitches they don’t throw to anyone else just to try something to get him out.” He said Alvarez sees changeups from pitchers that he didn’t even know had changeups, and while that might’ve been a slight exaggeration, it worked to explain the helplessness that opposing pitchers must feel when Alvarez is in the box.

That’s the last we’ll discuss Alvarez here today, but if you want to read more about his MVP-worthy season, I’d encourage you to check out Dan Szymborski’s post from Monday breaking down Alvarez’s odds of winning the American League Triple Crown. Instead, in this week’s mailbag, we’re answering your questions about a pair of Cardinals pitchers who are greatly outperforming their peripherals, whether strong plate discipline translates to successful ABS challenges, the final franchise to (maybe) register a 100-loss season, and more. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Boston Globe ran a story by Red Sox beat writer Alex Speier on the concept of momentum. I can hear the collective groans of our Members now. Haven’t we gone over this enough? We’ve already established that there’s no such thing as momentum! Or, if there is, its effect is minimal. Our readers would be the first to point out that the month-and-a-half long surge up in Boston is mostly a matter of a talented, drastically underperforming Sox team experiencing some serious positive regression, bringing its overall record back up to about where we expected it to be all along. I get that, of course. We cannot conclusively prove the effect of momentum in baseball — and it’s not for lack of trying — and so therefore cannot definitively say that it exists. Yet when it comes to the Big Mo, a palpable feeling rather than a tangible metric, I tend to subscribe to what I call the Robert Graysmith Theory: Just because you can’t prove it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

What’s interesting about Speier’s piece is that he, along with Globe staffers Julian Benbow and Daigo Fujiwara-Smith, looked for data to support the impact of momentum on winning and losing streaks. Speier, an analytically savvy writer, said in his Bluesky post sharing the story that he “was skeptical” that their search would lead to anything. Instead, he was astonished to learn that, as he writes in the story, “A Globe analysis of Retrosheet data that includes the outcome of every MLB game from 1901 through 2025 revealed a striking pattern: The longer a winning streak lasts, the higher a team’s winning percentage in the next game.” The inverse is true for losing streaks. Speier mentions several factors unrelated to momentum that help to explain why “baseball streaks tend to be somewhat self-sustaining,” most notably that team quality probably plays a major role in enduring stretches of winning or losing. That alone is enough of a reason to maintain any skepticism you may have toward the idea of momentum. But at the same time, we should acknowledge that many players believe in the power of momentum, and if that belief influences how they feel, and how they feel contributes to how they perform, then it stands to reason that momentum — or at least, their belief in momentum — has at least some impact on performance.

That’s the last we’ll be discussing momentum here, though I’d encourage you to read the entirety of Speier’s story after you’ve finished reading this mailbag. Instead, today we’ll be answering your questions on players to be named later, the teams that most improved (or diminished) their 2027 playoff odds with their moves at this season’s trade deadline, and where Pete Crow-Armstrong would stack up on the five-star catches leaderboard if we had Statcast data going back through baseball’s history. But before we do, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re less than three days away from the trade deadline, and aside from a challenge trade here and some minor swaps there, the only action we’re getting is inaction. Both Casey Mize of the Tigers and Freddy Peralta of the Mets were scratched from their scheduled starts Friday night, presumably as a precautionary measure to ensure that neither hurler would get hurt ahead of a likely trade.

Of course, we’ve known for a while that the Mets were going to be sellers this deadline season, giving their last-place standing for most of the year. They fired manager Carlos Mendoza at the end of June, and more recently, they’ve been giving every fan a $10 concessions voucher with their ticket, as both an apology for the poor performance on the field and an incentive to keep fans coming to the park to watch that poor performance — which in a few days could get even worse. In addition to Peralta, the Mets are also likely to at least some of their other pending free agents, such as Luis Robert Jr., Tyrone Taylor, Clay Holmes, and Brooks Raley 레일리, as well as high-leverage reliever Luke Weaver, who’s under contract through the end of next season. Detroit’s decision not to start Mize may have something to do with a groin issue that he’s been dealing with recently, as The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Cody Stavenhagen noted. The team let Tarik Skubal, the top pending free agent on the block, start on Thursday even as it is supposedly shopping him. That’s because the Tigers still have about a 1-in-4 shot to make the playoffs, as of the start of play Friday, according to our Playoff Odds. They reportedly haven’t made a final decision on whether they will trade Skubal and their other players on expiring contracts, among them Mize and second baseman Gleyber Torres. If Detroit ends up selling, closer Kenley Jansen, who has a club option for next season, could also be on the move.

In addition to answering your questions about the trade deadline in this week’s Mailbag, we’ll also cover Jordan Hicks’ resurgence with the White Sox, home runs hit slower than the pitch that was thrown, and odd Hall of Fame cap decisions. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Controversy surrounding José Caballero’s pre-pitch routine struck twice in the Bronx this week, with the first time prompting the benches to clear and the second causing unnecessary confusion. In the eighth inning of the Yankees’ 8-5 win over the Pirates on Monday night, Caballero did what he usually does — he dug into the batter’s box and didn’t look up at the pitcher until there were eight seconds left on the pitch timer. The idea is to disrupt the pitcher’s rhythm. Pittsburgh reliever Dennis Santana took exception to Caballero’s tactic — which, again, he has done many, many times for the last four seasons — and yelled at him after getting him to ground into a double play. The benches emptied, and the Pirates complained to MLB about it.

Turns out, the griping worked. After the game, the league told the umpires to more strictly enforce the rules requiring batters to engage with the pitcher with no fewer than eight seconds left on the clock. Instead of warning the batter, and then calling an automatic strike for a repeat violation, the umpires were directed to assess a strike to Caballero for attempting to deceive the pitcher, no matter how much time was left on the pitch timer. Both Caballero and the Yankees claim the league did not notify them about the change. As crew chief Adrian Johnson told a pool reporter after, “He’s been warned all season. We were instructed not to warn him. We were instructed to violate him. That’s what it is. It’s a violation.” Along with Johnson’s poor phrasing, the sudden change in enforcement is quite jarring and, in my opinion, inappropriate. If what the Yankees said is true — that the league didn’t tell them about the change — then I think this is an overstep by MLB to single out a player. Caballero accused the umpires and the league of “picking on” him. But even if MLB did give the Yankees and Caballero the heads up, I think the escalated enforcement is an incorrect interpretation of the rule. I love that Caballero uses the pitch clock to his advantage; pitchers can hold the ball and run down the clock to zero, so why shouldn’t batters be allowed to wait their full allotted time before engaging with the pitcher? Moreover, I also don’t know how Caballero is deceiving the pitcher by doing something he does so frequently. He’s certainly trying to annoy the opposing pitcher, but that’s not deception — that’s good gamesmanship.

Anyway, that’s the last you’ll read about Caballero in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about Esmerlyn Valdez’s heater, Gunnar Henderson’s woes against fastballs, how to fix the Angels, and whether anyone will break Jesse Orosco’s record for games pitched. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been thinking a lot about the baseball calendar in recent days, specifically how we use it to both mark the passage of time and look ahead to the possibility of what’s yet to come. As fans, we slice up the season to make it easier for us to discuss noteworthy performances, evaluate trends, and justify our irrational faith that our team just might turn things around. As analysts, we know that we shouldn’t draw grand conclusions from these individual slivers — the sample sizes are just too small — but we also recognize the benefits of using these otherwise arbitrary segments to understand the season as it unfolds.

I mention all of this because this weekend is start of the second half of the season. Of course, we all know that the All-Star break hasn’t been the season’s true midpoint for some time now, as Opening Day is scheduled earlier in the year than it used to be while the All-Star Game continues to be played on the second Tuesday of July. Even so, there are three reasons that I continue to find value in splitting up the season in mid-July. First, pausing the regular season for a few days provides a natural demarcation point. Second, with playoff field now expanded to 12 teams, the postseason lasts longer than ever before. Because the team that wins the World Series could play up to 22 additional games, the All-Star break ends up being much closer to the halfway point on the journey from Opening Day to the decisive game of the Fall Classic. Finally, the three-week stretch after the All-Star Game is a frenetic rush to the trade deadline that then rolls right into the Dog Days of August and the strenuous sprint of September. The games after the All-Star break are much more demanding than the ones before it, thus making the few days of respite in July feel like a more representative dividing line than Game 81 in late June.

Anyway, in this first mailbag of the second half, we’re answering your questions on what it would be like if MLB had a loan mechanism like professional soccer, Kyle Karros’ breakout, the longest time a team has spent within a half-game of .500, and what Anthony Rendon’s career might have been. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »