Second base is the bass guitar of a baseball team. If you’re there, most people will assume that you don’t have the chops to play lead or rhythm guitar (shortstop and third base in this metaphor). And unless you’re truly exceptional, those same people will immediately forget you exist. Most of the time, it’s a thankless, anonymous job. But while most four-piece rock bands can plug along with a mediocre bassist, an exceptional bassist can elevate the group’s sound, and indeed come to define it.

Unless one of the youngsters listed below really pops in 2025, “exceptional” will probably be difficult to come by at this position. But competence abounds. Some 15 teams are projected for 3.0 WAR or more at this position, with 24 teams projected for 2.5 WAR or better. You could count on one hand the teams that have neither a solid regular at second base nor a prospect with that upside waiting in the high minors. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know everything about baseball, but I know this: When a player’s name is in a headline that ends with the phrase “Stares Down Oblivion,” that’s not a good sign. That happened to Joey Gallo four weeks ago, as Michael Rosen wrote a lovely tribute to a popular player whose career seemed to be nearing its end. If the headline weren’t ominous enough, little of what followed augured good things: A table that showed Gallo posting the two highest single-season whiff rates of the decade; a comparison to Ken Griffey Jr. and Andruw Jones, but only during their time with the White Sox; a metaphor about hanging off a cliff by one’s fingertips.

Gallo went 2-for-20 for the White Sox in Cactus League play, and while a minute batting average is nothing new, Gallo’s secondary skills — the talents that made him an impactful big leaguer — were not in evidence. Both of his hits were singles, and he drew just one walk.

The man might swing from his heels, but he’s smart enough to read the signs. So on Sunday, he posted a video of old defensive highlights to X with the caption, “It’s been fun outfield,” with a peace sign emoji. A retirement announcement, perhaps? It seems Gallo also realized he’d been ambiguous, so 11 minutes later he sent a follow-up post: “Just to be clear, I will be pitching.” Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve all heard the terms “luddite” and “sabotage” before. They’re words with pejorative connotations: The former is someone who distrusts technological progress; the latter is the act of conspiring to destroy from within. Luddites and saboteurs are rubes and terrorists, respectively, in modern vernacular.

These are more recent linguistic developments than you might think. Both words come from organized labor movements in which workers saw machines lowering product quality and putting entire industries’ worth of skilled craftsmen out of business in a time of economic precarity. They reacted to this existential threat the way you’d expect: by destroying it. Throwing one’s body on the gears and the levers until the machine stops working would one day become a vivid political metaphor, but to the original Luddites and saboteurs, it was a literal thing. Read the rest of this entry »

One way to tell the difference between a baseball fan who has a life and a true sicko is whether they have strong opinions on players who sign minor league contracts and attend spring training on a non-roster invite. The person in a Cubs hat who’s stoked about the Kyle Tucker trade and knows all sorts of intimate biographical details about Shota Imanaga? That’s your friend. If they start talking to you about Travis Jankowski, they might be in a little too deep.

We sickos know that while championships can be won and glory earned on the major league free agent market, NRIs are nonetheless a meaningful collection of useful roster players. Sometimes more. I’d argue that these fringe hopefuls are the only players who truly stand to gain by their performance in camp.

Moreover, these players are by definition underdogs. They include former top prospects, guys recovering from injury, and itinerant Quad-A players hoping for one last spin of the wheel. If you weren’t interested in their progress on a competitive level, surely we can interest you in an underdog story. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever lived in a cold climate and had a car that you’re trying to nurse through one more winter because you can’t quite afford to replace it, you know the startup noise. Sort of a squeal on a rumble on a cough. You’re waking your old Ford Explorer from hibernation, and it would rather go back to bed.

Throwing arms are like that to some extent. As much as pitchers stay loose and work out all offseason — we no longer live in an age when a pitcher could spend all winter inside a bottle of whiskey, dry out on the train ride to Sarasota, and throw 250 innings without breathing hard — sometimes the body just does not ramp up to game fitness the way you’d expect.

As routine as injury announcements are this time of year, the end of last week was a bloodbath. Three pitchers who were going to end up on a lot of AL Cy Young shortlists — Gerrit Cole, George Kirby, and Grayson Rodriguez — all came down with some flavor of arm ickiness. Any kind of layoff at this point in the calendar can disrupt a pitcher’s ramp-up to the point that it imperils an Opening Day start, and three contenders are now praying that worse news isn’t coming. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were looking for differences between collegiate and professional baseball, you wouldn’t have to try very hard to find them. One of my favorites is the value and frequency of the hit-by-pitch.

College hitters get plunked more often than big leaguers for three reasons: First, college pitchers have worse command, as a rule, than their professional counterparts. Second, while the quality of play is high in college baseball, it’s not quite high enough to weed out all the weirdos. So you’ll get guys with no nerve endings in one of their arms who are quite happy to trade a welt for a free trip to first base. Read the rest of this entry »

What follows is a brief summary of the modern history of the Atlanta Braves: six straight division titles from 2018 to 2023. That includes a World Series championship in 2021 and back-to-back 100-win seasons the following two years. I was tempted to caveat this by saying all this would’ve looked even more impressive if the Dodgers hadn’t ruined the curve, but in the 2020s, the Braves have been right there with them. Here’s a coincidence that’s nonetheless useful from a literary perspective: Brian Snitker is now one spot ahead of Bobby Cox on the career managerial winning percentage leaderboard.

In 2024, the Braves were still good, but not quite as good as before. There were reasons for this. After years of unusual lineup stability, everyone got hurt except for Marcell Ozuna, Matt Olson (who had a down year by his standards), and Orlando Arcia (who had a down year by Yuniesky Betancourt’s standards). Still, the Braves finished six games behind a Phillies team that came out of the gate like the 2001 Mariners but ended the season like, well, pick any subsequent Mariners team. The Braves needed a Game 162 win to grab a Wild Card berth, and didn’t do much with it, bowing out in straight sets to the Padres. Read the rest of this entry »

When David Appelman announced on Monday that we were adding college stats to our player pages and leaderboards, more than one person reached out to congratulate me personally. I had nothing to do with the conception or implementation of this blessed happening, but it is true: FanGraphs having college stats could not be more up my alley.

I wanted to play around with the new leaderboard, but this early in the season, there’s little to be gleaned. No pitcher has made more than four starts; no team has played more than 14 games. And most of the action we’ve seen so far has been nonconference throat-clearing, mismatches between blue bloods and mid-majors. The numbers will tell, but not for another few weeks.

So I decided to go back to the roots of the sabermetrics movement. Our college leaderboards might not have all the latest fancy Statcast stuff, but we’ve got FIP and K% and all sorts of things you wouldn’t take for granted if you’ve ever had to calculate a pitcher’s WHIP by hand on the back of a box score in a MAC press box. When we got all that stuff in the pro game, what did we do with it?

That’s right, relitigate award voting. Read the rest of this entry »

Many years ago, there was a bar in Columbus, Ohio. It’s since been closed and razed after its owner, a serially corrupt lobbyist who later served time for his role in “a food service bribery scheme,” went to jail for owing some $300,000 in back taxes. When I was a young man, my friends and I would descend on this bar once a week in order to wreck house at pub trivia under our collective nom de guerre: Gorilla Bizkit.

One of the recurring theme rounds for this trivia game was called “Paxton or Pullman?” The host would give the title of a movie, and each team would have to say whether the film featured Bill Paxton, Bill Pullman, both, or neither. I remember Paxton-Pullman confusion being a minor internet meme back in humanity’s digital golden age, when we — green and callow as a budding flower — saw fit to spend our days determining whether a hot dog was a sandwich. (Among other questions of great teleological import.) Read the rest of this entry »

In this time of interchangeable elbow ligaments, we’ve mostly become inured to the effects of routine Tommy John surgery. Pitcher blows out, pitcher gets stitched together like a beloved sock monkey, pitcher returns in 12 to 18 months.

If that were always the case, Tommy John would be little more than an annoyance. But it’s not always that simple. Sometimes, the pitcher wears out before his UCL undergoes rapid unscheduled disassembly. Sometimes there are half-measures — rest, PRP injections, what have you — that end up having no effect other than prolonging the agony. Then there’s the timing of the injury and surgery; go under the knife in September, and you might not even miss a full season. Show up to camp with a threadbare elbow in February, blow out in late March, and you might miss two. Read the rest of this entry »