The Reds rotation has been an undeniable strength this season. The team’s starters are third in park- and league-adjusted ERA, and their collective peripherals mostly back it up; they’re 10th in park- and league-adjusted FIP. Hunter Greene has been phenomenal, Nick Lodolo has made some key command improvements, and Brady Singer has added a secret ingredient, though his ERA has ballooned to over 5.00 since Michael Baumann wrote about him last month. But the pitcher leading the team in ERA is Andrew Abbott, and before Baumann can write about his third Cincinnati starter this year, I’d like to take a stab at puzzling out what’s gone right for the 25-year-old lefty.

What if I told you that while Abbott’s fastball is coming in about a tick slower than normal and his arm slot is five degrees higher than usual, he has somehow managed to slightly improve the pitch’s Stuff+ score? You might be a bit confused, as the trend for many pitchers has been to try and lower their arm slot in an effort to flatten out their four-seamers. A flatter approach angle often leads to more swings and misses at the top of the zone and weaker contact, as batters have trouble squaring up a pitch that looks like it’s rising above their bat. Abbott has always had a high release point, but his 50 degree arm angle is now the 11th-highest arm slot among qualified left-handed pitchers.

Research into the relationship between a pitcher’s arm slot and the shape of their pitches has shown that as a pitcher’s arm slot rises, they’re able to generate more backspin. More backspin allows them to create more induced vertical break (IVB). Put simply, IVB is a function of arm angle. The other thing about a high arm angle is that purer backspin fastballs tend to cut less horizontally. Abbott has managed something somewhat tricky with his new arm slot:

Despite the higher release angle, Abbott hasn’t experienced a corresponding increase in the amount of carry on his heater. The other odd thing is that he’s been able to maintain the higher-than-normal horizontal break he generates with the pitch. Because he’s now throwing from a higher slot, the pitch has a much steeper approach angle, and the pitch’s cutter-esque shape provides a wider horizontal approach angle.

Abbott’s four-seamer now stands out both because it doesn’t carry as much and because it cuts more than you’d expect. A “dead zone” fastball describes a pitch with unspectacular movement traits — a fastball that moves as expected. Research has shown that a fastball’s dead zone is a function of the pitcher’s arm angle, leading to the concept of a dynamic dead zone (DDZ). Using Alex Chamberlain’s calculated DDZ deltas (based on work done by Max Bay), we can see just how much Abbott’s fastball falls outside of what the batter expects based on his arm slot:

Remember, magnitude is what matters when evaluating a pitcher’s DDZ, so Abbott’s negative vertical dead zone delta isn’t necessarily a bad thing, though his +2.8 horizontal dead zone delta is very much a good thing.

The results have been positive so far. His whiff rate on the pitch has improved from just over 19% during his first two seasons to 25.2% this year. The additional swings and misses are nice, but he’s also turned his heater into a contact-suppression monster. Just look at some of these key contact metrics from Statcast:

Abbott’s expected wOBA on contact when he throws his fastball is just .297, 17th among the 248 pitchers who have thrown at least 100 four-seamers this year. The hard-hit and barrel rates against the pitch are miniscule. The most impressive aspect of his contact management comes from Statcast’s new bat tracking data. Opposing batters produce the second-highest average bat speed in baseball against Abbott’s fastball, but they “square-up” the pitch at the third-lowest rate on a per swing basis and they produce a “blast” against his heater at the fourth-lowest rate in baseball. In other words, batters really gear up when they see Abbott’s fastball because their eyes are telling them that the pitch is very hittable, but they simply cannot make solid contact against it.

To connect this all back to the pitch’s shape, I expect that this contact suppression is all linked to the amount of horizontal break Abbott generates with his fastball. With his high arm slot, a batter expects to see a straight four-seamer with tons of carry. Instead, they’re presented with a cutting fastball that doesn’t have as much carry as you’d expect. Rather than swing completely under the pitch like they might if it had a ton of carry, they’ll often put it in play, but it’s weak contact because the pitch doesn’t come in where they expect it to horizontally. So much of the contact he generates with the pitch is off the end of the bat or in on the handle, leading to weak fly balls and popups.

Of course, location matters, too. In the first table above, I included average vertical location, because location is a critical component of vertical approach angle. Abbott is locating his fastball much lower in the strike zone this year, which, along with his higher arm slot, has contributed to his steeper approach angle. He’s also been very consistent with his location on the outer half of the plate to right-handed batters:

Because the horizontal break on the pitch causes it to tail away from righties, his location is perfect for inducing weak contact off the end of the bat while avoiding the barrel if it ends up over the heart of the plate.

In case you were worried about Abbott’s dip in velocity, I’m happy to report that his heater has had a bit more zip during his last few starts:

A shoulder injury last August cut short his 2024 season, and he entered spring training a little bit behind schedule because of it. I suspect that he was still ramping up during his first few starts of the season and that his velocity will be back to normal moving forward.

Beyond his fastball and the new arm slot, there’s one key change to the rest of Abbott’s repertoire that could be contributing to his success. He’s getting about three more inches of drop on his changeup while still maintaining the pitch’s above-average horizontal break. The whiff rate on that pitch has improved by about four points, and the expected wOBA against it is just .222. More importantly, the change in shape has allowed him to differentiate the pitch from his fastball a bit more:

Please excuse the color differences from year to year in the plots above. In Abbott’s pitch plot from 2024 on the left, his changeup (the black blob) somewhat overlaps with his fastball (the blue blob). In 2025, on the right, his offspeed pitch (the green blog) is wholly distinct from his heater (the blue blob).

Abbott briefly discussed the evolution of the pitch with Charlie Goldsmith of the Dayton Daily News in late April:

It’s come a long way. I talked with Nick Martinez and a bunch of the guys about how to throw it, grips and all of that stuff. It’s finally coming around. It’s not to where I think it can be yet, but it’s gotten a lot more consistent.

He has increased his use of his changeup from 16.3% last year to 21.3% this year, and it has proven to be a potent weapon against right-handed batters.

With a new arm slot, a deceptive fastball, and an improved changeup in hand, Abbott has truly elevated his arsenal. His walk rate is a little high right now, but his strikeout rate is 30.3%, and the contact suppression improvements he’s made to his heater have almost entirely negated those additional free passes. The top-line results certainly speak for themselves: Abbott has allowed more than one run in just one of his starts this year, and that happened to be the only start in which he’s allowed more than four hits. As long as batters are unable to square up his fastball, we could be seeing a significant step forward from the young lefty.

I spend a lot of time saying the word “April.” It’s a convenient excuse to wave away any notion of changing my mind drastically on a player after two or three weeks of the season. But April isn’t actually meaningless, and as we head toward June, we’re already nearly a third of the way through the season. A lot of the stuff we’ve seen isn’t just a rough patch or a freak BABIP, but career trajectories changing, and that has consequences for the players and their teams. One of the most common questions about players I get in chats is some variation of “What does ZiPS think now?” I can’t answer them all, mainly because “doughy middle-aged nerd talks to his magical baseball box for an hour” sounds like the worst episode of Black Mirror ever. That said, because I do full in-season runs of ZiPS in the middle of every month, now seems like a good time to get some projectionist changes of heart for the overachieving and underperforming players.

So whose changing fortunes are most likely to lead to changed destinies? Well, to get an idea of which trajectories have changed the most, I took the current 2026 projected numbers for each player and compared them to the 2026 ZiPS projections from before this season began. We’ll start with the good news, because I’m a Baltimore native and an Orioles fan, so I need something sunny first. These are park-neutral projections, and I eliminated anyone who is projected as below replacement level, since we’re focusing on major league-relevant players.

Yesterday, sometimes known as “one Orioles loss ago,” I took a look at the hitters whose 2026 projections have changed the most since the start of this season, so now it’s the pitchers’ turn. Since we’re talking about pitchers, I also took out the guys who have missed most of the season due to injury, or the bottom 25 would just be a list of pitchers who might need Tommy John surgery.

Here are the pitchers whose 2026 ZiPS projections have improved the most since the beginning of this season, sorted by the greatest gains in projected WAR: Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, just after midnight, Major League Baseball released a bevy of new bat tracking data. It was accompanied by the now customary combination of an explainer from Mike Petriello and a breakdown of the most extreme players from David Adler. Like many people, I’m still trying to wrap my arms around how these data work and what we might be able to learn from them. Bat tracking metrics are complicated because swings are complicated. The various numbers are interconnected, dependent on location, pitch type, and the batter’s tendencies and intent. There’s no one perfect way to swing, and it’s easier to draw inferences about individual players than overarching conclusions. My first takeaway was that something weird is going on with Leody Taveras. I’ll write about that tomorrow, but for now I’d like to take the new metrics for a test drive. We’ll look at two specific pitch archetypes to get a sense of what these numbers do and how they look in action.

Let’s start as simple as we can. I pulled the league-average numbers for swings against four-seam fastballs right down the middle in zone 5, but I split them up. The top row shows the numbers only for competitive swings on hard-hit balls. The bottom row shows the numbers only for competitive swings that resulted in whiffs. Let’s see how these two swings might differ.

Plenty of differences jump out at you here. When a hitter misses a four-seamer right down the middle, it’s usually because they’re behind on it or under it. All of the new metrics are telling us that in their own way. I’ll capitalize all the metrics in this article, just so we get comfortable with their names and definitions. Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the halcyon days of 2021, things were looking up for Robbie Ray. After a promising but inconsistent start to his career, he put everything together all at once and won a Cy Young award. He hit free agency on the back of that season and signed a deal that guaranteed him five times what he’d made in the majors so far. The future was bright – except that Ray turned around and put up a miserable 2022 campaign, meaningfully worse across the board despite pitching in Seattle, where trained squirrels can go six innings and give up two runs in the pitcher-friendliest ballpark in the big leagues. Then he got hurt. And later got traded as salary ballast. Life comes at you fast.

Ray would hardly be the first pitcher to spike some hardware in a weak year — only six AL pitchers reached 4 WAR in 2021; Ray wasn’t one of them — and then fade away. Rick Porcello says hi, by the way. If Ray’s last act was keeping replacement-level time on the Giants, at least he got his one big payday. Expectations weren’t high, and when he was shut down with an injury only a month after returning in the second half of last year, they fell further still.

Of course, I’m writing this article, so you know that hasn’t continued. Rather than teeter into irrelevance, Ray has come out strong to start 2025. He looks as good as he has since his award-winning season – and arguably even better. So let’s look at how he’s doing it now, because whether you’re a long-time Ray-head or just seeing the first Rays of light this year, he’s a strange enough – and fun enough – pitcher to be worth taking notice of. Read the rest of this entry »

At one point or another, most of us have done the thing where we go to the refrigerator in search of a snack, decide nothing looks appealing, close the door, then come back 15 minutes later to check again and somehow feel annoyed when the contents remain unchanged. It’s a near-universal experience despite the illogical nature of the whole thing. And when we relate this experience to others, it’s always the refrigerator, even though we could just as easily choose to re-check a cabinet or the pantry. But I think this is where we do get some credit for being slightly logical. The contents of a refrigerator are far more transient than the dry and canned goods stored elsewhere in the kitchen. The fridge is where we keep the perishables, the food that by definition isn’t meant to last long. Food in the refrigerator comes and goes, rots and gets tossed, all at a much faster rate than elsewhere in the kitchen.

Park factors work a little like a refrigerator. They present a single value that contains within it the influence of several different components that vary from park to park, much in the way my refrigerator is two-thirds beverages and cheese, while yours probably has fruits and veggies and maybe some leftover ham from Easter that you should definitely throw away. Some of the components captured by park factors are static and easily measured, like surface dimensions and wall height. They’re the condiments that remain consistently stocked in the fridge door.

But sometimes you throw open the door to a park’s refrigerator and get whacked in the face with a stench of unknown origin. And that stench becomes all the more potent as it mingles with a to-go box of leftover Thai and a carton of milk growing more questionable by the day. Likewise, wind speeds, the daily dew point, and the angle of the sun at different points relative to the solstice all fluctuate and interact in a way that a scientist with the right expertise could tease out and quantify, but that remain a bit fuzzy to the casual observer.

It was these squishier components of park factors, the ones that ebb and flow as weather cycles in and out and the seasons change, that sparked my curiosity about how park factors might vary over the course of such a long season. Traditionally, park factors are calculated over multiple full seasons of data (though sometimes single-season park factors are useful for capturing more recent trends), and that’s not just a sample size consideration. A full season of data is needed to ensure a balanced schedule where every opponent faced on the road is also faced at home and vice versa. This ensures that when comparing runs per game at home to runs per game on the road, the team quality is consistent in both subsets. Read the rest of this entry »

I spend a lot of time saying the word “April.” It’s a convenient excuse to wave away any notion of changing my mind drastically on a player after two or three weeks of the season. But April isn’t actually meaningless, and as we head toward June, we’re already nearly a third of the way through the season. A lot of the stuff we’ve seen isn’t just a rough patch or a freak BABIP, but career trajectories changing, and that has consequences for the players and their teams. One of the most common questions about players I get in chats is some variation of “What does ZiPS think now?” I can’t answer them all, mainly because “doughy middle-aged nerd talks to his magical baseball box for an hour” sounds like the worst episode of Black Mirror ever. That said, because I do full in-season runs of ZiPS in the middle of every month, now seems like a good time to get some projectionist changes of heart for the overachieving and underperforming players.

So whose changing fortunes are most likely to lead to changed destinies? Well, to get an idea of which trajectories have changed the most, I took the current 2026 projected numbers for each player and compared them to the 2026 ZiPS projections from before this season began. We’ll start with the good news, because I’m a Baltimore native and an Orioles fan, so I need something sunny first. These are park-neutral projections, and I eliminated anyone who is projected as below replacement level, since we’re focusing on major league-relevant players. Today, we’ll cover the position players before moving on to the pitchers tomorrow.

Here are the players whose 2026 ZiPS projections have improved the most since the beginning of this season, sorted by the greatest gains in projected WAR: Read the rest of this entry »

When we last checked in on the Twins, they had stumbled out of the gate, losing eight of their first 12 games — a start that looked particularly dismal given last September’s collapse, which cost them a playoff berth. But times have changed, with the offense heating up and the pitching staff emerging as one of the league’s stingiest. Thanks to a just-ended 13-game winning streak, the Twins now own the American League’s fourth-best record (26-21, .553), though injuries to players such as Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa threaten to stall their momentum.

On May 3, the Twins beat the Red Sox 4-3 in Boston, ending a four-game losing streak that had dropped them to 13-20 and had included two walk-off wins by the Guardians. They beat the Red Sox to close out a road trip, then went home and pulled off three-game sweeps of the Orioles and Giants, punctuated by a 10th-inning walk-off victory. Back on the road, they swept three from the hapless Orioles in Baltimore before taking the first two from the Brewers in Milwaukee, running their record to 26-20. On Sunday, they finally lost again, falling to the Brewers 5-2.

The final three wins of the Twins’ streak were all shutouts, starting with a 4-0 blanking of the Orioles by starter Chris Paddack and two relievers on Thursday, continuing with a 3-0 whitewashing of the Brewers behind Joe Ryan and three relievers on Friday, and concluding with a 7-0 drubbing of Milwaukee highlighted by the work of Pablo López and three relievers on Saturday. In all, the Twins shut out their opponents for 34 consecutive innings (the longest since the franchise moved to Minnesota in 1961), beginning with the fourth inning of Wednesday night’s game, after the Orioles had scored six runs; they extended that streak until the second inning on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

“The reason the Royals are so far down this list is that they don’t have an obvious back of the rotation yet.” That’s what Ben Clemens wrote when the Royals turned up at no. 13 on our Positional Power Rankings back in March. Until Saturday, the lack of depth hadn’t held them back at all. Their five starters, Seth Lugo, Cole Ragans, Michael Wacha, Michael Lorenzen, and Kris Bubic, had started 45 of the team’s 46 games. As Michael Baumann wrote last week, Bubic, the biggest question mark of the bunch, has instead pitched like an exclamation point. After taking a no-hit bid into the seventh inning in San Francisco last night, he’s 5-2 with a 1.47 ERA and 2.72 FIP. Put it all together, and the Kansas City starters have a 2.93 ERA and 3.45 FIP, good for the third- and fourth-best marks in baseball, respectively. But that depth is finally going to be tested. On Saturday, the Royals announced that they’d sent both Lugo and Ragans to the injured list.

Lugo and Ragans, who respectively finished second and fourth in the AL Cy Young voting in 2024, have been on opposite sides of the process-results spectrum thus far this season. Lugo is rocking a 3.02 ERA with a 4.52 FIP, while Ragans has a 4.53 ERA and a 1.99 FIP. The good news is that neither injury sounds too serious (with the obvious caveat that because they’re pitchers, either player could spontaneously combust at any moment). Both had been dealing with nagging injuries in recent weeks and seemed to reach the point where it was time to back off rather than risk something more serious. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Riley was relatively raw when our 2017 Atlanta Braves Top Prospects list was published in February of that year. Six weeks short of his 20th birthday, he was coming off of a Low-A season in which he logged 20 home runs and a 124 wRC+, but also fanned 147 times. With lingering concerns about both his contact profile and conditioning, Eric Longenhagen conservatively ranked Riley no. 28 in a then-strong Atlanta system.

Riley has obviously gone on to have a highly successful career. Since debuting with the Braves in May 2019, Riley has put up a 124 wRC+ and 19.9 WAR across parts of seven seasons, slugged 30-plus homers in three different years, and made a pair of All-Star teams. A mainstay in the middle of Atlanta’s lineup, the 41st-overall pick in the 2015 draft out Southaven, Mississippi’s DeSoto Central High School has developed into one of the senior circuit’s top sluggers.

What did Riley’s 2017 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out I shared some of what our lead prospect analyst wrote and asked Riley to respond to it.

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“Riley began the year struggling with any sort of velocity and then improved the timing of his footwork, quieted his hands and started hitting. Late in the year, he was turning on plus velocity.”

“Very accurate,” Riley said. “Coming out of high school, I hadn’t seen velo a lot, and I kind of had a lot going on with my swing. I needed to make some adjustments. Being a bigger guy, a power guy, it was kind of, ‘All I have to do is touch the ball, get a barrel to the ball.’ It was one of my first steps in learning how to shorten everything up and just get a barrel to it. From there, good things happen.”

“He has plus raw power (at least) and has improved his body composition since high school (when he was a heavy 230). But at just 19, with some general stiffness to his actions, Riley is pretty likely to kick over to first base as he matures.” Read the rest of this entry »

As we get further and further into the month of May, signs of summer are popping up all around us. Allergies are flaring, you can start to trust the major league stat leaderboards, and colleges across the country are wrapping up their spring semesters.

That last point is important, because summer is the season of study abroad. Every year around this time, thousands of American undergraduates get on planes, learn to navigate a foreign country, meet new people, and discover that their Spanish gets way better after three or four beers. It’s a marvelous experience, and I want to bring it to you, the FanGraphs readers.

Welcome to the 2025 FanGraphs Fan Exchange Program.

For one week, I want you to put your favorite team on the shelf and follow a different one. Do whatever you do in the normal course of being a fan, but do it for another ballclub. Read the rest of this entry »