Late last week, Major League Baseball proposed to drastically change the game’s player developmental system. Beginning in 2028, the domestic draft would be cut from 20 rounds to 12, and eliminate eligibility for high schoolers — players would need to be at least 20 years old and two years removed from high school to be drafted. Players who choose to play for a JUCO school would need to do so for both seasons, rather than the one-year requirement currently in place. Most players at a four-year college would become draft eligible a year earlier under MLB’s new proposal; right now, they are not eligible for the draft unless they turn 21 by August 1 of their draft year or until after their third year a four-year college. MLB’s proposal would move the age cutoff date back to September 1. More than 40% of the dollars would be pared from the draft pool, with the most recent $358.7 million available slashed to $200 million.

On the international side, MLB proposed instituting a new draft, an idea originally discussed during the last set of CBA negotiations. The draft, which would begin in 2027, would require players to be at least 18 years old by September 1 of their draft year. The draft pool would stay mainly intact otherwise, with the same $200 million available for international draftees as domestic ones, pretty close to the nearly $199 million that was in the final draft bonus pool in 2025.

We don’t need to do any detective work to figure out where the savings go. As was the case with the league’s parallel salary cap proposal, which management disingenuously promoted as a way to improve competitive balance, this proposal is part of the ever-continuing quest of owners to transfer money from the players’ pockets to their own. Based on pretty much every example ever, the money saved will not offset consumer costs, and I’d be shocked if it was redirected to improve the pay of team staffers, who tend to take in reduced salaries for the privilege of working in baseball, or minor leaguers.

J.J. Cooper covered the proposal in greater detail over at Baseball America, so I won’t go too in the weeds on it here today. Instead, I want to spotlight how much money the proposal would cost the game’s top players. Read the rest of this entry »

Most teams hit the halfway mark in their seasons last week, and the standings are no closer to resolving themselves. It’s a wide open Wild Card field in both leagues, with surprise contenders like the Nationals and Marlins sticking around in the race.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out between now and October, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise remains reactive to hot streaks and cold snaps. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula.

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After beginning the week with a three-game sweep of the Rays, the Dodgers dropped two of three to the Orioles over the weekend. Still, with the Padres floundering, Los Angeles has opened up the largest division lead in baseball, at nine games. Thanks to an excellent starting rotation and a potent lineup, the Dodgers shouldn’t have any trouble locking up their 13th division title in the last 14 years.

In what could be a postseason preview, the Brewers and Braves met over the weekend, with Milwaukee avoiding a sweep with a big win on Sunday. The Brewers lost a game that Jacob Misiorowski started for the first time since May 13 and a game that Kyle Harrison started for the first time since April 11. With Brandon Woodruff on the verge of returning from the IL, this team could have a formidable trio anchoring the rotation down the stretch this season.

As for the Braves, their worst stretch of their season continued into last week, with their two losses to the Giants in a rain-shortened series dropping them to 1-6 in their previous seven games. Atlanta got things back on track with that big series win over the Brewers this past weekend. Drake Baldwin was activated off the IL last week, providing some needed reinforcements for the injury-depleted roster.

The Yankees have fared well since placing Aaron Judge on the IL at the beginning of the month. They’re 10-7 without him and have wrestled control over the AL East away from the Rays. Even so, New York scored only three runs across the final two games of its weekend series against the Reds, both losses. Ben Rice has done his best to make up for the missing Judge; he blasted three home runs last week.

The lopsided nature of the Phillies lineup was on full display over the weekend against the Mets. Bryce Harper hit for the cycle on Saturday and added three more hits and a home run on Sunday, while Kyle Schwarber hit four home runs, three of them on Saturday. On the season, the non-Harper/Schwarber hitters on the Phillies have combined for an ugly .226/.279/.353 slash line, a 73 wRC+. Impact position players have to be high on Philadelphia’s wish list as the trade deadline approaches next month.

The Rays’ early-season success in one-run games has quickly turned sour; they went 1-4 in one-run contests last week alone, and have gone 2-7 in those close games since the beginning of June. Elsewhere in the AL East, the Blue Jays have looked a lot stronger recently. Toronto swept the Red Sox last week before splitting a rain-shortened series against the Cubs over the weekend. George Springer collected seven hits and two home runs last week, and the team is planning on activating Shane Bieber off the IL on Monday.

Over in the AL Central, the Guardians and White Sox meet for a huge series this week in Chicago. These two rivals will play each other seven times over the next two weeks, a massive opportunity for either of them to take control of the division. After playing so well against the Braves and Dodgers a few weeks ago, Chicago stumbled against the Yankees and Tigers last week, losing five of six. Meanwhile, the Guardians limped along without both José Ramírez, who underwent surgery on Tuesday for a fractured hamate bone, and Chase DeLauter, who landed on the injured list on Wednesday with a right side rib fracture, going 2-4 against the Brewers and Astros last week.

The Mariners activated Cal Raleigh and J.P. Crawford off the IL last week — and Randy Arozarena shouldn’t be too far behind them. Even with that duo’s return, Seattle scored no more than three runs in any of its games last week, but still wound up with a 3-3 record thanks to some strong pitching. Logan Gilbert had a pair of brilliant starts, tossing 13 1/3 innings with 18 strikeouts and just two runs allowed. The Mariners have managed to barely stay ahead in the AL West over these last few weeks, but they are also one of just three teams in the AL with a positive run differential. Eventually, the offense should start to click now that it’s mostly healthy.

The Twins have gone 8-3 over their last 11 games and are suddenly in the mix in the very crowded AL Wild Card picture. Byron Buxton has been crushing the ball recently. He’s up to a .317/.368/.698 slash line in June (189 wRC+) with seven home runs, and on the season, he’s now one homer behind Yordan Alvarez for the AL lead. It’s not just Buxton either; the entire offense is humming along, scoring 6.9 runs per game during this stretch. I’m not sure Minnesota has the pitching to stick around in the playoff race, but it’s certainly been a promising season so soon after the team’s big sell-off last summer.

The Cubs’ up-and-down season has sort of calmed down over the last three weeks; they’re 8-9 in June, and their longest winning or losing streak has been three games during this stretch. Pete Crow-Armstrong has been on fire this month, running a gaudy .437/.481/.930 slash line (281 wRC+) with nine home runs. He’s done his best to lead the offense, but the pitching staff is still dealing with a bunch of injuries. Last week, Daniel Palencia hit the IL for the second time this season, though Matthew Boyd is on a rehab assignment now and on track to return soon.

The Diamondbacks have managed to hang around in the NL Wild Card race, but their season took a turn for the worse last week when they placed Michael Soroka, Ryne Nelson, and Jordan Lawlar on the IL. It’s unfortunate timing for Lawlar, who had just returned from a wrist injury a week ago, but losing the pitchers — Soroka to a left glute strain and Nelson to a right elbow strain — is of greater concern. Soroka’s absence is the biggest blow; he has been the team’s best pitcher and one of the lone bright spots in a starting rotation that has been shaky all season long. With Corbin Burnes suffering a setback in his rehab from Tommy John surgery that pushes his recovery timeline back a couple of months, it doesn’t seem like reinforcements are arriving anytime soon for this beleaguered pitching staff.

It was two steps back, one step forward for the Rangers last week. They got swept by the Twins before turning around to win their weekend series against the Padres. Wyatt Langford has been excellent since being activated off the IL on June 5, collecting 19 hits and five home runs in 15 games. Still, with Corey Seager sidelined again and Jack Leiter placed on the IL with an ankle issue last week, Texas is struggling to gain ground in the AL West standings.

The Mets finished May with a 16-12 record that helped them climb to seven games under .500. They haven’t been able to make any progress past that point in June, and a 2-4 week against the Reds and Phillies certainly didn’t help. Juan Soto is trying to carry the team on his back — he’s slashing .415/.529/.780 (258 wRC+) with four home runs over the last two weeks — but the rest of the roster isn’t giving him much support. Francisco Lindor is on the mend and should be activated off the IL sometime this week, but it feels like it’s already too little, too late.

These next three weeks have the potential to define the Tigers’ season. With a sweep of the White Sox over the weekend providing some momentum, they’re entering a critical part of their schedule; they’ll face the Yankees, Astros, and Yankees again, followed by the Rangers, Athletics, and Phillies before heading into the All-Star break. If they can emerge from this gauntlet with a positive record, they could gain some ground in both the AL Central and Wild Card standings. Any further stumbles during this stretch, and they’re probably looking at selling at the trade deadline.

Even after a series win against the Cardinals over the weekend, it might be time to start looking toward next year for the Royals. Bobby Witt Jr. sprained his MCL on Thursday, and while he hasn’t been placed on the IL yet, he sat out the team’s last two games. Losing the AL MVP frontrunner for any amount of time would be devastating. Salvador Perez has limped to a 58 wRC+ in his age-36 season, and Maikel Garcia has struggled to replicate his breakout from last year. You can’t count anyone out in such a mediocre AL playoff field, but the Royals desperately need to turn things around soon if they want to make a run.

The Angels placed Mike Trout on the IL last week with a hamstring injury. He had slowed down just a bit after his torrid start to the season, but he was still the beating heart of this ball club and enjoying a bit of a renaissance year. It was obvious to everyone except the Angels, but this organization desperately needs to turn toward the future. That’s why it was encouraging to see Denzer Guzman, the team’s sixth-ranked prospect entering the season, blast home runs in three straight games over the weekend. He probably won’t be a star, but any positive developments from the pipeline have to be taken as wins at this point.

If you clicked through to read this post, you’ve probably visited the ABS Challenge Leaderboard on Baseball Savant at some point this season. While you were there, you may have sorted by Won% to see which players have been the most successful with their challenges. And if you, like me, are a bit of hater, you also reverse sorted to see which players are now considered a fire hazard because of how rapidly they burn through challenges. In that case, you know that James Wood has won just 20% of his 15 challenges, that Josh Naylor owns a 25% success rate on 12 challenges, and that Jazz Chisholm Jr. has a 27% hit rate on his 15 challenges. Players this bad at picking their spots probably shouldn’t be allowed to challenge at all, right? Well the truth is, those samples probably aren’t large enough to definitively signal an inability to consistently win ABS challenges. Or maybe they are large enough, but it’s tough to say for sure because the ABS challenge system hasn’t been in place long enough to generate the volume of data needed to determine an appropriate sample size.

But even if there were absolute certainty about which players lack the eye for challenging ball/strike calls, sitting a player down and telling him he’s not allowed to challenge anymore because he sucks at it isn’t exactly the best strategy. It runs the risk of damaging the relationship between the player and the team and it shuts down the opportunity to improve with additional reps. And let’s say that player is in the box for a pitch that absolutely should be challenged — given the short window to challenge following a call, a batter paralyzed by self-doubt or concern over potential reprimand is set up to fail. It’s also much easier to communicate and get buy-in on a single, team-wide philosophy than it is to devise a bunch of player-specific exceptions to the rule.

The good news is that there’s a straightforward method for eliminating many of the most infuriating failed challenges, a method independent of any given player’s ability to judge whether a pitch was in the zone. Because there’s more to challenging than assessing whether a ball/strike call is correct and then assigning a level of certainty to that assessment. If you’ve ever watched a batter on your favorite team spend a challenge on an 0-0 count in the first inning, you know that it’s vexing on multiple levels. Even a successful challenge in that scenario doesn’t offer a significant swing in advantage, since it’s just flipping an 0-1 count to a 1-0 count (a swing in run expectancy of about a tenth of a run, depending on the base-out state). And to make things even more maddening, it also tightens the calculus around future challenges, since an additional failed challenge risks leaving the team unable to act on a potential missed call in a late-and-close situation. Read the rest of this entry »

George Lombard Jr. is bound for The Bronx — or maybe Motown? According to the New York Post’s Jon Heyman, the Yankees’ top-rated prospect is being targeted by the Tigers in a potential trade for Tarik Skubal. Swap or not, the 21-year-old shortstop has a bright future. A first-round pick in 2023, Lombard Jr. has come to the plate 287 times this season between Double-A Somerset and Triple-A Scranton Wilkes-Barre and is slashing .258/.387/.446 with eight home runs and a 124 wRC+. Moreover, he was scorching the ball prior to being placed on the IL with sprained fingers on his glove hand this past Thursday. Over his previous eight games he had gone 11-for-30 with seven doubles and a pair of round-trippers.

How has the son of former MLB outfielder, and current Detroit Tigers bench coach, George Lombard changed since I interviewed him late in the 2024 season?

“From a physical standpoint, the stance and setup are a little different,” Lombard Jr. told me last month. “But it’s more the mental side. Compared to then, I have a more complete understanding of my swing, how my body moves, my tendencies, and what I need to do to stay in a good place. Most of the change has been mental maturity.”

Asked to elaborate on the physical, he replied that he has changed his hand positioning in an effort to get to ”the firing spot” more efficiently. That adjustment came over the offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackson Chourio got a late start to his season. A fractured metacarpal in his left hand, suffered during the run-up to the World Baseball Classic but not definitively diagnosed until three weeks later, knocked him onto the injured list just hours before the Brewers’ Opening Day game, and he didn’t make his season debut until May 4. Since then, the 22-year-old outfielder has not only been one of the majors’ top hitters, he’s shown notable improvements in a few key areas while helping to propel the Brewers into first place in the NL Central. He’s becoming the star the Brewers hoped he would when they signed him to an eight-year, $82 million extension in December 2023, before he’d even debuted in the majors.

On Wednesday night against the Guardians, Chourio hit his 10th home run of the season, turning a high cutter from Gavin Williams into a two-run opposite-field shot that helped the Brewers to a 9-4 win:

Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

May 8
I’ve spent so much time writing about burping here that I feel I owe some context to anyone who hasn’t spent much time feeding babies. I’m sure you know the basics of the exercise. You raise the baby to your shoulder and pat them on the back until they burp or spit up. Voilà: You have burped a baby. That’s not wrong, but I never really understood the whys and wherefores until the last couple weeks.

Before I get into it, I feel like I should apologize. I’ve always been staunchly opposed to public discourse about bodily functions. When I was a kid, I tended to define myself in opposition to my older brother, and that was his thing. I was a voracious reader; he could burp the alphabet. I mimicked Ken Griffey Jr.’s stance and Cal Ripken Jr.’s sidearm throwing motion; he learned to spit like a big leaguer. Now, of course, my life is sometimes exclusively focused on bodily fluids and diaper drama and coaxing monster burps out of the sweetest little baby you ever saw, then exclaiming “Oh-ho-ho!” and congratulating her on their grandeur. Somehow, I have turned into the guy who texts this to his wife:

So. Babies are born with immature digestive systems. Everything is difficult. They choke easily, things often don’t sit right in their stomachs, they get the hiccups constantly, and they tend to go to the bathroom while they’re eating. All of these issues are distracting and uncomfortable. In order to avoid pouring more milk on those already dicey situations, evolution developed a simple fail-safe: If something’s wrong, the baby just won’t swallow the milk. Sometimes they’ll stop pulling it into their mouth in the first place, but even if they’re ravenous and they’re sucking aggressively, they’ll then just let it pour right out of their mouths and down their round faces.

When you’re feeding a baby, you have to listen carefully for the adorable little piglet grunts that indicate that they’re swallowing. You learn to appreciate the nuances of those teeny-tiny gasps and grunts and harrumphs, all of which tell you whether and how well they’re getting the milk down. When a baby is eating successfully, it should sound a bit like a Rich Hill start — wait, no, that’s way too intense — rather, it should sound like Rich Hill having a gentle game of catch. Here’s an audio recording of Derek Jr. during a particularly aggressive mealtime. It’s…a lot:

You can hear her grunting and swallowing and gulping for air. You can hear the wind whistling through the vent in the bottle. At one point, you can hear the milk tumbling down into her stomach. And if you listen really closely, you can hear my wife and me trying not to giggle so loudly at her ferocity that we ruin the recording.

When you’re feeding a baby, you’re listening and you’re constantly keeping an eye out for milk pooling at the corner of their mouth or dribbling down their chin. Whenever you sense that the milk is no longer flowing into the tummy, it’s burp time. A nice, big burp will resolve whatever buildup of gas is causing their distress, or at the very least, give them some time to reset themselves and get ready to resume the meal. Essentially, there’s something in the way, and your job is to shake it loose.

You put the bottle down, lift the baby by the armpits and sling them over your shoulder, and pound them on their tiny back as hard as your conscience will allow. (No matter how hard that may be, it’s be a butterfly kiss compared to the thwacks of the nurses at the hospital, who could slap a burp out of a cinder block.) You rock back and forth, because aligning the alimentary canal so that it’s leaning slightly forward can encourage a burp. You alternate between patting on the back and rubbing firmly from the lumbar region up toward the shoulders. (It’s unclear to me whether this actually induces a burp, but it seems like it would feel nice, and that makes you feel better about all the back whacking.) You walk around and bounce the baby on your shoulder as you go. I sometimes do a little shuttle run across the apartment, or put on a song and dance around just for fun.

As you do all this, you can’t help but verbally encourage the baby to burp. Often, the baby is very hungry and therefore very upset that you’re interrupting their (unsuccessful) alimentation, so you end up simultaneously whacking them on the back, explaining why you’re denying them food, and pleading for a burp. I often find myself emphasizing the transactional nature of the relationship like a kid attempting to prize away a friend’s prize rookie card. “Look, you and I both know what you want, and we both know there’s only one way to get it,” I’ll cajole. “If you can think of another way to get food in your belly, by all means, have at it. You scratch my back, I’ll stop whaling on yours.”

Eventually you’re rewarded with a big burp, which is your signal that the baby is ready to eat again. The burps always come suddenly, which means they often elicit from you a cry of surprise and joy, at which point you congratulate the baby like she just won the Super Bowl. I used to despise the very idea of wasting my precious attention on something as crass as burping. Now here I am 30 years later, telling my daughter how proud I am every time she emits a window-rattling burp.

Bottle feeding tends to require much more burping than breastfeeding. [Note from the future: We have also discovered that Derek Jr. needs significantly fewer burps if we feed her bottles that are closer to room temperature rather than from the fridge. She doesn’t mind the cold bottles, but she has a lot more trouble with them. We’re still learning here.] As a result, I’ve spent more time burping Derek Jr. than my wife has. I’m more comfortable with it. Compounding that is the fact that burping can be more challenging when you’re breastfeeding. My wife likes to have a whole pillow situation set up around her, along with her water bottle (because breastfeeding dehydrates you) and her phone to track how long Derek Jr. is eating. That’s no big deal for standard issue burps, but if you need to stand up and dance around the apartment to dislodge a particularly stubborn one, you have to reconfigure the whole nest when you sit back down. I’m desperate to find ways to lighten the huge load my wife is bearing as she recovers from the physical trauma of the birth, deals with massive postpartum hormone shifts, and gives over so much of her time to nursing and pumping, so I often volunteer to jump in and do the burping in order to preserve the nest. I’m now the designated burper.

Once the baby is finished eating, she’s usually adorably drowsy, but you can’t put her down to sleep right away. She needs time to process all the milk she just ingested, which means staying at least somewhat upright. If you put her on her back right away, she’ll be extremely uncomfortable. Even if she does fall asleep that way, she’ll likely get the hiccups or spit up, which is both scary and uncomfortable. The spit-up will run down her cheek and spread in a wet circle on the sheets beneath her face.

When things go well, burping leads right into this upright period, and she’s sleepy putty in your hands. She’s adorable and calm, and your job is to sit there and admire this warm little bundle who has dropped into your life. It’s a special time, and I feel certain that it’s what I will remember most about these last several weeks. It’s also the time when I’ve done most of the writing in this journal and the reason that so much of what I’ve written has been so lovey-dovey. If you were sitting with your drowsy baby’s warm body pressed against your chest and your cheek, you’d be mawkish too.

I tend to give Derek Jr. 20 or 25 minutes to digest, during which time I sing or play music or hold my phone out of her line of sight and watch baseball. It’s nearly four in the morning right now, long after all the games are over, so in between songs, I’m watching highlights of Jacob Misiorowski mowing down the Yankees. He struck out 11 while throwing harder than any starter has ever thrown. I wish I’d seen the whole game, because I’m genuinely curious about how Les Miz is progressing as a pitcher. PitcherList gave his location a B- tonight and Stuff+ gave it a 141, both the best grades he’s gotten all year. That’s exciting. When you’re sitting 101 mph with the fastball and — good Lord — 96 with the slider, B- command should work out just fine. The curveball is the pitch that jumps out the most, because there’s just no way for a hitter to be ready for such an extreme change of pace:

The most important thing I glean from the highlights, though, is that Misiorowski is still locked in a fierce battle against his own hat. The topic for today is shaking things loose, and it definitely applies to him. Watch him closely and you’ll notice that he has to adjust his hat after every single pitch. Clad in the new Brewers City Connects — with “Wisco” across the chest in script, they look more than anything like a product placement for a chain of off-brand gas stations — he still sports the stiffest brim in the league. I swear you could use that thing as a ruler.

Speaking of rulers, the 6-foot-7 Misiorowski is long and narrow everywhere, including his head. The hat doesn’t quite reach his ears. No wonder the thing never gets broken in; he’s barely even wearing it! This is actually something I noticed last year, when Eric Longenhagen posted slow motion footage of Misiorowski’s delivery. Combine a significant head whack with the fact that the stiff hat is basically resting atop his dome like a yarmulke, and you’ve got a recipe for a hat that bounces all over the place every time Misiorowski throws:



Peyton Gray has one of the better backstories in baseball. A 31-year-old right-hander who made his major league debut with the Texas Rangers in April, Gray not only entered pro ball in 2018 as an undrafted free agent out of Florida Gulf Coast University, his résumé includes three seasons with the independent Atlantic Association’s Milwaukee Milkmen, as well as four stints in winter ball. Moreover, he’s undergone Tommy John surgery and been granted his release by the Colorado Rockies, Kansas City Royals, and Cincinnati Reds.

His 2026 numbers are impressive. The Columbus, Indiana native began the year by tossing 12 2/3 scoreless innings for Triple-A Round Rock, and since reaching The Show, he has come out of the bullpen 18 times and recorded a 3.70 ERA and a 3.71 FIP over 24 1/3 frames. Each of his two decisions have gone in the win column.

Gray’s top offering is an 83-mph changeup, which he has been throwing at a 44.0% clip to the tune of a .220 batting average allowed and a 31.0% whiff rate. I asked him about it when the Rangers visited Fenway Park earlier this month. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s an idiom that gets thrown around in soccer that I wish we would adopt here: talismanic. A talismanic player is particularly important to his team, especially for intangible reasons. Sometimes the club’s talisman is the best player on the squad, but not always. He’s the captain who marshals the defense, or the creative passer who ties the team’s attack together, or a veteran forward who always seems to find the crucial late goal.

We don’t really have a word for this kind of player in baseball. We have club icons, cult heroes, and players with veteran presence, but referring to a player as a talisman implies actual mystical powers that only the team and its fans can truly see.

If any baseball player of the past 20 years is his club’s talisman, surely it’s Salvador Perez. Read the rest of this entry »

On April 15, Zach Neto was at the plate with one out and nobody on in the top of the fifth inning of the Angels’ game in the Bronx, where his team trailed the Yankees, 3-2. The first two pitches, a low changeup and a high slider, were nowhere near the zone, and Neto laid off easily. The 2-0 pitch from Luis Gil was another slider, this one about belt high and bending away from the right-handed Neto, who kept the bat on his shoulder and watched as the pitch appeared to clip the outside edge of the zone. Home plate umpire Lance Barksdale held up his hand. Strike one. Neto tapped his helmet immediately to challenge the call.

The graphic on the gigantic video board in center field showed that the pitch had missed by 0.4 inches. The call was overturned; the count was now 3-0. Neto walked on the next pitch. Mike Trout stepped in, took a fifth straight ball from Gil, then let a four-seam fastball over the heart of the plate get deep on him. He unloaded, clobbering the cookie 383 feet into the right field seats for a go-ahead two-run blast.

The no-doubt Trout clout would have been the decisive blow in an Angels win if not for a misplayed popup and a Jordan Romano meltdown. The Yankees walked it off on a José Caballero single, relegating Neto’s challenge to a footnote in that night’s game story, if it was mentioned at all. Even so, the gamble was an early example of how the new automated ball-strike challenge system can make the difference between winning and losing a game. Read the rest of this entry »

Top prospects like Jesús Made and Leo De Vries are among the game’s most exciting potential call-ups this season, but most of the players who make the majors in the next couple of months won’t be in the same galaxy as those guys when it comes to their potential. Some may be fringe prospects, others former standouts who fell off team lists — some may have even already been labeled journeymen or organizational players. Nevertheless, a good number of them will contribute in the big leagues down the stretch. Some of last year’s impact rookies, like Caleb Durbin, Isaac Collins, Joey Cantillo, Justin Wrobleski, and Chad Patrick, weren’t Top 100 prospects — most would have struggled to make a Top 500 list. Yet their production mattered, and you can point to a dozen players like that every year.

We’re still a month away from the trade deadline, but relatively few top-tier players are available and the ones who are won’t come cheaply, meaning many teams will have to look internally as they work to improve their rosters. Below, I’ve chosen seven players, either fringe prospects or guys who’ve fallen off the big league radar, who have some combination of projection, performance, improvement, or a pressing team need that makes them intriguing over the rest of the 2026 season. Naturally, this leaves out top prospects like Kade Anderson, who I absolutely adore, and even pretty good ones, like James Tibbs III. Let’s dig a little deeper. Read the rest of this entry »