This isn’t how they drew it up on the North Side this winter. The Cubs won 92 games in 2025, and then they made some additions in the winter. The Brewers, meanwhile, subtracted. Chicago had the best playoff odds of any team in the NL Central, whether you’re talking about our odds, PECOTA’s odds, or pretty much any projection system you can name. The Cubs had exciting rookies, battle-tested veterans, and fun vibes. Surely, they’d sail through 2026.

Nearly two weeks into the season, it’s fair to say that things haven’t gone according to plan. There’s the standings, for one thing: They’re in last place in the NL Central. But this early in the year, only four games separate first and last in the division, so that’s not the biggest problem in Wrigleyville. A bigger concern is that Cade Horton and Matthew Boyd, two of Chicago’s top starting pitchers, hit the IL on consecutive days. Seiya Suzuki hasn’t appeared yet this year, though he’s expected back on Friday.

Horton’s injury looks to be the worst of the two. He left last Friday’s start after feeling forearm discomfort, and after getting some scans over the weekend, he’s seeking a second opinion from Dr. Keith Meister. That ominous turn of phrase doesn’t guarantee a long-term injury, of course, but it’s definitely not a good sign. Pitchers don’t generally seek second opinions from famous surgeons unless there’s a decent chance of surgery.

Boyd was supposed to be the safe option in the Cubs rotation. We had him down for the most innings and the most WAR, the staff ace. His bicep strain might not be all that bad; he noted that he could have pitched through the injury if it weren’t so early in the year. But that’s not really the nature of pitcher injuries, in my experience. Sure, sometimes they’re short. But a guaranteed minimum stay doesn’t exist. I think it’s reasonable to be worried about Boyd’s prognosis until he’s back on a major league mound, even though he seems likely to return far sooner than Horton. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Grant is one of the game’s most entertaining color analysts. Teamed with play-by-play announcer Don Orsillo, the man affectionately known as “Mud” is a big part of why the San Diego Padres TV booth polled as baseball’s best in Awful Announcing’s 2025 local broadcaster rankings. Now in his 11th season alongside Orsillo, Grant first began working Padres games in 1996. His previous partners in the booth include the legendary Dick Enberg.

Grant was a pitcher prior to becoming a broadcaster, toeing the rubber for six teams across the 1984-1993 seasons, including the Padres, with whom he made 126 of his 233 appearances. All told, he went 22-32 with eight saves and a 4.31 ERA over 638 2/3 innings.

How well does he remember his matchups against certain batters he faced? As I’ve done previously with David Cone, Mark Gubicza, and Jeff Montgomery — those pieces can be found here, here, and here — I decided to find out by challenging him to a career quiz. Not only did he oblige, he supplied fun anecdotes along the way.

I began by asking the pitcher-turned-broadcaster which batter he faced the most times. Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays have lost another key player to injury.

Alejandro Kirk left Friday’s game against the White Sox in the 10th inning after a foul tip glanced off his glove hand. He immediately dropped his glove, grabbed his thumb, and hustled into the clubhouse with trainers. The team after the game announced Kirk had fractured his thumb. No timeline for a return was given. Our injury log suggests batters with thumb fractures typically return in about four to eight weeks, although Kirk fractured the thumb on his catching hand, which could require a longer recovery.

It’s the latest significant injury for the reigning AL champs, who lost Cody Ponce last week while fielding a grounder in his first start in the majors since 2021. Trey Yesavage, José Berríos, and Shane Bieber are on the injured list, as well, though each is in the “throwing” process of his rehab. Read the rest of this entry »

“Gee, Michael Soroka has been pretty good,” is the kind of statement that tells you more about the calendar than Soroka himself, but the point remains: Michael Soroka has been pretty good. The big Canadian steamrolled the Tigers (my pick for the AL pennant) with 10 strikeouts in five scoreless innings in his first start of the year. He followed that up with a solitary earned run over five innings against his former team, the Atlanta Braves.

The total bill, so far, is 13 strikeouts and 13 baserunners allowed (eight hits, four walks, one hit batter) in 10 innings, with a 0.90 ERA and 2.10 FIP. And against reasonably tough competition. So do the Diamondbacks, currently in dire need of pitching with seven big league arms currently on the IL, have something here? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Dan Szymborski looked at how much a team’s fortunes can change in the first month of the season. That old truism – you can’t win the World Series in April, but you can lose it – turns out to, in fact, be true. Dan’s research found that even teams we think are good – those projected to win 90 or more games – had meaningfully worse results after a bad April, even if their actual talent remained the same.

In other words, those early losses really do count. But I like to look at things from a glass-half-full perspective, so my takeaway was that there’s still plenty of time to fix a bad start, because it’s still early in the season. But how to fix it? That’s a trickier question. Luckily, “that’s a tricky question” is just FanGraphs for “that’s a fun thing to write an article about,” so I’ve got answers for you. Read the rest of this entry »

Jo Adell performed a miracle. Let’s turn it into math.

Adell robbed the Mariners of three home runs on Saturday. He got Cal Raleigh in the first inning, Josh Naylor in the eighth, and J.P. Crawford in the ninth. Sports Info Solutions has tracked home run robberies since 2004 and only twice had an outfielder robbed even two home runs in a game — nobody had ever robbed three.

Each catch was crucial. The Angels wound up winning 1-0, with Zach Neto’s leadoff solo shot in the first inning being the only run of the game. That means Adell was thrice the difference in the Angels’ narrow victory.

Win Probability Added doesn’t agree. It suggests Adell overall hurt the Angels’ chances of winning by about 3%. Position players only gain WPA on offense — Adell went 1-for-3 with an irrelevant single — so he didn’t get credit for any of these catches. WPA instead gives all the glory to the pitcher, with the assumption that an out is an out on defense, and the only thing that can be known about an out is who threw the ball (in this case, Jack Kochanowicz, Sam Bachman, and Jordan Romano).

While this assumption makes sense for nearly all plays and scenarios, home run robberies are a bit different. They’re definitive. We know what the outcome was, and we know what the outcome would have been had Adell not intervened.

How much was each catch worth? And how much credit does Adell deserve? Let’s take a look. Read the rest of this entry »

Going into yesterday, Mason Miller had thrown 37 pitches on the season, 19 of them fastballs averaging 101 mph, while another 17 were sliders that elicited a 60.0% whiff rate. There was also one changeup. Delivered to Luis Arraez on a 1-1 count, the ninth-inning offering was wide outside and taken for a ball.

Why did the San Diego Padres closer throw his seldom-used changeup to the three-time batting champ on Wednesday night? Low leverage was certainly a factor; the Friars had scored four times in the bottom of the eighth to turn a 3-1 lead into a far safer 7-1 advantage. It nonetheless represented an outlier for the 27-year-old flamethrower. Over the previous two seasons, only 2.3% of his pitches were changeups.

I asked him about it when the Padres visited Fenway Park on Friday,

“A changeup is a good pitch, but I’m not going to feel comfortable with it if I’m not throwing it,” Miller told me. “I’m picking my spots. There are certain guys it matches up well against. [Arraez] is a guy who isn’t going to swing and miss, so I’m not going to be hunting a strikeout. If I can get softer contact on it… any time you have a guy who isn’t fast and he puts it on the ground, that’s an opportunity for an out.”

Arraez didn’t kill any worms in his matchup with Miller, instead lining a 2-1 fastball to right field for a single. Not that it mattered. The righty proceeded to fan the next three batters, one on a 101.5-mph heater, and two on nasty sliders. While those pitches were pristine, the execution on his lone changeup was another story. Read the rest of this entry »

When looking at most April stats, especially the basic ones, I spend a lot of time issuing disclaimers about small sample sizes. After all, any player can do just about anything in 25 or 50 or 100 plate appearances. I’m pretty confident that Joey Wiemer is not going to end the season as the NL MVP, and that Hunter Barco won’t finish the season with the worst WAR in major league history. But conversely, when we’re talking about standings, even if bad/good starts shouldn’t necessarily overconcern us about a player’s future, when it comes to teams, playoffs are determined by wins, which are cumulative numbers with razor-sharp margins. It’s not the end of the world if Cal Raleigh, because of his slow start, finishes with 38 homers instead of his projected 41 (ZiPS DC), but it may doom the Mariners if they underperform their projections by three wins.

The season is just a week old, but there are already sizable impacts in playoff probabilities around the league. To demonstrate this, I ran ZiPS overnight to get the updated playoff odds, so I could compare them to the preseason projections. Six teams have seen their playoff odds change by at least five percentage points. Here’s the full table, as things stand on Friday morning.

Read the rest of this entry »

Let me tell you a story about a 34-year-old baseball player. Seven games into the new season, there are some worrying signs about his performance. His swing speed is down half a tick, and two full ticks from 2024. His fast-swing rate has declined precipitously. He’s squaring the ball up less frequently than ever, the opposite of what’s supposed to happen when you rein in your swing. He’s never run a lower hard-hit rate. He’s never run a higher infield fly ball rate. Somebody call an ambulance.

… But not for him. The hitter in question is Mike Trout, and he’s off to a scorching start. He’s slashing an absurd .261/.485/.522, good for a 192 wRC+. Whenever process statistics and result statistics diverge this much, this early in the season, I’m tempted to yell “April” in my best Dan Szymborski voice and move on. But when it’s Trout, one of the best players of all time, I’m willing to be more open-minded. Let’s take a quick peek into what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what’s too early to tell.

The most obvious change in Trout’s statistics this year is that he’s walking 30% of the time. Walks have always been a part of Trout’s game, of course. He has a keen eye at the plate, annually notching one of the lowest chase rates in the game, and he makes enough contact that he can grind his way back into at-bats even after falling behind. But 30% is double his career rate. What gives? Read the rest of this entry »

It feels incredibly weird to say this but… it’s a good time to be a Pirates fan? Because Konnor Griffin is coming to the majors. He’ll make his major league debut in Pittsburgh’s home opener on Friday.

Griffin was the Pirates’ first-round pick in 2024, ninth overall, and quickly emerged as the no. 1 overall prospect in baseball. A team that’s been as bad as the Pirates, for as long as they’ve been bad, will have some familiarity with the ballyhooed prospect debut, but I’m not sure even they’ve seen anything like this. I was as big a Paul Skenes fan as anyone, and as pumped as I was to see him hit the majors, he’s surpassed even my expectations.

Well, now Skenes is in the majors to stay. So is Bubba Chandler. The Pirates flirted with spending some money this past offseason, and while a 3-3 record is the definition of unremarkable, the Pirates just went on the road and played the Mets and Reds — two of their erstwhile NL playoff rivals — to a draw. The Pirates might be kind of OK. Life hasn’t been this good, genuinely, in more than 10 years.

But Griffin’s debut is the main event. Because as big as the hype around Skenes was, the expectations for Griffin are even greater. Read the rest of this entry »