A warning up top: This article is about seeking and not finding, about the unique ways that data can mislead you. The hero doesn’t win in the end – unless the hero is stochastic randomness and I’m the villain, but I don’t like that telling of the tale. It all started with an innocuous question: Can we tell which types of hitters are streaky?

I approached this question in an article about Michael Harris II’s rampage through July and August. I took a cursory look at it and set it aside for future investigation after not finding any obvious effects right away. To delve more deeply, I had to come up with a definition of streakiness to test, and so I set about doing so.

My chosen method was to look at 20-game stretches to determine hot and cold streaks, then look at performance in the following 20 games to see which types of players were more prone to “stay hot” or “stay cold.” I started throwing out definitions and samples: 2021-2024, minimum 400 plate appearances on the season as a whole, overlapping sampling (so check games 1-20 vs. 21-40, 2-21 vs. 22-41, and so on), wOBA as my relevant offensive statistic, 50 points of wOBA deviation against seasonal average to convey hot or cold, 40-PA minimum per 20-game set to avoid weird pinch-hitting anomalies, throw out games with no plate appearances to skip defensive replacements — the list goes on and on. Read the rest of this entry »

You might remember that, back in May, I issued a challenge to baseball fans across the globe: Give up your favorite team for a week and follow another. Thus was the inaugural FanGraphs Fan Exchange Program born.

I published the original survey on May 20, assigned everyone a new team to watch between June 16 and June 23, and promised to publish my findings sometime in mid-July. July, as you might have noticed, has come and gone, and so has most of August, but the results are finally in.

Why the delay? Well, I want to say that draft season bled into trade deadline season and I just couldn’t find the time, but that’s not the whole story. I didn’t consider that I would have to do more to publicize the exit survey than post a link on BlueSky, and quite a bit of time passed before I went back to the original email list and sent a link directly. If you’re still waiting for the exit survey as you’re reading this, well, I’m quite embarrassed to say that doesn’t surprise me. At the end of the day, I’m not sure it went out to everyone. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets are the best Rorschach test in baseball right now. You can see almost anything you want to when you look at them. A band of high-paid underachievers? Sure. A great team in a rough stretch? Yup. A triumph of pitching development? Sure thing, but also a cautionary tale about what happens when you don’t have enough starters to get through the season. Each of those topics – and plenty more – are worth a closer look. But in watching the Mets in recent weeks, I’ve been struck by the same observation every time I watch a game. That observation? Man, Francisco Lindor is good.

Lindor has been right at the center of the Mets’ mid-summer meltdown. After starting the season as hot as he ever has, he posted two straight abysmal months in June and July while the team swooned in sympathy. I’m not sure you understand quite how bad it was, so let’s look at the numbers. He hit a desultory .205/.258/.371 over those two months, good for a 77 wRC+. So imagine my surprise when I looked at this year’s hitting leaderboard and saw Lindor’s 4.7 WAR in 11th place.

Now, am I writing an article to tell you that Francisco Lindor is good? I mean, kind of. More than that, though, I’m thinking of this as an appreciation post. Lindor’s year-to-year consistency is otherworldly. He’s putting the finishing touches on his fourth straight five-win campaign, all with wRC+ marks between 121 and 137. He’s doing it without it ever feeling like it’s unsustainable. So let’s appreciate that greatness and take a look at what this year’s roller coaster says about Lindor’s time in Queens more broadly. Read the rest of this entry »

By all rights, this should be a lost season for Daulton Varsho. The Toronto center fielder missed the first month of 2025 while rehabbing from offseason rotator cuff surgery. He started his year with a seven-game minor league rehab stint during which he batted .129 with no walks and no extra-base hits, good for a wRC+ of -29. Varsho got one month in Toronto, and then a strained hamstring stole another two months from him. After seven more games in the minors, Varsho returned on August 1 and now has 20 more games under his belt. So just to recap, Varsho’s season has gone: rehab for a month, play for a month, injured for two months, play for another month. He’s seen a grand total of 44 games of action.

That’s not exactly enough time to get your bearings, especially after a major surgery. At least, that wouldn’t be enough time for most people. Varsho is putting up the best numbers of his career. He’d never topped a wRC+ of 106 in a single season, but he’s currently at 127. He’s already posted 1.5 WAR, and although he can only get into a maximum of 74 games, he’s almost certain to put up the third-most WAR of his career. What makes all this even wilder is that Varsho only heated up during this most recent stint. He ran a 102 wRC+ before the hamstring injury, and he’s at 161 since he returned. As the cliché goes, getting Varsho back from the IL was Toronto’s best trade deadline acquisition. In fact, on a per-PA basis, Varsho has been a top-25 position player, on pace for 4.3 WAR over a normal, 150-game season.

So what is Varsho doing differently in this weird, bifurcated season? I’ll go over a few changes later on, but honestly, not that much. He’s just being himself, but his traits have been intensified over this short timeframe. Varsho has always been an extreme lift-and-pull hitter with a very steep swing. He piles up home runs and strikeouts, and he runs low BABIPs despite his speed because of that homer-or-bust approach. This season, he’s striking out more than ever, hitting more homers than ever, and running a career-low BABIP. Varsho has always been one of the game’s true elite outfielders despite below-average arm strength. This season, he’s putting up bonkers defensive numbers even though his arm has been one of the weakest in baseball so far. It’s like we got the from-concentrate version of Daulton Varsho, but somebody forgot to add water. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not telling our readers anything they don’t already know, but defense is a very important part of baseball, especially at the up-the-middle positions. You probably watch enough baseball to list the best and worst couple of defenders at each position with a fair amount of accuracy; I bet you’d nail most of them off the top of your head (aside from Trea Turner, I think the 2025 FRV list is damn good), and that you have a proper appreciation for the importance of defense at the premium positions, even if it comes with some amount of sacrifice on offense.

In the prospect realm, though, things are trickier. Prospect hit data from TrackMan and Hawkeye has become common in public-facing analysis and discourse, but defense remains something of a black box. There aren’t many publicly available minor league defensive stats, and so much of evaluating defense is still best done visually, at least in my opinion. I wrote a version of today’s piece a few years ago, wherein I performed the same sort of video deep dive that I use to evaluate top shortstop prospects’ defense, and ripped and edited together key plays from that deep dive to share with you.

This year, I’m turning that exercise into a series. I’m going to batch together a few players at a time until I’ve gone through all of the 50 FV shortstops, as well as a few key prospects with lesser grades. That will include all of the players linked here, plus a few more. Read the rest of this entry »

The Texas Rangers placed second baseman Marcus Semien on the injured list with a broken left foot over the weekend, retroactive to Thursday’s games. The result of a foul ball hitting the top of his foot, Semien was initially diagnosed with a contusion, but after getting multiple additional opinions, that diagnosis was revised to a fracture of the third metatarsal and a Lisfranc sprain. Semien, who turns 35 next month and whose last injury that merited an IL stint was a wrist contusion back in 2017, is having one of his weaker offensive seasons, with a .230/.305/.364 triple slash line, but thanks to his still-solid glove, he’s still amassed 2.1 WAR. The injury likely ends Semien’s regular season, and given where Texas is in the standings, probably his 2025.

I can’t think of many good times to break your foot. Just speaking for myself, I might consider a broken foot preferable to, say, going to a wedding I really don’t want to attend. But Semien is a professional athlete, not an introverted middle-aged baseball analyst who writes from home surrounded by computers and cats, and his team is on the brink. Texas is coming off a sweep of the Cleveland Guardians, but those three wins only got the team back to the .500 mark, with a 9-13 record for August. Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles came into this year with a few goals. Foremost among them: reach the playoffs, find reliable pitching, and sign some of their young core to contract extensions. Goal one is out of the question. Goal two is up in the air. But goal three? Goal three is going strong after the Orioles and Samuel Basallo agreed to an eight-year, $67 million contract extension, with a team option and escalators that could push the total value to $88.5 million. Andy Kostka of The Baltimore Banner first reported the deal.

Basallo, currently the third overall prospect in baseball, debuted in the majors last week after a whirlwind tour of the minor leagues. He overpowered A-ball at 18 in 2023, mastered Double-A in 2024, and was hitting .270/.377/.589, good for a 150 wRC+, in Triple-A before the O’s called him up. He’s been far younger than his opposition at every level, and it just hasn’t mattered; his colossal raw power has papered over any weaknesses or growing pains again and again.

Throughout his ascension through the prospect ranks, the biggest question about Basallo has been whether he’ll stick behind home plate or have to move to a less demanding defensive position, likely first base. While Basallo’s offensive performance has been consistently excellent, his defense hasn’t been quite so exciting. A stress fracture in his elbow has slowed him, costing him valuable reps at catcher. He played DH about as frequently as he caught in Triple-A this year, and the same was true in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, you don’t really have to squeeze your glove when you catch the ball. At least, you don’t have to think about squeezing it. It’s an instinctual thing, and while it’s different if you’re a catcher, the whole point of the glove is to corral the baseball. It was designed just for that. The ball tends to stick in there.

That’s most of the time. Sometimes you really do have to think about squeezing the ball, though. Sometimes there’s geometry involved. I love the geometry.

I love thinking about the angles. How do I position myself so I can catch this throw and apply the tag in one motion? Should I wait on this ball, or should I circle around it so I can charge it and field it on a short hop? At what point do I give up on picking this throw and step back to catch it on the long hop? Read the rest of this entry »

Tarik Skubal and Hunter Brown matched up at Comerica Park earlier this week, and the aces didn’t disappoint. In a game Detroit won 1-0 in 10 innings, the Tigers southpaw fanned 10 batters through seven stellar innings, while the Houston Astros right-hander tossed six scoreless frames with half a dozen strikeouts. In terms of modern-day pitchers’ duels, this was nearly as good as it gets.

On pace to win his second straight AL Cy Young Award, Skubal is currently 11-3 with a 2.32 ERA and a 33.1% strikeout rate. Brown, who is fast establishing himself as one of baseball’s best pitchers, is 10-5 with a 2.36 ERA and a 29.3% strikeout rate. Both cook with gas. Skubal’s fastball ranks in the 91st percentile for velocity, while Brown’s ranks in the 83rd percentile.

A few hours before they went head-to-head, I asked Detroit manager A.J. Hinch how — left and right aside — the two hurlers compare.

“I know my guy, and don’t know Hunter as well — how he goes about it or how he prepares — but if you’re looking at who has the best fastballs in the league, you’re going to look at both of those guys,” replied Hinch. “If you look at who has elite secondary pitches, both do. Tarik will use his changeup more than Hunter will. I just think there’s an it factor that comes with a guy where, when we come to a ballpark and Tarik is pitching, we expect to win. I’m sure when Hunter is pitching, the Astros expect to win. That’s the definition of top of the rotation.”

Which brings us to the baker’s dozen innings they combined to throw on Tuesday night. Once upon a time, it would have been several more. For much of baseball history, pitchers who were dealing were generally allowed to keep dealing. The legendary July 2, 1963 matchup between San Francisco’s Juan Marichal and Milwaukee’s Warren Spahn is a case in point. That afternoon, Marichal threw 16 scoreless innings, while Spahn (at age 42, no less) tossed 15-and-a-third of his own — only to then be taken deep by Willie Mays for the game’s only run. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, my colleague Jay Jaffe touched a bit on Jacob deGrom and his Hall of Fame case. Since the world can always use more sentences describing how awesome deGrom is, and because I’m fascinated by how his Hall of Fame case will look to voters sometime in the mid-2030s, I decided to dig a little more into his future candidacy and reasonable expectations for what the end of his career can add to his record. I also wanted to explore what deGrom’s case means for 2010s/2020s Hall of Fame starting pitcher representation more broadly.

This has been a concern of mine for a while, and I talked a bit about it last year in the context of Chris Sale’s marvelous comeback season. This piece has stuck with me as it was one of those rare articles in which the act of writing it changed my opinion somewhat. At the start, my thought process was “with a less than 50% chance of finishing with 200 wins, Sale probably won’t be in the Hall of Fame, and may be too borderline for even me.” But then I projected the rest of the league, and for the first time ever in ZiPS, not a single pitcher who hadn’t already passed 200 wins was projected to have a 50% chance of reaching that milestone. So, perhaps Sale should get to Cooperstown even if he falls short of that threshold, because if the writers don’t vote for him on the grounds that he didn’t get to 200 wins, how could we justifiably elect any future starting pitcher?

When I wrote last year’s piece, there were only 11 pitchers between 100 and 200 wins, a shockingly tiny number. And of those 11, only one is in a better position to win 200 games now than he was then: Sonny Gray, who has added 12 wins and is having a fairly typical season by his standards. As far as the other 10 are concerned… Gerrit Cole is out until well into 2026 due to elbow surgery, and Sale has missed a bunch of time this year from injuries. Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson have both since retired, Johnny Cueto has all but officially done the same, and Carlos Carrasco and Dallas Keuchel are in the minors and, for the purposes of this exercise, might as well be retired. Wade Miley has one win this season and is currently out with forearm pain in his comeback from Tommy John surgery. Yu Darvish, who didn’t make his season debut until July, has moved only two wins closer to 200 in his age-38 season. As a Baltimore native, I’m not psychologically prepared to talk about Charlie Morton’s progress.

The good news is eight new pitchers have joined the 100-win club this season, but none of them look to be on a path to 200 wins right now.

Of these eight, only Nola projects with a 50% chance to get to even 150 wins. While it’s theoretically possible for most of the eight to get to 200 wins, it would require an unusually robust late-career surge. During the Wild Card era, only 10 pitchers have amassed 90 wins after their age-34 season, and almost all of them were in the early part of the era; pitcher workloads have continued to drop, and starting pitchers get fewer decisions than ever.

ZiPS projects only four other pitchers to have a 50% shot at reaching 150 wins: Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, George Kirby, and Paul Skenes.

Rewind ZiPS a decade, and it gave 17 active pitchers a 50% chance to win 200 games. Nine eventually did hit that milestone, and Cueto, the only member of the other eight who is still technically active, isn’t going to do it.

So, let’s run the ZiPS projections for the remainder of deGrom’s contract with the Rangers, beginning in 2026 and running through 2028 — assuming Texas picks up his club option for that season. ZiPS was really worried about his health entering the season, for very obvious reasons, and while he just missed his most recent scheduled start due to shoulder fatigue, the injury is not believed to be a long-term issue. His projected workloads in future seasons have increased now that he’s stayed mostly healthy in 2025.

Give deGrom the 21 projected wins for 2026-28 and a couple September wins this year, and that gets him to 123 for his career. In his piece, Jay brought up Sandy Koufax while discussing deGrom, and I think it’s an apt comparison.

Koufax’s peak was more concentrated and more impactful in individual seasons than deGrom’s, but as I said about Johan Santana when he was on the Hall of Fame ballot, if your best years are being mentioned in conversation with those of Koufax, you must have been a dynamite pitcher. To me, from a pure dominance perspective, Peak deGrom isn’t that far behind Peak Koufax; certainly, the gap isn’t wide enough to keep deGrom out of Cooperstown considering pretty much everyone views Koufax as a no-doubt, inner-circle Hall of Famer.

Of course, it’s an inauspicious sign for deGrom that I’m using Santana as the other not-quite-Koufax comp, given that Santana went one-and-done on the ballot. But I’m hopeful that time is on deGrom’s side here. Santana was knocked off the ballot in the 2018 election, and the demographics of BBWAA members who stick around long enough to earn a Hall of Fame vote have changed a lot over the last decade. In fact, the BBWAA didn’t open up membership to internet-based writers — a group that tends to be more versed in analytics — until after the 2007 season, and many of these stathead members couldn’t vote when Santana was eligible. That will be different by the time deGrom hits the ballot in roughly eight or so years.

By then, it’ll be nearly 20 years of writers seeing starter workloads change, and maybe voters will have figured out how to account for the fact that the role of a starting pitcher is very different in the 2020s than it was in the 1990s, let alone in the days of Old Hoss Radbourn. The trio of former Cy Young winners in their 40s — Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Zack Greinke — will likely be in Cooperstown by the time deGrom hits the ballot. Clayton Kershaw is only three months older than deGrom, but considering the Dodgers icon debuted six years earlier, it feels all but guaranteed that he will be the first of the two to retire, meaning he will also enter the Hall before deGrom becomes eligible. If that happens, Kershaw will be the last of his kind to be voted in by the writers, setting the stage for a new standard for starters to make it to Cooperstown. That is, unless Kershaw is to be the last-to-debut Hall of Fame starting pitcher.

I can’t imagine that will be the case, but it is true that over the next decade, the BBWAA has some interesting philosophical questions to answer about the nature of starting pitcher greatness. I’m not sure what those answers will be, but I do know that deGrom will be instrumental in determining them.