Archive for Daily Graphings

The hottest pitching prospect in baseball joined the coldest pitching staff in baseball over the weekend.

Mariners left-hander Kade Anderson was solid in his major league debut on Saturday. The Cubs weren’t the softest landing, entering the day as the best lineup in the majors with a 111 wRC+. But the top prospect kept the Chicago batters off balance for five innings, striking out five with minimal resistance. Manager Dan Wilson left Anderson in to face the top of the order for a third time to begin the sixth — a controversial decision, but perhaps a necessary one given Seattle’s pitching implosion over the last two months — and he was quickly slugged out of the game. It was a sour note to end an otherwise strong debut, although dogpiling with his new teammates following a walk-off home run by Randy Arozarena certainly improved the mood.

The Mariners took Anderson third overall out of LSU last year. He got his first taste of pro ball this spring and blew through the competition in Double-A, posting a 1.06 ERA, a 1.78 FIP, a 40.5% strikeout rate, and a 3.9% walk rate over 93 1/3 innings. He made it as high as third overall on our Top 100 Prospects list, definitively the best pitching prospect in baseball at the time of his debut. He might have been called up sooner, but, well, I’ll get to Seattle’s pitching mess soon enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob deGrom tallied his 2,000th strikeout last week, providing another late-career achievement that might be engraved on a Cooperstown plaque sometime in the 2030s. That deGrom would reach 2,000 strikeouts seemed almost certain back at the end of the 2020 season, when he was 641 away. At that time, he’d struck out at least 200 batters in four of his six non-pandemic seasons. The first of those two other seasons was his 2014 NL Rookie of the Year campaign, when he didn’t debut until May 15, and in 2016, injuries limited him to just 24 starts. But since 2020, deGrom has been an example of Zeno’s paradox, seeming perpetually stuck in medias res. Achilles did eventually catch the tortoise, and deGrom and calculus won the day.

deGrom’s journey to 2,000 is a good reminder of why I like to occasionally harass ZiPS for milestone probabilities rather than simply dividing a player’s remaining distance by his most recent seasonal number and calling it a day. Whether or not there are infinite universes where every possibility happens, in this one, tendons tear and players age. A player can be on pace to finish with 500 home runs for a decade and never come particularly close, while another can sneak in the back door to a milestone that nobody saw coming, as Nick Markakis threatened to do late in his career.

The uncertainty is what makes baseball (and life) interesting. I can tell you that Aaron Judge needs 115 homers to make it to number 500; I have a calculator for that, and even if I didn’t, I was once a third-grader. But the road is hard to map, and the aging curve, performance models, and injury models in ZiPS give us a better idea as to the probability that Judge will hit 500 or 600 in this particular universe. It’s no fun to have such a tool and not deploy it, so it’s a good time to do an update on baseball’s search for pretty, round numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonah Cox had never set foot in Wrigley Field prior to June 5th of this season. It turned out to be a day he won’t soon forget. Six games into his MLB career, the 25-year-old San Francisco Giants outfielder went 3-for-3 and left the yard for the first time at baseball’s highest level. In front of an announced crowd of 39,060, the visitors ran roughshod over the Chicago Cubs by a count of 18-3.

His initial impression of the Friendly Confines?

“It’s one of those stadiums you see in movies, like Rookie of the Year, so when you walk out there it’s like ‘Oh my gosh,’” the Colorado native told me earlier this week. “Knowing the history and the fanbase, it’s just a really cool place to play.”

“Oh man, the ball was flying,” Cox went on to say of the contest, which featured eight home runs, seven of them by the Giants, “It was a ton of fun watching guys swing and have so much success. Then I got the call to come in and face Hoby Milner, the lefty [in the sixth inning with the Giants leading 9-0]. I was excited to get in there, and one thing led to another.”

Did it ever. The rookie recorded his second hit of the game — and just his third in the majors — in that same inning, which ended with the Giants on top 16-0. Then came the top of the ninth. With Cubs catcher Carson Kelly toeing the rubber, Cox cleared the ivy. Read the rest of this entry »

For the New York Mets, the 2026 season has been an almost unmitigated disaster. Widely expected to compete for the NL East crown, the Mets got off to a brief hot start. And by brief, I mean brief, as the season’s high point was knocking out Paul Skenes in the first inning on Opening Day against the Pirates. From there, the season unraveled like the finances of Mike Campbell from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Gradually and then suddenly.

The Mets ambled around the .500 mark for another week or so, until a 12-game losing streak knocked them firmly into the league basement, where they have mostly stayed. By the time the calendar flipped to August, they had long come to terms with the idea that they would be sellers at the deadline. Recently, though, the Mets have gone on a tear, winning 11 of their 15 games since their deadline fire sale, giving some fans an excuse to dream on a miracle wild card run. That almost recently won’t happen, but their abysmal season doesn’t have to signify the start of a long rebuild. In fact, New York teams with massive payrolls aren’t generally extended much rope, with the hope being that the club will find its way back to contention quickly. Can the Mets do that in 2027? Read the rest of this entry »

If the 2026 regular season finished today, not only would a sub-.500 team qualify for the playoffs, but Shohei Ohtani’s run of three straight Most Valuable Player awards — the last two in the National League, since signing with the Dodgers — would probably end. Pete Crow-Armstrong has been absolutely on fire since late May, as substantial adjustments to his mechanics and approach have helped his offense catch up to his already-elite defense. The 24-year-old center fielder has overtaken Ohtani on the WAR leaderboard at a time when the two-way superstar has been shut down from pitching, and this week, he put himself in the history books in a few different ways.

On Monday night at Wrigley Field, Crow-Armstrong put on a particularly entertaining show against the White Sox, going 4-for-5 with a pair of home runs, a stolen base, two runs scored, and three runs batted in. Batting leadoff for the Cubs, he began the home half of the first inning by homering on Luis Castillo’s first pitch of the evening, a four-seamer on the inner edge of the plate. He singled off Castillo in the second, and after taking strike three looking on a sinker in the fourth, he drew a walk against reliever Tyler Schweitzer in the sixth, doubled off Trevor Richards in the eighth, then capped his night with a walk-off two-run homer off a hanging slider from Hagen Smith in the 10th. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Mathemadage, a new series where I investigate time-honored baseball adages using whatever data I can get my hands on and explore whether there’s any validity to them. I’ll apply my normal Ben Clemens mixture of a bit of math, a bit of intuition, and plenty of healthy doubt in declaring strong solutions to complicated problems. I hope to demonstrate that some of these true and others false, but I’m sure that many will end up in a suggestive but unprovable middle ground. And true to the premise of the series, we’re starting off with a fun adage that resists easy conclusions.

If you watch a baseball game from start to finish, you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a hitter get tied up on an inside fastball. “Got jammed,” the announcer might say, or maybe, “He just couldn’t get around on that one.” It’s a visual reminder of one of the pitching truisms that I learned as a kid and haven’t forgotten since: hard in, soft away.

I intuitively look for this pitching pattern when I’m watching a game. Hitters look incredibly uncomfortable when they’re trying to get their bat around a fastball in on their hands. Now that we have a few years of bat tracking data, though, I can do better than just vaguely searching for this effect. So this week, when I saw someone get jammed, I winced in sympathy and then started furiously downloading spreadsheets. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1981, when a seven-week players’ strike split the season into two “halves,” and in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic shortened the season to 60 games, teams with sub-.500 records snuck into the postseason via expanded playoff formats created to accommodate the unique and extraordinary circumstances. No team finishing below .500 over the course of a full schedule has received a playoff berth, but the possibility looms large this year. With five and a half weeks and about 35 games per team still to play, the American League has just five teams above .500, including one — the AL West-leading Astros — that entered Wednesday right at that mark before beating the Angels. It’s not out of the question that two sub-.500 teams could make the playoffs, but for all of the owners’ carping about a lack of competitive balance, messy free-for-alls such as this are just what Major League Baseball wants.

If the postseason were to start today, the Rays (76-50) would win the AL East by five games and White Sox (66-60) the AL Central by four games, with both earning first-round byes. The Yankees (71-55) and Red Sox (68-59) would qualify as the top two Wild Card winners; as the fourth and fifth seeds, they would square off in a best-of-three Wild Card Series as they did last season. But from there, things get ugly. The Astros (64-63) are currently clinging to a two-game lead over the Rangers (62-65) atop the AL West, but with a projected win total of 82 wins according to our Playoff Odds, they don’t have much margin for error when it comes to clearing the .500 bar, and could join or surpass the 2005 Padres (82-80) and 1973 Mets (82-79) in terms of mediocre division winners. The 1994 Rangers were a whopping 10 games below .500 at 52-62 but one game ahead of the A’s (51-63) when the players’ strike put them both out of their misery, though MLB does not consider any first-place teams from the shortened season to be official division winners. That’s how the Braves, who trailed the NL East-leading Expos by six games when the strike hit, are still considered to have won 14 consecutive division titles from 1991–2005 (an assertion I take issue with, but that’s an argument for another day). Read the rest of this entry »

Noah Schultz remains a work in progress. Fifteen outings and 65 1/3 innings into his major league career, the recently-turned-23-year-old southpaw has a 3-9 record to go with a 6.06 ERA and a 4.86 FIP since debuting in April. Ranked second in the Chicago White Sox system coming into the season, Schultz is currently doing more fine-tuning in Triple-A, having been sent down to Charlotte earlier this month.

Two days before his August 8 demotion, I caught up to the 6-foot-10, high-ceiling hurler to ask how much he has learned about pitching since being drafted 26th overall in 2022 out of an Oswego, Illinois high school.

“A ton,” Schultz replied. “I didn’t know anything when I signed. I didn’t know anything about metrics. I knew that spin rate was good — I knew that I spun the ball well — but that was about it. Velo and spin rate. So, I’ve definitely picked up a ton over the past few years.”

Enough that he would now consider himself a data nerd? Read the rest of this entry »

CJ Abrams’ ambitions as a fielder have fallen short, but the future remains bright for the Nationals star.

Washington over the weekend announced Abrams will move from shortstop to second base. That’s not a surprise. Abrams has been terrible at shortstop for his career, ranking as one of the worst fielders ever recorded by Baseball Savant’s fancy player-tracking technology. What is a surprise, however, is that a minor-career update for Abrams is newsworthy enough to justify an article, a testament to his tremendous breakout at the plate in 2026.

Abrams this year has posted -17 Outs Above Average at shortstop, which is the worst mark in the majors at any position. This isn’t an outlier for him. Since his debut in 2022, Abrams has played almost exclusively shortstop, putting up OAA marks (chronologically) of -8, -9, -18, and -11 before the -17 mark so far in 2026. His career -64 OAA makes him the sixth-worst fielder — at any position — ever recorded by the system, which dates back to 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

Week Three has concluded in the WPBL, and as such, let’s get to recapping. As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors list discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into their new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN.

If you need a refresher on the league’s structure and mechanics, check out the Week One recap.

Without any further ado, your Week Three winner is the San Francisco Firebells. The Firebells went 3-0 on the week with two decisive wins over the second-place team in the standings (the Los Angeles Queens), and team captain Kelsie Whitmore issued a temporary moratorium on the Denae Benites MVP chatter. Read the rest of this entry »