Archive for Daily Graphings

After taking a few months off from releasing new experimental data visualization options in the FanGraphs Lab, I’m happy to announce that we’re back at it. Meet the Count Progression tool:

With the advent of the ABS challenge system, this year’s league-wide walk rate has been in the news. The first month of the season featured a huge number of walks, and while subsequent months haven’t been quite as extreme, we’re still tracking for the highest full-season walk rate of the 21st century (2020 was weird, naturally). When I was tracking down where those extra walks were coming from back in May, I came up with the idea of looking at each count in isolation to hunt for changing behavior. This tool is an offshoot of that line of research. Read the rest of this entry »

I say this with nothing but charity in my heart: It’s generally not a good sign when your team has a load-bearing Derek Hill. When the Phillies traded for Hill in June, he was arguably less valuable than the international bonus money they picked up in the same deal.

Hill is a career fifth outfielder with a strikeout rate (31.5% in 806 career plate appearances) that would make almost any hitter unplayable, especially a hitter with a career .281 on-base percentage and a career .132 ISO. But he can run, he can play center field, and he can hit lefties a bit. Best of all — and again, I’m not trying to be unkind here — Hill could not have dreamed up a scenario in which the bar for success was lower. Read the rest of this entry »

Want to build a projection system? There are a lot of things you want to prepare for ahead of time, like fans thinking that you have a secret vendetta against their favorite team. The most practically important thing to know is that you are going to be wrong. Not just occasionally, but all the time. And assuring people afterwards that yes, 10% of players are supposed to fail to even meet their 10th-percentile projection isn’t going to get you off the hook, no matter how technically correct you are. Being wrong, however, is your opportunity to improve your model. Indeed, models learn a lot more from being wrong than being right.

When it comes to projecting the number of wins for a team, it mostly comes down to two big factors: how good the players are and who actually plays. Predicting the future is an incredibly difficult activity, and that is reflected in the variance in the probability “buckets.” ZiPS entered the season highly confident that Paul Skenes was a darn good pitcher, but even with that belief, ZiPS was only 50% sure that his 2026 ERA would fall between 2.37 and 3.20, and only 80% sure that it would land between 1.80 and 3.65. But as hard as it is to project how effective a player will be, that’s still easy compared to predicting who will play. Models can get a general idea of the likelihood of injuries from some specifics, like whether a player has missed a lot of time recently or just had Tommy John surgery. But what they don’t know, and certainly never will, is who will tweak their hamstring next Thursday and be out for the rest of the season, who will suddenly lose their velocity in their Labor Day start and need a UCL repaired, or who will be abducted by giant mutant ants and forced to toil in underground sugar caves.

So, which teams have suffered the most due to injury in 2026? If you ask fans, especially those of underperforming clubs, they’ll tell you that their favorite team has been uniquely put upon by injuries this season. But we’re numbers people here. We can do a bit better than that and see which team’s fans can justify their sad laments about the trials and tribulations of the hometown 26. Read the rest of this entry »

Tommy John spent 26 seasons pitching in the majors from 1963–74 and then 1976–89, more than any player besides Nolan Ryan, but his level of fame – and indeed, his contribution to the game — stems as much from the year that cleaves that span as it does from his work on the mound. As the first recipient of the most famous sports medicine procedure of all time, the elbow ligament replacement surgery performed by Dr. Frank Jobe in late 1974 that now bears his name, John endured an arduous year-long rehab process before returning to pitch as well as ever. His recovery gave hope to generations of injured pitchers whose careers might otherwise have ended.

By the count of analyst Jon Roegele, keeper of the Tommy John Surgery List, over 2,700 professional players have undergone some variant of Jobe’s pioneering surgery on John during either their amateur or professional careers. That list ranges from Brent Strom — who did not make it back to the majors after becoming the second recipient of Jobe’s ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction technique but went on to become a successful pitching coach — to Hunter Greene, who just underwent his second Tommy John last week. So far, only three are in the Hall of Fame, namely Paul Molitor (the first position player to undergo the surgery), John Smoltz, and Billy Wagner, but Justin Verlander, Chris Sale, and Shohei Ohtani will almost certainly follow in their wake, with more to come. By Roegele’s accounting, over 39% of all major league pitchers in 2025 had undergone Tommy John surgery.

On the mound, John was the epitome of the “crafty lefty,” so good at his vocation that he arrived on the major league scene at age 20 and made his final appearance three days after his 46th birthday. His 700 starts and 288 wins are both more than any other 20th- or 21st-century pitcher outside the Hall of Fame except Roger Clemens, but John’s longevity, his more dominant cohorts — including six 300-game winners — and the surgery that bears his name have overshadowed the rest of his on-field accomplishments. Between going 0-for-15 on BBWAA ballots (where he topped out at 31.7%) and 0-for-5 on Era Committee ballots (where he peaked at 43.8% on the 2025 Classic Baseball ballot), he never came particularly close to election, though in 2013, he got a share of the spotlight when the Hall honored Jobe. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of great statistics in baseball these days. They measure everything! Swing path tilt? Contact point against center of mass? Exit velocity? Hard-hit rate on opposite field line drives? You can get a report on any of those things at the wave of a few fingers. Expected wOBA? Barrel rate? There are acronyms and stat blends and projection aggregates for days. It’s analysis paralysis; the hard part isn’t finding stats to describe hitters, but figuring out which ones not to use.

I don’t have a foolproof method for seeing through all the noise for you. But I do have a fun experiment in how to work with statistics in such an overwhelming environment. I want to suggest a method that I call, These Things Are Good. Basically, it boils down to this: Come up with some statistics that you think are good without pre-determining which players you’re looking for, measure how good the entire league is at your statistics in question, and see what shakes out.

How should we do this in practice? I started by saying that I think pulling the ball when you hit it in the air is good. That gives me the first statistic I care about: air pull rate. I turned that into standard deviations for every player in baseball so that we could compare apples to apples across multiple statistics, then started looking for who the standouts were across all categories.

Air pull rate is nice, but it’s certainly not the only statistic that I’m interested in. Next, I wanted guys who hit the ball hard when they put it in the air. After all, exit velocity matters far more when batters can elevate. I did the same thing and put that in z-score terms via standard deviations. If you’re wondering what kinds of hitters these two categories identify, Kyle Schwarber, Griffin Conine, and Junior Caminero are the top three. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers are not the best team in baseball right now.

It’s been a tough go of late for the team supposedly breaking the sport. The Dodgers began August with a seven-game losing streak, and they’ve played two games below .500 since the All-Star break. They just dropped three of four to the Brewers over the weekend, ceding their standing as the top team in the majors.

Most slumping teams are slumping at the plate, and that’s certainly the case for the Dodgers. Their 93 wRC+ in the second half ranks 18th in the majors, after reaching the All-Star break with a best-in-show 115 wRC+. Their walk rate has dropped about three points, and their slugging percentage has dropped about 30 points. They’ve really struggled to get runners on, and when they do, the threat often ends in a popup or double play — sometimes even both. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Rainer is one of the game’s most promising prospects. Currently No. 25 on The Board and No. 3 in our Detroit Tigers rankings, the 21-year-old shortstop boasts elite bat speed — eye-opening exit velocities are part of his profile — as well as arm strength that Eric Longenhagen has described as “incredible.” Our lead prospect analyst’s preseason report elaborated that Rainer was “pumping mid-90s gas off the mound in high school.”

His pitching background is what I wanted to hear about when I sat down with Rainer last month. After beginning the campaign with a smattering of games at Low-A Lakeland, Rainer has put up a .267/.374/.455 slash line and a 118 wRC+ with the.High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. His left-handed stroke has produced a dozen home runs across 358 trips to the plate with Detroit’s Midwest League affiliate.

Just how good was the 11th-overall pick in the 2024 draft when he was toeing the rubber for North Hollywood’s Harvard-Westlake High School?

“I don’t really love talking about myself,” Rainer replied when posed that question. “That’s kind of how I was brought up when it comes to interviews, but now that I don’t pitch anymore, I will say that I enjoyed my time on the mound. It was fun. I threw pretty hard and was successful at it.”

Pressed for radar readings, the humble ex-hurler affirmed that he indeed sat mid-90s, adding that he would occasionally reach the upper 90s. Repertoire-wise, he was fastball/curveball/slider/changeup. As you’d expect, scouts for a multitude of MLB organizations were keeping close watch when he stood atop the bump. Read the rest of this entry »

The worst-case scenario for Hunter Greene’s elbow has come to pass. The ace right-hander had Tommy John surgery on Thursday, ending his 2026 season and almost certainly knocking him out for the entire 2027 season, too. This was Greene’s second elbow procedure this season; a previous arthroscopic surgery to remove loose bodies delayed his seasonal debut until Independence Day. Greene’s 2026 season wraps up with a 6.83 ERA, but a better 3.55 FIP over 27 2/3 innings in five starts. This is a full Tommy John revision — Greene previously had Tommy John surgery in 2019 — and not the internal brace procedure that tends to have a quicker recovery.

Suffice it to say, this is a major blow for both Greene and the Cincinnati Reds. For Greene, it’s the latest (and scariest) injury setback in a professional career that has never seen him throw enough innings to qualify for an ERA title. There comes a point at which one starts to wonder if he has crossed the proverbial Rubicon, the point where teams now can’t realistically tell themselves that they can keep him healthy as a starting pitcher. His fastball-splitter-slider repertoire would almost certainly play nicely in relief, though he’ll be hard-pressed to make the same impact as a closer as he could as a legitimate frontline starter. Read the rest of this entry »

Darrin Jackson is 62 years young and in his 26th season as a broadcast analyst for the Chicago White Sox. Currently paired with Len Kasper in the radio booth, the erstwhile MLB outfielder is equally adept at breaking down plays and sharing entertaining anecdotes. Much for the latter reason, he is a fantastic fit for our Challenging Career Quiz series, which now runs 11 deep and most recently featured Baltimore Orioles legend Jim Palmer.

Jackson’s playing career comes nowhere close to rivaling Palmer’s, although he did have his fair share of success. Suiting up for seven clubs — including both of Chicago’s — over a dozen seasons, Jackson was at his best in San Diego. Across the 1991-1992 campaigns, the right-handed swinger swatted 38 home runs as a Friar while logging a 99 wRC+ and 8.5 WAR. Filling a platoon role for much of his big league tenure, Jackson retired with 676 hits, including 80 round-trippers, over 2,816 plate appearances.

Which pitcher did he face the most times? That proved to be an easy question, as Jackson correctly guessed Tom Glavine with little hesitation. When I informed Jackson that the southpaw was also the pitcher against whom he’d garnered the most hits, he offered an unsurprising recollection of Glavine. As most fans know, the Hall of Famer had a well-earned reputation for getting strikes just off the plate.

“Facing him was never a fun practice, mainly because umpires had their own strike zones back then,” said Jackson, who went 11-for-44 with a pair of home runs and one walk versus Glavine. “He knew how to abuse that strike zone by working away, away, down and away, down and away. He would get you diving across the plate, looking in that zone, and the next thing you knew, he’d be throwing a two-seam fastball on the inside corner to freeze you for strike three. I probably got rung up looking by him more than anyone else I faced, because of that exact way of pitching. It drove me crazy. Even though you said I had a bunch of hits, I never liked facing him. He was just too smart and too good.” Read the rest of this entry »

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