Archive for Daily Graphings

Adley Rutschman and Liam Hicks were hardly the only catchers dealt to contenders in the hours before last Monday’s trade deadline. Much further below the radar, the Dodgers acquired — re-acquired, actually — not one but two backstops, namely Ben Rortvedt and Hunter Feduccia, and their reasoning soon became clear. Dalton Rushing, who had been scratched from their lineup on August 2 due to “minor arm irritation,” landed on the injured list the next day with what the Dodgers initially termed a mild right elbow sprain. On August 4, the team revealed that the 25-year-old Rushing had suffered a partial tear of his right ulnar collateral ligament.

The injury hit the Dodgers almost exactly two months after they lost starting catcher Will Smith to the IL due to an inflamed disc in his neck. He has yet to return, and while Rushing’s UCL tear may not require surgery, it will likely prevent him from catching again during what has been something of a breakout season — albeit an uneven one.

“I would say it’s very small. I hope I’m wrong,” said manager Dave Roberts last Wednesday, referring to the likelihood of Rushing returning to his catching duties this season. He added that the Dodgers are “certainly trying to keep the bat alive for sure.” Shohei Ohtani’s occupation of the designated hitter slot would likely limit Rushing to pinch-hitting, ideally against righties, a potential luxury that the Dodgers will have to weigh against rostering a healthier and more versatile reserve such as Hyeseong Kim, who can play both middle infield positions and center field while being fast enough to serve as a pinch-runner. The current prognosis is for Rushing to be shut down from throwing for four to six weeks, though he’s expected to start a hitting progression sooner. Read the rest of this entry »

Randy Arozarena is leading the Seattle Mariners with 3.2 WAR. He’s on pace for a career-high 4.5 WAR. He’s running a 138 wRC+, his best mark since the summer of 2020, when a steady diet of chicken, rice, and pushups turned him into the kid who only hit homers. He was an All-Star. But some of Arozarena’s underlying numbers are confusing. He’s on pace for 20 home runs, his standard year-end total. If you’ll forgive a digression, Arozarena has ended up with 20 homers in three of his five full seasons, which ties him for third on the all-time 20-homer-season leaderboard, behind only Bobby Abreu (five) and Harold Baines (four). But Arozarena’s bat speed is down by a huge margin, as is his launch angle. How is he going yard just as often while swinging softer and running a career-high groundball rate? Let’s try to figure out what’s going on here.

I always like to start with plate discipline, and that’s certainly a logical jumping off point, because the biggest change in Arozarena’s profile is in the strikeout column. He’s running a 20.7% strikeout rate this season. That’s an enormous six-point drop from last year, and it’s more than three points below his previous low. In fact, if you look at things from a certain angle, that drop is the entire reason that Arozarena is putting up his best season ever. If you ignore walks and strikeouts and just look at balls in play, Arozarena’s wOBAcon and xwOBAcon are nearly identical both to the numbers he put up last year and to his career averages:

Arozarena is getting the same results as ever when he puts the ball in play. Now, I know that he’s getting to those results in a different way, and we’re going to dive into those differences soon, but in that sense, the entirety of his wRC+ boost has come from the fact that he’s striking so much less. So let’s talk about why he’s striking out less. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, a friend of mine asked if ABS challenge data gets incorporated into WAR. (I have extremely cool friends.) It doesn’t, and I explained that while an individual challenge can absolutely change the course of an inning (or a game, or even a season), a single ball-strike call is of negligible run value out of context. If anything, we should be adding challenges to WPA, not WAR, except WPA only gets calculated on a per-plate-appearance basis, rather than a per-pitch basis.

At any rate, challenges aren’t like catcher framing in the early days. In 2008, the first year for which we have framing data, the difference between the best framer in baseball (Brian McCann) and the worst (Ryan Doumit, the poor guy) was 97.7 runs. At 10 runs per win, well, you can do the math on your own. Read the rest of this entry »

Even by the standards of his recent, injury-marred seasons, Max Scherzer’s 2026 campaign has been a rough one. The 42-year-old righty has made two trips to the injured list, and through the end of July had taken just seven starts and allowed more than a run per inning. Even on a Blue Jays team destined to be retooled ahead of the trade deadline, he was clearly in no shape to be any contender’s hired gun. Nonetheless, Scherzer’s last two starts have been bright spots, and on Saturday evening, he notched career strikeout 3,516, officially moving him into the all-time top 10.

Scherzer wasn’t the only pitcher who reached a strikeout milestone this weekend. Aaron Nola, who started for the Phillies opposite Scherzer at Citizens Bank Park, collected his 2,000th career strikeout. Elsewhere, in a matchup that pitted the third- and fourth-ranked pitchers on the active strikeouts leaderboard, namely Chris Sale and Gerrit Cole, the latter notched his 1,000th strikeout since joining the Yankees. Then on Sunday, Jacob Misiorowski became the first pitcher to notch his 200th strikeout of the season.

I’ll get to all of those pitchers, but first Scherzer. After holding Philadelphia scoreless through five innings while scattering three hits and striking out three, he returned for the sixth inning and faced leadoff hitter Kyle Schwarber, who entered the day as the major league leader in strikeouts (172) and who on June 10 in Toronto was the victim of Scherzer’s career strikeout no. 3,500. That outing was the only major league start Scherzer took between April 24 and July 27; first he was sidelined by a combination of forearm tendinitis and left ankle inflammation, and then — after lasting just 3.1 innings against the Phillies while being tagged for five runs — a bout of back spasms. He was in much better shape on Saturday evening, and in his previous two plate appearances against Schwarber had limited the slugger to a groundout and an infield single. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Yordan Alvarez’s Triple Crown chances. Time hasn’t been cruel in this case, and his Triple Crown bid looks even stronger now than it did then. Since I’ve gotten several requests for updates, it made sense to do a quick InstaGraphs post on the Triple Crown race probabilities. There’s a slight change for the probability charts you’ll see below. In order to make the percentages in the individual statistic tables add up to a clean 100%, I did not allow for ZiPS to include ties atop its simulated leaderboards when I ran the projections for that June 8 piece. In the latest run, I’ve factored in ties and expressed them in the tables as multiple players winning.

Back in June, Alvarez was second in the American League in batting average, looking up at Rays DH Yandy Díaz. Díaz continued to hit in June, but a .213 July knocked him out of the top spot, and he’s now 24 points behind Alvarez. Most of the other batting title contenders from June have also seen their averages decline, while Alvarez’s mark has actually increased, going from .316 to .322 entering play Monday. Rays outfielder Chandler Simpson has snuck into the second spot, with Díaz down to third and 22 points of average below the Astros slugger. Both Royals shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. (.284) and Tigers rookie infielder Kevin McGonigle (.286) are very dangerous hitters and could go on a heater at any moment to make things interesting, but Alvarez leads them by over 30 points right now, and at this point in the season, it’s unlikely that they will catch him. Alvarez has also hit the required minimum number of plate appearances to qualify for the batting title, so no hitless at-bats would need to be added to get him to the 502-PA threshold, meaning a season-ending injury would freeze him at .322.

Alvarez (86) holds the RBI lead by six, so a first-place finish here isn’t guaranteed, but it still leaves him in an incredibly strong position. Ben Rice is 11 behind now, in part because the Yankees have put fewer men on base in front of him these last few months without three-time MVP Aaron Judge in their lineup. Meanwhile, reigning AL Rookie of the Year winner Nick Kurtz, who is currently on the IL with a strained right thumb, has fallen to 17 off the lead. A good chunk of the remaining risk to Alvarez’s RBI crown chances comes from a potential injury; even a minimum IL visit for him could leave Orioles first baseman Pete Alonso (75) or Tigers catcher Dillon Dingler (80) with room to swoop in.

The home run title is basically a three-player race at this point between Alvarez (35), Caminero (33), and Rice (32). Of the other four players in the top five as of June, three missed serious time due to injury and fell out of contention: Munetaka Murakami (26), Byron Buxton (25), and Judge (17). With Caminero and Rice hot on Alvarez’s heels, this category is going to be the most difficult one for him to win.

Alvarez’s Triple Crown probability is nearly the same as his odds to lead the league in home runs at this point; if he takes the home run crown, he almost certainly will have played well enough to hang onto the RBI lead and secure the batting title, too. ZiPS projects Alvarez now as having nearly two-in-three odds (66.5%) to win the AL Triple Crown.

Davis Martin had a first inning to forget on Tuesday. Pitching at Fenway Park, the Chicago White Sox right-hander was torched for six runs by a scorching-hot Red Sox team that went on to prevail 14-2. He settled down after the tumultuous frame — only one more runner crossed the plate before Martin departed in the sixth — but by then the damage was done.

What happened in the fateful first inning? I asked him that question the following day, but before we get to his thoughts, a quick recap:

With two on and one out, Willson Contreras singled home a run. Two batters later, Caleb Durbin launched a grand slam. Jarren Duran then followed with a solo shot on Martin’s 20th pitch of the game.

The hurler’s take?

“First, there is a lot to be said about how good this Red Sox team is, and what they’ve been doing,” said Martin, who is 9-6 with a 4.13 ERA and a 3.48 FIP over 122 innings on the season. “We studied the scouting report, and there weren’t a lot of pitches that I would want to take back. But yeah, I felt that they were one step ahead. They were doing a really good job of keeping me off balance.”

Red Sox hitters had clearly been more aggressive than the White Sox expected. Half a dozen runs coming on 20 pitches thrown to seven batters is notable, especially when you consider that Contreras saw six of them. His at-bat was arguably the key to the inning. After fouling off consecutive two-strike offerings, the slugger got his RBI knock on a breaking ball that was well wide of the plate. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Boston Globe ran a story by Red Sox beat writer Alex Speier on the concept of momentum. I can hear the collective groans of our Members now. Haven’t we gone over this enough? We’ve already established that there’s no such thing as momentum! Or, if there is, its effect is minimal. Our readers would be the first to point out that the month-and-a-half long surge up in Boston is mostly a matter of a talented, drastically underperforming Sox team experiencing some serious positive regression, bringing its overall record back up to about where we expected it to be all along. I get that, of course. We cannot conclusively prove the effect of momentum in baseball — and it’s not for lack of trying — and so therefore cannot definitively say that it exists. Yet when it comes to the Big Mo, a palpable feeling rather than a tangible metric, I tend to subscribe to what I call the Robert Graysmith Theory: Just because you can’t prove it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

What’s interesting about Speier’s piece is that he, along with Globe staffers Julian Benbow and Daigo Fujiwara-Smith, looked for data to support the impact of momentum on winning and losing streaks. Speier, an analytically savvy writer, said in his Bluesky post sharing the story that he “was skeptical” that their search would lead to anything. Instead, he was astonished to learn that, as he writes in the story, “A Globe analysis of Retrosheet data that includes the outcome of every MLB game from 1901 through 2025 revealed a striking pattern: The longer a winning streak lasts, the higher a team’s winning percentage in the next game.” The inverse is true for losing streaks. Speier mentions several factors unrelated to momentum that help to explain why “baseball streaks tend to be somewhat self-sustaining,” most notably that team quality probably plays a major role in enduring stretches of winning or losing. That alone is enough of a reason to maintain any skepticism you may have toward the idea of momentum. But at the same time, we should acknowledge that many players believe in the power of momentum, and if that belief influences how they feel, and how they feel contributes to how they perform, then it stands to reason that momentum — or at least, their belief in momentum — has at least some impact on performance.

That’s the last we’ll be discussing momentum here, though I’d encourage you to read the entirety of Speier’s story after you’ve finished reading this mailbag. Instead, today we’ll be answering your questions on players to be named later, the teams that most improved (or diminished) their 2027 playoff odds with their moves at this season’s trade deadline, and where Pete Crow-Armstrong would stack up on the five-star catches leaderboard if we had Statcast data going back through baseball’s history. But before we do, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

With apologies to Tarik Skubal and the Dodgers, for my money the most eye-catching deal ahead of Monday’s trade deadline was the Red Sox acquiring Adley Rutschman in a six-player blockbuster with the Orioles. Not only did a switch-hitting All-Star catcher move from one Wild Card contender to another, but he did so within the same division — and he’s more than a rental, with one more year of arbitration eligibility before he reaches free agency. Though he’s currently on the injured list due to inflammation in his left wrist, Rutschman is reportedly nearing a rehab assignment, and once he returns, he should provide a substantial upgrade for a team whose catchers landed on my Replacement-Level Killers list a few weeks ago.

Rustchman wasn’t the only prominent catcher on the move to a contender on Monday, as the Marlins traded Liam Hicks to the Rays, but he’s a part-time backstop whose hitting makes him a useful DH and first base option as well. While the concurrence of his being dealt illustrates that trading for a catcher on the fly in the midst of a playoff race isn’t unheard of, such moves do stand out. They’re not to be undertaken lightly because of the weighty responsibility that falls on a catcher’s shoulders in terms of quickly having to build relationships with a new pitching staff to understand repertoires, situational preferences, and interpersonal dynamics. Odds are that those newcomers are also expected to provide more offense than the catchers they replaced, because offensive slumps often spur teams to make such changes. Read the rest of this entry »

Jim Palmer faced 870 different hitters over the course of a Hall of Fame career that spanned from 1965 to 1984. A Baltimore Oriole throughout, the now-80-year-old broadcast analyst did so while fashioning a 268-152 won-lost record and a 2.68 ERA. A six-time All-Star who captured three Cy Young Awards, he is widely considered the best pitcher in franchise history.

How well does Palmer remember his matchups against Carl Yastrzemski, Rod Carew, and other notables from his era? Moreover, can he correctly answer questions such as “Who did you strike out the most times?” and “Who did you surrender the most home runs to?” I decided to find out. Given his reputation as an entertaining storyteller with a good memory, Palmer seemed like a perfect fit for our Challenging Career Quiz series.

That he didn’t know who he had faced the most times came as a surprise. Palmer faced Yastrzemski a whopping 197 times, with his next most frequent matchup, Graig Nettles, lagging well behind with 160. Of course, his not being able to name the Red Sox icon didn’t mean there weren’t stories. With Palmer, there are almost always going to be stories. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the best pitch in baseball?

That’s a tough question. Whatever answer you come up with will certainly say just as much about your methodology as the pitch itself. That’s OK. We’re open-minded people here, and there’s more than one way to approach this problem. Read the rest of this entry »