Anthony Santander might be the most underrated hitter in the American League, at least from a national perspective. Overshadowed by the young talent on his own team, the 29-year-old Baltimore Orioles outfielder has 102 home runs and a 123 wRC+ over the past three seasons. This year’s numbers are especially impressive. A reliable cog in manager Brandon Hyde’s lineup — he’s played in 145 of the team’s 151 games — the switch-hitter from Margarita, Venezuela, has hit 41 homers while putting up a 129 wRC+ and a club-best 95 RBI this season.

The degree to which he remains under the radar is relative. Santander enjoyed his first All-Star selection this summer, and he is currently getting increased attention due to his forthcoming free agency. Accolades have nonetheless been in shorter-than-deserved supply, and that includes our own coverage here at FanGraphs. As evidenced by his player page, Santander’s name isn’t in the title of any piece we’ve published prior to the one you’re reading. As good as he’s been, that is something that needed to be corrected.

Santander sat down to talk hitting one day after smacking his 40th home run of the season last week at Fenway Park.

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David Laurila: How did you first learn to hit, and what has been your development path from there?

Anthony Santander: “My dad introduced me to baseball when I was 4 years old, and when I was young I was a pure right-handed hitter. I didn’t start switch-hitting until I started working to become a pro when I was 15 or 16. That took a little bit, because it was new for me.”

Laurila: Why did you start switch-hitting? Read the rest of this entry »

I was writing from the heart. When the Nationals designated Victor Robles for assignment back in May, I wrote about what it was like to wait for him to make it to the big leagues; and then, once he arrived, to wait for him to turn into a star; and then, when it became clear that he wasn’t going to turn into a star, to wait for him to turn into a solid contributor; and then, as the likelihood of that outcome grew more and more faint, just to wait.

Fans reserve a special kind of affection for players like Robles. They don’t do it on purpose; it’s just how people tend to work. Superstars, with their reliable excellence, are easy to love. They’re big, warm Labrador retrievers with their tails waggling like Gary Sheffield’s bat as they wait impatiently for you to open the front door every night. They give you exactly what you want, and the love they inspire is beautiful and simple. When they move on to another organization, the loss you feel is deep, yes, but its edges are clearly defined because something pure has been taken from you.

When you’ve been watching and waiting and hoping for a player to figure things out for the better part of the decade, the feelings involved are a lot messier. Even if your love and your loss aren’t as profound, their edges are a lot more ragged. You’ve spent years pinballing between highs and lows, hopes and fears, anxiety and joy and despair, sometimes all at once. In other words, it’s a lot more like real life and real love. By the time a player like that moves on, you’ve invested way too much of your well-being in them to simply stop caring. It’s hard to imagine a single Nationals fan anywhere who wasn’t rooting for Robles to finally figure things out once the Mariners gave him the change of scenery he so clearly needed, who wasn’t truly happy to see him get off to a hot start in Seattle. But we all have our limits.

Back on August 6, over at Baseball Prospectus, Mikey Ajeto broke down all the mechanical adjustments that Robles has made since he joined Seattle. (Yes, the same Mikey Ajeto who writes exclusively about pitchers. Honestly, the biggest miracle that Robles has performed isn’t magically going supernova the moment that he turned the W on his hat upside down; it’s getting Ajeto to pay attention to a hitter for once.) He’s dropped his hands, ditched his leg kick, and added a scissor kick and a mini-squat before the pitch. Because Ajeto covered those more technical topics, I can continue to focus on the surface-level numbers. And you know what happened to the surface-level numbers after the publication of that article, which was entirely devoted to documenting Robles’s sudden improvement as the plate? They didn’t just keep getting better, they exploded.

I was wishing as hard as anyone for Robles to succeed with the Mariners, but I didn’t mean like this. I was thrilled to see him land a two-year extension worth a guaranteed $9.75 million, but he wasn’t supposed to instantly turn into the best player in baseball, like moving moving from a district named Washington to an actual state named Washington was all it took to break a powerful curse cast by some old Issaquah-based witch who fell into the Reflecting Pool during her mock trial team’s trip to DC in ninth grade and never got over the humiliation. And no, I’m not exaggerating. From June 5 to August 17, Robles turned his season around, running a 118 wRC+. Since August 18, Robles has literally been the best player in baseball: He’s put up a 230 wRC+ and accrued 1.8 WAR, more than whichever Cooperstown-bound MVP candidate you’d care to name. Sure, it’s fair to point out that he’s running a comically high .527 BABIP over that period, but his .386 xwOBA still ranks 19th among qualified players during that stretch. It’s starting to look like the simplest explanation for why Robles never lived up to his potential is that cherry blossoms are his personal kryptonite.

Somehow Robles left this ragged hole in the hearts of Nationals fans, but arrived in Seattle a gleaming superstar. The chaos has only reared its head lately. Robles is playing through a hip issue, and left his last two games due to different injuries: leg soreness on Sunday and a right hand contusion after getting hit by a pitch to lead off last night’s game, an 11-2 loss to the Yankees. Before Robles was removed against New York, his wildness on the basepaths finally caught up with the Mariners, with whom he’d previously gone 25-for-25 on stolen base attempts. He was caught stealing home in the bottom of the first inning, taking the bat out of Justin Turner’s hands with the bases loaded, two outs, and a 3-0 count.

I’m not saying all this is going to last, no matter how much Robles loves the Puget Sound. Since he arrived in Seattle, he’s run a 34.4% hard-hit rate and an 86.7-mph average exit velocity. The former is much better than Robles has put up in any previous season, but the latter isn’t and both are still well below league average. The real change is his barrel rate of 8.6%, which is miles above anything he’s accomplished in previous years. But keep in mind that we’re talking about just 13 barrels out of 151 balls in play, and neither his launch angle nor his GB/FB rate represents much of a departure from his career numbers. We’ve moved past any-batter-can-do-just-about-anything-over-60-plate-appearances territory, but we’re not all that far off either.

Robles has made some honest-to-goodness adjustments to his swing that have had an immediate, dramatic effect — frankly, the effect was so immediate and so dramatic that the Nationals should be looking closely at every single one of those adjustments and asking themselves what the Mariners saw that they didn’t — and we should probably adjust our priors going forward. But I haven’t seen anything (yet) to convince me that he’s going to keep running a BABIP above .500 from here on out. Further, Robles has been dealing with a hip issue in addition to the leg soreness (which is a separate ailment) and the hand injury that forced his early exit from the last two games. As someone who spent something like a quarter of my life rooting for Robles to finally put it all together, I sincerely hope his nagging injuries turn out to be no more than just that, and that when Robles finally does come down to earth, he finds a comfortable spot that’s situated well above sea level. But as long as he’s spending whole months with a wRC+ above 200, I reserve the right to be a little jealous.

Projecting the future is always difficult and full of inevitable misses, and I’m not just saying this because I have a vested interest in having you think I’m good at my job. We have a vague idea of a player’s broad future, enough so that nobody would trade Jackson Holliday for, say, Patrick Corbin. However, there’s always a great deal of uncertainty in prognosticating, and assuming for the sake of this opening paragraph that multiverse theory is correct, there will be planes of existence in which Corbin wins the NL Comeback Player of the Year award in 2025 when the Dodgers somehow fix his slider after a five-minute conversation. That’s not the way to bet, of course, and it’s likely that struggling rookies, especially ones with immaculate pre-2024 credentials — such as Holliday — will see this season as a bump in the road rather than a nasty car-destroying pothole.

Turns out, this was the season for longshot Rookie of the Year picks, especially in the American League. Of the top 17 AL rookies based on the preseason Rookie of the Year betting odds, only two players, Colton Cowser and Wilyer Abreu, ever had a plausible argument for being in the conversation once games started. Luis Gil and Austin Wells were nowhere to be found. For the table below, I’ve included 15 of the 17 players who were given AL Rookie of the Year awards odds by DraftKings before the season, sorted by their preseason ranking in descending order, along with their actual 2024 stats. I’m citing these rankings to get a general sense of who the favorites were back in March, not because I think they are more or less accurate than any other sportsbook odds.

(I’ve excluded the two other players, outfielder Everson Pereira and pitcher Ricky Tiedemann, because neither of them have reached the big leagues this season.)

Only six of these 17 players played even a half-season’s worth of games in the majors. It’s not just sportsbooks and bettors that got it wrong; by the time voting is official, we will have gone 0-for-25 here at FanGraphs.

I’ve done the same thing for the 19 NL players who were given preseason Rookie of the Year odds, with one table for hitters and another for pitchers. (All of the AL rookies who received preseason odds and actually played in 2024 are position players.) Things went significantly better for senior-circuit rookies.

So, what’s next for the rookies who are out of the awards picture? To get an idea of the change in their futures, I re-ran their projections for the next five years to compare to what their outlooks were during the preseason, using data as of Tuesday morning. I left out the players who have at least two WAR in 2024, as well as Matsui, who is a reliever and performed right in line with expectations, giving us a group of 21. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a National League Rookie of the Year voter this year, so I will not express any of my personal feelings regarding who should win that award.

In the projections, Evan Carter took the biggest hit. With a rather short, walk-heavy pedigree, ZiPS already saw him as riskier than the other top projected rookies, and then he had a rough early-season performance and a back injury that ruined his 2024. Taking all of this into account, ZiPS drops his 2025 line to .244/.338/.399; with a decent glove, that’s enough to be an average corner outfielder in this offensive environment, but well short of his preseason .259/.358/.412 projection. Carter’s teammate, Wyatt Langford, was a source of much projection disagreement entering the season, with Steamer and ZiPS quite excited, and THE BAT being rather meh about the situation. So far, meh has been closer, though he has hit much better (.258/.326/.424 in 91 games) since returning from an injury in late May.

Jasson Domínguez mainly makes this list for two reasons, more time on the injured list, causing ZiPS to take a foggier view of his health, and the fact that he didn’t have the major breakout yet, which is one of the things that ZiPS was banking on for him. His performance in Triple-A was good, but minor league offense is still crazy; ZiPS has his minor league translation at .263/.320/411, compared to his actual .309/.368/.480 line. That said, Domínguez should be starting every day for the Yankees over Alex Verdugo.

ZiPS is definitely bearish on Nolan Schanuel, and it’s increasingly confident that he won’t develop enough power, or enough secondary skills to compensate for his lack of power, to be a real plus at first base. The projections never bought into Hunter Goodman; he hit even worse than expected this year, and is not particularly young. I’m actually surprised DL Hall didn’t take an even bigger hit; back in a starting role, the walks came back with a vengeance, to the extent that returning to the bullpen for good might be the far better fit for him now.

Jackson Holliday’s numbers didn’t take a big hit for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, despite a really lousy debut in the majors, he played well enough in the minors — plus he’s so young and his résumé is so strong — that his small-sample struggles barely register. By reverse-o-fying Holliday’s major league woes into an untranslated minor league line and including it in his overall Triple-A production, ZiPS estimates that he would’ve had a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A this season, down from his actual mark of 142. A 20-year-old shortstop with a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A would still top everybody’s prospect list.

Several of these players simply didn’t get enough playing time to make a real impression. Coby Mayo and Heston Kjerstad never really had significant chances to grab starting roles with the Orioles this year, and James Wood and Dylan Crews were both midseason call-ups. Even so, the two Nationals rookies received some of the biggest bumps in their new projections. For Crews, the improvement was massive, largely because ZiPS has very little to go on and didn’t translate his college numbers as positively as Wyatt Langford’s, meaning that with a good first impression, Crews had a lot of room to grow in the eyes of ZiPS. Wood added nearly 200 points of OPS at Triple-A from his previous season — a combined .874 mark between High- and Double-A — at the time of his call-up; it was such a drastic improvement that if I had re-done the ZiPS Top 100 prospect list then, he would have come out on top.

None of these 21 players is in contention for the Rookie of the Year awards that will be announced in a few months. But for most of them, the lack of hardware in 2024 doesn’t represent a setback that changes their future outlooks too much.

The Twins still have a hold on the third AL Wild Card spot — for the moment. After blowing a 3-0 lead against the Guardians in Monday’s series opener in Cleveland, they’ve lost 18 of their past 27 games. They haven’t won a series against a team with a winning percentage of .500 or better in over a month, and now lead the surging Tigers by just a game and a half in the Wild Card standings. This past weekend, Minnesota activated both Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa from the injured list following lengthy absences, but the two stars by all accounts are playing at less than 100 percent, and sadly for manager Rocco Baldelli, they aren’t likely to provide innings out of the bullpen when they’re not in the lineup.

As of August 17, the Twins were 70-53, a season-high 17 games above .500. At the time, they were running second in the AL Central, two games behind the Guardians, and second in the Wild Card race, a game and a half behind the Orioles but two games ahead of the Royals, from whom they’d just taken two out of three (that aforementioned last series victory against a winning team). Since then, the Twins have gone just 9-18 (.333), outdoing only the White Sox (5-21, .192) and Angels (7-19, .269) among all major league teams; even the worst NL team in that span, the Marlins, has gone 10-17 (.370). The slump has pretty much closed the door on Minnesota’s chances of claiming the AL Central, and meanwhile, the Tigers have gone 17-9, tied for the majors’ best record in that span, to poke their noses into the Wild Card picture.

During this slide, the Twins have lost series to the Padres, Cardinals, Braves, Royals, and Reds, splitting one with the Rays, and beating only the Blue Jays and Angels — not exactly a performance befitting a playoff-bound team. In that span, the offense has scored just 3.81 runs per game while the pitching staff has allowed 5.22 per game. It’s not what you want. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into the year, everyone thought this would be the season that Shohei Ohtani, rehabbing from elbow surgery and DHing only, stepped aside and yielded MVP to someone else before resuming his place as the de facto favorite for the award in 2025. Instead, Ohtani decided to make a run at the first ever 50-homer, 50-steal season. The other primary competitor for NL MVP is Francisco Lindor, who isn’t chasing any statistical milestones and plays for a team whose most interesting narratives involve an amorphous fast food mascot, the musical endeavors of a part-time utility infielder, and the failure to extend Pete Alonso. And yet, Lindor’s position atop the NL WAR leaderboard demands consideration.

The marginal difference between Lindor and Ohtani’s WAR totals (7.4 and 7.0, respectively, at the time of this writing) creates a virtual tie to be broken based on the personal convictions of voters and anyone else with an opinion and an internet connection. For most, the choice between the two distills down to whether Ohtani’s 50/50 chase overrides his DH-only status. I’m not here to disparage Ohtani for not playing defense, but if you find that disqualifying for MVP recognition, I feel that. Then again, WAR includes a positional adjustment that does ding Ohtani with a significant deduction for not taking the field, and he’s still been keeping pace with Lindor on the value front anyway, so there’s not much more analysis to do there.

Instead, I want to explore how Ohtani’s one-dimensional role interacts with the value of a roster spot and the limitations that it places on how Los Angeles constructs and deploys the rest of its roster. In a two-way Ohtani season, he brings tremendous value to an individual roster spot as a frontline starter and an elite hitter who takes 600 or so plate appearances. But this year he contributes only as an offensive player. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

After taking a look at the qualifying offer decisions that have to be made shortly after the conclusion of the World Series, I figured now would be as good a time as any to run down the team and player option decisions. We’ll start with the National League, with the American League following on Friday. Here’s what’s on the table. Read the rest of this entry »

With just two weeks left in the regular season, the two Wild Card races look like they’ll be the only source of drama down the stretch. Entering this week, the top team in the closest divisional race has an 87.8% chance to finish in first — that’s the most uncertain winner, according to our playoff odds.

This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.

To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps. Read the rest of this entry »

The Diamondbacks won a wild game against the Brewers at Chase Field on Sunday, one in which they built and then squandered a 5-0 lead, overcame an 8-5 deficit to send the game to extra innings, fell behind 10-8 in the 10th inning, and finally, won in walk-off fashion, 11-10. Eugenio Suárez was at the center of much of the excitement. The 33-year-old third baseman drove in the game’s first run, and later plated both the tying and winning runs as well. It was the latest stellar performance of the player who’s been the NL’s hottest hitter since the beginning of July, digging his way out of an early-season slump.

Suárez began his Sunday afternoon by slapping a one-out RBI single off DL Hall through the right side of the infield, bringing home the first of three runs that the Diamondbacks scored in that frame. Facing Hall again, he struck out in the third before Arizona mounted a two-out, two-run rally that extended its lead to 5-0. Suárez grounded out against Joe Ross to end the fourth, and struck out again, against Aaron Ashby, to end the sixth, by which point the Brewers had pulled ahead 7-5 after chasing Zac Gallen and roughing up reliever Kevin Ginkel.

After the Diamondbacks scored two runs to cut the lead to 8-7 in the seventh, Suárez hit a sacrifice fly that brought home Corbin Carroll — who had walked, stolen second, and taken third on a wild pitch — in the eighth. Milwaukee scored two in the top of the 10th, but in the bottom of the frame, four straight Diamondbacks reached base, via three singles and a hit-by-pitch, before Suárez swatted a towering 100.5-mph fly ball that bounced off the right-center field wall, driving home Ketel Marte with the winning run. Read the rest of this entry »

Colton Cowser is a leading contender for American League Rookie of the Year honors, and his power numbers are among the reasons why. The 24-year-old Baltimore Orioles outfielder has 20 home runs to go with a .240/.321/.431 slash line and a 115 wRC+. San Diego’s Jackson Merrill (23) is the only rookie in either league to have left the yard more times.

That Cowser is clearing fences with some regularity is in many ways unsurprising. At a listed 6-foot-2, 220 pounds, his build is that of a basher. That said, his profile going forward wasn’t entirely clear when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in February 2022. Drafted fifth overall the previous summer out of Sam Houston State University, Cowser had propelled just a pair of baseballs over outfield barriers in 149 low-level plate appearances. Moreover, as I related to him in our offseason conversation, Baseball America had recently cited his “impressive walk-to-strikeout ratio,” adding that his swing path is “presently more geared toward contact versus power.”

The numbers suggest that Cowser is no longer the same style of hitter. After having more free passes than Ks in college and in his first taste of professional action, the left-handed-swinging slugger has fanned a team-worst 157 times this season with a 30.5% strikeout rate and a 9.5% walk rate. He’s also hitting more balls in the air, as evidenced by his 38.2 FB%. That number was just 26.9 in his two-plus years down on the farm.

Cowser’s thoughts on making less contact as he settles in to what promises to be a productive MLB career? Read the rest of this entry »

Even in an age in which baseball – and most sports to an extent – has become an extremely data-driven enterprise, the stew of conventional wisdom, mythology, and storylines could still feed a pretty large family. That’s not to say that this is a bad thing; even an old, jaded stat nerd like me gets excited to enjoy such a stew from time to time. But at the end of the day, an analyst has to focus on what’s true and what is not, and very few bits of baseball orthodoxy are more persistent than that of the sophomore slump. Coined for underperforming second-year high school or college athletes, the meaning in baseball is roughly parallel it: After a successful rookie season, a player finds it difficult to maintain the performance from their debut and are weighed down by the greatly increased expectations. As an analyst, the inevitable follow-up question is whether the sophomore slump is actually real.

While I entered this article with some rather developed skepticism, there’s no denying that high-performing rookies do occasionally have pretty wretched follow-up campaigns. Every longtime baseball fan can probably rattle off a dozen or so names instantly after reading the title of the article. For me, visions of Joe Charboneau, Pat Listach, Mark Fidrych, Jerome Walton, and Chris Coghlan dance in my head. And the list goes on and on. However, a second-year skid doesn’t mean there’s a special effect that causes it. The fact of the matter is that you should expect a lot of regression toward the mean for any player in baseball who can be optioned freely to the minors. The way baseball’s minor league system works accentuates the selection bias; underperforming rookies are typically demoted while the ones crushing reasonable expectations get to stay.

Looking at the sophomore slumpers, the story is typically more complicated than the cautionary tale. ZiPS has minor league translations going back to 1950 at this point, and while Super Joe (Charboneau) hit very well in the season before his debut (.352/.422/.597 for Double-A Chattanooga), at 24, he wasn’t young for the level, and ZiPS takes enough air out of that line to drop his translated OPS below .800. ZiPS thought he’d be an OK lefty-masher, but not much more than that.

Charboneau had a solid offensive rookie season, winning the AL Rookie of the Year award, but in his case, the fates didn’t really give him a fair opportunity to repeat that season. He injured his back in spring training and played through the injury, as was the style of the time. Across a couple of stints in the majors after his rookie breakout, he combined to bat .210/.247/.362 over 147 at-bats, and he was never healthy or trusted enough to make good. He didn’t hit again in the minors, either, with the only exception a walk-heavy .791 OPS as a 29-year-old in A-Ball (!).

As quick as Charboneau’s fall from grace was, it was far from the biggest rookie WAR drop-off. Using the definition of rookie in our leaderboards, which doesn’t know about roster service time days but is suitable for the approach of identifying rookies rather than specific Rookie of the Year eligibility, here are the biggest sophomore slides by WAR since 1901.

Some of these players recovered to have solid major league careers and some of these slumps resulted from serious injury, such as Kerry Wood’s, but for some of the players, that was the end of the road for them in the big leagues. As for Super Joe, his skid was the 100th worst in history among hitters!

So, how do we extract a sophomore-slump effect from simple sophomore slumps? At this point, I’ve been running projections for two decades, so I have a decent-sized database of projections calculated contemporaneously (as opposed to backfilling before ZiPS existed). I certainly haven’t told ZiPS to give a special penalty to solid rookies having bad follow-up campaigns, so I went back and looked at the projections vs. realities for every hitter with a two-WAR rookie season and every pitcher who eclipsed 1.5 WAR. (Rookie pitchers tend to have more trouble grabbing playing time.) That gave me 166 hitters and 207 pitchers. Let’s start with the hitters.

The 26 players in the top bucket averaged 5.1 WAR in their rookie seasons and 3.7 WAR in their sophomore seasons. That’s a pretty significant drop-off, but they were projected for an even steeper decline. The next group — 44 players who accumulated 3-4 WAR as rookies — underperformed its projection by about two runs per player, while the 96 rookies who finished with 2-3 WAR slightly overperformed their projections, but it was very close. As for the entire sample of 166 hitters, ZiPS projected a decline from an average 3.1 WAR as rookies to 2.3 in their sophomore seasons. Their actual average in their second year was… 2.3 WAR. Let’s look at the pitchers.

This is the same story, with the decline for pitchers being about as predictable as it was for hitters: ZiPS underestimated their second-year WAR by about 0.08 wins on average.

That’s not the end of it, however. I wanted to see if ZiPS has projected a similar decline for players who were coming off their second through fifth seasons, because that would determine whether ZiPS was capturing a sophomore-slump effect or if this was just a more general regression to the mean for players with less major league experience.

In sum, ZiPS didn’t knock more performance off high-performing rookies than it did for sophomores, juniors, seniors, and guys who stayed a fifth year because they had to drop too many 8 a.m. classes that they slept through. That’s because the sophomore-slump effect doesn’t exist.

So yes, projections will likely project fewer WAR next season from this year’s standout rookies, such as Jackson Merrill, Jackson Chourio, and Masyn Winn. But that dip is likely to be the result of the typical regression toward the mean that any high performer with a limited track record is expected to experience.