I like to make up statistics. Why? Because it’s fun, mostly. There’s so much baseball analysis on the internet these days that without shaking things up, it’s hard to say something truly interesting. Isolated power? You’ve seen it a million times. Strikeout rate, or even strikeout rate implied by whiff rate? Boring. xWhatever, something with BACON in it? We’ve done that before.

Most of my random gimmick stats don’t really catch on. But I’ve used two this year that I think have some real analytical interest to them, and they’re not exactly on the FanGraphs leaderboard page. So I’m going to maintain some Google Sheets with them highlighted, and I’m also going to intermittently highlight the best performers.

Remember whomps per whiff? That one is just fun to say, and particularly fun to hear Vinnie Pasquantino say. Also, it seems like it’s doing something right. Here are the top 10 hitters in baseball by that statistic this year, minimum 500 pitches seen:

Oh look, another statistic that tells you Juan Soto is amazing. What he’s doing this year is truly ridiculous. He’s absolutely clobbering the ball and yet rarely swinging and missing. He’s as far ahead of Ryan O’Hearn in second as O’Hearn is ahead of Taylor Ward in 10th. He has more barrels and 30 fewer whiffs than Shohei Ohtani. Read the rest of this entry »

I think everyone has moments where they wonder just what the hell they’ve done with their lives. I’ve been blessed with the divine spark of human consciousness, and a body to tote those thoughts around in, and what have I accomplished? I had one of those moments recently while I was holding a friend’s baby, trying to make her laugh. What a delightful and important but most of all profound thing, to create a whole other person and cultivate her — from scratch — into a happy adult.

Or the next best thing, creating art. I’ll speak to what I know: music. I’m left in awe of songs that, through dynamic contrast and precision of rhythm and density of countermelody, seem to be carrying that divine spark themselves — the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th symphony, or Typhoon’s “Prosthetic Love.” So much care and emotion went into such composition that it’s hard not to be bowled over by the emotional transference of the artistic process even as you’re astounded by how precisely the pieces have been crafted and how seamlessly they fit together.

Again: What am I doing with my life to show that I value this gift? How am I using this spark to shape the world into a better place? How am I passing this light on to others? This thought burst out and grabbed me recently when I was poking around our site’s pitcher defense leaderboards and noticed something interesting about Josh Fleming. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last few years, I’ve been checking the accuracy rate of the ball-strike calls made by umpires, dividing the number of correct calls by the total number of takes. It’s a blunt approach, but because umpires make so many thousands of calls each year, it yields solid results. On Tuesday, I pulled the numbers for the 2024 season, and I found something I didn’t expect: Accuracy is going down rather than up. In every single season since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008, umpires have gotten better at calling balls and strikes according to the Statcast strike zone. This is the first time I’ve ever pulled the numbers and seen a lower accuracy rate. However, this is also the first time I’ve checked the numbers this early in the season, and it turns out umpires tend to make better calls as the season goes on. Since 2017, accuracy in March, April, and May has been 0.19 percentage points lower than accuracy over the full season (though the difference in 2023 was just 0.03 percentage points). Here’s what that looks like in a graph.

You know how at the beginning of every season, there are a couple blown calls during a nationally televised game (or at least, calls that appeared to be wrong according to the on-screen strike zone), and certain people start complaining that umpires are terrible and they’re getting worse? Those people always catch me off guard. I usually forget about the missed calls when the season ends, but those people somehow manage to keep their umpire anger at a high idle through the entirety of the offseason so that the instant baseball returns, they’re ready to shout about the umpires again without any need to ramp up. I don’t know how they do it without pulling an oblique, but in a sense, those angry people are right. Even though the umpires are always getting better year after year, they’re nearly always more accurate toward the end of the season than at the beginning — so much so that when the season starts, they’re worse than they were at the end of the previous season. For a month or two, the umpires really have gotten worse. We often say early in the season that pitchers are ahead of hitters. It turns out they’re ahead of umpires too.

For each season, I broke down the overall accuracy in two-month increments, essentially dividing the season into thirds. I also broke down the accuracy during spring training and the playoffs, although there are plenty of factors that make those numbers suspect. During spring training, the umpiring pool is much wider. Perhaps more importantly, there are far, far fewer tracked pitches during spring training, both because the number of games is so small and because not every stadium is set up for Statcast. That results in a much smaller, much less reliable sample. The playoffs are also a much smaller sample, but they’re also, at least in theory, selecting for better umpires. Working the playoffs is seen as an honor and a reward for performing well in the regular season. We should expect accuracy to be at its lowest during spring training and highest during the playoffs.

Generally speaking, the results fit our preconceptions. Spring training accuracy is very low and it features the volatility that we’d expect from a small dataset. Umpires are also more accurate in the playoffs. The red line is March, April and May, and as you can see, it’s nearly always below everything but the spring training line. Not only do umpires start getting better in June, but they keep getting better right through the end of the season, which is why the light blue line for August, September, and October is usually above the yellow line for June and July. The trend is a little bit easier to see if we focus just on pitches in the shadow zone, the area that’s one baseball’s width from the edge of the zone on either side.

In the graph above, the dotted line represents that season’s overall accuracy on calls in the shadow zone. Each data point represents the number of percentage points above or below that year’s average. Not only do the calls get better as the season goes on, there’s a definite gap between the first two months and the rest of the season. Umpires are decidedly worse in those first two months. However, 2023 was a real outlier. It was first time since 2008 that umpires were more accurate in the beginning of the season than the end.

With that, I want to bring you back to 2024. So far this season, umpires have gotten 92.46% of calls right, down from 92.81% in 2023 and just two thousandths of a percentage point higher than in 2022. Based on everything I’ve shown you, we should expect umpires to get better over the rest of the season. However, the drop-off from last year is noticeable. Accuracy over the first two months of the season has only fallen once before, from 2009 to 2010, when it dropped by 0.16 percentage points. So far this season, accuracy has fallen by twice that amount: 0.32 percentage points. That’s a tiny change, on the order of one call per game, but that doesn’t make it any less real. We’ll have to wait and see how the rest of the season goes, but perhaps this year really could end up being different. Or, if it follows the pattern of the past decade and a half, accuracy will soon be in its way up.

When Steven Kwan left the Guardians’ May 4 victory after straining his left hamstring, the Guardians owned the American League’s second-best record (21-12) as well as a 1.5-game lead in the AL Central. While Kwan was their most productive hitter at the time, they’ve thrived in his absence, going 15-6 thanks in part to a nine-game winning streak that ended at the hands of the Rockies on Monday. All of that has netted them the league’s second-best record (36-18)… and a 2.5-game lead in the Central. Baseball is a funny game sometimes.

The Guardians haven’t gained as much ground as you might expect given that the Royals ran off an eight-game winning streak that began on the same day as Cleveland’s streak and have gone 14-7 in Kwan’s absence; meanwhile, the Yankees have gone 15-5 to supplant the Orioles (12-7) as the team with the league’s best record. Still, the streak did create some daylight between the Guardians and the Twins, who were tied for second in the division with the Royals but have since gone 10-11 to fall to 6.5 games back.

A soft schedule probably didn’t hurt the Guardians, either. After winning the rubber game of their three-game series with the Angels sans Kwan, they took two of three from the Tigers, lost three of four to the White Sox (oops), then took two of three from the Rangers before sweeping consecutive three-game series from the Twins, Mets, and Angels. Collectively those teams have a weighted winning percentage of .418, with the Twins (.547 via a 29-24 record) the only ones at or above .500.

Kwan’s injury is a convenient inflection point for analysis. If it’s still somewhat arbitrary, it does offer a window into the Guardians’ overall performance, as well as how they’ve maintained a .714 winning percentage without him. Read the rest of this entry »

We knew the best hitter in baseball this year would be a multi-positional talent. We knew he would play for one of the top teams in the league. We knew the value of his contract would begin with the words “seven hundred” and the first syllable of his last name would be a source of complex carbohydrates. What we didn’t know is that it would be Guardians catcher/outfielder/first baseman/third baseman/DH David Fry, who is making $741,100 this season and currently leads the majors (min. 50 PA) in OBP (.488), OPS (1.079), wOBA (.459), and wRC+ (204).

The Brewers took Fry in the seventh round of the 2018 draft, eventually sending him to the Guardians during the 2021-22 offseason as the player to be named later in a trade for right-hander J.C. Mejía. Fry had first appeared on the Brewers’ top prospect list ahead of the 2020 season, when Eric Longenhagen ranked him 24th in a weak system, noting the positional flexibility that made him “an interesting potential bench piece.” That assessment largely stuck as Fry rose through the minor leagues (and switched organizations), although he was downgraded from a 40 FV to a 35+ FV in 2021 and eventually fell out of the Guardians’ top 50 ahead of the 2023 season. Eric tweaked his evaluation that year, subtly downgrading Fry from “interesting potential bench piece” to “interesting 26th man candidate.” It was a fair assessment at the time; Fry was roughly a league-average hitter in his first full season at Triple-A (105 wRC+). Entering his age-27 campaign, there wasn’t much reason to bet on his upside.

Yet, Fry was hard to ignore during his first full spring in big league camp in 2023. He bookended that spring training with home runs in his first and last at-bats and hit well in between, too, finishing with a 154 wRC+ in 19 games. Although he didn’t make the Guardians’ Opening Day roster, he surely made a good impression; after a solid month back at Triple-A, he earned his call to the show. Playing catcher, first base, corner outfield, and a little bit of third (with a couple of pitching appearances to boot), Fry showed off his versatility while hitting well enough (106 wRC+) to collect major league paychecks for the rest of the year. Entering 2023, ZiPS projected a .291 wOBA from Fry, and he boosted that projection to a .306 wOBA before the start of this season. Nobody would call his performance last year a breakout, but he put himself on the inside track to play a role for Cleveland once again in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

Brice Turang grew up swinging a bat, and the fruits of those labors are coming to fruition in his second MLB season. Following up on a rookie campaign in which he logged an abysmal .585 OPS, the 24-year-old Milwaukee Brewers second baseman is flourishing to the tune of a .301/.366/.428 slash line and a 128 wRC+ over 188 plate appearances. Showing that he can be more than a threat on the bases — he swiped 26 bags a year ago and is 19-for-20 so far this season — Turang also has 15 extra-base hits this season, as many as he had in all of 2023.

The son of former big league outfielder Brian Turang, Brice Turang was drafted 21st overall by the Brewers in 2018 out of Santiago High School in Corona, California. He was ranked no. 65 on our Top 100 Prospects list entering last year. At the time, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin wrote that Turang was “almost certain to have a significant and lengthy big league career,” albeit someone who “has never been a sure bet to do enough offensively to be an impact everyday player.” Two months into his sophomore season, one in which the Brewers are surprisingly atop the NL Central standings, Turang is looking like a hitter — small sample size acknowledged — who you just might not want to bet against.

In the latest installment of my Talks Hitting series, Turang discusses his gap-to-gap approach to his craft, which is driven more by competing than data.

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David Laurila: How have you developed as a hitter over the years?

Brice Turang: “A lot of it is that I hit basically every day. My dad owned a facility and I would go with him from three o’clock to nine o’clock every night. I loved it. I loved going to work with him. I’d be in the cage all the time, hitting, [developing] hand-eye coordination. Then, as you get into pro ball, the work you do is more of a quality-over-quantity type of thing.”

Laurila: There wasn’t nearly as much hitting data available when your father played. How does the way you learned from him relate to the present day?

Turang: “I don’t look at the data. I’m up there to compete and hit the ball hard. I mean, the data is what it is. You can put a number on anything, so I don’t really even think about it. I just compete and try to hit the ball hard up the middle, hit a line drive up the middle.” Read the rest of this entry »

Statcast’s new public repository of bat tracking data has been out for a few weeks now. Like every number manipulator with a sense of curiosity and middling technical skills, I’ve been messing around with the data in my spare time, and also in my working time, because messing around with data is both my job and hobby.

Mostly, I’ve been reaching some conclusions that mirror what others have already shown, only with less technical sophistication on my part. This article by Sky Kalkman does a great job summing up the biggest conclusion: Pitch location and spray angle (pull/oppo) influence swing length so much that you probably shouldn’t quote raw swing length. But I thought I’d look for something slightly different, and I think I found something.

Here’s the high level conclusion of my search: When pitchers throw harder fastballs, hitters slow down their swings to compensate. It sounds counterintuitive. Shouldn’t hitters speed up their bats to try to get to the faster pitch? But I had a hunch that this wasn’t the case. If you listen to hitters describe their approach against flamethrowers, they focus on shortening up and putting the ball in play. “Shortening up” might sound like it describes swing length, but it also surely describes swing speed. A hitter who is just punching at the ball likely won’t swing as hard as one trying to launch one. If you’re prioritizing having your bat on plane with the ball as long as possible, you probably aren’t focusing as much on raw speed. Read the rest of this entry »

The Portland Sea Dogs roster includes three Top 100 prospects, but neither Roman Anthony (15), Marcelo Mayer (42), nor Kyle Teel (83) has been the Double-A affiliate’s best player so far this season. That distinction belongs to a 23-year-old, shortstop-turned-left-fielder whom the Boston Red Sox drafted 69th overall in 2019 out of the Carlos Beltran Baseball Academy. Along with playing stellar defense at a new position, Matthew Lugo is slashing .306/.404/.653 with 10 home runs and an Eastern League-best 191 wRC+.

Markedly-improved plate discipline has played a big role in his breakout. Last year, Lugo logged a 5.9% walk rate and a 27.6% strikeout rate. This year those numbers are 13.4% and 22.5%.

The key to his newfound ability to dominate the strike zone?

“Timing,” explained Lugo, who takes his cuts from the right side. “Last year, I had a lot of movement with my hands, which made me inconsistent being on time with the pitcher. My hands were very low, and then when I got to the launch position they were very high; there was a lot of distance for my hands to go through. This year, I’m closer to my launch position before I swing. I also had a [bat] wiggle and this year I just get to my spot with no wiggle. I’m getting into my spot early and have more time to see the pitch, so I’m making better swing decisions.”

The decision to move Lugo off of his natural position and into an outfield corner wasn’t based on defensive shortcomings, but rather on the arrival of Mayer. The high-ceiling shortstop was promoted to Portland last year on Memorial Day weekend, and given his first-round pedigree, he wasn’t going to be the one moving. Read the rest of this entry »

Before the start of the season, the Atlanta Braves were the consensus pick to win the NL East. While it wasn’t unanimous – try getting a few dozen writers to fully agree on something – 22 of 25 FanGraphs writers predicted the Braves to win the division for the seventh straight season. Sportsbooks offered odds on Atlanta that had an implied probability of 75-80% for winning the division. ZiPS projected the Braves to win the most games in the majors and gave them a 63% chance to take the NL East crown. But as we approach the end of the first third of the season, it’s the Philadelphia Phillies who are on top of the division with the best record in baseball. The team’s six-game lead over Atlanta isn’t an insurmountable barrier, but it’s still a comfortable cushion for this point of the season. So, how concerned should the Braves be? And how long do they have to overcome their rivals and keep their division streak alive?

Frequently, when I discuss surprise first-place teams at this point of the season, I compare the situation to a hypothetical foot race between Usain Bolt and me. It goes without saying that Bolt is a much faster runner than I am, to the degree that he’d probably beat me in a race hopping on one foot. But what if he gave me a head start so I could get a sufficient lead? How far ahead would I have to be to have a chance to hold off the world’s fastest man? Uhhh, 10 steps from the finish line by the time he starts running might get it done. Obviously, this isn’t the perfect analogy, because even if Bolt is the Braves of running, I certainly am not the Phillies. But you get the idea: At some point in the season, a division race becomes a question of time, not talent.

First things first, let’s take a look at the current simulated ZiPS projected standings, through Thursday night’s games.

Well, at least if you go by the ZiPS projections, Atlanta fans aren’t getting the happiest version of this tale. ZiPS still thinks the Braves are the better team, but the margin has narrowed considerably. What was a 10-win gap in March has thinned to just a hair over a three-win separation per 162 games (20 points of winning percentage, to be exact). In fact, the Phillies are now projected to have an almost identical probability of winning the division as the Braves did at the start of the season, despite Atlanta’s aforementioned 10-game edge; as I remind people, the future is almost always far more uncertain than you think.

This is actually an impressively durable change, which further complicates matters for the Braves. Projections for teams don’t usually move quickly because, well, baseball history says they shouldn’t. ZiPS has been doing team projections since 2005. If all you had to go on to project the last two-thirds of a season was a team’s preseason projection in ZiPS and the team’s actual record for the first-third of the season, the best mix based on two decades of projections is about two-thirds ZiPS and one-third actual record.

The offenses tell much of the story, so let’s start with Philadelphia’s offense. Here are the differences between ZiPS preseason WAR and the current projected final WAR. The latter consists of the WAR already on the books and the rest-of-season projections. Remember, this already includes all those grumpy old regressions toward the mean.

That’s eight players projected to finish with at least a half-win more than at the start of the season. Castellanos is the only Phillies player whose projected WAR is now a half-win worse, but the projection systems didn’t expect much from him going into the season anyway. None of the hitters who are smashing the ball right now are expected to turn into midnight pumpkins. Even Bohm, the infielder ZiPS was most suspicious of, is now in the top 10 for most projected WAR added for 2025. And it’s not shocking that Harper, Realmuto, Turner (who is currently on the IL), and Stott are projected to maintain their strong starts.

As for the pitching, we projected the Phillies to have the second-best rotation in baseball, so their awesomeness is hardly surprising. Philadelphia’s stars have more than balanced out some of the outfield question marks and its depth hasn’t truly been tested yet, except for Turner’s injury — and as Jon Becker noted in his morning column on Tuesday, Turner’s replacements in the lineup, Sosa and Kody Clemens, have excelled in his absence.

As for the Braves, their vaunted offense has come out rather impotent. They rank seventh in the NL in runs scored, which isn’t disaster territory, but Ronald Acuña Jr., Matt Olson, and Austin Riley have all been just barely above league-average hitters this year. Sean Murphy has been out with an oblique injury that he suffered on Opening Day, but that’s been less of an impact because Travis d’Arnaud has been solid as the everyday backstop. Things might be a lot worse right now if not for the performances of d’Arnaud and Marcell Ozuna.

Atlanta’s current place in the standings is the fault of its underperforming stars, not its complementary talent. And that’s what makes it tough for the Braves to turn things around with a few trades, as they did in 2021 before surging to win the World Series. It’d be one thing if the problem were someone like Orlando Arcia, because the Braves wouldn’t think twice about benching or trading him to acquire a better shortstop. But when it comes to Acuña, Olson, and Riley, all Atlanta can do is wait for them to catch fire. What adds to this general feeling of helplessness is that the team’s biggest problem on the pitching side is Spencer Strider’s season-ending UCL injury. Even if the Braves were to try and swing a trade, their farm system is one of the weakest in baseball right now and only a few teams are currently out of contention. Major reinforcements aren’t on the way anytime soon.

The good news for Atlanta is that its stars are capable of breaking out of their funks at any moment, but the longer it takes them to turn things around, the more time the Phillies have to pull away. To get an idea of how much time the Braves have left, I took the current projected standings and had ZiPS simulate the rest of the season with both teams posting the same record going forward (for the sake of the example, I’m going with a 94-win pace) to see how quickly the divisional probabilities would change. Without picking up ground but also not losing any, Atlanta would slip to two-to-one divisional underdogs by June 10, and hit the three-to-one spot on the last day of the month. If this continues to the morning of the trade deadline, the Braves would find themselves with only an 18% projected chance to win the NL East, while the Phillies’ divisional odds would climb to 81%. (The Mets would still retain a few tenths of a percentage point.)

Let’s be clear: Despite the relatively gloomy outlook for Atlanta, a six-game deficit heading into Memorial Day Weekend is not insurmountable. In fact, the Phillies have the same divisional odds now as the Braves did two months ago. That said, for the first time since 2011, the NL East is the Philadelphia’s division to lose.

Xander Bogaerts‘ first season as a second baseman hasn’t gone as planned. He’s struggled mightily at the plate thus far, and while he’s fared better defensively, on Monday he suffered a fracture in his left shoulder while diving for a ball. He could miss a couple of months, leaving the Padres — who despite going just 27-26 thus far currently occupy the third NL Wild Card spot — to fend without him.

The injury occurred during the first game of Monday’s doubleheader in Atlanta. With the bases loaded in the third inning, Bogaerts ranged to his left to try to stop a Ronald Acuña Jr. grounder. He dove in time to get his glove on the ball, but he landed hard, and awkwardly. He immediately began writhing on the ground and could only wrist-flip the ball to shortstop Ha-Seong Kim, who saw the play to its conclusion — a run scored, though Bogaerts’ stop probably prevented a second one from doing so as well — and motioned for help.

“As soon as I caught the ball, I heard, like, cracks. Four cracks,” Bogaerts told reporters. “At that point, I was like, ‘Something’s wrong.’ I didn’t feel exactly like something shifted. I just felt, like, cracks.” Read the rest of this entry »