First impressions can prove to be fleeting in baseball, but it’s still better to make a good one than a poor one. And as first impressions go, Boston Red Sox rookie Connelly Early’s was absolutely dynamite. Throwing five innings in his debut, Early whiffed 11 A’s batters, with a single walk as a minor demerit, and exited the game with a 5-0 lead that was never threatened.

Even in a strikeout-happy era, striking out 11 of 21 batters faced is an impressive feat. In fact, 11 strikeouts tied Don Aase for the most by a Red Sox pitcher in a major league debut, and Early’s mark is the most ever in a five-inning rookie debut. And it wasn’t done in a particularly easy environment. The Red Sox are a probable playoff team fighting to win the AL East and grab an extremely valuable first-round bye, which would give injured players like Roman Anthony more time to return. And while the Athletics have one of the worst records in the American League, the responsibility for that plight falls mostly on the pitching staff, not the lineup Early faced. The A’s have a 105 wRC+ on the season, well short of elite, but in the solidly above-average range. Nor did Early benefit from a Bad Team September Lineup © situation, with the A’s playing all five of their full-timers who have an OPS above .800.

So how did he do it? Sometimes rookie pitchers simplify their repertoire somewhat while they’re getting adjusted to the majors, but Early threw five different pitches at least 10 times, and got at least three swings and misses on each of them, totaling 19 for the game. His most hittable pitch on Tuesday, his changeup, still had a respectable 70% contact rate, about league average for changeups (70.5%). And with the exception of his sinker, which he only offered up against lefties, he didn’t aggressively limit his toolset based on the platoon advantage, either. (For more on Early’s stuff, I can’t do better or find a more fitting piece for you to read than David Laurila’s May profile of the southpaw.) Read the rest of this entry »

Does anybody want to win the National League batting title? Granted, with all these statheads devaluing batting average and instead offering fancier stats that identify more productive hitters, batting titles ain’t what they used to be. Nonetheless, with less than three weeks to go in the regular season, it bears noting that just one NL qualifier has a batting average of .300 or better, namely Trea Turner — and he just landed on the injured list.

The 32-year-old Turner left Sunday’s game against the Marlins in the top of the seventh inning after running to first base, where he was safe on a throwing error by shortstop Otto Lopez. He felt his right hamstring “grabbing on me,” as he described it afterwards, and was replaced by a pinch-runner. An MRI on Monday showed that he’d suffered a Grade 1 hamstring strain — thankfully not as serious as the Grade 2 left hamstring strain that knocked him out of action for six weeks last season; the Phillies think he could be back after just a 10-day IL stint. Even so, the move came on the same day that the team also placed third baseman Alec Bohm on the IL due to a cyst in his left shoulder; suddenly the Phillies are down half an infield. Luckily for them, they now own an nine-game lead in the NL East.

Thanks in large part to a 4-for-5 night on Friday, Turner is currently hitting .305/.356/.458 (125 wRC+). That’s the highest his batting average has been since June 17 (.308); he was as low as .281 as recently as August 13 but had been on fire over the past four weeks, batting .420/.448/.620 (197 wRC+) since then to overtake Will Smith (who at the time led the NL at .312), Xavier Edwards (.308), Freddie Freeman (.300) and everyone else vying for the title. Turner already has a batting title, having led the NL with a .328 mark in 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not going to act like Byron Buxton has been healthy all year or anything. He’s already had two IL stints this season for two unrelated injuries, and just this week he missed a game after being hit in the thigh with a pitch. This isn’t a single nagging, career-altering injury; this is a man who just can’t catch a break. Or who can’t catch without breaking, rather.

But this is about as close to a healthy Byron Buxton season as we’re likely to see. The 31-year-old has figured in 109 of Minnesota’s first 144 games and collected 467 plate appearances in those games, putting him on pace to qualify for the batting title for just the second time in 11 big league seasons. And he’s made the most of that extended run of playing time: .271/.332/.562 with 30 dingers and 21 steals. That comes out to a wRC+ of 140 (tied for 10th among qualified hitters) and 4.7 WAR.

For all intents and purposes, this is a full season. Which is not something you can take for granted where Buxton is concerned. Read the rest of this entry »

Daylen Lile has been swinging a hot bat. Over his last nine games, the 22-year-old outfielder is 16-for-37 with a double, four triples, and two home runs. Moreover, he’s been one of the top position player rookies in the National League this season. Since debuting with the Washington Nationals in late May (and subsequently receiving a second call-up after a 10-day return to the minors in June), Lile has a 114 wRC+ to go with a .282/.327/.450 slash line over 286 plate appearances. His 74 base knocks include 13 two-baggers, eight three-baggers, and five round-trippers.

How well he’ll perform going forward is a good question. Ranked fifth with a 45 FV when our Nationals list came out in early July, the 2021 second round pick out of Louisville’s Trinity High School was described by Eric Longenhagen as a player whose “most important attributes are his hand-eye coordination and his bat control.” Our lead prospect analyst went to say that he has Lile “graded as a contact-oriented platoon bat.”

The youngster’s left-handed stroke did a lot of damage — albeit not of the fence-clearing variety — down on the farm. In 47 games between Double-A Harrisburg and Triple-A Rochester, Lile slashed .328/.377/.503 with four home runs and a 143 wRC+ over 213 plate appearances. That he’s heated up since getting off to a slow start in the bigs — a 56 wRC+ and a .571 OPS through his first 20 games — isn’t exactly a surprise. Read the rest of this entry »

Every morning, I go to FanGraphs and pull up a few leaderboards. One of my favorites these days shows trailing 30-day plate discipline statistics. Ever since Michael Harris II dug himself a huge hole by swinging at everything and then dug himself out of it by swinging some more, I’ve been checking to see whether he’s reined in his swing-first tendencies. Never fear, he’s still up there hacking — his swing percentage ranks 18th in the majors over the last month — but this isn’t an article about Harris. Here are the top 10 hitters in baseball by swing percentage over the last 30 days:

This generally isn’t a ranking you want to be at the top of. Ezequiel Tovar is on there because he’s never seen a slider he doesn’t like. In the aggregate, this group is hitting horribly over the last month. But there are two exceptions to that statement. Ozzie Albies is having a resurgent stretch, and as you can see from his low swinging strike rate, he’s operating pretty differently from the rest of this group. That’s neat, but Albies also isn’t the focus of today’s article. No, that would be Bryce Harper, who seems to defy everything I know about patience and power.

Sluggers wait for their pitch. I’ve known that for as long as I’ve followed baseball. I grew up on Barry Bonds’ perfect idea of the zone, A-Rod and David Ortiz taking tough pitches off the outside corner, Albert Pujols walking more often than he struck out. And this isn’t some SEAGER issue, either. That metric is about measuring controlled aggression, the ability to swing frequently without bad chases. Corey Seager’s career chase rate is 27.1%. The last time Harper showed that much restraint was 2018. How does he do it?! Read the rest of this entry »

When the Mets signed Juan Soto to a 15-year deal last December, they expected him to be the heaviest hitter on a contending team, a player who would factor into the Most Valuable Player voting. Odds are that they didn’t price his base-stealing ability into his record-setting, $765-million contract, yet with just under three weeks remaining in the regular season, the 26-year-old slugger has not only set a career high in steals, but he might very well become the first player this season to join the 30-homer, 30-steal club.

Despite a slow start that included just three home runs and two stolen bases through the end of April, Soto has clubbed 38 homers and is just three away from his career high, set last year with the Yankees. He’s already had additional seasons with 34 and 35 homers (2019 and ’23, respectively), so any total in that range is hardly out of the norm. What’s remarkable is that he now has 29 steals, a country mile beyond his previous career high (he stole 12 in both 2019 and ’23), and more than he swiped from 2022–24 combined (25 steals). At this writing, he’s third in the NL in homers but 11 behind leader Kyle Schwarber. By comparison, he’s fifth in the league in steals but just eight off the lead, held by Oneil Cruz.

Soto stole seven bases (in 11 attempts) last year, and averaged about nine steals for the 2021–24 span. He added five steals in May to those two in April, but he stole just two more in June. Once July hit, though, and especially after the All-Star break, he started running more frequently, with four of his six steals for the month coming in a nine-game span from July 19–28. He’s maintained a similar clip since then, with 11 steals in August — tied with Jazz Chisholm Jr. for the major league lead in that month — and three more in September. That’s a major league-leading 18 steals in 20 attempts over his past 45 games, a 65-steal pace! Chisholm is second over that same span with 17. Read the rest of this entry »

To no one’s surprise, Shohei Ohtani is having a big season. His 170 wRC+ is second only to Aaron Judge with 192. He’s on pace to tie his career high of 54 home runs. He leads all of baseball with 127 runs scored. Oh, and he’s started doing that pitching thing again. Don’t let his 3.75 ERA fool you. He’s only made 12 appearances and thrown 36 innings, but his 2.47 expected ERA, 2.17 FIP, and 2.53 expected FIP are all career-bests. His average fastball velocity is up. He’s striking out as many batters as ever while slashing his walk rate and avoiding hard contact. There’s no shortage of reasons to write about Ohtani, but our subject today is his spot in the lineup.

Last Tuesday, Ohtani hit his 46th home run. It left his bat at 120 mph, making it the hardest-hit ball of his entire career. I wrote a whole article about it. It was also his 100th home run as a Dodger (in just his second year as a Dodger!). Lost amid all that hoopla was a different milestone. I neglected to mention at the time that it was Ohtani’s 42nd home run of the season from the leadoff spot, which set a new record. It’s the most ever. He also homered twice on Sunday, to push the record to 44. Should we watch all three of those recent home runs? I think it’s best that we do.

The old record was not particularly old. It belonged to Ronald Acuña Jr., who conducted his scorched earth 2023 campaign against the pitchers of the world while batting first for the Braves. In fact, eight of the top 10 seasons have come in the past nine years, five of them in the past four years. That shouldn’t necessarily come as a shock. Home run power has increased over the course of baseball history, and lineup optimization has become the norm over the last several years. Teams are stacking their best hitters in the first and second spots, and the best hitters tend to hit homers. Here’s the top 10 according to our friends at Stathead: Read the rest of this entry »

I learned a new fact while watching the Yankees-Blue Jays game on Sunday, and I’d like to share it with you: YES Network play-by-play man Michael Kay mentioned that Austin Wells is tied for the league lead in sacrifice flies with Geraldo Perdomo.

I don’t want to disabuse anyone of the notion that FanGraphs writers are all-seeing brains-in-jars, but I had no idea this was the case. Even considering the vast bigness of my highly learned noggin, I can’t say that sacrifice flies have ever been a stat I cared much about tracking. I’m sure there’s some connection (positive or negative, I cannot say) between the quality of a hitter and the number of sac flies he produces, but mostly sacrifice flies seem to be more a function of opportunity than skill. Not least because I don’t think anyone sets out to hit a sacrifice fly as such; if you’re putting the ball in the air with a runner on third and less than two outs, you’d probably rather hit a home run or a double. A sac fly is a fallback position.

But this fun fact about the major league sac fly leaderboard struck me, because in my mind, Perdomo isn’t the sac fly guy, he’s the sac bunt guy. Read the rest of this entry »

David Hamilton doesn’t wait casually at first base. He lurks, waiting for the slightest opening to take off. Watch an at-bat where Hamilton is on the bases, and he’s often as much a point of discussion as the man at the plate. Take the game between the Red Sox and Guardians on September 1, for example. Hamilton pinch-ran for Carlos Narváez with Connor Wong at the plate. Wong fouled off a bunt for strike one with the entire defense focused on Hamilton at first base. Then Hamilton stole second on the next pitch even with the catcher, pitcher, and infielders all fixed on his every move.

Hamilton isn’t the most prolific basestealer in the majors. He isn’t the most successful. But he is the baserunner who tries to steal most frequently, after adjusting for opportunities, and so he’s a great poster boy for what I’d like to talk about today: stolen base opportunities and takeoff rate.

It doesn’t take much to make a stolen base possible, just a runner and an open base. You do need both of those, though. Draw a walk to load the bases, and you’re not attempting a steal without something very strange going on. Stolen base opportunities aren’t easy to find in a box score or a game recap. They’re the negative space of baseball – no one’s counting them, and it’s easier to see where they aren’t than where they are. So, uh, I counted them. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to believe, but in two months, the celebratory World Series Champagne will have dried, the beer will be gone, and free agents will hit the open markets. After the season, players and teams have only five days to make their final option decisions, a choice that can have an enormous impact on future earnings or offseason team plans. I’m not here to predict all of those options in a 40,000-word article, as you, loyal FanGrapheteer, might nod off in boredom while Meg and Matt plot my no-doubt painful demise. But we can do a subset of them, the opt-outs and player options, as many of these are the biggest decisions that will need to be made in November. Plus, it’s an excuse to run out some early projections, which is always fun.

Unless I missed one, there are 15 opt-out clauses or player-only options.

Alex Bregman, 3B, Boston Red Sox

It took until mid-February for Alex Bregman to find a new team last year, and his arrival in Boston set off an unexpected chain of events that ended with Rafael Devers getting traded to San Francisco. Bregman has a particularly interesting choice to make in that he has only two years remaining on his deal, but a pretty spicy $80 million coming to him for those two seasons if he stays. Naturally, Bregman wants a little more security that what his Red Sox deal calls for, but that might not be attainable to him at his current rate of $40 million per year. He turns 32 in March, so he won’t be able to command a lucrative long-term deal like the one that Kyle Tucker, who is still in his 20s, is expected to sign this winter. Read the rest of this entry »