Previously one of the most durable pitchers of the 2020s, José Berríos was absent last year when the Toronto Blue Jays missed out on a World Series championship by a single base. Berríos was first demoted to the bullpen in late September after a string of uninspiring starts, and then was left off the playoff roster due to elbow inflammation. Three mediocre spring starts and an ugly rehab stint in the minors later, Berríos underwent season-ending Tommy John surgery this week, cutting short his 2026 season before it ever really began, and almost certainly costing him a decent chunk of 2027 as well. If the Jays aren’t furrowing their brows at their fourth and fifth starters yet, it may be time to start.

The Jays had been at least cautiously optimistic about Berríos entering the season. He said he felt back to 100% this spring, and new inflammation was only discovered when he underwent an MRI for insurance purposes as he attempted to play for Puerto Rico in the World Baseball Classic. Neither Berríos nor manager John Schneider seemed the least bit worried, at least publicly:

“It’s weird. The MRI is seeing something, and what I feel is way different,” Berríos said. “The MRI says I have inflammation, so we need to take care of that.

“He feels great, and I can’t overstate that. He feels great,” Schneider said. “He’s going to continue to play catch until we get a bit more info, but he’s not going to start today. It’s a unique situation right now with an MRI and the WBC insurance.”

But since pitchers are cursed by the Fates to near-Odysseus levels, things naturally unraveled from there. Berríos consulted with Dr. Keith Meister in mid-March, and was diagnosed with a stress fracture that caused him to miss the start of the season. After four rehab starts in the minors, Berríos reported additional elbow soreness, which led to surgery to address the fracture and remove loose bodies. Apparently, those bodies were pretty darn loose, and Berríos had the full reconstructive Tommy John surgery, definitely erasing him from the team’s short-term plans.

Toronto’s rotation has actually been quite good overall in 2026 so far, thanks to the trio of Dylan Cease, Kevin Gausman, and Trey Yesavage all likely pitching as well as they ever will. In terms of their best three starters, the Jays have been absolutely elite so far:

The Jays rank third in the majors in WAR from their best three starting pitchers, and that’s with Yesavage missing the first month of the season with a shoulder impingement. Outside of their top three starters, however, the Jays have been among the bottom of the league:

The good news is that the performance of a team’s top three starters becomes extremely important when we’re talking postseason baseball, given that that trio tends to get a much larger proportion of the team’s innings than it does during the regular season. The projections reflect this, and despite a rest-of-season projected roster winning percentage of only .521, ZiPS has the Jays at a .543 roster strength for a possible playoff run.

Of course, to get to October, the Jays first have to survive May through September, and that’s a bit trickier. The AL East crown looks like a tough get, with Toronto 11 games back as of Friday morning. The team has a lot of pitchers theoretically available, but they’re now mostly injured, which is why Berríos coming back healthy was so important. A healthy Berríos is probably best classified as a no. 3 starter at this point, but eating innings has a lot of value on a team like this, and only three pitchers, Aaron Nola and teammates Gausman and Patrick Corbin, have thrown more innings over the last decade. Among the alternatives, Bowden Francis and Cody Ponce are both out for the 2026 season, and while Max Scherzer is nearing a return, he looks like he’s running on fumes at this point in his Hall of Fame career. Shane Bieber is nearing a return as well, but betting on him staying healthy is a pretty gutsy dice roll. Spencer Miles is fascinating, but he has all of three professional starts and an even scarier injury history than Bieber. When Corbin is likely in your rotation for the foreseeable future, you know there are depth issues to be concerned about.

That’s why when the Marlins inevitably start shopping Sandy Alcantara around again, the Blue Jays ought to be all-in on him. This is a roster designed to win now, and if you’re going to move on from Bo Bichette and go with an Andrés Giménez/Ernie Clement middle infield, you might as well take advantage of it with a sinkerballer who doesn’t whiff that many guys. ZiPS projects the Jays to get a bigger boost from acquiring Alcantara than any of the other 28 possible suitors. And Gausman is a free agent after the season, so acquiring a pitcher who can be written into the 2027 rotation wouldn’t be a bad idea even under happier circumstances.

The Blue Jays didn’t need Berríos to be what he was with the Twins — a boring, sturdy, and available version would do — but they did need him, and that is why losing him hurts. They’re a dangerous team if they make it to October, but to get there, some additional tinkering with the rotation looks increasingly necessary.

Geoff Blum faced 841 different pitchers over the course of 14 big league seasons, and while he doesn’t remember them all, many come to mind easily. That was proven when he recently became the sixth player-turned-broadcast-analyst to take part in our Challenging Career Quiz series. Did the erstwhile infielder maybe take a few liberties and look a few things up before we sat down for the exercise? He admitted as much, but as was the case with David Cone, Mark Grant, Mark Gubicza, Jeff Montgomery, and Dan Petry — links to those pieces can be found on their player pages — right and wrong answers are largely a secondary consideration. Entertaining anecdotes are the primary objective, and Blum followed suit by providing plenty of them.

I began by asking Blum — the first position player to be featured in this series — which pitcher he stood in the batter’s box against the most times.

“I was going to say Carlos Zambrano, but you gave me some time to look it up and I did cheat a little bit,” Blum replied with a laugh. “I knew it was going to be somebody in the NL Central, and we faced the Cubs a lot, so I figured it was going to be either Zambrano or Ryan Dempster. I also faced Dempster a bunch when he was with Florida and I was with Montreal, so I’m not surprised that he is the answer.”

Blum faced the right-handed Dempster 58 times — 18 more than Zambrano — going 15-for-53 with five walks. What does he remember about the current MLB Network analyst? Read the rest of this entry »

On April 28, with the Phillies off to a 9-19 start — tied with the Mets for the worst in the majors — president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski fired manager Rob Thomson and named bench coach Don Mattingly as interim manager. Since then, the team has been red-hot, going 16-6 and (briefly) climbing above .500 for the first time since April 7. While they aren’t yet in a playoff position, the Phillies’ season has at least gotten a much-needed reset. Cristopher Sánchez and Kyle Schwarber appear to be on their way to especially productive campaigns, and Zack Wheeler has made a strong return from surgery to alleviate thoracic outlet syndrome.

After winning the NL East in back-to-back seasons and making the playoffs four times in a row, at the outset of 2026, the Phillies appeared to have a pretty good shot at returning to October baseball, with a 24.4% chance of winning the division and a 68.8% chance of reaching the postseason according to our Playoff Odds. That said, they did have significant concerns, particularly with regards to their starting pitching and their remade outfield. Their rotation placed third in our preseason Positional Power Rankings, which seemed overly optimistic given not only the question marks regarding Wheeler but also the departure of Ranger Suarez for Boston, the ugly 6.01 ERA Aaron Nola put up last year, and the arrival of top pitching prospect Andrew Painter despite a subpar 2025 season at Triple-A. The remade outfield, with Justin Crawford taking over in center, Brandon Marsh settling in left in place of Max Kepler, and Adolis García replacing Nick Castellanos in right, offered a chance to improve upon last year’s subpar showing, but it was hardly a guarantee, particularly given that García had been non-tendered by the Rangers.

Under Thomson, the Phillies won just two of their first nine series, taking two out of three games from the Nationals at home and the Rockies in Colorado during the season’s first two weeks but losing series to the Rangers, Diamondbacks, Cubs (twice) and Braves (twice) — with a 10-game losing streak spanning parts of their home-and-home series against the last two teams — before Dombrowski swung the axe. It was a surprising move given the Phillies’ success under Thomson, who himself took over for the fired Joe Girardi in June 2022, guided the team to its first pennant in 13 years, and won at a .580 clip while making the playoffs in every subsequent season. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Feduccia is striving to establish himself behind the dish in Tampa Bay. Acquired by the Rays from the Los Angeles Dodgers as part of a four-player swap at last summer’s deadline, the 28-year-old former LSU Tiger is currently sharing time with Nick Fortes as the left-handed side of a platoon. His pedigree is that of a mid-level prospect. A 12th-round pick in 2018, Feduccia has been described by Eric Longenhagen as “a fairly well-rounded defensive catcher,” but also as a “bat-first backup catcher who struggles to control the run game.”

His offensive numbers in limited major league action are nothing to write home about. Feduccia has just a 63 wRC+ over 184 plate appearances, although his stroke has been showing signs of promise. So far this season, the Lake Forest, Louisiana native is slashing .278/.365/.370 with a 111 wRC+ in 62 trips to the plate. Moreover, he went yard for the first time Thursday afternoon in Tampa Bay’s 5-3 win over the Baltimore Orioles.

But it’s not his bat that I wanted to talk about when I sat down with him prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. What I was interested in were certain nuances of his position, particularly when runners are attempting to pilfer bags. While Feduccia remains a below-average thrower, he’s put a lot of effort into trying to improve that part of his game over the years and has a strong understanding of the components that go into it. I began by asking him how catchers are trained to throw. Read the rest of this entry »

When a meteor* slams into Earth’s atmosphere, it’s moving so fast that it compresses the air in front of it. That compression superheats the air to nearly 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and the extreme heat in turn melts the outside of the meteor. The outer layers of rock glow brilliantly as they disintegrate, leaving a trail of plasma in the meteor’s wake. By the time the flying object has descended to around 30 miles above the surface, air resistance slows it to a more reasonable speed, though still hypersonic. At that elevation, the meteor is in what’s known as “dark flight” – without the plasma trail, the remaining hunk of rock is impossible for the human eye to pick up at that speed and distance. This explains why it’s so difficult to hit Chase Burns’s fastball.

*It’s technically a meteoroid until it encounters Earth’s atmosphere, and then the rock plus the trail of plasma is a meteor until the plasma burns out, at which point it becomes a meteorite. You’re welcome, pedants.

Few pitchers release the ball higher than Burns:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year was a rough time for the best pitchers of the early 2020s. Zac Gallen cost himself untold tens of millions of dollars with a brutal walk year. Aaron Nola got hurt, and even when he was available, he was little more effective than a batting practice machine. Spencer Strider made 23 starts, but nearly doubled his FIP from his 20-win campaign in 2023.

Sandy Alcantara, like Strider, was coming back from a torn UCL that wiped out his 2024 season, he also had a rough go of it. Alcantara’s ERA was over 7.00 at midseason, leaving the Marlins unable to cash in on their former Cy Young winner at the trade deadline. Even with a strong stretch run, Alcantara ended 2025 with a 5.36 ERA, and an xERA and FIP in the mid-4.00s. Read the rest of this entry »

Expectations were generally quite low for the Minnesota Twins coming into the 2026 season after last summer’s fire sale that resulted in the departure of seven players from the 26-man roster, including Carlos Correa and half the bullpen. To defy those expectations this year, the Twins needed to wring as much performance as they could out of the talent that remained. In the early going, Ryan Jeffers did more than meet his projection, hitting .295/.408/.541 for a sterling 165 wRC+. At 1.7 WAR in just under two months, he was already nearing his career-best 2.3 WAR from 2023. Now, a broken left hamate bone will likely knock him out for four to six weeks, resulting in a lot more Victor Caratini in the lineup than anyone wants to see.

The Twins also held onto third baseman Royce Lewis last summer. Part of that was because he was affordable and under club control through the 2028 season, but it was also because he took a major step backward last year and wouldn’t have fetched them much in a trade. The oft-injured Lewis was a crucial part of the last Minnesota team to make the postseason in 2023, and the hope was that he would bounce back this season. Instead, a .539 OPS and some fairly extreme struggles with contact earned him a trip to Triple-A St. Paul.

Neither player’s stat line in 2026 looks like a fluke. Jeffers has shown continual improvement in his plate discipline over the last few years, and his walk rate was higher than ever in 2026. After debuting with a contact rate hovering around the 70% mark in 2020-2021 and running a 77.0% rate across 2022-2024, Jeffers increased his contact rate to 80.7% last year, and he was making contact at an 85.5% clip in 2026 before his injury. While he’s not going to absolutely destroy baseballs like Giancarlo Stanton or Oneil Cruz, Jeffers makes enough meaningful contact to do damage, especially for a catcher.

Caratini is a serviceable enough backup, but he’s a bit stretched as a starter, and six weeks of him in the lineup versus Jeffers does shrink Minnesota’s playoff odds a bit. With an uninjured Jeffers, ZiPS projected the Twins to have a 23.1% chance of making the playoffs this year. With the injury, though, their probability is down to 20.5%. That’s not a crazy-large gap, but it’s a major hit to take just from losing a single player for a quarter of a season.

Lewis hasn’t been completely healthy in 2026, but the sprained knee that sent him to the injured list last month isn’t really a satisfying explanation for what’s wrong with him. He’s been an absolute mess on offense, striking out in 31.1% of his plate appearances, nearly a 50% increase from his career strikeout rate. His contact rates have plummeted, suggesting that his inflated percentage of strikeouts is legitimate. His overall contact rate is down to 65.6%, well into the danger zone, and he’s making contact just 78.3% of the time when he swings at pitches in the zone, nearly five percentage points below his career mark. Meanwhile, his out-of-zone contact rate is a career-worst 44.0%, and he’s swinging at 32.8% of the pitches he sees outside the zone. Noticing all of this, pitchers are throwing 38.3% of their pitches to Lewis into the chase/waste zones compared to 29.8% last year. These numbers are highly concerning, especially because they tend to be quite meaningful in small sample sizes, enough to raise serious questions about Lewis’ future. Entering 2026, ZiPS saw him as a .730ish OPS guy over the next few years. That is no longer the case:

To replace him, Minnesota is likely to go with some combination of Tristan Gray, Orlando Arcia, and Ryan Kreidler. With that trio, the Twins are projected to rank 30th out of the 30 major league teams in production from their third basemen. If they’re going to have any hope at the hot corner, they’re going to need Lewis to figure things out in the minors and then right the ship in the majors. Otherwise, ZiPS thinks their best option at third base is to sign 36-year-old free agent utilityman Jon Berti. That’s bleak.

To add insult (and… injury) to injury, the Twins also lost another possible bat this week when 23-year-old prospect Emmanuel Rodriguez suffered a torn UCL in his left thumb, which will require surgery to repair. Rodriguez’s power upside and ability to play center field are tantalizing, but this is yet another setback for him in a professional career in which he has never been able to get on the field for 100 games in a season. ZiPS evaluates him as a 110 wRC+ hitter in the majors, but his impressively varied array of injuries has prevented him from getting a chance to try and do that in the big leagues for real.

No AL Central team is a juggernaut, and hanging in the playoff race well into the summer could have done a lot to improve fan perceptions of the Twins, who entered this season with their smallest payroll in some time. According to Baseball Prospectus/Cot’s Contracts, Minnesota’s payroll this season is its lowest since 2014 (excluding 2020 payroll, which is only lower because of the 60-game season). Adjusted for inflation, this is the team’s tiniest payroll since 2009.

The 2026 Twins are not dead and buried, even with the Jeffers injury and Lewis’ offensive issues. After all, nobody in the AL Central is capable enough to dig them a very deep grave. But their margin of error has shrunk considerably, and unless they can conjure up a quick answer or two soon, the Twins may end up extending their fire sale into another summer.

Elly De La Cruz is one-third of the way to an all-time season in Cincinnati.

De La Cruz collected his first triple of the season on Tuesday, ripping a middle-middle changeup from Jesús Luzardo into the gap in left-center at 103 mph. He later drew a walk to raise his wRC+ on the year to 147. His 2.6 WAR ranks third in the majors behind only Bobby Witt Jr. (3.1) and Shohei Ohtani (2.9). If the season ended today, De La Cruz would be the favorite to at least challenge Ohtani for the National League MVP:

De La Cruz at the moment is on pace for 30 stolen bases, 38 home runs, and 8.9 WAR. The first two numbers aren’t all that notable, beyond our affinity for the nice round, rhythmic 30-30 label. Well, 38 homers would be a career high for De La Cruz, who topped out at 25 in 2024. But no, it’s the 8.9-WAR pace that’s caught my attention. That would tie him with George Foster in 1977 for the fifth-best Reds season ever — a leaderboard that goes back to 1882 — behind only Joe Morgan, who registered 11.0 WAR in 1975 and 9.5 WAR in both 1973 and 1976, and Johnny Bench, who put up 9.2 WAR in 1972. We simply haven’t seen a a performance this good in Cincinnati in 50 years. Read the rest of this entry »

As the resident FanGraphs playoff odds watcher, I spend a lot of time looking at our playoff odds and trying to figure out both what they’re seeing and what they’re missing. Over the years, I’ve written many audits of how well our odds perform. Last fall, I described a Bayesian method that does slightly better than any of our existing models at predicting playoff teams. It’s particularly useful early in the season, when the headline FanGraphs mode (using projections) can be slow to pick up on new information and the season-to-date mode is prone to overreaction. A Bayesian filter does a good job balancing those two – or so I found last year.

If you’re looking for a detailed technical description of the way that I’m blending up our existing playoff projections to churn out different odds projections, you can find it at the bottom of the article. But first, let’s take a Bayesian trip through the league and highlight the divisions where reconsidering our odds in light of how much the results so far have diverged from preseason expectations matters the most.

AL East

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite sticks to beat the White Sox with (and over the past few years, there have been plenty) has been the Erick Fedde trade of 2024.

You know the one: Chicago was en route to a record-breaking number of losses, and with the season in the tank, GM Chris Getz flipped three of his best-performing players — Michael Kopech, Tommy Pham, and Fedde — in a three-way deal with the Cardinals and Dodgers. The 2024 White Sox were enduring a lost season that redefined the term; trading those guys was obviously the right thing for Getz to do. My objection was the return.

The headliner for the White Sox was Miguel Vargas, who at the time was the Dodgers’ second-best utility infielder named Miguel, behind a 35-year-old for whom the Marlins had no need. The Dodgers not only got Kopech, they managed to finagle Tommy Edman, the best player in the deal, as well. Kopech immediately slotted in as a leverage reliever, Edman won NLCS MVP, and the Dodgers won the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »