Justin Verlander’s 2025 season isn’t going to be one for the history books. After his second stint with the Astros ended with a whimper (17 starts and a 5.48 ERA in 2024), he signed a one-year deal with the Giants that felt like a potential career capstone. At 42 and with a résumé that’s already a stone cold lock for Cooperstown, this year was never going to be about accumulating more statistics. When he started the year 0-8 with a 4.99 ERA, it felt like the final act of his career. No one fights off time forever, not even the seemingly ageless Verlander.

Anyway, here’s a leaderboard of the pitchers with the most WAR in the last 30 days:

Now, did I leave ERA out of this table on purpose? I sure did – ERA is noisy in small samples anyway, but mostly Verlander’s is just less impressive than the rest of this group. He’s at 4.18 in that span and 4.55 for the season, despite solid strikeout, walk, and home run numbers. He’s certainly not one of the best 10 starters in baseball, regardless of what that leaderboard says. But he’s been a solid big league starter, undoubtedly, and that in itself is pretty remarkable given how things looked a few months ago. Read the rest of this entry »

To put it delicately, Giancarlo Stanton’s stint with the New York Yankees hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. To put it less so, Stanton has amassed fewer WAR in eight years in New York than Aaron Judge did in 2024 alone. When the Yankees acquired Stanton in late 2017, the expectation was that he’d be the foundation of the team’s lineup for the next decade as he finished assembling his Hall of Fame case. However, since a solid if mildly underwhelming debut season in the Bronx, Stanton has suffered through a parade of injuries that has left him with only a single 120-game season, and his deity-level exit velocities have rapidly become his main offensive skill. Five hundred home runs, which once would have seemed like a disappointing final milestone for Stanton, increasingly looked liked the happy result.

Stanton’s health has remained a problem, as he missed a large chunk of this season with a severe case of tennis elbow in both elbows. But the results he’s gotten when he has been available have been of classic Marlins vintage: a .313/.388/.663 line with 17 home runs and 1.9 WAR in 51 games, with the WAR total his best tally since 2021. With Judge first out with a flexor strain and then missing his usual power since his return, having Stanton bust out to this degree has kept the Yankees’ current spate of problems from becoming even greater.

So, how has he done it? Rather than revolutionize his game, Stanton is playing like the most Stantonified version of himself. His average exit velocity and hard-hit percentage are at their highest levels ever, and his out-of-zone swing percentage is the lowest it has been in years. The attack angle on his swing has ticked up a couple of degrees, enough to give him an ideal attack angle 65% of the time, up from 60% in 2024 and 57% in 2023. We don’t have bat tracking data further back, but we do know that Stanton has a career-high rate of flyballs and a career-low rate of grounders. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a rough season for Francisco Alvarez — and specifically his hands. The 23-year-old catcher fractured a hamate in his left hand while taking batting practice on March 8, and after undergoing surgery, missed the first four weeks of the regular season. He scuffled upon returning, to the point that the Mets optioned him to Triple-A Syracuse in late June, but particularly since returning in late July, he hit well until he sprained the ulnar collateral ligament of his right thumb (as opposed to the UCL of his elbow) while making a headfirst slide on August 17. The injury, which requires surgery to fix, appeared to be season-ending, but to the Mets’ surprise, Alvarez has been able to swing the bat without pain, so he began a rehab assignment with Triple-A Syracuse on Wednesday. Unfortunately, in his third plate appearance of the game, he was hit on the left pinkie by an 89-mph sinker and had to leave the game.

Alvarez, who also missed seven weeks last year due to surgery to repair a torn UCL in his left thumb, was sent for testing after being removed. At this writing, the Mets have yet to reveal his prognosis, but this may set back his return, and he’ll still need another surgery this offseason. When available, he’s been one of the Mets’ more productive hitters, a big step up from the team’s other catchers on the offensive side. In 56 games, he’s hit for a career high 125 wRC+ (.265/.349/.438) with seven homers in 209 plate appearances, good for 1.4 WAR. Luis Torrens, who hit well while serving as the team’s regular catcher during Alvarez’s early-season absence, has slumped to the point that he’s batting .218/.282/.320 (73 wRC+) in 245 PA, and third-stringer Hayden Senger has been even less productive, hitting .180/.227/.197 (22 wRC+) in 67 PA.

[Update: On Thursday afternoon, Alvarez revealed that his pinkie is fractured. He said he hopes to play again this season, but a timeline for that has yet to be determined.]

The Mets, who are now 72-61, just swept a three-game series against the Phillies (76-57) at Citi Field to pull within four games of the NL East leaders. They’ve won eight of their last 11 games after losing 14 of 16 from July 28 to August 15, a skid that bumped them down to third in the NL Wild Card race, though they now have a 4 1/2-game cushion over the Reds (68-66). They’ve got some other injuries that could affect their drive for a playoff spot, but in that, they’re not alone. What follows here is a roundup of fairly recent injuries among NL contenders, some that slipped through the cracks in our coverage during recent weeks and others that merit mention so long as we’re on the topic; an alarming number of these involve fingers. I’ll go division-by-division, and follow this with a similar AL roundup. Read the rest of this entry »

When he was first featured here at FanGraphs in August 2022, Emmet Sheehan was 22 years old and pitching for the High-A Great Lakes Loons. A sixth-round selection the previous summer out of Boston College, the right-hander had been assigned a 40 FV and a no. 25 ranking when our 2022 Los Angeles Dodgers Top Prospects list came out a few months earlier. But his stock was clearly rising. Sheehan boasted a 2.72 ERA, and he had fanned 93 batters while allowing just 39 over 59 2/3 dominant innings.

His ascent was rapid. Sheehan reached Los Angeles midway through the 2023 season, and enjoyed some immediate success. Debuting against the San Francisco Giants, he hurled six scoreless innings without surrendering a hit. He then went on to finish the year 4-1 with a 4.92 ERA and 4.85 FIP in 13 appearances comprising 60 1/3 innings. But the hard-throwing righty subsequently hit a speed bump. Sheehan opened last season on the IL due to forearm inflammation, and ultimately underwent Tommy John surgery in May. He didn’t return to the mound until this May.

He’s been rock solid since rejoining the Dodgers rotation. Over eight starts and a pair of relief outings, Sheehan has a 3.56 ERA, a 3.23 FIP, and a 27.6% strikeout rate over 48 innings. Moreover, he shoved his last time out. This past Monday, the erstwhile BC Eagle dominated the Cincinnati Reds to the tune of 10 strikeouts, allowing just three baserunners over seven scoreless innings.

Sheehan sat down to talk about his return to action when the Dodgers played at Fenway Park in late July. A night earlier, he’d allowed a pair of runs over five frames in a 5-2 win over the Red Sox.

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David Laurila: You’re back after missing a year due to Tommy John surgery. Has anything changed, or are you basically the same pitcher as before?

Emmet Sheehan: “I’m similar. With the rehab process and having a year to think about things, that has changed me in some ways. Obviously, learning from these guys up here has changed me, too. Getting to be around guys like Kersh [Clayton Kershaw], Glass [Tyler Glasnow], Yama [Yoshinobu Yamamoto]… all of them are amazing pitchers. I try to pick stuff up from them, just find little things. We’re all different, but we still do some things similarly.

“Pitch-wise, the one big change was my changeup. Before, it was really big. I was rolling it a lot, like really over-pronating and maybe dropping the slot a little bit, trying to get more depth on it. Coming out of rehab, pronating hard didn’t feel great in my elbow, so we tried the kick-change grip — I’m doing the little spike with my middle finger. And it’s been great. For one thing, I can sell it more like my fastball.” Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve had to avert your eyes from the funeral pyre of the 2025 Baltimore Orioles, I feel ya. It has, at times, not been a pretty sight. But hope springs anew, as of Tuesday, with the return of Kyle Bradish to the Orioles’ rotation.

Bradish was a late-blooming prospect who only really put it together in his age-26 season, and was only at the top for a little over a season before he tore his UCL last June. Since Bradish went down, the Orioles’ pitching staff has weathered some even noisier crises: The departure of Corbin Burnes, a season-ending back injury to Zach Eflin, a season-ending (possibly multiple seasons-ending) shoulder injury to Félix Bautista, and ongoing elbow issues that have kept Grayson Rodriguez out of action all year. (I’m not comfortable calling Rodriguez’s injury season-ending, because the question of whether you can end something that never started is an ontological conundrum I’m not equipped to solve.) Read the rest of this entry »

Pardon me, but have you by any chance seen second base? It can usually be found over in that large patch of dirt, but I seem to have mislaid it. Second base. It’s the second of the bases. I could have sworn I left it right there. Amid the dirt. You turn your back for one second. Maybe I should retrace my steps. Here’s what happened.

It was the bottom of the ninth. One out, runners on first and second. Fernando Tatis Jr. came to the plate. That’s the white pentagon in the ground over there. When a strapping slugger comes to the plate, I have to take a walk. Out of respect for his prodigious power, I bid farewell to my traditional post alongside third base and I sojourn a half dozen steps in a northerly direction, toward the outfield. Sometimes I carry a generous scoop of trail mix in my back pocket for such journeys. Tonight I went without, and maybe that’s what did me in. Low blood sugar can wreak havoc on your sense of direction. Read the rest of this entry »

Early in the season, the American League Most Valuable Player race didn’t look like much of a race at all. Continuing a stretch of dominance dating back to the latter days of April 2024, Aaron Judge was destroying opposing pitching at a level not seen since Barry Bonds, putting himself on a pace to challenge his 2022 AL record of 62 home runs and even flirting with a .400 batting average. He couldn’t maintain that breakneck clip, however, and while he’s cooled off, Cal Raleigh has closed the gap, setting a home run record of his own while powering the Mariners’ bid for a playoff spot.

On Sunday against the Athletics at T-Mobile Park, Raleigh went 3-for-5 with a pair of two-run homers, both off lefty Jacob Lopez; the first had an estimated distance of 448 feet — his longest of the season — and the second 412 feet. On Monday against the Padres, Raleigh went deep against JP Sears, a solo homer with an estimated distance of 419 feet.

The home runs against the A’s were Raleigh’s 48th and 49th of the season; with them, he tied and then surpassed Salvador Perez’s 2021 total to claim the single season record for a player whose primary position is catcher. The shot against the Padres was his 50th, an unfathomable number for a player who spends most of his days squatting behind the plate. Read the rest of this entry »

Casey Mize had seven big league appearances under his belt when he was featured here at FanGraphs in January 2021. He also had high expectations. Drafted first overall by the Detroit Tigers out of Auburn University three years prior, the right-hander ranked 32nd when our 2021 Top 100 Prospects list was published that February. Bullish on his ability, Eric Longenhagen projected Mize as a “no. 2 starter capable of pitching at the top of a contender’s rotation.”

Our lead prospect analyst’s assessment came with an “if he stays healthy” caveat. Longenhagen wrote that he was “sufficiently scared of Mize’s injury history… to slide him behind players of a similar talent.” Those concerns have unfortunately been validated. The 28-year-old hurler required Tommy John surgery in June 2022, and he has also landed on the shelf with a handful of comparably mild maladies.

His numbers reflect the time missed, and the impact that it has had on his career. Entering the current campaign, Mize had thrown just 291 innings as a Tiger, and his ledger included a lowly 9-19 won-lost record to go with a 4.36 ERA — not exactly what was expected from a high-profile draft pick with a high-ceiling arm. Read the rest of this entry »

A warning up top: This article is about seeking and not finding, about the unique ways that data can mislead you. The hero doesn’t win in the end – unless the hero is stochastic randomness and I’m the villain, but I don’t like that telling of the tale. It all started with an innocuous question: Can we tell which types of hitters are streaky?

I approached this question in an article about Michael Harris II’s rampage through July and August. I took a cursory look at it and set it aside for future investigation after not finding any obvious effects right away. To delve more deeply, I had to come up with a definition of streakiness to test, and so I set about doing so.

My chosen method was to look at 20-game stretches to determine hot and cold streaks, then look at performance in the following 20 games to see which types of players were more prone to “stay hot” or “stay cold.” I started throwing out definitions and samples: 2021-2024, minimum 400 plate appearances on the season as a whole, overlapping sampling (so check games 1-20 vs. 21-40, 2-21 vs. 22-41, and so on), wOBA as my relevant offensive statistic, 50 points of wOBA deviation against seasonal average to convey hot or cold, 40-PA minimum per 20-game set to avoid weird pinch-hitting anomalies, throw out games with no plate appearances to skip defensive replacements — the list goes on and on. Read the rest of this entry »

You might remember that, back in May, I issued a challenge to baseball fans across the globe: Give up your favorite team for a week and follow another. Thus was the inaugural FanGraphs Fan Exchange Program born.

I published the original survey on May 20, assigned everyone a new team to watch between June 16 and June 23, and promised to publish my findings sometime in mid-July. July, as you might have noticed, has come and gone, and so has most of August, but the results are finally in.

Why the delay? Well, I want to say that draft season bled into trade deadline season and I just couldn’t find the time, but that’s not the whole story. I didn’t consider that I would have to do more to publicize the exit survey than post a link on BlueSky, and quite a bit of time passed before I went back to the original email list and sent a link directly. If you’re still waiting for the exit survey as you’re reading this, well, I’m quite embarrassed to say that doesn’t surprise me. At the end of the day, I’m not sure it went out to everyone. Read the rest of this entry »