Archive for Daily Graphings

Back on June 23, I wrote an article called “What’s Going on With Wan Steven Kwan?” A week later, Kwan responded, “Nothing!” Well, he said it with his bat, anyway. On July 1, he went 1-for-2 with a triple, then 1-for-2 with two walks the next day, and then he hit another triple two days after that. Since July 1, Kwan is batting .350 with more walks than strikeouts for a 154 wRC+. My deep dive into Kwan’s troubles was an attempt to answer a question from a reader named Kevin, and now that Kwan is back on top again, Kevin has written back to ask what’s changed. I wanted to write about it, but this graph gave me pause.

Kwan got unbelievably hot at the beginning of July, and then he spent the next two months and change slowly cooling off. Every batter’s rolling wRC+ graph is full of ups and downs, but this one made me a bit wary. Zack Meisel had written a story about the turnaround for The Athletic back on September 1. In it, Kwan described poring over journal entries from previous slumps looking for the right attitude adjustment to get him back on track. And then over the next 12 games, Kwan ran a wRC+ of 80 and struck out twice as often as he walked. That’s the danger of writing about a hot streak. But over Kwan’s most recent 10 games, he’s back on top with a 178 wRC+, and honestly, I’m still curious. Has he fixed whatever was wrong? Is this just about BABIP? I really don’t know, Kevin. I’m writing this introduction before I dig into the numbers so that we can go on a journey of discovery together. Let’s away. Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like ages ago that I wrote about Sandy Alcantara and how he’s on pace to lap the field in innings pitched for the second time in five seasons. Actually, it’s only been a week and change, and two very interesting things have happened in that time, meriting further exploration.

Those two things: Alcantara’s first two career saves. On September 16, two days after his last start and with the Marlins’ bullpen depleted, Alcantara came in to throw a clean ninth inning to preserve a one-run win against Arizona. He started as normal on Sunday against the Padres, and then, after two days’ rest, he locked down another one-inning save against the Cubs.

Alcantara is as pure a starter as you’ll ever find. His first eight major league appearances came out of the bullpen for the Cardinals in 2017. (I sometimes forget that the Marlins got Alcantara and Zac Gallen in the same trade.) It was nine years and 201 big league starts before Alcantara made another relief appearance. Read the rest of this entry »

While I was on vacation last month, the Miami Marlins axed their pro scouting department. They’re just the latest team to do so: Per recent reporting from Yahoo Sports’ Jake Mintz, four teams have no pro scouts and another five have four or fewer on staff, though the Nats are hiring, and as Jake notes, exact roles and titles can vary team to team.

I should be up front about my perspective: I worked as a pro scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates for four years. It was a great experience and I saw firsthand how scouts can add value to a front office, even one with strong analytical chops. While it’s gutting any time friends or former colleagues lose their jobs, I’m both frustrated and baffled when orgs choose to cut, or severely curtail, their entire department. For mediocre middle reliever money, clubs can have a team of expert player evaluators provide information that statistical and acquisition models can’t produce, and challenge some of the conclusions they can. In an era where teams increasingly rely on (similar) data to build their models and evaluate talent, scouting should be more important, not less.

Given the state of the pro scouting landscape, that’s clearly not an intuitive conclusion. In part, that’s because the scouting profession doesn’t look the same as it did 20 years ago: Statcast, TrackMan, and other tools have reshaped the role and, in some places, taken a bit of the guesswork out of the job. Some scouts still primarily evaluate in the park but many others primarily scout on video, much like Eric and I do here at FanGraphs. As with the radar gun a generation ago, in my view, these tools are both helpful for scouts and not nearly sufficient to replace them. While modern scouts must be more data literate than their forebears, sharp eyes and sound information-gathering skills remain the most critical tools of the trade. Holistic evaluation is the best way to analyze players, and scouts who can blend analytical fluency with strong visual evaluations are worth their weight in gold. Even in a world with robust data, it’s immensely valuable to have scouts who can project which players will under- or over-perform their statistical projections. To help bolster that conviction, let’s look at some of the specific ways scouts help big league clubs. Read the rest of this entry »

Approaching the end of a 2026 season that didn’t match his stratospheric standards, Paul Skenes attributed some of his problems this year with velocity to his participation in the World Baseball Classic.

Usually, that time of year, you’re kind of ramping up and it’s a little bit slow. You can kind of get onto the slope and find your body. One live [batting practice], you’re topping at 97 [mph], and then the next you’re 98, 99. And that wasn’t the case this year. Looking back, I don’t think that really helped.

This notion from Skenes did not come out of nowhere. A wide assortment of people has addressed this question on some level. Our very own Michael Baumann touched on it in 2023, though he was looking more at teams as a whole than players.

I’m a natural skeptic when it comes to claims of causation, which tend to be fueled by anecdote. From the supposed sophomore slump to the suspected swing-ruining impact of the Home Run Derby, there’s a lot of loosey-goosey if-then statements going around. But as these things go, the theory that WBC participation in a given year negatively affects player performance in the corresponding campaign has a lot of plausibility. The WBC is a very different environment than typical spring training games, and it comes at a time when players are normally focused on getting ready for the regular season. It doesn’t sound crazy to think these changes in preparation have some kind of deleterious effect on a player. However, we should test these things. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of baseball’s awards races are formalities this year. The favorites are clear, and deservedly so. Pete Crow-Armstrong is having one of the greatest seasons of the 21st century. Jacob Misiorowski is a closer throwing starter innings. Bobby Witt Jr. has been terrific, but Yordan Alvarez is unsolvable. Cam Schlittler has more fastballs than batters have answers. Kevin McGonigle is a phenom. But I’m most interested in the sixth major race: National League Rookie of the Year. The gambling odds would tell you that it too is settled, with Sal Stewart the prohibitive favorite. But if I had a vote this year, I’d cast it for JJ Wetherholt, and I want to explain myself because I think this race provides a fascinating look into old school versus new school baseball statistics, and how both have blind spots.

Before we get into my argument, let’s get a few disclaimers out of the way. I am not voting for NL Rookie of the Year. I’m not a member of the BBWAA, even. I haven’t placed any wagers on NL ROY, or on any awards, or on anything even peripherally related to this. I was a Cardinals fan before I started working in baseball, but that has faded away. I have a lot of fond memories of Ozzie Smith, but I’m a fan of the sport now, not a team, and I’ve watched more Reds games than Cardinals games this year because I love watching Elly De La Cruz play. No one in the world is truly unbiased, but I don’t have a horse in this race in any meaningful way.

With that out of the way, let’s get down to brass tacks. The two leading candidates for the award are Stewart and Wetherholt, with Carson Benge a distant-enough third according to the odds that I’m largely leaving him out of the discussion, though he’ll make some cameos. Stewart’s résumé revolves around his thunderous bat. He’s batting .266/.333/.465, with 32 homers and a gaudy 110 RBI. Even in an offense-friendly home park, that’s good for a 115 wRC+, 15th-best among qualifying first basemen, and of course the RBI total is better than that. He’s played so-so defense at first – not that I care much about that in award voting – and has accrued 2.2 WAR per our calculation of the statistic. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I jumped the gun by a year. Last year, I got excited that the Homerless Qualifier Club might be reopening. Nick Allen was playing every day for the Braves, and Nick Allen’s approach to impacting the baseball is sort of like Atticus Finch’s approach to parenting: It’s composed almost entirely of occasional, gentle nudges in the right direction. If Allen could just get enough plate appearances, I figured, he’d qualify for the batting title without a single home run to his name, making him just the second new member since 2012. The problem was that Allen didn’t just lack punch; he couldn’t get on base at all. The Braves batted him last and pinch-hit for him every chance they got, then gave his spot to waiver wire pickup Ha-Seong Kim. Allen never homered, but he ended up 86 plate appearances short of qualifying. This year is different. This year it’s in the bag. Chandler Simpson has already qualified for the batting title, and he is about to finish the season without a single home run.

As was the case for Allen, the reason that the Homerless Qualifier Club has been closed for business for so long is that it’s really hard for a regular baseball player to be playable without any power whatsoever. Allen’s a defensive specialist whose game has never been built around the home run ball, but he still needs some base level of power to keep his offense from sinking the entire profile. Think of your favorite contact hitter – Luis Arraez, Steven Kwan, Nico Hoerner – these guys are much better at avoiding strikeouts than Allen, and they still hit the ball hard enough to rack up a bunch of doubles and at least a handful of home runs a year. Meager though it is, if that power production were to disappear, their offense would simply be too much of a deficit to overcome. They’d stop getting enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title. That’s why the pipeline has dried up.

This season, Allen has just 161 plate appearances with the Astros, but he’s betrayed us to the tune of a whopping three home runs. Stretch that over 500 plate appearances and he’s nearly in double digits. My point is that although these are extreme examples of contact hitters, they still have plenty in common with the rest of the league. They are still looking to drive the ball, at the very least, over the infield. Simpson may as well be playing a different sport. Read the rest of this entry »

Back from vacation, I returned to the field Monday for an Instructional League game between the Athletics and Rockies. How is the Instructional League different from the Bridge League, which I’ve covered previously? Both are unofficial leagues with a scrimmage-style setting, but “Instructs” take place after the rest of the minor league schedule has concluded, and typically includes a handful of select players from the various affiliates that the parent club wants to see more of, and maybe the best couple of guys from each org’s DSL squad. So, Bridge League (which takes place after the Draft and Complex League seasons are over but before the rest of the minors are done) features rookie-level players, new draftees, and rehabbers, while Instructional League has more select talent from several different minor league levels, and often includes Arizona Fall Leaguers who are getting ramped up for their looming slate. There isn’t the same kind of internal team video or shared data for this window as there is for regular season affiliated ball, so this makes Instructs particularly useful to see in person. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees had to make do without Aaron Judge for all of June, July and August due to a stress fracture in his right first rib. With the days on the calendar dwindling and the AL East title still in play — which is no longer the case after the Rays clinched on Tuesday night — Judge bypassed a rehab assignment, but once he returned, he played in just seven games before landing back on the injured list due to a right calf strain. Both the slugger and the team took great pains to avoid discussing the injury’s specificity and timeline for recovery until Tuesday, when manager Aaron Boone revealed that Judge has a “moderate grade” strain, received a platelet-poor plasma injection, and isn’t expected to be available for the team’s Wild Card Series rematch against the Red Sox.

While deadline acquisition Heliot Ramos has heated up after a very slow start to his pinstriped career, the Yankees’ right field situation is one of the more glaring potential trouble spots among American League contenders. As the playoffs approach, teams no longer have a chance to upgrade from outside their organizations and instead must make do with the talent on hand. What follows here is a look at the most vulnerable teams at each position — something of a companion to my annual pre-deadline Replacement Level Killers series, with a focus on the teams that still have a chance to make the playoffs. For the AL, that means the Rays, Yankees, and Red Sox — all of whom have clinched spots — plus the Guardians, White Sox, Rangers, and Astros, who are battling for the other two division titles and the third Wild Card spot. I’ve taken the Blue Jays out of consideration, as their Playoff Odds now start with a zero in front of the decimal. While full-season performances play a significant part here, I’m more concerned with who’s worst now, with injuries and adjustments in mind. Each position has a headliner (or two, if it’s a job share), but at several positions, I’ve noted other teams with concerns. A companion National League piece will follow. Read the rest of this entry »

Royalty is all about taking a select few and placing them upon a pedestal for adoration and worship by the faceless masses. And often, when a team wins a title, it happens as a result of star players doing what star players do — making big plays at pivotal moments and swaying outcomes with jaw-dropping feats. But as the championship series of the WPBL’s inaugural season progressed from one game to the next, the stories behind each result weren’t written by the team captains or the players with the most impressive regular-season stats. Rather, a varied cast of unlikely heroes took the stage each night and managed to put on a unique rendition of a show we’ve all seen dozens of times before. We’re all familiar with how a playoff series typically unfolds, and we’ve even seen how it’s gone when these exact teams faced one another during the regular season. And yet, a band of unlikely heroes with representation from both the Los Angeles Queens and the San Francisco Firebells came together to offer us something completely unexpected.

Below we’ll walk through the five-act play that was the WPBL’s championship series, which went the full five games and which the Queens ultimately won, and highlight the unlikely heroes from each game by describing what they did and why their accomplishments were so improbable.

Game 1: Queens 7, Firebells 6

Because their first-round series with the Heights went the full three games, the Queens had just one day off prior to Game 1 of the championship series on Wednesday. Comparatively, the Firebells’ last game was the previous Friday, since their series against the Hunters began one day prior to Queens-Heights and San Francisco dispatched of Boston in a two-game sweep. Michelle Roche — the Queens’ most effective starter — threw 3 1/3 innings in Game 3 against the Heights, and Ayami Sato — their only other pitcher with more than one start during the regular season — threw two innings in Game 3 after covering three innings in Game 2. Out of necessity, Game 1 was a bullpen game for Los Angeles, while the Firebells got to line up their optimal rotation, which meant no. 1 starter Kelsie Whitmore took the ball for San Francisco in the series opener. Read the rest of this entry »

When Aaron Judge is healthy, he’s the most dangerous hitter in baseball. Sometimes I get alarmed at how uncontroversial a statement that is; ours is a sport that so frequently humiliates those who make such sweeping, unequivocal judgments as those.

But the empirical evidence is what it is. Judge has played 150 or more games in a season four times in his career. In those four seasons, he’s led all position players in WAR four times and led the league in wRC+ three times. He’s been named AL MVP three times and finished second once, ahead of some real doozies: Cal Raleigh’s 60-homer year, Bobby Witt Jr.’s 10.5-WAR campaign in 2024, Shohei Ohtani’s best pitching season — in fact, a healthy Judge is the only thing that’s ever trumped a healthy Ohtani in an MVP race.

So again, it’s not uncontroversial to say that when Judge is healthy he’s the best hitter in the world. He has not, however, always been healthy. Least of all this season, when he missed three months with a broken rib. And now, the single-season AL home run king is back on the IL with a calf strain. The timing could not be worse. Read the rest of this entry »