The Tigers didn’t wait long. On Monday, the team announced that starter Reese Olson would miss the rest of the season (and possibly the postseason) with a right shoulder strain, and that same day, Detroit filled Olson’s rotation spot by swinging a trade within the division for Minnesota right-hander Chris Paddack. The full deal brought Paddack and reliever Randy Dobnak to the Tigers in exchange for 19-year-old catching prospect Enrique Jimenez. The trade represented an attempt to stabilize an increasingly banged-up Detroit rotation for an increasingly important stretch run. For the Twins, the move kicked off what has the potential to be a significant sell-off.

We’ll start with the Twins side. “It’s just crazy how fast it can turn around,” Paddack told Dan Hayes of The Athletic, who initially reported news of the deal along with Ken Rosenthal. “World just got twisted upside down, to say the least. It stinks. This business is out of our control sometimes. I was really pulling for us, as a Twin. I was hoping we would make some moves and go get that Wild Card spot. I’m excited for this new opportunity with a new team.” It’s not immediately clear who will take Paddack’s spot in the Minnesota rotation. The Twins have a bullpen game planned for today. Paddack will start tomorrow, and he’s lined up to face his old squad when the Tigers and Twins face off a week from today. The Twins broadcast made a point of circling the date on the calendar during last night’s game. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of chatter about surplus value around these parts in recent days. As Ben Clemens wrote last week, surplus value informs a large part of a given player’s appeal as a trade target. Count up all the projected WAR remaining on a player’s deal, multiply it by the price of a single win, subtract the remaining cost of the contract, and what’s left over is an estimate of the player’s surplus value. Anything less than zero, and the contract can be considered underwater; if a contract is underwater, a team seeking to offload that player would expect to receive nothing of value in a trade return.

A couple of months back, my assumption was that Mitch Keller’s contract was ever-so-slightly underwater. The right-hander inked a five-year, $77 million extension in February of 2024. His first year on that deal was thoroughly mediocre: He made nearly every start, but posted a so-so 4.25 ERA/4.08 FIP. Over the two years preceding the deal, it was much of the same. His 4.13 ERA between 2022 and 2024 ranked 68th out of 106 pitchers with at least 300 innings pitched; his 3.92 FIP ranked 51st. The strikeout and walk rates were nearly dead-on league average.

Is a roughly 2-WAR starter worth tens of millions of guaranteed dollars? Your mileage may vary. Patrick Corbin went to the Rangers for $1.1 million after posting a 1.8-WAR season last year. Andrew Heaney got two years and $25 million after delivering 2.2 WAR. Nick Pivetta, notably younger than both of those guys but still three years older than Keller, signed with the Padres for four years and $55 million. If Keller had hit the open market after the 2024 season, when he put up 2.2 WAR in 31 starts (178 innings), I’d imagine he would have received a contract similar to what Pivetta earned after his 2.0 WAR and 145 2/3 innings. Perhaps Keller’s deal wasn’t terrible, but it also wasn’t something teams would be dying to get on their books.

But now it’s the peak of trade deadline season, and the 29-year-old Keller is a hot commodity. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported last Tuesday that the Blue Jays are in on Keller. That’s in addition to reported interest from the Cubs, Mets and Yankees. Nearly half of the most serious World Series contenders are in on the Keller sweepstakes, suggesting that contract is now perceived as having surplus value. Perhaps this has something to do with the haggard state of these teams’ rotations, but I’m inclined to believe that isn’t the entire reason. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, we launched our new crowdsourced trade value tool, which aggregated responses to simple “Which of these two players do you prefer?” questions to create a composite trade value ranking across our readership. With your help, we logged nearly 900,000 matchups – 897,035, to be precise. Now that the Trade Value Series is in the books, it’s time to see how the broader FanGraphs audience lined everyone up. Today, I’ll walk you through how to access and interpret your results, which can be found here, and share a few interesting tidbits about the places where the crowd and I agreed or differed.

Let’s start with the exercise itself. We sampled up to 500 results from each user’s set of submissions and threw them all into one big group of matchups. We ordered those matchups randomly, then used Elo ratings to turn the matchups into an ordered list. Then we redid the random ordering a total of 100 times and averaged the results, which got rid of Elo’s bias towards more recent matchups. That created a list of the crowd’s aggregate preferences. When you open the above link, the first thing you’ll see is your own results in full. I, for example, came pretty close to matching my official list:

Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I hear the name Robbie Ray, I think about the bar scene from 2002’s Sweet Home Alabama, where Reese Witherspoon’s character Melanie drunkenly stumbles up to an old friend as he’s about to attempt a pool shot. Through a fit of giggles she says, “Bobby Ray! Don’t blow this one, OK?”

Most recently, this happened when I read that Robbie Ray had been named to the National League All-Star team. Because Robbie Ray has not been blowing it this season. In fact, he’s been posting numbers not far off the pace from his 2021 Cy Young season. But despite the Cy Young on his résumé, I probably think about Bobby Ray more often than Robbie Ray, because Robbie followed up his award-winning performance with a merely average 2022, and then spent much of 2023 and 2024 on the IL. Overall, Ray’s career has been a bit of an up-and-down journey, and if we’re comparing career arcs to character arcs, Ray’s is more akin to Melanie’s than Bobby Ray’s, despite the similar name.

Dropping in on Ray’s 2021 season is roughly equivalent to where we drop in on Melanie Carmichael at the beginning of Sweet Home Alabama. Melanie (whose real last name is Smooter, but she chose to adopt a more sophisticated persona after leaving Alabama for the big city) is a fashion designer fresh off a successful debut at New York Fashion Week and newly engaged to the mayor’s son (Patrick Dempsey). Melanie has accumulated career accolades and social status, just as Ray spent his 2021 season reeling in award votes and leveling up his status as a starting pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s pretty unusual, three days before the trade deadline, to have a different news story rocking the baseball world. But these are unusual times.

On Monday, Major League Baseball placed Cleveland Guardians closer Emmanuel Clase on non-disciplinary paid leave through August 31, pending the results of a sports betting investigation. As the name suggests, Clase will still draw a check, and can still have contact with the organization, but for the next five weeks, he is persona non grata at major league facilities. Clase’s teammate, Luis Ortiz, has been on leave under the same designation since July 3, and is slated to come off leave the same day as Clase.

This is the latest in a series of embarrassing gambling-related scandals for baseball in general and MLB in particular. But with the exception of the Ippei Mizuhara Affair, in which Shohei Ohtani was involved but never accused of wrongdoing, all the players involved had been (at the risk of sounding impolite) relative unknowns. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a few weeks since our last run of the power rankings, and a lot has happened since then. Teams we thought of as contenders are suddenly out of the playoff picture, and the buyers and sellers ahead of this week’s trade deadline are quickly sorting themselves out.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula. Read the rest of this entry »

“All in all, we got good news today,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone told reporters on Saturday. “I think all of us kind of feared the worst.” On Sunday, the good news Boone was referring to became official. The scuffling Yankees placed Aaron Judge on the 10-day injured list with a flexor strain in his right elbow, but not a torn UCL. Judge underwent an MRI on Saturday, and based on reports that the Yankees think Judge has a chance to miss only the minimum 10 days, it seems safe to assume that the imaging revealed only a minor strain. He has received a platelet-rich plasma injection and won’t throw for 10 days to two weeks. Crucially, returning after the minimum would also allow Judge to be back by the time of his bobblehead day on August 13. The Yankees also traded for utility player Amed Rosario on Sunday, but we’ll cover that move after addressing the news about Judge.

Concern about the elbow arose last Tuesday, when Judge was noticed grimacing after throwing the ball in to the infield. The right fielder did his best to tamp down concerns, telling reporters, “I make facial expressions all the time,” in his characteristic deadpan. He also downplayed the injury to the organization, trying to push off calls for an MRI. “You never want to go in the tube,” he said. But he DH’d on Wednesday and exhibited more discomfort on Friday. “Throwing is the main concern,” Judge said on Saturday. “Hitting happens too quick, and it’s not really the motion that I felt anything. I think the muscle that hurts is the muscle used to grip, so there might be some issues with that.” Over his past nine games, he’s batting .143 with a 35 wRC+. That stretch dropped his best-in-baseball 220 wRC+ all the way down to a still-best-in-baseball 208. According to Jon Heyman of the New York Post, the absolute best-case scenario is that Judge returns after 10 days, then needs just 10 days at DH before getting back to right field. Read the rest of this entry »

The trade deadline is nearing, and while we’ve had some recent activity — Josh Naylor is a Mariner! Ryan McMahon and Amed Rosario are Yankees! — the general environment can be best described as “peaceful.” If this is anything like past years, however, that’s about to change as teams face up to their Artificially Designed Roster Construction Deadline anxiety. And while we don’t know exactly what will happen — and if you do, you should probably use that time machine for purposes better fit to benefit humanity — it doesn’t mean that we can’t do some fantasy tradecrafting. As usual, I’ve conjured up some possible trade scenarios, trying to construct packages that are at least within the realm of plausibility. So get out your Hugwatch foam finger, read along, and maybe add your own ideas in the comments section!

For each player in the high minors or the major leagues, I’ve included their post-2025 projections while under contract — you can find their rest-of-2025 projections on their player pages. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Hays is having a productive-when-healthy season with the Cincinnati Reds. The 30-year-old outfielder has missed time with a calf strain, a hamstring strain, and a foot contusion, but he’s also slashed .282/.338/.510 with 10 home runs in 228 plate appearances. Moreover, his 128 wRC+ and .360 wOBA are both second on the team (behind Elly De La Cruz) among those with at least 140 PAs.

His résumé is that of a solid hitter. From 2021-2023— his first full seasons in the majors — Hays had 97 doubles and 54 home runs, as well as a wRC+ ranging between 106 and 111. Those three seasons were spent with the Baltimore Orioles, who subsequently swapped him to the Philadelphia Phillies in exchange for Seranthony Domínguez and Cristian Pache a few days before last July’s trade deadline. Hays’s 2024 campaign was the worst of his career. Hampered by injuries and illness — a kidney infection proved most problematic — he had a 97 wRC+ while playing in just 85 games. The Reds then inked him to a free agent contract over the winter,

Which brings us to the crux of this column’s lead item: the reasons behind the success he’s currently having.

“Consistency is probably the biggest thing,” Hays told me. “There’s not always an adjustment to be made. Sometimes it’s just the game [and] you’re being pitched tough. I don’t want to be altering too much of what I do well. In the past, I would sometimes pay too much attention to what the pitcher was doing and try to adjust to that. Staying strong to my strengths — locking in on those strengths — is going to help me over the course of 162 [games].” Read the rest of this entry »

Nick Allen is definitely going to show up on my FanGraphs Walk-Off page. I’ve checked in on him a lot over the last month, but of the 1,664 stats on his player page (yes, I counted them all), I’ve really only been paying attention to one number. I just want to know how many plate appearances Allen has. The answer is 304, and that won’t do.

A month ago, I wrote about homerless qualifiers, the all-but-extinct subset of players who come to the plate often enough to qualify for the batting title – a minimum of 3.1 plate appearances per team game, or 502 over a 162-game season – without hitting even a single home run. At the time, Xavier Edwards was the only homerless qualifier left, but I didn’t believe in him – which is to say that I did believe he had the capacity to hit a home run. He did just that on July 12, blasting a 97.8-mph wall-scraper off Scott Blewett:

Read the rest of this entry »