With just a week of play left before the All-Star break, the playoff pictures in both leagues still look crowded. That should make for a particularly interesting trade deadline. There aren’t many definite sellers, and the two weeks of games after the midseason break could have a huge impact on who is buying and who might be looking to reset for next year.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format 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 between now and October, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise remains reactive to hot streaks and cold snaps. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab.

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 »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

May 15
Derek Jr. has another evening of gas trouble. She wakes up after my wife and I eat dinner, then spends 90 minutes alternately docile and racked by quick bouts of intense, outwardly inexplicable pain. It’s gone by 10 PM, and as I finish feeding her, we catch the end of the Phillies-Pirates game, then switch over to Giants-A’s. We are lucky enough to witness a rare sighting: Luis Arraez hitting a home run. Jeffrey Springs leaves an 81-mph changeup belt high on the inner half, and Arraez abandons his usual stay-back-as-long-as-possible-and-slap-it-the-other-way approach. He turns on the ball with a ferocious uppercut:

Usually, this is one of my very favorite things to witness: Arraez realizing mid-pitch that there is a ball he can absolutely pummel, and turning into a ferocious slugger all of a sudden. His hands are lightning quick. I wish I had a millisecond-by-millisecond breakdown of exactly what is going through his head leading up to this swing decision. What is it exactly that he sees, and what is it exactly that tells him, “Hey man, you know how you go up to the plate and look to do the exact same thing every single time? Well, we’re throwing that out the window right now. Friggin’ rip it.” I’ll always wonder what kind of hitter he’d be if he came up to the plate intending to do damage. Could he make it work? Might he be even better?

She just tooted. I’m gonna try to go to sleep. [So, uh, I was dictating this entry on my phone and my wife walked in, and I guess I forgot to turn off the speech-to-text function. Let’s just get back to Arraez.]

This time, however, I’m a little bit bummed. Last year, I started tracking something I call homerless qualifiers. A homerless qualifier is a player who qualifies for the batting title, but doesn’t hit a single home run all season long. It’s a really tough needle to thread, being good enough to merit 500 plate appearances without even a single homer, and it’s increasingly rare. However, with Arraez playing in San Francisco, I thought we had a great chance to see it. Power isn’t a part of his game anyway, and he should be able to pile up singles in that big park. His homers only ever come on balls like this one, where he turns and rips it down the line, and Oracle Park doesn’t reward that kind of behavior for all but the strongest left-handed sluggers. I figured it might discourage Arraez from turning on the ball entirely. But Sacramento is a different story, apparently. I guess now we’ll have to pin our hopes for a homerless qualifier on… Fernando Tatis Jr.?

May 15
Derek Jr. only woke up once last night. My wife and I got something like seven hours of sleep. Seven hours! We are refreshed. We are renewed. We are reborn. Once Derek Jr. finishes her breakfast, we throw her into the stroller and head out to have a morning. It’s a beautiful sunny day. We pick up coffees and hit the park. It turns out the Brooklyn Half marathon is today. It’s in full swing, and as we approach the park, we can hear the cheers of the spectators from across Bartel-Pritchard Square (which is, in fact, a traffic circle and not a square at all). The jogging loop that circles the park is jam-packed with runners. In order to actually enter the main part of the park, we have to wait on the sidewalk for a few minutes along with all the spectators cheering on their half-marathoning friends. Finally, I see an opening. I turn to my wife and tell her to follow very close, then I charge through the gap, pushing the stroller ahead of me like a fullback on Supermarket Sweep.

We rattle the stroller down the walking path and settle on some benches with a good view of the morning’s Little League action. It turns out it’s picture day. Team after team masses on our right, poses for their photos, then disperses. I can only imagine the chaos all these hundreds of little kids caused as they tried to weave through the packed half marathon traffic.

On the grass right in front of us is a team of six- or seven-year-olds in green uniforms. Their game today must be scheduled awkwardly in relation to their team photo, too close to leave and then meet back at the field later, but too far off to do anything other than sit around waiting. With time to kill, their coach gets a drill going. The players line up in single file, he rolls the one in front an unbelievably slow grounder, and the player fields it and throws it back to the coach. But again, these are six- or seven-year-olds. Not one of them actually fields the ball cleanly. Not one of them throws a catchable ball back to the coach. He is completely unperturbed, waiting patiently as each player chases down their ball and then not minding a bit when it’s his turn to chase down each wild throw. I’m antsy just watching it, but he has the patience of a saint.

The real action is on Field 1, to our left. It’s a game between 10-year-olds, the Red team against the Blue team. As Derek Jr. snoozes and my wife and I chat, I keep a loose eye on the game. The first ball in play is a routine fly to left field, but again, these are 10-year-olds. The Blue left fielder warbles unsteadily toward the approximate landing spot of the ball, his glove hand already reaching up to the sky. The hang time can’t be more than two and a half seconds, but it stretches out for an eternity. You can feel every single person at the field — players, coaches, parents, even the bored siblings — holding their breath and wondering whether this kid can actually do the impossible and catch a baseball. It’s high drama at 8:45 AM on a Saturday, and he nails it. He nails it! The ball smacks into his mitt and sticks, and the crowd goes wild. F7.

We only see two more balls that even make it into the outfield, both off the bat of some enormous kid on the Blue team. Because the ball rarely even makes it out there, the outfielders are only stationed a few feet onto the outfield grass, but twice, this kid smacks the ball a good 40 feet over the head of the Red left fielder. Both times, it rolls directly into a picnic, and both times, this poor kid has to navigate snacks and blankets in order to retrieve it. By the time the world’s slowest relay begins, the giant Blue kid has already scored and is back on his bench panting.

We have a great time on the benches. Derek Jr. wakes up happy, and we feed her and play with her and snap a million pictures.

We need to change a couple diapers on the park benches. It’s the first time we’ve done so in public, and it turns out that they’re angled more steeply than we realized, but once we figure out how to keep our baby from rolling off the back, it goes just fine. And as it turns out, her poopy diapers aren’t even the most disgusting thing in the vicinity. After a while, an old man takes a seat on the last bench in the row, two down from us. He’s wearing a bucket hat, a button-up, khaki shorts, and sandals. Have I painted the picture? He looks exactly how you’d expect a kindly older gentleman who spends his Saturdays enjoying the fresh air in the park to look. Then he removes the sandals and starts clipping his toenails.

It is so loud. It is so weird. And it takes him so, so long. I have lived here for my entire adult life and I assure you that I have seen some stuff, but I’m ready to call it. This is the grossest thing I have seen in New York City. The other gross things I’ve seen have always been, at least to some extent, accidents. Sometimes nature calls at an inopportune moment. Sometimes nature causes a gigantic rat to drop dead on the sidewalk directly in front of your front door. But this man left the house with clippers in his pocket. This is a premeditated act of domestic terrorism, on picture day of all days. We move all the way down to the farthest bench. It is still loud.

Back home, Derek Jr. goes down for a nap, and I flip on the Orioles-Nationals game. The first thing I notice is that the billboards behind home plate at Nationals Park are advertising a dumpster company. Given the way the Nats have played over the past five seasons, it’s maybe a tad on the nose:

Then the billboards get weirder. Adley Rutschman’s gold catching helmet perfectly matches the Bet MGM ad that’s behind home plate in the bottom of the seventh inning. Actually, the Bet MGM ad isn’t behind the plate. It’s digitally superimposed over the physical ad behind the plate, which is for a new motion sickness drug. Also, it’s digitally superimposed very shoddily.

The ball blinks and glitches the whole way to the plate. Also blinking on and off the screen are the bat, the sliding mitt in the batter’s back pocket, and even the pitcher’s face. It’s disorienting to watch, but I suppose it’s impressive that someone found a way to make gambling ads even less palatable. Maybe this is all just an elaborate ploy to sell more of that anti-nausea medication. I miss the dumpster ads:

Will Warren has come a long way since the New York Yankees selected him in the eighth round of the 2021 draft out of Southeastern Louisiana University. He has also made big strides since he was first featured here at FanGraphs following a 2022 season that saw him reach Double-A. Discovering that his four-seam fastball is a viable weapon is a big reason why. When I interviewed Warren four years ago, his preferred offerings were a sweeper and one-seam sinker.

His numbers in the current campaign are rock solid. Building on a 2025 first full big league season in which he went 9-8 with a 4.44 ERA, the 27-year-old right-hander has toed the rubber 17 times to the tune of a 3.73 ERA and a 3.57 FIP over 89 1/3 innings. Further establishing himself in the Yankees’ starting rotation, he counts seven wins among his 10 decisions.

How and why did Warren go from a hurler who relied heavily on a sinker-sweeper combination to one who aggressively attacks batters with a 93.7-mph four-seamer? Read the rest of this entry »

Recent Sunday Notes columns have included soccer segments with Jake Burger (Tottenham Hotspur) and Tommy Kahnle (Bayern Munich) discussing their respective allegiances, as well as their thoughts on the World Cup. This week we’ll hear from Sean Doolittle. The Washington Nationals’ assistant pitching coach is a devoted fan of Leeds United.

“It really kind of took off in 2020,” explained Doolittle, who prior to joining the coaching ranks made 463 relief appearances while playing for four teams, primarily Oakland and Washington, from 2012-2022. “Harvey Sharman, our director of medical services — the head of our training staff group [with the Nationals] — was a “physio” at Leeds for 15 years before he came to the states. I learned a lot about the club from him. Before that I was more of a casual soccer fan, playing a lot of FIFA on Xbox.

“They were in the Championship,” continued Doolittle, referring to England’s second-tier league. “They started up before us after the shutdown, and I remember watching those games and kind of jumping on the bandwagon. They won and got promoted to the Premier League. I was hooked after that. It’s since been an up-and-down couple of years, but last season [a mid-table finish] was really fun.”

Doolittle told me that his Leeds allegiance “isn’t super-influencing” the way he has been watching the World Cup, although he is very much aware of how the team’s players — four in all — have been faring on the sport’s biggest stage. He cited how Gabriel Gudmundsson (Sweden), Ao Tanaka (Japan), and Crysencio Summerville (Netherlands) have all seen their countries eliminated, while Brenden Aaronson still has a chance to hoist a trophy with Team USA. Read the rest of this entry »

It has not been a good season for Trea Turner. The two-time batting champion is in the midst of a career-worst season at the plate, hitting for a 79 wRC+ (.239/.287/.368) even after homering in three straight games, including a three-run shot off Pirates ace Paul Skenes on Wednesday night. What’s more, after breaking a streak of three straight below-average seasons at shortstop according to both Defensive Runs Saved and Fielding Run Value last year, he’s not only back in the red, but is tied for last at the position with -8 DRS, while being tied for fifth-worst with -5 FRV. All of which once again marks Turner as a fairly typical Phillies player.

Indeed, through ups and downs that have included four postseason appearances, one trip to the World Series, and two in-season managerial firings, one constant of the Dave Dombrowski era of Phillies baseball has been lousy defense. Since the start of the 2021 season, the team is 100 runs below average according to FRV (the majors’ seventh-lowest mark) and 127 below average according to DRS (fifth-lowest). It hasn’t stopped the Phillies from being competitive — or highly entertaining — though it may have cost them seeding here and there, to say nothing of the way last year’s Division Series against the Dodgers ended. But given the choice between good hitters with questionable gloves and slick fielders with subpar bats, the team has generally gone for the offensive boost and lived or died with the consequences.

Thus it was hardly a surprise that the Phillies ranked second-to-last in my recent aggregation of team defensive metrics, even with right fielder Nick Castellanos — who contributed -41 DRS and -45 FRV from 2022–25 before being released in February — no longer on the team, and Kyle Schwarber more or less a full-time designated hitter. The Phillies’ .672 Defensive Efficiency, the rate at which a team turns batted balls into outs, is lower than all but the Rockies (.669), while their -29 DRS is lower than all but the Twins’ -32. Read the rest of this entry »

After wandering for years, Jake Bauers has found himself in Milwaukee as one of the top hitters of 2026.

I first learned about Bauers because of a stat I made up sometime in 2019, around when Baseball Savant began publishing the attack region perspective of the strike zone. Rather than labeling pitches as simply in or out of the zone, Savant drew the distinction between meatballs, borderline strikes, and various distances beyond. Analysts had made similar observations for as long as PITCHf/x had been around, of course, but this was the first time (to my knowledge) the data was easily searchable, sortable, and available to download. No longer was the concept of plate discipline limited to walks and strikeouts, or even simple chase rate, but we could now look at which players were actually swinging at the right pitches within the zone, too.

At a high level, batters should only swing at pitches in the heart region. At a more granular level, this isn’t entirely true, as things like the count, situation, and swing profile change the calculus from pitch to pitch. But as a general rule, the players who swing at the right pitches are the ones who swing at heart pitches and lay off everything else. This gives us some fairly simple math: Read the rest of this entry »

Today at FanGraphs, we’re introducing an updated approach to prospect valuation. You can read the announcement here, and also see the new Farm System Rankings for 2026 on The Board. This post is a detailed methodological examination of how we’ve produced our new estimates. It goes over each step of the process in order, and concludes with a sensitivity analysis. If you’re interested in the broad strokes of our new approach, the introductory post will likely suffice. But if you want to see how the sausage is made, read on.

Prospect Classes
We began with Baseball America’s annual Top 100 prospect lists for each year from 2005-2016, plus FanGraphs’ lists for 2017 and 2018. The BA lists serve as a publicly accessible bridge to the current era of FanGraphs prospect writing, and provide a nice through line with Craig Edwards’ earlier research. We took all instances of a prospect being ranked, including duplicates of the same prospect in multiple years. We converted those ordinal rankings into Future Value grades using a two-step process. First, we separated the rankings into pitchers and hitters and created two separate ordinal lists for each year. Second, we adjusted those ordinal rankings between years by a regressed factor based on that class’ major league production. This allowed us to differentiate between classes – without some type of delineation between years, every top overall hitter would receive the same grade, which is contrary to the way we grade prospects.

This method introduces some potential bias. Judging prospects based on how they turned out inherently brings some information from the future into the mix. We decided that this was the best possible way to systematically introduce varying year-over-year quality to an otherwise ordinal-only set of values, and that it also did a good job of replicating the way that grades might have actually been assigned in the past. The top pitching prospect on the 2010 list was Stephen Strasburg. The top pitching prospect on the 2011 list was Julio Teheran. It’s important to differentiate between the likely grade that they would have received. There’s some volatility in relative value assignment at the very top end of the scale based on this methodology, which is addressed in the sensitivity analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Seven years ago, Craig Edwards published a landmark study on prospect valuation. Craig’s work built on previous studies by Victor Wang, Scott McKinney, Kevin Creagh, Steve DiMiceli, and our own Jeff Zimmerman, as well as a few prior ad hoc attempts here at FanGraphs; subsequent work on the subject was done by the team at Driveline Baseball. These studies have been hugely important both for FanGraphs’ own evaluation of prospects — among other things, Craig’s work has helped to feed the Farm System Rankings over on The Board — and for the broader public study of the minor leagues.

The reasoning behind these studies is clear and simple. If you want to evaluate a prospect-for-big-leaguer trade, you’ll need to know the expected value of the prospect in the trade. If you want to evaluate how much help is waiting in a given team’s farm system, a quantitative assessment of the talent there is necessary. Even if you’re just wondering how likely your team is to find the next big thing, again, you’ll need some type of framework to understand how often that’s happened in the past.

The previous studies of prospect valuation are still excellent, but they’re all very much of their time. Since Craig published his study in November 2018, the league has changed significantly. The COVID-abbreviated 2020 season changed minor league timelines across the board. The league contracted the number of minor league franchises significantly in 2021. A new CBA, signed before the 2022 season, changed compensation structures and competitive balance tax levels, and introduced the Prospect Promotion Incentive. The cost of a win in free agency has skyrocketed; league-wide payrolls are up more than 30%, and free agent salaries are up by more than that. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper started out as a catcher. By the time he was old enough to drive, though, everyone knew his catching days were numbered. When the Nationals drafted him in 2010, they stamped that nonsense out, because no one who can mash like Bryce Harper is allowed to waste their energy and their knees behind the dish. Harper moved to the outfield, and those of us who were there in 2012 will recall that for a short while, he was fantastic out there. He played with his hair on fire, he had a rifle arm that slotted in nicely alongside Rick Ankiel’s cannon, and in those first couple years before Statcast appeared, he was downright fast. It didn’t last too long, though. Harper decided to beef up, arriving in Florida each spring with more and more muscle mass and less and less footspeed. Also, he ran into walls a lot. For most of his career, Harper was a poor outfielder, and then in 2023, he returned from Tommy John surgery as a first baseman, initially on a temporary basis. He has not played in the outfield since.

So far this season, according to Statcast’s Fielding Runs Value, Harper has been the fourth-worst fielder in baseball. He’s at -7 FRV, ahead of only Willy Adames and Logan O’Hoppe at -10, and Owen Caissie at -8. According to our defensive numbers, which include a positional adjustment, Harper has been worth -12.3 runs, making him the worst defender in baseball by a substantial margin. So that’s bad. Nobody wants to be at the very bottom of the leaderboard. I mean, I suppose once you sort the leaderboard upside down, it shouldn’t be called a leaderboard anymore. It should really be called a trailerboard. Or maybe the shame list. I’m spitballing here. The point is that’s not where Harper wants to be. And it gets worse.

Statcast has FRV values dating back to 2016. Here’s the single-season trailerboard for that entire 11-year period:

So the worst total ever recorded is -9 FRV. Harper is already at -7, and he’s still got half a season left to move beyond 1,250th place. He’s on pace for -13 FRV and -23.2 defensive runs, which would absolutely boat race the worst defensive seasons of the Statcast era. On the bright side, he’s no longer running into walls.

So is Harper one of the worst defensive first basemen in recent history? The other defensive metrics don’t think so. (As a matter of fact, they’re formulas, so they don’t think at all, but you get the point.) Harper is at -1 Defensive Runs Saved this season, an improvement over the -3 he put up in 2025. Deserved Runs Prevented, the flagship defensive metric of Baseball Prospectus, is much more conservative than the others, so Harper’s -0.3 mark makes him the fourth-worst first baseman this season. That’s very bad, but it’s not historic or anything. Last season, he was at a positive 0.3 DRP. In other words, we’re seeing a sudden drop-off according to two metrics, while the other metric thinks Harper has gotten very slightly better.

Harper also graded out fantastically at first base as recently as 2024. That was his first full season at the position, and he nailed it. He was worth 5 DRS, 5 FRV, 0.9 DRP. You can take my word for it (along with the absence of minus signs) that all of those numbers are good. Two years ago, Harper was a good first baseman and all the computers thought so. This season, one of them thinks he’s meh, one thinks he’s terrible, and one thinks he’s bordering on the worst ever to do it.

Now it’s time for the big caveat you’ve been waiting for. Defensive metrics are far from perfect, and they take a long time to stabilize. In fact, when I started writing this article yesterday, Harper was at -8 FRV. Then last night, he made a couple great plays — one of which you can watch below — and knocked it down to -7. That’s the thing about small sample sizes.

Half a season of an ugly FRV does not the worst defender ever make. Still, numbers this extreme definitely mean something, and the nice thing about Statcast is that it gets very specific. Here’s why the fancy cameras dislike Harper:

First basemen don’t really go back on the ball too much, so we can mostly ignore that last column. Charging the ball isn’t Harper’s problem either. Hit the ball right at him, and he’ll probably be just fine. The problem is on the sides. In 2024, Statcast says Harper was great going both to his right (toward second base) and to his left (toward first base). In 2025, he stopped being good to his right side. This year, he stopped being good to his left side, too. He has now officially run out of sides.

With this data in hand, I hit the tape. Here’s another big caveat: Every player is going to look bad if you’re going into your film session looking for the things they’re doing wrong. It’s just human nature. However, I did my best to look at every single ball hit Harper’s way, not just the ones that got by him. Moreover, I’m here to help. I did notice a few clear issues, and I’ve prescribed some simple fixes.

The first problem is that Harper isn’t great at diving for the ball. That’s unfortunate, because although first base isn’t the hot corner, the position is still awfully close to home plate and involves a lot of plays that don’t provide much in the way of reaction time. Harper has had a lot of plays this year where he only has time for a step and a dive. I suspect that a fielder with better instincts and a quicker first step wouldn’t have to dive quite as often, but there’s only so much I can do to quantify that. That’s what Statcast is particularly good at, because it knows every player’s starting point and how much time they have to make each play. For right now, what I noticed is that Harper rarely seems to come up with the ball when he dives for a grounder. On nearly every play in the supercut below, he is within range of the ball, but he doesn’t get his glove down in time, or he dives too late, or the ball deflects off him, or he just doesn’t get extended.

All of these clips are just from the first half of this season, so this is happening pretty regularly. I don’t really know how you fix that. Harper didn’t grow up playing the infield. He spent almost no time on the dirt until he turned 30. It might just be too late for him to develop that particular skill, and it would be lunacy to risk an injury to such a valuable hitter by making him practice hurling himself to the ground over and over again. So that part’s going to be tough. Just to make Phillies fans feel better about this one, here’s a video of Harper making a diving play:

There, that’s nice. Now, I don’t mean to say there’s nothing Harper can do to fix this problem. I don’t know how you get him better specifically at making the play once he’s diving for the ball, but I do think there are a few things he could do to avoid having to dive in the first place. I’m sure that working on his instincts and his first step is already a part of his daily infield routine, but beyond that, there are a couple of ways for him to get in a position to make a few more plays.

I would argue that Harper should play a bit deeper to buy himself more time. This season, when lefties are at the plate with no one on, the league’s first basemen have average depths ranging 120 feet and 130 feet. Harper is right in the middle at 125. When righties are up, he averages 111 feet, a bit shallower than average. If you recall the table at the top of this article, Harper has always been good, maybe even great, at coming in on the ball, so why not push him back just a couple feet? He still wouldn’t be the deepest first baseman out there, but he would get a little bit more of the reaction time that he needs.

The next issue I noticed also has a pretty simple fix. As I watched ball after ball sneak past a diving Harper, I noticed something simple. When he’s holding a runner on first base, he tends not to get back into a good fielding position. When you’re holding the runner on first, you’re all the way on the edge of the field, which drastically reduces your range, since all of the area to your left is foul territory. Once the pitcher commits to home, first basemen usually shuffle toward their right in order to get back into a more useful fielding position. Harper is not great at that. In fact, he sometimes seems to forget to do it altogether.

According to the Statcast data, Harper actually grades out in the middle of the pack in terms of positioning when there’s a runner on first. His average angle is 41 degrees, and some players are as high as 43 (standing directly on the foul line would be a 45 degree angle). However, that data gets measured when the pitcher releases the ball, not when it crosses the plate, and at that point, most first basemen would only be a step or two into their shuffle. Harper often doesn’t seem to shuffle at all, and ball after ball leaks by his right side, even balls that are within the cutout of the infield grass. Believe me when I tell you that the video above could have been longer. At a certain point, I stopped pulling videos, because there were just too many, so here’s a sample of screenshots that show just how close he is to the bag:

He’s flat-footed in all of these shots. No wonder the numbers say that he doesn’t have good range going to his right. He’s starting as far to the left as it’s possible to get, and he doesn’t seem particularly interested in correcting that. Again, the Statcast numbers say that Harper is not the most egregious offender on this particular count, but he is a player whose range could really use some help, and making sure he remembers to take a shuffle or two in order to get into a better position seems like it would be pretty easy.

The last issue I noticed specifically about balls to Harper’s right is that he has a tendency to get greedy. You can’t run into that many walls as a first baseman, but you can go steal grounders away from your second baseman. I love that Harper is aggressive. You want your first baseman to go get the ball. And sometimes, like on these plays, it works out just fine.

Those ended up as outs. That’s great. But we all saw the second baseman behind Harper, ready to field the ball, right? Sometimes it doesn’t work out that great.

The good news is that this should be at least somewhat fixable. I’m sure every infield coach has a drill where they hit tweeners toward their first basemen in order to help them practice making the split-second decision to go after the ball or cover the bag. Let’s make that a regular part of Harper’s pregame warmups.

I have one last complaint. I think Harper is genuinely great at starting the 3-6-1 double play and the 3-6 double play where the first baseman steps on the bag and the shortstop tags the lead runner. His turns are smooth and his throws are strong and accurate. That’s why Statcast thinks he’s great coming in on the ball. Those are often balls where he has to charge and make a good throw, and he’s excellent at it. However, I think Harper doesn’t charge the ball hard enough, specifically on routine plays. He’s often happy to wait back even on softly hit balls, which means that he won’t have time to step on first base himself, which means his pitcher has to cover and catch a flip. Now, Harper’s good at making that flip, but you’d still much rather have your first baseman make that play himself. A lot of things can go wrong on those flips plays: errors, sprained ankles, collisions. Here’s a glaring example:

This ball was an easy grounder hit at 49 mph, but Harper still chose to wait back and field it 15 feet behind the bag. Even then, he still had plenty of time to make the play himself. The runner wasn’t even halfway to first when he flipped the ball to the pitcher. This was a low stakes play, and about as easy a flip play as you’ll see, but it was also a play that did not necessitate a flip at all. Harper just decided early on that he was going to flip it; that’s why he didn’t charge the ball, and that’s why he didn’t keep it even after the runner gave up on the play. Here’s a higher stakes example:

This is a very easy play that Harper turned into a hard one. That’s Cy Young candidate Cristopher Sánchez on the mound. The Phillies should be protecting his ankles at all costs! Not only was Harper the closest player to first base when he fielded this ball, but also, look at where everybody else was when he fielded it.

The batter is barely out of the box. Sánchez is still on the mound, and he has to bust it over to first. Watch that clip again and look how hard he hits the bag. This is egregious. It hasn’t really come back to bite Harper just yet, but turning easy plays into hard ones is not a great habit.

So that’s my critique of Harper’s first base defense. Just a quick 2,400 words. I should once again close by noting that we’re talking about small sample sizes, and that Harper is probably not quite as bad as Statcast makes him out to be, if for no other reason than the fact that no first baseman has ever graded out as badly for a whole season as he has in the first half of this one. However, I need to bring up one more thing.

Just a few days ago, Tom Tango wrote a blog post revealing that Statcast will soon be incorporating data about how first basemen handle throws. It’s an exciting development, and I recommend reading the whole post, but we’re interested in one specific part. Naturally, Tango mentioned a couple players who stand out: “For the 2021-present (thru June 27, 2026), Matt Olson and Freddie Freeman are tied at +25 receiving outs above average. Yuli Gurriel is at +12 at half the playing time. On the flip side is Bryce Harper at -13.” Harper is the worst at this stat even though he’s only been playing first base since late 2023. As Tango was quick to mention, Harper is a converted first baseman. Because we don’t have a year-by-year breakdown, it’s entirely possible that he’s fine at this particular skill now, and that he racked up all that negative value when he was a newbie at the position. I asked a couple smart Phillies fans (though I left Michael Baumann alone because he’s on vacation) what they thought of Harper’s receiving. One said they hadn’t noticed it much one way or another, and one said they thought he’s pretty good at it. So maybe this is merely old news or nothing at all. Or maybe Statcast is about to hate Bryce Harper even more.

When fans woke up on the first morning of May, the Cincinnati Reds led the NL Central with a 20-11 record and were coming off their fifth consecutive series win. Since that point, the Reds have been the second-worst team in baseball with a 19-34 record, and those same fans awoke on the first morning of July with Cincinnati in last place by three games. There’s a bit of good news, however, as the team’s ace, Hunter Greene, will finally make his 2026 MLB debut in Saturday’s holiday game against the Baltimore Orioles. The return of Greene couldn’t come sooner, but is it a case of too little, too late for the reeling Reds?

A lot was expected of Greene coming into the 2026 season. The second overall pick in the 2017 draft out of Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California, Greene was a long time coming. At that point, he’d already been featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated, in a story by Lee Jenkins, touting him as “the star baseball needs.” His career came close to being derailed by two missed seasons in 2019 and 2020 due to Tommy John surgery, with an assist from COVID to keep him from a 2020 return. Greene’s stuff remained intact after the involuntary time off, and he finally reached the majors in 2022. The 2024 season was his true coming-out party. He posted a 2.75 ERA and a 3.47 FIP in 150 1/3 innings, good enough to rank 10th in the NL with 3.7 WAR. Greene slashed off a walk per nine in 2025, and likely would have received some Cy Young votes if not for two stints on the injured list with a groin injury.

While last year was marred by injury, it wasn’t an arm ailment, and the Reds hoped to get a full, healthy year out of Greene this time around. They needed it, too. Cincinnati was near the bottom of the league in team wRC+ in both 2024 and 2025, and the team hasn’t had a wRC+ of 100 or better since 2010. With the offense expected to be lousy, the Reds likely had to get a lot from their pitching staff in order to be playoff relevant this year. Naturally, that outcome would probably require their best pitcher. But after a single appearance in the spring, Greene had surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. Now, after spending three months of the season on the shelf, Greene is back. Read the rest of this entry »