Archive for Daily Graphings

Alex McCoy isn’t a high-profile prospect. Signed as a non-drafted free agent in 2024 out of Hofstra University, the 24-year-old corner outfielder is ranked just 25th in the San Diego Padres system with a 35+ FV. That doesn’t mean he’s without upside. Over 541 plate appearances this season, the Baltimore native left the yard 19 times while logging a 112 wRC+ and a .278/.355/.467 slash line between High-A Fort Wayne and Double-A San Antonio. Last year, in an injury-limited first professional campaign, he put up a 146 wRC+ over 226 plate appearances in Low-A.

McCoy does serious damage when he squares up baseballs. Asked for a scouting update, Eric Longenhagen recently told me that the 6-foot-5, 260-pound slugger possesses “crazy high-end power [with] max exits and 90th-EV markers [that] are plus-plus on the scale.” That came with a caveat. Our lead prospect analyst also said “a lack of feel means the consistency of the contact is not as good… his 66% contact rate is a 30 on the scale.”

McCoy didn’t shy away from the power-hitter label when I spoke to him shortly before his mid-August promotion to Double-A. Even so, he sees himself as more than just an all-or-nothing masher.

“I would say I am [a power hitter],” acknowledged McCoy, whose 2026 ledger included a 9.2% walk rate and a 26.2% strikeout rate. “At the same time, I try to build my game around being gap-to-gap and getting base. Home runs will come if I put a good swing on the ball, but getting base hits plays too.”

Baseball wasn’t the only game he played at Essex, Maryland’s Our Lady of Mount Carmel High School. He also hit the hardwood — “I was actually pretty bad at basketball” — and the gridiron. Both a tight end and a defensive end, he received a walk-on offer to play collegiately, but as McCoy explained, “I didn’t love football like I love baseball.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s time for another installment of Mathemadage, where I investigate time-honored baseball sayings using whatever data I can get my hands on and explore whether there’s any validity to them. If you’re new to my writing, I would describe my method as a semi-rigorous blend of math and intuition, with a rigorous amount of skepticism applied on top. If you’re not new to my writing, hi, hello! Welcome back. Today, we’re investigating a saying that was both my top candidate for this article and the one that came up most frequently in the comments of my last one. Yes, it’s time to talk about outs at third base. Oh, and if you’re looking for Five Things, it will return next Friday – Pete Alonso’s return to Citi Field was my favorite thing this week, and Jay Jaffe already covered it.

“Don’t make the first or third out at third base” was one of the rules that got hammered into me most frequently as a kid. It’s so ingrained that the last time I played rec league softball, I bonded with teammates over how we reflexively repeated it every time we coached third base. (I’m a big nerd, OK? I’ll take whatever bonding I can get.)

The logic behind this one makes good sense, too. With no one out, two productive outs could drive you home from second – why risk erasing yourself heading to third? With two outs, most plays that score you from third would score you from second as well – why risk erasing yourself again? But with one out, getting to third base is a big deal, because then a sacrifice fly or well-placed groundout can bring you home. From that angle, the logic is incontrovertible. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night at Citi Field, the 2026 Mets season reached either a rather humiliating new low or a moment of catharsis, depending upon your point of view. With one out in the top of the ninth inning and the Mets clinging to a 3-2 lead over the Orioles, closer Kodai Senga left an 82.5-mph forkball over the plate, and Pete Alonso absolutely hit the fork out of it for a game-tying solo shot, the 300th home run of his career. The 31-year-old slugger punctuated the shot with an emphatic bat toss as the ball caromed off the face of the second deck in left-center field. While most opponent homers in such situations would elicit groans and boos, Alonso — who made his long-awaited return to Queens this week after signing a five-year, $155 million deal with the Orioles last December — instead received a standing ovation and made a curtain call.

Though unorthodox, the response from the crowd was understandable. Alonso hit 264 home runs during his seven seasons with the Mets, the most homers in franchise history, making five All-Star teams and two trips to the postseason while earning a spot in the hearts of fans as their beloved Polar Bear. Tuesday night’s game was just his second at Citi Field as a visitor, and as they’d done the night before, Mets fans brought their homemade cardboard signs displaying sentiments such as: “Thank You Pete — Forever a Met,” “Mets Fans Still Love Pete,” and “Should’ve Paid Pete.” The last of those also featured a Mets logo in front of the phrase “Fans Rooting For” before an Orioles logo.

Prior to Monday night’s first pitch, the Mets presented a tribute video, and shortstop Francisco Lindor joined the crowd of 35,880 in an ovation before Alonso’s first plate appearance. Alonso went 0-for-3 with a walk in Baltimore’s 2-1 win that night, a victory that officially eliminated the Mets from playoff contention. Tuesday’s homer, his 36th of the season, was his lone hit in five plate appearances, though it loomed large in an 11-inning, 7-5 win that sent the Mets to their 82nd loss, guaranteeing them their first sub-.500 season since 2023, before David Stearns took over as president of baseball operations.

In the wake of Alonso’s homer, the scene at Citi Field took a surreal turn, as chants of “Fire Stearns!” followed Alonso’s cameo, ringing out around the ballpark. The crowd — officially 28,097 but in actuality much more sparse, befitting a home team playing out the string — vented its anger and disappointment regarding Stearns’ offseason overhaul of the roster.

Pete Alonso grins as Mets fans chant “fire Stearns” after Alonso hit his 300th home run in his old ballpark pic.twitter.com/XbNLhDE7yn

— Jomboy Media (@JomboyMedia) September 16, 2026

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in March, I wrote about Jac Caglianone’s entry into the 120 Club. Even during a spring training game, when the brawny Royal sent a line drive into the right field gap at 120.2 mph, it was news. Statcast has been measuring exit velocity since 2015, and one thing we’ve learned from the data is that batted balls don’t get hit that hard very often. In fact, I can tell you the exact frequency. Between spring training, the regular season, the playoffs and the All-Star Game, Statcast has registered an exit velocity for just under 1.45 million batted balls. Twenty-nine of those balls were hit at least 120 mph. That works out to 0.002% of batted balls. It’s not never, but it’s not all that far from never.

If you’re willing to include spring training, Caglianone became just the eighth person to join the club, out of 2,593 players who have registered an EV, which means this skill is limited to just 0.231% of the player population. Still, we’ve seen at least one ball hit 120 mph in the regular season in every year of the Statcast era. But with just 11 days left in the regular season, that streak looks like it’s about to be snapped. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a time traveler who jumped forward from late May 2026 to today, you’d probably recognize most of what’s going on. Gas is expensive. People hate data centers. Super El Niño is coming, even if no one knows exactly what that means for the weather. But if you’re a time traveler from San Diego in particular, one thing will no doubt floor you: Fernando Tatis Jr. isn’t in the biggest slump of his career. He’s been the second-best position player in the majors since the calendar flipped to June, in fact. So let’s make a trade. You can give me the secrets of your time travel down in the comments. I, in turn, will try to use Tatis’ resurgence to explain variance. No pressure.

Tatis hit his first home run of the year May 30, in his 239th plate appearance of the season. Up to that point, he’d looked like a completely different hitter from his 2025 form. Here’s a big old smorgasbord of statistics that changed:

It’s almost too much to think about. He swung harder and hit the ball softer. He put it on the ground too much, but also didn’t pull it often enough. If you looked up what not to do in a baseball textbook, it’d probably say something like that. Now let’s add on the rest of the year:

Read the rest of this entry »

To the extreme dismay of schoolchildren everywhere, the semifinal series between the Los Angeles Queens and the New York Heights came down to which team was the most thorough in completing its homework. In any league, a playoff series provides the opportunity to devote more dedicated study time to an opponent than is typically afforded by the day-to-day grind of the regular season. It’s a group project with season-ending consequences, if not done properly. Both sides delivered a strong showing during the practical exam, but Monday’s decisive Game 3 ended with a 15-11 victory for Los Angeles. Yet, despite the win on the scoreboard and in the series, it would be a bridge too far to say that the Queens aced the test. At several points during the series, the Heights posed a question and the Queens had no answer, but Los Angeles kept New York guessing too, and you can only default to bubbling in B on the scantron so many times before your score starts to look ugly.

Here’s the game-by-game breakdown of how the Queens ultimately outwitted the Heights.

Game 1

Queens Game 1 starter Michelle Roche was interviewed on the field following their 10-3 win. She went five innings, threw a modest 65 pitches, and allowed just one run on four hits and a walk with two strikeouts. When asked what made her so effective, Roche said the team’s pitchers and catchers got together and, “Went through all the data, all of the games, and just figured out the weaknesses of their batting, but also the strengths of our pitching — and just went with our strengths.”

By contrast, here’s a quote from Heights manager Rocky Henley during a postgame press conference on August 19, “I really don’t know about Trackman yet. Trackman is available, but it takes so much time,” she said. “My days are just so full of other things right now that I just can’t sit down and learn Trackman. I need someone to actually walk me through it, so I can kind of learn a little bit more about it, and I’m waiting for that day. Maybe this weekend, I can really sit down on Sunday and start really diving into those numbers.” Read the rest of this entry »

On August 24, I wrote about the Phillies, who’d just completed a nine-game winning streak in terrific style. After dropping the first two games of an extended West Coast road trip, they ripped off another six-game winning streak, with a run of seven games against the first-place Braves in a 10-day stretch to come.

Things haven’t gone so well since. Over the past two weeks, the Phillies are 4-8, with five of those losses coming by a single run. The bullpen is showing fatigue cracks; Jhoan Duran has lost twice while pitching in non-save situations, while on Friday, three different Phillies relievers blew saves in the span of three innings.

One of the bright spots of the Phillies’ last homestand came on Labor Day, when Jesús Luzardo threw a shutout in a 1-0 victory over Atlanta, thus obviating the need for a bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been almost four months since one of my periodic check-ins on Sandy Alcantara. And everything’s going well. In May, I declared the 2022 NL Cy Young winner “part of the way back,” after he’d lowered his ERA from 5.36 in 2025 to 3.53 in his first 10 starts of 2026.

Alcantara has started another 21 games since that post, and the results have been similar, if not quite as good. Since May 21, Alcantara is 10-8 with a 4.01 ERA, with xERA and FIP marks in the low 4.00s as well. Even in 2022, Alcantara was never a big per-inning strikeout guy; he was fourth in the league in punchouts mostly on the strength of how many innings he threw. That year’s NL strikeout leader, Corbin Burnes, struck out 36 more batters in 26 2/3 fewer innings.

But Alcantara used his height and changeup and three-fastball combination to get lots of groundballs and allow basically zero homers. Thus: The no. 11 strikeout rate in the NL (out of just 22 qualified starters) led to the no. 2 ERA. Read the rest of this entry »

Reacher needs our help. Reacher is in trouble, and only we baseball nerds can provide the assistance he needs. Wait, I should back up.

Reacher is the eponymous protagonist of the television show Reacher, based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels. He’s an enormous former military policeman and current drifter who wanders across America maiming, torturing, and murdering people – but, like, in a good way. It’s another in a long line of entertainments based on the simple premise that it’s perfectly fine to enjoy watching somebody commit horrific acts of violence so long as they visit that violence on people who deserve it. It’s also a baseball show. Reacher likes baseball. Most of the characters like baseball. They tie themselves in knots wedging baseball into conversations where it absolutely does not belong, and for that I not only salute them. I want to help.

Trouble always finds Reacher. He visits Georgia to pay his respects to a legendary blues singer and stumbles onto the world’s largest counterfeiting operation. He visits Philadelphia to watch an unnamed Phillies pitcher who touches 105 mph and winds up entangled in a plot to auction off chemical weapons to the highest bidder. He visits Maine for lobster and just happens to run into a man he once marched to the edge of a cliff, shot in the head, and left for dead. (Just to clarify once more: In this world, the guy who got shot in the head and fell off the cliff is the bad guy; the shooter is the good guy.)

Because trouble always seems to find him, Reacher takes precautions. He stays off the grid. He travels by bus. He checks into fleabag motels under false names. And because he’s a baseball fan, he always uses the names of Yankees second basemen. We’re going to help him do a better job of that, because, well, he sucks at it. Read the rest of this entry »

ZiPS has been generally one of the most positive projection systems in recent years regarding the Cleveland Guardians, but it has not been quite as excited about them when it comes to the postseason. The reason? Throughout the 2020s, their rotation has typically been thoroughly competent, but not very top-heavy, and the sprint of the playoffs is a different beast than the marathon of the regular season.

This season, Cleveland is hovering around the .500 mark, but that’s no fault of the starting pitching, where there’s an argument that it has now developed two aces, an ingredient that’s an important part of a recipe for making a deep postseason run. One is Parker Messick, who previously dominated in the upper minors and seemingly didn’t need an adjustment period when he debuted with the Guardians last August. He’s emerged as one of the top pitchers in the AL, and he’ll almost definitely get downballot Cy Young votes this season. Gavin Williams, on the other hand took a bit longer to really arrive in the majors, but I think he’s unambiguously there now. Read the rest of this entry »