No team has been caught stealing more than the Royals this year. As hard as it might be to believe, their 20 thwarted stolen base attempts are the most in the league. Their 70.1% stolen base success rate ranks 27th, as do their -2.1 weighted stolen base runs (wSB). This stands in stark contrast to what many think of as the Royals’ brand of baseball. After all, you’d have to go back to 2017 to find a full season in which the Royals didn’t rank among the top five AL teams in wSB, and all the way back to 2010 to find the last time their wSB was below league average. Thanks to players like Whit Merrifield, Jarrod Dyson, Adalberto Mondesi, Alcides Escobar and, most recently, Bobby Witt Jr., the Royals of the 2010s and 2020s developed a reputation as the most larcenous team in the league. From 2011-24, no team stole more bases, and no team racked up more wSB.

Kansas City’s stolen base supremacy hasn’t been limited to one side of the ball, either. From 2011-24, only two teams allowed fewer stolen bases than the Royals, and none caught would-be basestealers at a higher rate. According to the stolen base component of DRS (rSB), their catchers were twice as productive as any other team’s backstops in that period, while their pitchers were 12 runs better than the next-best team (the Diamondbacks) and more than three times as valuable as the next-best AL club (the Orioles). The Statcast numbers tell a similar story, although they only go back to 2016. From 2016-24, Kansas City catchers ranked second in both catcher and pitcher stealing runs. No other team placed within the top five in both metrics. So, you could make a pretty convincing case that preventing stolen bases is even more essential to the Royals’ brand of baseball than stealing bases, especially with the way things have gone in 2025. Their baserunners might be struggling to swipe bags like they did in the past, but their defense has taken control of the running game like never before. Read the rest of this entry »

You can’t keep Pete Crow-Armstrong away from the baseball field. I mean that in the sense that he’s a passionate young star who loves the game and plays with his hair on fire all the time. But I also mean that in a more literal sense. The Cubs might need to devise a system for keeping Crow-Armstrong away from the baseball field. He has a problem.

The Cubs walked off the Rockies on Monday night. The score was 3-3. With one out and two on in the bottom of the 11th inning, rookie Matt Shaw stayed back and punched a Tyler Kinley slider into right field, scoring Jon Berti from second base. It was thrilling. (For the Cubs, anyway; for the Rockies, it was probably akin to the feeling you have when you go to bed with a tickle in your throat and you just know that it’s a really bad cold coming on even though there’s no tangible basis for that certainty, and then you do in fact wake up in the middle of the night with a terrible cold.) As you’d expect after a thrilling(-slash-miserable) walk-off hit, Shaw got mobbed by his teammates.

Well, he got mobbed by one teammate, anyway. There’s Shaw, moments after his big hit, engaged in an intimate leaping chest bump with Crow-Armstrong. I mean “intimate” in the sense that it seemed like a special moment, but I also mean it in the sense that it’s just the two of them all alone on the grass under the romantic Chicago skies, smiling at each other like there’s nobody else in the whole wide world. The rest of the Cubs are just out of frame, celebrating too. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a public service post of sorts. If you’re like me, when you type “Run Ex” into Google, it will auto-complete to “Run Expectancy Matrix.” It knows what I want – a mathematical description of how likely teams are to score in a given situation, in aggregate. I use this extensively in analysis, and I also use it in my head when I’m watching a game. First and third, down a run? That’s pretty good with no outs, but isn’t amazing with two.

There’s just one problem with that Google search: It’s all old data. Oh, you can find tables from The Book. You can find charts that are current through 2019. There’s a Pitcher List article that I use a lot — shout out to Dylan Drummey, great work — but that’s only current through 2022. And baseball is changing so dang much. Rather than keep using old information, I thought I’d update it for 2025 and give you some charts from past years while I’m at it, so that you can understand the changing run environment and use them for your own purposes if you so desire.

First things first: Let’s talk methodology. I downloaded play-by-play logs for all regular season games played between 2021 and 2025. For each play, I noted the runners on base, the number of outs, and then how many runs scored between that moment and the end of the inning. I did this for the first eight innings of each game, excluding the ninth and extras, because those innings don’t offer unbiased estimates of how many runs might score. Teams sometimes play to the score, and the home team stops scoring after the winning run. If you have the bases loaded and no one out in the bottom of the ninth, one run will usually end it, and that provides an inaccurate picture of run scoring. That’s also why I skipped 2020; the seven-inning doubleheaders and new extra innings rules produced a pile of crazy results, and the season was quite short anyway. No point in trying to wade through that maze. Read the rest of this entry »

Count me among the multitudes who have been borderline obsessed with the emergence of Pete Crow-Armstrong as a superstar this season. I’m sure he’ll reach a saturation point eventually where hardcore fans get tired of him — it happened to superhero movies, and bacon, and Patrick Mahomes — but we’re not there yet.

Every time I write about PCA, I revisit the central thesis: This is a player who’s good enough to get by on his glove even if he doesn’t hit a lick. But out of nowhere, he’s turned into a legitimate offensive threat. Great athletes who play with a little flair, a little panache, a little pizzaz, tend to be popular in general. The elite defensive center fielder who finds a way to contribute offensively is probably my favorite position player archetype; the more I compared PCA to Lorenzo Cain, Jackie Bradley Jr., Enrique Bradfield Jr., Carlos Gómez… the more I understood why I’d come to like him so much.

In fact, let’s take a moment to talk about Gómez, and his offensive breakout in the early 2010s. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Aaron Judge win the Triple Crown? If you were hanging around on FanGraphs three years ago, this question might sound familiar. If you don’t want to click the link, back at the end of 2022, both Judge and Paul Goldschmidt were within earshot of a Triple Crown in the final weeks of the season. The projected probabilities were firmly against either of them winning it (about 4% for Judge and 3% for Goldschmidt), the bank won as it tends to do, and Miguel Cabrera remained the only Triple Crown winner of the last half-century. There’s a lot of 2025 left to go, but the man sometimes known as Arson Judge is once again setting fire to the league. And this time, some of the factors weighing against his potentially performing the feat are no longer present.

Triple Crown stats have lost their luster as tools for evaluating overall performance, especially batting average and runs batted in, but not everything has to be an optimized evaluative tool to be cool. Bo Jackson was not even close to the best baseball players of the late 1980s, but I dare someone to say he wasn’t one of the [insert superlative used by kids today that Dan totally doesn’t know because he’s old] players of his time. Triple Crowns are fun in a way that some sabermetric Triple Crown, perhaps wRC+/sprint speed/FRV, is not. Judge is, of course, also having an insanely good season by our more nerdy numbers, but today, we’re old school. And what could possibly be more old school and sepia toned than projection algorithms? Read the rest of this entry »

Home teams don’t win enough in extra innings. It’s one of the most persistent mysteries of the last five years of baseball. Before the 2020 season, MLB changed the extra innings rules to start each half of each extra frame with a runner on second base. (This only occurs during the regular season, which means the 18-inning ALDS tilt between the Mariners and the Astros in the picture above didn’t actually feature zombie runners, but the shot was too good to pass up.) They did so to lessen the wear and tear on pitchers, and keep games to a manageable length. Almost certainly, though, they weren’t planning on diminishing home field advantage while they were at it.

In recent years, Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus has extensively documented the plight of the home team. Connelly Doan measured the incidence of bunts in extra innings and compared the observed rate to a theoretical optimum. Earlier this month, Jay Jaffe dove into the details and noted that strikeouts and walks are a key point of difference between regulation frames and bonus baseball. These all explain the differing dynamics present in extras. But there’s one question I haven’t seen answered: How exactly does this work in practice? Are home teams scoring too little? Are away teams scoring too much? Do home teams play the situations improperly? I set out to answer these questions empirically, using all the data we have on extra innings, to get a sense of where theory and practice diverge.

The theory of extra inning scoring is relatively simple. I laid it out in 2020, and the math still works. You can take a run expectancy chart, start with a runner on second and no one out, and figure out how many runs teams score in that situation in general. If you want to get fancy, you can even find a distribution: how often they score one run, two runs, no runs, and so on. For example, I can tell you that from 2020 to 2025, excluding the ninth inning and extra innings, teams that put a runner on second base with no one out went on to score 0.99 runs per inning. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan O’Hearn has been the best hitter on an underachieving Baltimore Orioles team so far this season. Moreover, he’s been one of the best hitters in the game. The 31-year-old first baseman/outfielder boasts a 185 wRC+, a mark currently topped by only Aaron Judge, and Freddie Freeman. Over 180 plate appearances, O’Hearn has left the yard nine times while slashing .340/.428/.558.

He began to bash after leaving Kansas City, where he posted a .683 OPS over parts of five nondescript seasons with the Royals. He was designated for assignment and subsequently dealt to the Orioles in exchange for cash consideration in January 2023. Baltimore then dodged a bullet. The O’s also DFA’d him, only to see him go unclaimed, allowing them to assign him to their Triple-A roster. Called up to the majors two weeks into the 2023 campaign, O’Hearn proceeded to do what he hadn’t done with his old team: square up baseballs on a consistent basis.

Since the start of the 2023 season, the left-handed-hitting O’Hearn has the highest batting average (.286) and on-base percentage (.346), and the second-highest wRC+ (130) among Orioles who have come to the plate at least 250 times. Playing primarily against opposite-handed hurlers, O’Hearn has logged 1,042 plate appearances over that span.

How did he go from the waiver wire to laying waste to big league pitching? Read the rest of this entry »

Way, way, way back in December 2023, the Rangers signed Tyler Mahle to a two-year contract. Absolutely nobody cared at the time, mostly because the news dropped the same day as Shohei Ohtani’s first press conference with the Dodgers. But also because Mahle, then recovering from Tommy John surgery, was expected to play a trivial part, at best, in the 2024 season.

Mahle had been a bit of a hipster favorite as an upper-mid-rotation starter in Cincinnati and then briefly in Minnesota — far from a household name, but from 2020 to 2022, he’d been quite good, and in high volume. Over those three seasons, he’d averaged 27 starts, 146 innings, and 3.0 WAR per 162 team games, with an ERA- of 90. For two years and $22 million, the Rangers were conceding that he’d rehab on their dime for most of 2024. But he would’ve been available for the 2024 playoffs if they’d made it that far, and if everything worked according to plan, they’d have a workhorse no. 3 starter under contract for 2025 at a fraction of what that kind of production usually goes for.

At least in 2025, everything has been working according to plan. Mahle has made 11 starts so far this season, with the past 10 lasting at least 80 pitches and five innings. Until his most recent outing, he hadn’t allowed more than two runs in any start. Even then, he allowed only three runs in his season-worst outlier. His 1.80 ERA is fifth best among all qualified starters. Read the rest of this entry »

This is not the company the Red Sox hoped they’d be keeping. When they face off against the Brewers tonight, they’ll be trying to avoid joining the Rockies, White Sox, Pirates, and Rays as the only teams in baseball with three separate losing streaks of at least four games this season. Boston currently sits fourth in the AL East and 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. According to our playoff odds, the Red Sox have seen their postseason probability fall by more than half since Opening Day, dropping from 56.2% to 25.3%. Only the Braves, Orioles, and Rangers have had a bigger decline.

Boston’s most recent win also provided its biggest loss of the season thus far. When Alex Bregman signed back in February, there was every reason to believe that the Green Monster would be his best friend. His game is designed around lifting the ball to the pull side, and he’s already bounced five doubles and a single off the wall on the fly, to go with three homers launched over it. But the Monster betrayed Bregman on Friday. In the first game of a would-be doubleheader against the Orioles (the second game was postponed, and Saturday became a doubleheader instead), Bregman scorched a single that short-hopped the wall, but as he chopped his steps to back off an aggressive turn, something looked off.

“I was rounding first base and digging to go to second and I kind of felt my quad grab, so I didn’t continue running to second base for the double,” Bregman said. “I just kind of stopped and came back to the bag so I wouldn’t make it any worse. After I felt it, I knew I needed to come out and see the trainer.” Bregman left the game with right quad tightness, telling reporters that he initially feared that the injury might be more severe, but that he felt more positive after the game and hoped he could avoid an IL trip. “Hopefully, I sleep good and it feels great,” he said. “We’ll just see how it presents and take the next step there, just kind of follow the training staff, their lead. But right now, it’s just quad tightness.”

Bregman didn’t sleep good. Pain from the quad kept him up during the night, and an MRI on Saturday morning revealed a “pretty severe” strain. Bregman compared it to the left quad strain he suffered in 2021. That strain kept him out 69 days, from June 17 to April 25. In case the Red Sox are looking for consolation, Bregman looked like himself upon his return that season, running 115 wRC+ before the injury and a 112 wRC+ (with better exit velocity numbers) after he came back. But that’s cold comfort. With a 160 wRC+ this season, Bregman has been the team’s best player, and he’ll be out for at least two months. Read the rest of this entry »

In Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers don’t lack for superstars with potent bats, but so far this season, Will Smith is swinging — and, notably, not swinging — just about as well as any of them. The two-time All-Star catcher is off to an exceptionally hot start, particularly with runners in scoring position, and the Dodgers recently shook up their roster with an eye towards helping him maintain a high level of production later into the season.

The 30-year-old Smith is hitting .333/.456/.511, good enough to lead the NL in on-base percentage and to rank third in wRC+ (175) behind only Freeman (191) and Ohtani (182). Often batting ahead of either Max Muncy or Michael Conforto — both of whom have struggled thus far this year — he’s been pitched around to some degree, and he’s shown exceptional plate discipline:

Read the rest of this entry »