If you were only going by raw stat lines, the end of April would have been an understandable time to give up on Jo Adell. After struggling mightily in parts of four seasons with the Angels as well as the first half of 2024, he showed some positive gains in the second half before being shut down due to an oblique strain in early September. He finished in replacement-level territory, with a 90 wRC+ and 0.1 WAR, then was dreadful at the start of this season, sticking out even among one of the majors’ worst offenses. Lately, though, Adell has come around in promising fashion, offering hope that he can be a productive big leaguer after all, if not the star so many once believed he could be.
Originally, I intended to use the 26-year-old Adell to lead off the 2025 version of an article I wrote last year, covering players who had improved the most after dismal starts — even if their overall numbers were camouflaged by their early struggles and still came off as rather ordinary. Using May 1 as a cutoff, with a minimum of 80 plate appearances on either side, I found that Adell had improved the most from the first leg of the season to the second. Here’s the table, with the stats updated through Sunday:
Overall statistics through June 15. Mar/Apr statistics through April 30. May/June statistics from May 1–June 15. Minimum 80 plate appearances in both Mar/Apr and May/June.
Adell hit just .190/.236/.310 with two home runs in March and April while striking out 27% of the time, but from the start of May through Sunday, he hit .255/.344/.582 with 11 homers while trimming that strikeout rate to 23.2%. He was about half a win below replacement level before May 1, and has been about a full win above since.
I’ll dig into the numbers below, but first, a recap. A 2017 first-round pick out of a Louisville high school, Adell cracked our Top 100 Prospects list in each of the next three seasons, ranking as high as no. 4 in 2020, as a 65-FV prospect, and he was similarly regarded by other outlets thanks to his combination of plus-plus raw power and plus speed. But since debuting early in the 2020 season, he has generally struggled to make good contact, or any contact at all for that matter, with his lack of refinement limiting his opportunity to show off the tools that so tantalized talent evaluators. In a total of 178 major league games from 2020–23, he hit just .214/.259/.366 with 18 homers in 619 plate appearances en route to a grim 70 wRC+. After appearing in 88 games with the Angels but managing just a 77 wRC+ and -0.2 WAR in 2022, he played only 17 games in the majors in ’23 while returning to Triple-A Salt Lake for the fourth year out of five. As I joked early last year, when it looked like he might be breaking out — which proved not to be the case, alas — if he’d spent just a bit more time in my hometown, my parents would have been obligated to invite him over for dinner. Read the rest of this entry »
Alright, Dodgers bullpen! This is what we’ve been training for. They hit our guy. This is not a drill. I know it was an accident. I know it would have been the world’s worst time to throw at a hitter, down by a run in the fourth inning, a runner already on base, ahead in the count with the platoon advantage, unprovoked. But none of that matters right now. It’s time to look tough.
Everybody crowd up against the fence like you can’t wait to burst through the door. Time to posture. Strike a pose. This moment right here? This is the reason we watched The Warriors so many times. It’s time to get mean. It’s time to maybe, possibly, not really but you never know just in case, shove somebody a bit. We’re ready to jog out there. We’re ready to flex. Everybody ready for a fight?
When I volunteered to write about the Aaron Civale-for-Andrew Vaughn swap, I thought I was going to be covering the most interesting trade of the month. At the very least, I thought I’d be putting out the most interesting trade write-up of the day. It’s not that Civale and Vaughn are huge household names, but you don’t often see notable major leaguers traded for one another in June. Trade season isn’t supposed to have started yet! I looked back through the FanGraphs archives to find pieces with the “trade” tag that dealt with June transactions. I found six others:
Then, of course, there’s one you’re reading right now. Of those seven June trades we’ve covered, four took place before the last week of the month: the two from 2019 and the two from the past 72 hours.
Do I feel slighted that mine is no longer the biggest trade story of the month, the week, or even the day? That through no fault of my own and no fault of my editors’, my story has been relegated to a secondary position? No, not really. But if I did, I’d be able to relate quite well to Civale. Last week, the Brewers informed the right-hander he’d be moving to the bullpen. Civale was understandably upset. He’s in his free agent walk year, and moving to a long relief role could diminish his earning potential in the offseason. What’s more, aside from one postseason appearance last fall, he has never worked out of the bullpen in his professional career. Above all else, he remains a perfectly capable back-end starting pitcher. He didn’t cost himself a rotation spot with his poor performance; the Brewers simply had five superior options. Read the rest of this entry »
Four weeks ago, I announced a fun little summer project we’re doing here at FanGraphs: A fan exchange program in which you give up your own team to follow another for one week, and share your thoughts and feelings in the interest of science. It’s like study abroad, except you don’t have to leave your home and you don’t spend the next semester annoying your friends with stories about how convenient public transit was in Vilnius.
It’s not too late to participate. The rules (such as they are) can be found here. If you’re unwilling or unable to follow your suggested team, feel free to pick another. And if you’ve been meaning to participate but haven’t completed the entrance survey, you can find that here.
If you have questions or concerns (with this project, not, like, generally), you can find me on Bluesky or reach me via email at baumannwrites@gmail.com. I’m so grateful that more than 1,000 of you have already signed up; I hope everyone has fun and learns something new.
It was an exciting weekend of baseball, with nine series ending in a sweep, but that was all overshadowed by the unexpected trade of Rafael Devers on Sunday night.
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 »
The Royals’ rotation was a key reason last year’s team made the playoffs for the first time since 2015, with the one-two punch of Seth Lugo and Cole Ragans leading the way. It was the first full season in the majors for Ragans, whose five-pitch mix helped him dominate hitters en route to an AL All-Star selection and a fourth-place finish in the Cy Young voting. Unfortunately, his follow-up season hasn’t gone so smoothly, and after landing on the injured list with a groin strain in May, Ragans has now been diagnosed with a rotator cuff strain and figures to miss significant time.
A 2016 first-round pick who underwent two Tommy John surgeries before debuting for the Rangers in ’22, Ragans enjoyed a meteoric rise in ’23, after his average fastball velocity jumped from 92.1 mph to 96.5. Not until he was traded to the Royals in a June 30, 2023 deal centered around Aroldis Chapman did he finally stick in a rotation (he had a nine-start trial in 2022), but once he did, the results were revelatory. He posted a 2.64 ERA, 2.49 FIP, and a 31.1% strikeout rate in 12 starts totaling 71.2 innings post-trade; his 2.4 WAR ranked 12th in the majors from July 1 onward. On the strength of an impressive fastball-changeup combo accompanied by a knuckle curve, slider, and cutter, he solidified his spot among the majors’ top pitchers last year. He made 32 starts and finished second in the AL in FIP (2.99), strikeouts (223), strikeout rate (29.3%), and WAR (4.9); seventh in innings (186.1 innings); and eighth in ERA (3.14). Read the rest of this entry »
Jacob Misiorowski didn’t just flummox the Cardinals. Sure, when the 23-year-old right-hander made his big league debut in front of 26,687 very pumped Milwaukee fans last Thursday night, he confounded the St. Louis lineup until a leg cramp and a lightly rolled ankle ended his evening after five no-hit innings. But he also baffled Statcast. “Sinker,” read the graphic at the bottom of the screen when Misiorowski rocketed a 100-mph four-seamer into the bottom of the zone for the first pitch of the game. His changeup often went down as a sinker, his curveball went down as a cutter, and his slider was sometimes classified as a cutter and sometimes as a four-seamer.
The classifications were working perfectly by the end of the game, but even early on, you can’t really blame Statcast here. For one thing, it didn’t have a baseline expectation to work from because this was Misiorowski’s debut. For another, all of these pitches really did look like fastballs. I don’t just mean that in a jokey way. I mean it very, very literally. Nearly every pitch Misiorowski throws really does look like a fastball; I was planning on writing about it before I even learned about the Statcast side of things. “That’s how I throw,” he said after the game. “Every pitch is trying to throw 100%.” Read the rest of this entry »
Jake Mangum is impressing as a 29-year-old rookie. Seven years after being drafted by the New York Mets out of Mississippi State University following four collegiate seasons, the switch-hitting outfielder has slashed .303/.346/.370 with a 109 wRC+ over 128 plate appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays. Moreover, Mangum has swiped 10 bags without being caught.
His path to pro ball included being bypassed in the draft out of high school, then opting not to sign after being a low-round pick following his sophomore and junior seasons. One of the teams that called his name didn’t make an offer so much as wish him well. “Good luck with school next year,” was their message to the high-average, low-power Bulldog.
Mangum went to finish his college career with a .357/.420/.457 slash line, as well as a Southeastern Conference-record 383 hits. He also finished with a degree in business administration — although that’s not something he expects to take advantage of down the road. Paying days have a shelf life, but he plans to “stay around the game forever.”
A lack of balls over fences contributed heavily to the limited interest he received from scouts. When he finally inked a contract, the 2019 fourth-rounder had gone deep just five times in 1,200 plate appearances.
“It was always the power piece,” explained Mangum, whose ledger now includes 24 home runs in the minors and one in the majors. “They just didn’t see it playing in professional baseball, my not having enough power. I’m stronger now, but to be honest with you, I don’t try to hit home runs. I try to hit for a high average and help the team with good defense and base running.”
If you played baseball as a kid, you’re familiar with the phrase “a walk’s as good as a hit.” Your coaches probably shouted it at you. You probably shouted it yourself when your friend was at the plate with a three-ball count. Shouting a bromide is one thing, but believing it is another. We didn’t really buy it as kids, and for a while now, we’ve been able to quantify the difference. This season, hits have a wOBA of 1.129, while walks have a wOBA of .694. A walk, it turns out, is 61.5% as good as a hit. All of our coaches were liars.
On Wednesday, I was checking to see where Alejandro Kirk’s wOBAcon – his wOBA when he makes contact – ranked in relation to the rest of the league. The top of the list caught my eye. It couldn’t help but catch my eye. Aaron Judge is so far ahead of the pack he may as well be playing a different sport. He’s currently running a .685 wOBAcon. The difference between Judge and Cal Raleigh in second place is the same as the difference between Raleigh and Brandon Lowe in 47th place. Here’s the most shocking way I can find to express just how absurd Aaron Judge’s wOBAcon is right now: When Aaron Judge puts the ball in play, he’s nearly as good as a walk.
I know that may not sound particularly sexy, but that number is remarkable. A walk is a sure thing. It’s a bird in the hand. Putting the ball in play is a gamble. The league as a whole has a .362 wOBA on batted balls. A walk is nearly twice as valuable. This is why every couple years we write a whole mess of articles about how if batters were really smart, they’d juststopswinging. But there’s Aaron Judge, so, so, very close to having his batted balls be as valuable as a walk. He’s just nine points of wOBA away. That’s nothing. It’s the value of a popup to the second baseman.
If all this talk about Judge and the value of a walk is giving you déjà vu, that’s because just about a month ago, Ben Clemens wrote a whole article about when it makes sense to walk Judge intentionally. We’ll circle back to that point, but the first thing I did when I saw that number was try to figure out just how special it was. Turns out it’s pretty special.
I checked the pitch tracking era first. Since 2008, Judge is the only player in baseball to break a .600 wOBAcon. He’s done it three times, going .600 in 2017, .602 in 2022, and .617 in 2024. Mike Trout’s never done it. Shohei Ohtani, Yordan Alvarez, no one but Aaron Judge has done it, and this season he’s surpassing his 2024 mark by, at present, 68 points. Judge will likely cool off at some point, and over at MLB.com, Mike Petriello has addressed how much of his sky-high BABIP is the result of luck and how much is just coming from the fact that it’s really hard to field a ball that’s been hit at the speed of sound.
Still, this made me really curious. I started wondering whether anyone had ever been as valuable as a walk when they put the ball in play. That meant a lot of math, because wOBAcon isn’t readily available for players who preceded the pitch tracking era. I wanted to go all the way back to 1901, so I had to reverse engineer it by myself (and when I say “by myself,” I mean “with the help of Ben Clemens because he’s good at math”). I pulled the stats for every qualified player-season since 1901, so I had everybody’s wOBA and counting stats. I split each player’s plate appearances into three sections: balls in play, strikeouts, and walks/hit by pitches. To calculate the number of balls in play, I took at-bats, subtracted strikeouts, then added the number of sacrifices. Then I got to the algebra and set up an equation that looked like this:
Total wOBA = (BIPwOBA x BIP%) + (BBwOBA x BB%) + (KwOBA x K%)
(Since strikeouts have a wOBA of zero, I didn’t actually need the third part. It would always equal zero.) At that point, my numbers didn’t look quite right, so I went to Ben, who taught me that for arcane reasons, hit by pitches have a different wOBA from walks and intentional walks don’t count toward wOBA at all, so I had to rework my calculations some.
The numbers still weren’t perfect, sometimes because of rounding issues, but more often because we don’t have all the data, like intentional walks and sacrifices, for older players. With the help of Stathead’s Katie Sharp, I incorporated intentional walk data from Retrosheet to the players in the top 20. The Retrosheet data isn’t official, but it made the numbers more accurate, and I care more about that. So keep in mind that this isn’t iron-clad, but here you go, the highest wOBAcons ever recorded in a qualified season:
Eight of the top spots belong to Aaron Judge and Babe Ruth; Ruth’s 1927 Murderer’s Row season also ranked 11th at .589. Judge is only one point above the all-time record, so he’ll almost certainly lose it at some point over the next 97 games, but he’s still 50 points above the third-place entry and 90 points above 10th place. He’s staying on this top 10 list unless something horrible happens.
More importantly, the answer to our question is “no.” Nobody’s has ever been as valuable as a walk when they put the ball in play. As a matter of fact, Judge is closer this season than anyone else has ever been. He may not beat Ruth in terms of overall wOBAcon, but keep in mind that wOBA is a seasonal constant. It changes every year based on the run-scoring environment. Back in 1920, walks had a wOBA of .741. This season, Judge’s wOBAcon is 98.7% the value of a walk. Ruth was at 92.3% in 1920, and that was the only season when anyone had ever reached 90%. If we look at things that way, Judge has two of the top three seasons of all-time, plus his current campaign, which is in first place and will likely stay there even after his BABIP luck runs out:
Judge still has a shot at reaching the magic number, though he’d have to hit even better to do so. I don’t think that’s really something we can ask of Judge right now. It’d kind of be like if you were an Athenian and Pheidippides had just run all the way from Marathon and shouted, “We win!” and collapsed and died, and then you started nudging him with your sandal and saying, “That’s great buddy, but now that you’re back, could you run and get me a sandwich?”
Still, let’s get back to Ben’s article. Ben combined Judge’s stats over the last four seasons with a run expectancy matrix and win expectancy numbers to figure out when it was smarter to put Judge on than to let him hit. Ben allowed for a wider range, but the math indicated that the answer was very narrow: in the ninth inning of a one-run game, with two outs and a runner on second or third. That’s it. Other than that situation, it’s smarter to pitch to Judge than to walk him. A lot of this discussion is centered around risk aversion. It’s scary to give up a 500-foot homer to Aaron Judge, and that makes you overreact, giving him a free base when the numbers say that’s not the smart move. But maybe we’re right to be scared of Aaron Judge. First of all, he’s run a ludicrous 239 wRC+ since that article came out. That’s somehow worse than the comical 248 mark he had at the time, but it also represented an improvement on the numbers that Ben was running. Those numbers went back to 2022, when Judge ran a pathetic 206 wRC+. It makes more sense to walk Judge intentionally now than it did back in May.
Knowing all this, I’d like to run a quick scenario by you. Say you’re a pitcher facing down Aaron Judge. First of all, I’m so sorry. No one deserves to be in this position, and you should check and see whether you have any legal recourse against whoever got you into this mess. Second, take a moment to ask yourself a question: Can I strike out Aaron Judge? Seriously. Judge strikes out at a roughly average rate, which means that nearly 77% of the time that he comes to the plate, he doesn’t strike out. So be honest with yourself. Do you have it today? Is the slider biting? Does the ball feel good in your hand, or are the seams a little flatter than you’d like them to be? Did you sleep OK last night? If your answer to any of those questions is something other than, “Hell yeah, let me at him,” then it’s a very firm “no.” If you can strike out Aaron Judge, then by all means, pitch to him. You’ve got a 51% chance of getting him out and just a 15% chance of giving up extra bases. But if you don’t feel like you can strike him out, if your choice is either a walk or a batted ball, then you should probably just put him on. He’s 99% as good as a walk anyway.
Eric A Longenhagen: Good morning from dangerously hot Tempe, where I am coffee’ing at the kitchen island getting ready to work on Red Sox and Twins lists while prepping for the Combine.
12:07
Eric A Longenhagen: FOr those who missed it, please go read the Rangers list:
Ken: Has Jack Perkins’ performance so far in Vegas moved the needle for you at all in terms of how you view his ability to remain a starting pitcher?
12:11
Eric A Longenhagen: Yes. Ran into him last week as I was working on Mariners and he carved. Physicality looks like he’ll be able to handle it even if he isn’t the most efficient strike thrower. Let’s keep in mind, though, that he’s looked like this (sitting 95-96 t98, plus slider, strikes) for like five weeks, six weeks? It’s not as strong a look as if he’d been doing it since April.
