Last week, I modeled Shohei Ohtani’s chase for 50 home runs and 50 steals to predict when he might reach that historic dual milestone. That prediction isn’t static, though. Every time Ohtani plays a game, the likelihood of his getting to 50/50 changes. Good news, though: Updating the model is as easy as hitting a few keys and listening to my computer hum for a bit.

This isn’t going to be a long article. It is, however, an updated set of probabilities, which is the whole point of this exercise. Ohtani hit two homers in his weekend series against the Guardians, which leaves him only four home runs and four steals short of a half century in each statistic. His odds of reaching 50/50 are up to 61.3% in my simulations – they were 55.6% before this series.

As a quick refresher, I’m simulating the likelihood of his hitting 50 of each statistic with a Monte Carlo simulation that takes his talent, his opponents, and the stadiums where he plays into account. I also introduce a random fluctuation in his home run talent: Sometimes he’s hot, sometimes he’s not, and sometimes he’s in between. I then simulate the season a million times and note whether he hits 50/50, and if so, in which game he does it.

The two homers in the weekend series have slightly moved up the most likely date for when he’ll reach the 50/50 threshold. Before his series against Cleveland, my simulation suggested that the single game most likely to see Ohtani either steal the base or hit the homer that pushes him over the line was the Dodgers’ September 27 game in Colorado. That’s still the case – but it’s now dead even with the previous game, September 26 in Los Angeles against the Padres. Furthermore, the Padres series has overtaken the final Rockies series as the three-game set in which he is most likely to set the mark.

Here’s the complete set of game-by-game probabilities:

I think these projections do a good job of handling a tricky problem. But I do want to make one point about their limitations: Steals aren’t quite as easy to model as home runs. Pretty much every time that Ohtani comes to the plate, his ideal outcome is a home run. He swings to hit home runs, and pitchers do their best to prevent them. The past does a great job of predicting the future here, because intent doesn’t change from one plate appearance to the next. Steals don’t work quite like that. Sure, Ohtani’s speed is a consistent and important input; the same is true for his baserunning instincts, the opposing pitcher’s ability to hold him on, the catcher’s throwing arm, and so on. But how much he wants to steal is also crucially important. He’s attempting to steal more frequently in the second half of the season than he was in the first, and his desire to run presumably will only accelerate if he’s sitting on, say, 50 home runs and 49 steals. I’m modeling a steady-state true-talent world, but I think it would be reasonable to tilt the distribution slightly earlier if Ohtani hits the homer plateau before the stolen base one, which looks more likely today than it did last week.

In any case, some takeaways: The last six games of the season are the most likely time to see history. The series against the Padres is now the best bet despite San Diego’s excellent pitching staff. The last series of the season, at elevation against a bad pitching staff, is the next most likely. The likelihood of Ohtani’s getting to 50 during both series is higher now than it was on Thursday, and I might even be underestimating it given that he might decide to attempt more steals as he nears the border of history.

Last week, my colleague Jay Jaffe noted that Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor had just entered the list of top 20 shortstops in JAWS, his system for assessing players’ Hall of Fame worthiness, which factors in a mix of career value (WAR) and peak value (WAR over their seven best seasons). That’s not the only notable thing about Lindor’s season, of course, as after a slow start to 2024, he has forced his way into the NL MVP conversation. With a .270/.339/.492 line, 135 wRC+, and 7.2 WAR, he may be having his best season in a career that has him looking increasingly Cooperstown-bound.

It seems almost absurd, but Lindor’s OPS didn’t take even the tiniest of peeks over .700 until June 5 — he’s been so hot that you’d think he was produced in Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. With Shohei Ohtani fighting for the first ever 50-50 season, Lindor may now be the biggest obstacle to the former’s coronation. Given the relatively modest impact even the biggest baseball stars have in comparison to their peers in football or basketball, no individual can really carry a team, but Lindor is certainly trying his best: The Mets have the second-most wins in baseball since the start of June (54), with the offense going from 17th to sixth in seasonal wRC+ over the same timeframe:

In that stretch, Lindor has edged out the other NL hitters by nearly 2 WAR. One of the odder consequences of the shape of Lindor’s performance is that it may result in a Hall of Fame player having missed the All-Star Game in the best season of his career. In fact, despite ranking fifth in WAR among hitters since the start of 2020 (behind Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, Freddie Freeman, and José Ramírez), Lindor hasn’t made an All-Star squad since 2019. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for a player who plays in baseball’s largest market and has a $341 million contract to be underrated, but here we are!

Ranking 20th at your position in JAWS is already a mighty impressive feat, but it’s even more impressive when you’re only 30 years old, meaning there’s a lot of time left to add heft to your career WAR, which makes up half of JAWS. With Lindor’s (relatively) disappointing 2021 Mets debut even farther back in the rear-view mirror, it seems like a good time to provide an update on his rest-of-career projections:

Even projecting a typical decline through his 30s — there’s a reason the vast majority of Hall of Fame cases are largely built when players are in their 20s — Lindor’s mean ol’ ZiPS forecast offers ample opportunity for him to put up some seriously gaudy career totals. The median ZiPS projection has Lindor finishing with 400 career homers on the nose, enough to rank him as one of the best power-hitting shortstops in baseball history:

Whether you look at players who primarily played shortstop or only consider performance while playing the position, Lindor features prominently. His 30 home runs this season gives him 245 for his career, 10th all-time among shortstops, while finishing with 400 would be enough to put him fourth all-time. If we look only at home runs while playing short, Lindor is sixth and is just over 100 homers behind Cal Ripken Jr. for the top spot. Given that Lindor is an elite defensive player, it doesn’t seem like he’s ticketed for an easier position anytime soon, short of a serious injury that necessitates a move.

Before last season, I gave ZiPS the ability to project career JAWS. In an era that’s rich in star shortstops, Lindor is currently projected to finish at the top of this generation. Here’s a projected JAWS chart, once all the currently active major league players have headed off into the sunset:

Even just the median projection would make Lindor a shoo-in on his first Hall of Fame ballot and put him meaningfully ahead of the other shortstops who debuted in the 21st century — for now, at least. If Bobby Witt Jr. keeps his beast mode switched on, he’ll rocket up this list fairly quickly (Gunnar Henderson just missed the list, along with Trea Turner). Given his already impressive place in history, I think Lindor would still make the Hall pretty easily even if his career ended tomorrow, as the Sandy Koufax of shortstops. The Mets’ penchant for sudden, often hilarious implosions makes watching them sometimes feel like an especially cringe-inducing episode of The Office. But if you aren’t tuning into their games, you’re missing out on the peak of a possible future Hall of Famer. And as countless players from Mike Trout to Miguel Cabrera to Ken Griffey Jr. have demonstrated, the opportunity to see these players at their best is frequently far more fleeting than we hope.

Jaden Hamm was surprised when he was selected by the Detroit Tigers in last year’s draft. That it happened in the fifth round wasn’t unexpected — he’d been projected to go in the three-to-five range — but the organization he would soon ink a professional contract with certainly was. The right-hander out of Middle Tennessee State explained it this way when I talked to him prior to a game at West Michigan’s LMCU Ballpark last month:

“I get a call [from my agent] and he’s like, ‘The Tigers are you taking you in the fifth,’” Hamm recalled. “ I was like, ‘What?’ He was like, ‘The Tigers.’ I was like, ‘I know who you said, but I didn’t expect that.’”

Subterfuge played a role in the surprise. Hamm had talked to Detroit’s area scout only a handful of times during his junior season, and while he went to the draft combine and had meetings with teams. the Tigers weren’t one of them. His best guess was that he was going to be drafted by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Atlanta Braves, or Houston Astros. That none of them — nor any other team — pulled the trigger in time has turned out well for the Tabbies. Hamm has emerged as the second-best pitching prospect in Detroit’s system, behind only shooting star Jackson Jobe.

The numbers tell a big part of the story. In 99 innings with West Michigan, the 22-year-old (as of earlier this week) Hamm has overpowered High-A hitters to the tune of a 2.64 ERA, a 3.10 FIP, a 30.6% strikeout rate, and just 73 hits allowed.

Another part of the story are Hamm’s metrics, which include 20-21 inches of vertical ride on his low-to-mid 90s four-seamer. Learning how best to employ his heater is yet another part of how he’s gone from relatively unknown to a breakout prospect. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s only one playoff race this year. That might not sound right to you. The Yankees and Orioles are deadlocked in the AL East. The Guardians are holding the Twins and Royals at bay in the Central. The Padres are looking menacingly northwards toward LA. But those aren’t playoff races, because everyone involved is making the playoffs either way. The only race where the winner is in and the loser is out is the one for the last NL Wild Card spot, and it’s taking place between divisional rivals: the Mets and the Braves.

It’s weird seeing so little actual drama in September. Those two teams are the only ones with playoff odds between 20% and 80% right now. That’s rare for this time of year. There were seven such teams last year, six in 2022, and three in the top-heavy 2021 season. Even if we go back to the 10-team playoff era, the years from 2015-2019 averaged four teams in that 20-80% range with a month left in the season. Despite no truly dominant teams, the playoff races are abnormally set in stone this year.

That only makes the last race more exciting, though. In one corner, we have the Braves, who came into the year as the best team in baseball. They were so good, in fact, that we used them as a model when delving into some new depth chart data this spring. What might the Braves look like if they lost Spencer Strider and Ronald Acuña Jr. to injury? Our model thought they’d be a .551 team. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Chapman is the lone member of the so-called “Boras Four” — the quartet of top-tier free agents who remained unsigned when spring training began — who has played well enough to merit consideration in the postseason awards voting, not only with respect to a potential fifth Gold Glove but also down-ballot MVP mentions. As I noted last week, from among the group that also included Cody Bellinger, Jordan Montgomery, and Blake Snell, the 31-year-old third baseman was also the one who appeared headed towards a long-term extension with his current team. Late Wednesday night, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that Chapman and the Giants had agreed upon a six-year, $151 million extension, one that replaces the final two years of his existing deal, both of which were preceded by player options.

The contract ultimately validates Chapman’s decision to turn down what was reported as a six-year, $120 million extension offer from the Blue Jays — with whom Chapman spent 2022–23 — at some point last season. While the Jays pursued Chapman to some extent early in his free agency, the Mariners, Cubs, and Giants were the only other teams publicly connected to him. Chapman finally agreed to a three-year, $54 million contract on March 2. While it included opt-outs after 2024 and ’25 as well as a mutual option after ’26, it was the only deal from among those of the Boras Four that came in with a lower average annual value than projected by our FanGraphs Top 50 Free Agents list. List wrangler Ben Clemens estimated a five-year, $120 million deal ($24 million AAV), while the median crowdsource one was for four years and $80 million ($20 million AAV). Where Chapman wound up with an $18 million AAV, his new pact raises that to $25.17 million, a figure that ranks fifth among current third basemen:

Read the rest of this entry »

PITTSBURGH — Crossing the Roberto Clemente Bridge over the sun-shimmering Allegheny River two Thursdays ago, I came upon a vendor with Pittsburgh sports merch hanging from the golden steel structure about three and a half hours before first pitch.

At any other time, in any other place, such a scene wouldn’t have caught my eye. After all, in this weird world of sports, it is totally normal to see an enterprising middle-aged man trying to make a quick buck — or 80 — by selling fabrics of faith to his fellow congregants. That’s just good business. But the vendor’s specific assortment of apparel was notable because it was limited to three of the most important symbols in Pittsburgh sports these days: Terrible Towels, Roberto Clemente, and Paul Skenes.

That’s right, the 22-year-old right-hander who has yet to complete his first full season of professional baseball — at any level — has already become something of an institution in this city. Over the last few months, Skenes has returned the Pirates to relevance for the first time in nearly a decade. His first start, on May 11, was the most highly anticipated starting pitcher debut since Stephen Strasburg’s in 2010. Against the Cubs at Wrigley Field six days later, Skenes dazzled for six no-hit innings; he struck out 11, including the first seven batters he faced and nine of the first 12, and he didn’t allow anyone to reach base until he walked Michael Busch with one out in the fifth. A month into his career, pitching for the first time against the Cardinals at Busch Stadium, Skenes received a standing ovation as he walked off the mound after carving up the St. Louis lineup for 6 1/3 innings; he gave up five hits and no walks and finished with eight strikeouts. He started the All-Star Game for the National League, an honor that rewarded him for his early success and platformed him as one of the faces of baseball for years to come. Read the rest of this entry »

Late Wednesday night, I was poking around the internet looking for inspiration. A badly timed bout of writer’s block had kept me working on my Spencer Schwellenbach article well into the evening, so I wanted to get a head start on Friday’s piece and pick a topic before I went to bed. That’s when I saw this, from Weird Twitter agenda-setter and Batting Around podcast host Lauren:

i think all the 2024 white sox team records should stand but somehow player records should get expunged. like, the MLB stat nerd community has a duty to figure out how stuff was handled when individuals were held responsible for plagues that effected cities in babylon

— lauren (@Very__Regular) September 5, 2024

Over the past few days, you’ve probably seen something about how the AL Central has four teams with winning records, but the White Sox have been so bad they’ve dragged the division as a whole dozens of games under .500. This fun fact relies on the Detroit Tigers keeping their heads above the break-even point — a delicate tightrope act if ever one existed — but it speaks to an exciting possibility: That the White Sox might be so bad they’re breaking the curve for everyone. Read the rest of this entry »

Corbin Carroll had one hell of a 2023. Even before he was unanimously voted NL Rookie of the Year on the strength of a 25-homer, 54-steal season, he landed an eight-year, $111 million extension. He capped his stellar season by helping the 84-win Diamondbacks through a memorable, improbable October run to their first World Series appearance in 22 years. Yet for the first half of 2024, the D-backs’ dynamo rarely played up to last year’s standard, while his team struggled to stay within sight of .500. Since the All-Star break, it’s been a different story, as Carroll has rediscovered his stroke while spurring the red-hot Diamondbacks into Wild Card position.

The short version of the story is that Carroll hit just .212/.301/.334 (79 wRC+) through the first half, homering just five times; he didn’t hit his third shot until July 7. The Diamondbacks slipped below .500 on April 17 and didn’t get their heads back above water until July 12, in the midst of a four-game winning streak that helped push them to 49-48 at the break. They haven’t looked back, going 30-13 in the second half, the majors’ second-best record behind the Padres (30-12), and at 79-61, they’re now half a game out of the NL Wild Card lead, with playoff odds of 88.6%. Carroll has hit .282/.356/.647 (166 wRC+) with 14 homers since the All-Star break; his 11 homers in August was one shy of the majors-leading 12 hit by Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. His hot streak has helped the Diamondbacks weather the absences of both Christian Walker (who missed all of August with an oblique strain) and Ketel Marte (who’s been out since August 19 with a left ankle sprain).

The longer version of the story is that the 24-year-old Carroll’s resurgence has allayed concerns that stretch back to the middle of last season. Overall, he hit .285/.362/.506 (132 wRC+) while making the NL All-Star team, finishing eighth in the league in WAR (5.4) and fifth in the MVP voting. Yet even within that stellar campaign, he experienced a notable drop-off in performance. Carroll hit .290/.366/.559 (146 wRC+) with 17 homers through the end of June but slipped to .280/.356/.452 (118 wRC+) with eight homers from July onward; the dividing line for those two almost exactly equal stretches (323 plate appearances for the former, 322 for the latter) was his departure from a June 29 game due to soreness in his surgically repaired right (non-throwing) shoulder. He tore his labrum and posterior capsule in 2021, which cost him nearly the entire season. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of great baseball storylines to keep tabs on this month. Aaron Judge is on yet another historic tear. Bobby Witt Jr. and the Royals are crashing the playoff party. The Brewers and Guardians are showing the league that you overlook the Central divisions at your own peril. But it all pales in comparison to Shohei Ohtani’s pursuit of 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases, at least for me.

The 50-50 club doesn’t have any members. Ohtani is alone in the 44-44 club, the highest current rung he’s attained, and it doesn’t look like anyone else will be joining him anytime soon. Ohtani himself probably won’t repeat this; this is a career high in steals by a mile, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s happening in a season when he isn’t pitching. Next year, I think that he’ll rein himself in more, but right now, we’re seeing what it looks like when a fast player decides that they really do want to steal all the bases they can. Of course, it helps that he’s also one of the most powerful hitters in the game – both to aim for the 50-50 target and because opposing pitchers walk him quite often.

Will he make it? I’m not sure, but luckily I have a method that lets me estimate the odds. When Judge hit 62 homers two years ago, I built a little tool to estimate the likelihood of him hitting that milestone, as well as the chances of it happening in any particular game. That method works pretty well in general, so I redid it with a few modifications to handle the fact that we’re looking at two counting statistics instead of just one. I’ll start by reviewing the methodology, though if you’re not into that, there are some tables down below that will give you an idea of when and where Ohtani might hit (or run into) this momentous milestone. Read the rest of this entry »

When you write about sabermetrics, the word jump is your best friend. There are only so many ways to explain that a number got bigger from one period of time to the next, and the word increase carries a vanishingly small amount of sex appeal. On the other hand, jump is an action verb that can lend some verve to, say, a dry passage about Jurickson Profar’s expected weighted on-base average, just to pick one completely random example off the top of my head:

Today is the rare day when we actually get to use the word jump to talk about a jump, because on Tuesday, when Rangers third baseman Josh Smith hit a towering chopper to first base, he didn’t just jump — he jumped.

In the bottom of the eighth, Yankees pitcher Tommy Kahnle dotted a changeup on the corner of the zone, and Smith rolled over it with an awkward swing that sent the ball right into the ground. It bounced up toward the roof and came down headed almost directly for the bag, where the waiting DJ LeMahieu lost it in the lights. The ball hit him in the glove, then bounced right into the base path, whereupon both Smith and Kahnle, who had heretofore been drifting nonchalantly toward the base, instantly shifted into top gear. Kahnle made a sliding play to barehand the ball, but the slide took him into the basepath. In a daring display of both initiative and inertia, Smith managed to hurdle the turtling pitcher and step on the base without breaking stride:

It was a remarkable play, and after my eighth or ninth viewing, I started to notice the little things. Actually, that’s not true. First, I noticed one extremely big thing. Check out Josh Smith’s quadriceps muscle:

Good Lord. That quad needs its own post office. The next time somebody tells you that all baseball players are slow and out of shape, show them this picture and take a few steps back so that they have space to react. No wonder Smith was able to leap over Kahnle without breaking stride. I’m surprised he came back down to earth.

The biggest thing I noticed, though, was how differently the players on the field reacted based on their proximity to the play. Perspective changes everything, and the closer a player was to the play, the more concern they exhibited. I’ll show you what I mean. Here’s Kahnle’s body language in the split second when Smith was right over his head:

This is what fear looks like. Less than a second ago, this extremely muscly man was going all out for a baseball. Now he’s trying to set the world record for fastest assumption of the fetal position. No pitcher has ever been so thoroughly posterized. Smith is literally making the Jumpman logo on top of Kahnle’s head. Kids all over the country should be hanging this on their bedroom doors:

Speaking as someone who has taken the business end of a baseball cleat to the face before, I’m not trying to make fun of Kahnle’s reaction. When you find yourself helpless on the ground beneath a stampeding Josh Smith, cowering in fear is the appropriate course of action.

That was the person at the epicenter. Now let’s take one step back. Here’s the next-closest person to the play, DJ LeMahieu. He wasn’t in as much immediate danger as Kahnle. As such, he never quite looked like he was fearing for his life, but the first baseman went on his own roller coaster ride, and it’s fun to watch the video both forwards and backwards. That way, you can watch LeMahieu go back and forth between concern for his teammate’s safety and concern for his own:

You don’t have to be an awkward person to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering what your hands should be doing, but I’m pretty sure that you can’t be officially recognized as awkward without spending an inordinate amount of time wondering what your hands should be doing. Those of us in the club will recognize that LeMahieu is putting on a master class of manual expression. First, he reacts to his error by bringing his hands to his chest, a move so classic that it’s literally the defining gesture of the guilt-ridden Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter. Next, he reacts to Kahnle’s close call by reaching toward him. It’s what you do when you want to help, but you’re too far away to actually do anything. I personally find myself doing it from across the room any time my tiny nephew wobbles down the stairs without any regard for his own life. Lastly, if you slow the video to just the right speed, there’s a moment where it looks like LeMahieu is afraid that Smith is going to land directly on top of him, and he raises his hands as if to catch the plummeting third baseman. With nothing more than a first baseman’s mitt and one free hand, LeMahieu tells a compelling tale.

But travel just a few yards farther away and the play carried much less immediacy. Over at second base, Gleyber Torres crept toward first base, but he didn’t seem particularly concerned. Maybe it didn’t look quite as scary from his angle, or maybe he just had more pressing matters to attend to:

You know what? That’s a fun shot, what with Kahnle all blurred from the do or die dive and LeMahieu oozing concern, but let’s actually zoom in a little closer so we get a better look at Torres:

Yeah, that’s much better. Torres was definitely paying attention to the play, but he wasn’t so locked in that he couldn’t do a little multitasking. What makes this shot even better is that at the moment it appeared on the Rangers broadcast, color commentator Dave Valle was in the middle of a sentence that went, “…does a pretty nice job of grabbing this barehanded.” No, I’m not making that up. I’ve zoomed in on Torres, but otherwise the clip below is completely unedited:

Indeed he does, Dave. Indeed he does. Torres is paying attention to the play, but he’s also far enough from the action that he doesn’t look particularly concerned and he isn’t willing to forego his own comfort. Let’s close out by checking in on the people farthest from the action. Here’s how the New York outfielders reacted as Kahnle was risking his life:

Sorry, did I say “reacted?” I meant to say “stood there like statues.” Not one of them moved a muscle. Based on their complete disinterest, I can only assume that if you’ve spent as much of your life in the outfield as Alex Verdugo, Aaron Judge, and Juan Soto have, when you see a weakly hit ball to the infield, you instantly recognize it as a chance to take a 15-second standing nap and power down completely. This was a thrilling play, but all three of them look like they’ve been waiting in line at the post office for so long that when they finally get called up to the window, they’re not even going to remember why they were there in the first place.

Keep in mind that LeMahieu dropped this ball. Soto probably should have been backing up first base. Not only that, but this was an extremely dangerous play. Even if you assume that they don’t care at all about Tommy Kahnle as a human being, the guy has a 2.00 ERA over 42 appearances this season. He’s absolutely crucial to the team’s World Series hopes, and Smith came about eight inches from kicking his head clear off his body. Maybe it’s just because of how quickly the play developed, but not one of the Yankee outfielders was moved enough to so much as lean forward slightly.

Absence may make the heart grow fonder, but distance really does make everything seem smaller. If you’re LeMahieu, you’re terrified that Josh Smith and his gargantuan quads are about to grind your pitcher into a pulp right in front of your eyes. If you’re Aaron Judge all the way out in center field, that’s just a tiny problem for all those tiny people in the distance.