Two months ago, I checked in on Oneil Cruz, the center fielder. Things weren’t exactly going well. The Pirates shifted Cruz from shortstop to center at the end of the 2024 season, and the early returns were so discouraging I felt the need to write about the experiment just 17 games into the 2025 season. Here’s where the numbers stood at that point:

Cruz is currently sitting on -8 DRS, -2 OAA and FRV, and -0.1 DRP. Among all outfielders, those numbers respectively rank worst, third worst, fourth worst, and fifth worst. The advanced defensive metrics work on different scales and they often disagree, but on this point they are unanimous: Cruz has been one of the very worst outfielders in all of baseball this season. According to DRS, Cruz is the least-valuable defender in baseball, full stop.

There’s great news, though. Last week, reader AJ wrote into our newly introduced mailbag to ask for an update, because Cruz’s stats look totally different now. I decided the turnaround was worthy of a full article instead of a few paragraphs. I’ve broken everything down with my first article as the dividing line. There’s a chasm between Cruz’s first 17 games and his last 48.

Deserved Runs Prevented is inherently more conservative than the other defensive metrics, but all of the advanced numbers agree Cruz has completely turned things around over the past two months. He hasn’t just stopped racking up negative numbers, he’s dug himself all the way out, grading as a net positive in every metric except Defensive Runs Saved. Over the past two months, they pretty clearly see him as one of the better defenders in the league. Put that together with career-best hitting and baserunning numbers, and Cruz is on pace for a career year. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night in Los Angeles, Shohei Ohtani made his first major league start for the Dodgers. For any other starter signed before the 2024 season, that would be a disastrous sentence to type. Ohtani, of course, became the charter member of the 50/50 club, won the National League MVP, and then helped his team win the World Series. But he came to the Dodgers to hit and pitch, not just to play DH, and last night marked a key step in that process, his first game action as he rehabs from a 2023 elbow surgery.

I watched every pitch of Ohtani’s one-inning outing to compile a report. Obviously, these are the observations of a data analyst, not a scout. I’ve supplemented them with the Statcast and pitch model data generated overnight. I’m not the type to ignore the numbers, but realistically speaking, 28 pitches isn’t enough for a real sample, so the data is more supporting than primary. I’ll start with my first impressions, walk through each of the four pitch types Ohtani threw, and then share some general conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »

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:

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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:

1. The Phillies acquired Jay Bruce from the Mariners for Jake Scheiner (2019).

2. The Yankees acquired Edwin Encarnación from the Mariners for Juan Then (2019).

3. The Blue Jays acquired Adam Cimber and Corey Dickerson from the Marlins for Joe Panik and Andrew McInvale (2021).

4. The Mariners acquired Carlos Santana for Wyatt Mills and William Fleming (2022).

5. The Rangers acquired Aroldis Chapman for Cole Ragans and Roni Cabrera (2023).

6. The Giants acquired Rafael Devers for Kyle Harrison and Jordan Hicks (2025).

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.”

Kevin Cash sees Mangum’s skillset as old-school. Read the rest of this entry »