How likely do you think the Reds are to make the playoffs? I’m not asking you to guess what our Playoff Odds say about them. I’ll tell you that in the next paragraph. I’m asking you to put your own number on it, based on what you know and think about both the Reds and the playoff picture. They are 59-54 with 49 games to play. They’re three games back of the Padres for the final Wild Card spot and four behind the Mets for the second spot. Got a number in your head? Then we’re ready for another paragraph.

Thank you for playing. As of this writing, our Playoff Odds give the Reds a 12.4% chance of reaching the postseason. I imagine that feels a little light to at least some people. Baseball Reference gives the Reds a 36.3% chance of making the playoffs. They’re within four games of both the Mets and the Padres. They’re also within five games of the Phillies, the first-place team in the NL East. If the Reds keep playing like they’re playing and any one of those teams has a late-season swoon, they’re in. According to Pythagorean Win-Loss expectancy, they should have the same record as the Mets right now and a better record than the Padres. They just added at the deadline. Hunter Greene looks like he’ll be back soon, and Elly De La Cruz sure looks like the kind of player who can put a team on his back for a couple weeks and carry it over the finish line.

Then again, I’m sure that number feels high to some people. You can understand why the numbers don’t like the Reds. Baseball Reference gives them such a high chance because it ignores roster composition, and, well, the Reds have a weaker roster than the teams ahead of them. They rank 22nd in position player WAR, and they didn’t add as much at the deadline as the Phillies, Mets, or Padres. In fact, according to ZiPS, they actually became 3.2% less likely to make the playoffs when the deadline dust settled, because of doubts about Ke’Bryan Hayes and presumably because the other teams added so much more. They’ve had the fifth-easiest schedule in baseball to this point in the season, and they’ve got the toughest schedule in baseball from here on out. They’ve overperformed their xwOBA by six points, the second-highest such gap in baseball. Not only do our projections have the Reds missing the playoffs, they have them finishing at 82-80, one game above .500 for the season and seven games behind the Padres in the standings. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot has happened in the past week. When times were simpler, back when the Phillies signed David Robertson three lifetimes and somehow only two weeks ago, I raised the possibility that we might bring back the We Tried tracker for the trade deadline. It wasn’t a sure thing, because the trade deadline isn’t really the time for We Trieds. They tend to happen over the offseason, when news is slow and multiple teams are bidding on free agents – which is why Robertson had so many reported suitors – rather than when teams are trying to swing trades. Loose lips can sink the many relationships involved in trades, and in the aftermath of the draft and deadline, everyone’s too busy to reach out to a reporter with an unattributed attempt to assure fans they made an effort. At least that’s how it normally works. This deadline featured a record-setting number of trades, and a surprising number of We Trieds to go along with all the actual action.

I’m sure I didn’t catch every We Tried, mostly because I spent the entirety of the deadline with my head down writing up transactions, listening to intense film scores in order to push me to write faster. I didn’t have much time to comb headlines and social media, but I did have help from some friends. I offer special thanks to readers JD, Elizabeth, Joel, and Fox Mulder Bat Flip for sending We Trieds my way. If you’re aware of any that I missed, as always, you can let me know on Bluesky or by email at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com. Read the rest of this entry »

You’re probably pretty good at baseball if you end up on this list:

I get it. “Doing damage when you elevate the ball” isn’t the only skill that’s necessary to be a good major league hitter. It’s not even close to the only necessary skill. On the other hand, look at that list! It goes 10 hitters deep, and they’re all great. The worst guy on that list is probably Christian Yelich, and he’s having a nice year despite dealing with his chronic case of can’t-ever-get-the-ball-off-the-ground-itis.

Psh! Who cares about wOBA? What even is wOBA? First of all, good news, here’s an article explaining it in great detail. Second, fine, let’s use a different statistic then. Here’s slugging percentage, same minimum of 100 batted balls:

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Red Sox acquired Dustin May from the Dodgers at Thursday’s trade deadline, they brought on board a starter with a pair of elbow surgeries in his rearview. The 27-year-old right-hander had Tommy John in 2021, then needed to have a flexor tendon repaired in 2023. Boston also brought on board a pitcher who has matured admirably since he was drafted 101st overall in 2016 out of a Justin, Texas high school.

“As a pitcher, I haven’t changed a whole lot,” May told me prior to the trade. “My stuff is pretty comparable to what it was before. But off the field, I’ve changed a lot. A lot of life changes have happened through the surgeries — a lot of good things — and I feel like I’ve definitely improved as a person and as a husband.

“We’re all very blessed, and talented, to be here,” he added. “Stuff can be taken away from you in an instant, and you can have no control over it. No matter how hard you work, or what you put into it, life can come at you very fast at times.”

A serious health scare last summer is an example. May suffered a torn esophagus that required emergency surgery. Less scary, but nonetheless troublesome, was his not bouncing back from TJ as well as he’d hoped. Read the rest of this entry »

Thirty-six trades in a span of 18 hours. A deadline day record. This after there were a whopping 16 swaps the day before, for an astronomical two-day total of 52 — that’s also a record, and nine more than there were over the final two days before the deadline last year.

Conceptually, the numbers are staggering. But as I sit here writing this mailbag after 7 PM on Friday, the reality of what we all experienced is starting to sink in. And I don’t know about all of you, but after a marathon of editing trade analysis pieces for the better part of the last 48 hours, I’m twitching from what can only be described as an unholy cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline, and I can feel the comedown coming. I’m both absolutely riveted and utterly drained, and the only thing keeping me upright is a keen sense of anticipation for all of the great baseball still to come.

We won’t be covering any trade news in this week’s mailbag. If you want to catch up on or relive the chaos of the last few days, you can find everything we wrote about the trade deadline linked within this roundup post. Instead, we’ll lean a little more evergreen. Before we get to your questions, though, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the deadline dust has settled – or at least, started to settle – it’s time to start making sense of it. The Padres, Twins, and Orioles were everywhere. Top relievers flew off the board. Both New York teams spent all day adding. But who did well? Who did poorly? Who was so frenetic that they probably belong in both categories more than once? I tried to sort things out a little bit. This isn’t an exhaustive list. There were 36 trades on deadline day, a new record, and more than a dozen before it. Nearly every team changed its trajectory at least a little, and this is just a brief look into the chaos. Here are the trends that most stood out to me.

Winner: Teams Trading Top Pitchers
This year’s crop of rental players was lighter than usual, but deadline activity didn’t slow. Instead, it simply spilled over into relievers under contract for a while. Mason Miller, Jhoan Duran, Griffin Jax, and David Bednar are under contract for a combined nine more years after 2025. That drove the prospect price up on all four. Having long-term control of relievers might be less valuable than at other positions, but it’s still valuable.

Most of the best prospects who swapped teams at the deadline were involved in a trade for top pitching. Leo De Vries, the consensus best player of the 2024 international signing period, was the big name here, but both the Phillies and Yankees offered up multiple good minor leaguers in exchange for Duran and Bednar. Taj Bradley, whom the Twins got back for Jax, is a former top prospect who won’t be a free agent until 2030. Read the rest of this entry »

And so ends another action-packed trade deadline. It came in with a whimper, with a quiet Adam Frazier trade to the Royals, but it ended in an exciting crescendo during which seemingly every reliever in baseball moved to a new team in a 45-minute period. Whoever said comparison is the thief of joy had never heard of the ZiPS projections, here to distill that bullpen beauty pageant (and the rest of deadline period’s action) into some cold hard numbers estimating what all these moves actually mean in the big picture.

Deciding who “won” or “lost” the trade deadline is a fairly tricky philosophical question, since different teams come into deadline day with different goals. So instead, I’ll focus on a simpler question: Who helped their 2025 chances the most? That’s a more straightforward inquiry, one a projection system can assess. For this, I used my usual methodology, first projecting the league as it currently stands using the full-fat ZiPS projections, and then re-projecting the league as it stands, but having unwound every transaction made since the Frazier trade on July 16. Read the rest of this entry »

I was a young baseball writer working in Houston when Carlos Correa came up with the Astros. At the time, I was convinced that this 6-foot-4 mountain of a man with a massive throwing arm but unimpressive foot speed would end up at third base before too long. A lot has happened since then. When fellow shortstop prospect Alex Bregman got promoted a year later, it was Bregman, not Correa, who slid over to third. From there, Correa developed into a Platinum Glove winner and a consistent plus-10 defender or better.

Then Correa left the Astros entirely and stayed away after a successful one-season audition with the Twins. Even after a reunion with Houston was mooted in the lead-up to the deadline, the scuttlebutt said it wasn’t happening and the Astros traded for Ramón Urías to fill the Isaac Paredes-shaped hole in the infield.

But after all those bumps in the road, and after 10 years of waiting, I turned out to be right after all: Correa is headed back to Houston, along with $33 million in cash, for minor league left-hander Matt Mikulski, and in accordance with my prediction, Correa is going to play third base.

Never abandon your takes, kids, you have no idea when the universe will decide to prove you right. Read the rest of this entry »

It was shaping up to be a boring trade deadline day, with the most interesting rental, Eugenio Suárez, already off the board and no huge prospects or stars in play. But the San Diego Padres don’t limit themselves to the guys that everyone knows are on the block. They swung a massive, unexpected deal earlier today, getting Mason Miller and JP Sears from the Athletics in exchange for Leo De Vries, Braden Nett, Henry Baez, and Eduarniel Núñez, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.

Miller burst onto the scene last year with one of the great relief seasons of the decade. He ramped up his fastball to nuclear velocities, sitting 100-101 mph and topping out above 103 en route to a 41.8% strikeout rate and a 2.49 ERA with peripherals that were even better. He did all that over 65 innings, a career-high workload for the 2021 draft pick. His fastball is a pitch modeler’s dream, all backspin and flat approach angle, and his slider is nearly unhittable for batters thinking “don’t get put on a poster by this fastball” from the minute they step into the box.

Miller’s 2025 encore hasn’t gone quite as well. For relievers not named Mariano Rivera, that tends to be the case. He’s still breathing as much fire as ever, but he’s aiming it a bit less effectively, and his walk rate has ballooned from 8.4% to 11.9%. Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’s still been very effective. Did you miss the part where I said he throws 103 with great shape and mixes in a nasty slider? Of course he’s still been effective. The decline has only been on the margins — ERA estimators in the high 2.00s instead of the low 2.00s, a low strand rate, and bam, suddenly he has a 3.76 ERA instead of a 2.49 mark. His stuff still looks really good, it’s just hard to maintain a two-handle ERA. Those are the numbers you put up when things go right, and 2025 seems more like an average year for Miller.
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For the second time in eight days, the Mariners have upgraded their lineup by landing a corner infielder from the Diamondbacks in exchange for multiple prospects. On July 24, they acquired first baseman Josh Naylor in exchange for a pair of young pitchers, and on Wednesday night they brought back All-Star third baseman Eugenio Suárez for a three-prospect package.

The full trade sends the 34-year-old slugger, a pending free agent, to Seattle in exchange for 24-year-old first baseman Tyler Locklear, 24-year-old righty Hunter Cranton, and 25-year-old righty Juan Burgos; both Locklear and Burgos have a bit of major league experience. This is Suárez’s second go-round in Seattle. President of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto previously acquired him and Jesse Winker from the Reds as part of a six-player deal in March 2022, one driven in part by Cincinnati’s desire to dump the last three years and $35 million on Suárez’s contract. He served the Mariners well, totaling 53 homers and 7.8 WAR with a 118 wRC+ in two seasons, and helping them end their epic playoff drought in 2022. Dipoto traded him to the Diamondbacks in November 2023 for Carlos Vargas and Seby Zavala, and he’s been even more productive in Arizona, clubbing 66 homers and 7.0 WAR with a 127 wRC+.

Those Arizona numbers conceal a major turnaround:

Read the rest of this entry »