I’m sure you know the joke about the two hikers, the bear, and the running shoes. A bear is chasing two men through the woods; one stops to put on his running shoes. “You fool!” his friend says. “Even in those shoes you’ll never outrun the bear!”

“I don’t need to outrun the bear,” says the man. “I just need to outrun you.”

It’s an old joke, and I tell it a lot because I find it to have the probative value of an actual Biblical parable. You don’t need to be great; just be better than the other guy. For the past week, the Phillies have been mired in a losing streak that would’ve gotten national attention had the bear not been devoting its attention to eating the Mets. But on Wednesday, the Mets finally snapped their 12-game skid and the Phillies dropped their eighth game on the bounce. Now the two rivals both sit at 8-16, the worst record in the National League. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Kansas City Royals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

With big expectations entering the season, the New York Mets got off to a reasonably solid start; through their first 11 games, they had a 7-4 record and a half-game lead in the NL East. Since then, though, things have gone… less well. And after getting swept by the Chicago Cubs over the weekend, the team is now sitting on an 11-game losing streak, a skid that has dropped them into last place in the NL East, a full 8 1/2 games behind the Atlanta Braves. So, just how doomed are the Mets?

While you can’t win a pennant in April, you can certainly lose one. As my colleague Jay Jaffe noted last week, when the Mets’ losing streak stood at a mere eight games, the offense bears a large share of the blame. They’ve scored just 19 runs since the streak began, and have managed even three runs in just two of those games. The Royals, the next-worst offense over their last 11 games, have scored more than 50% more runs than the Mets (31 to 19), and considering they’re 2-9 over that stretch, it’s not like they’re cruising either. The loss of Juan Soto to a strained calf muscle is significant, but it’s hard to pin the team’s offensive woes solely on that. Their 1.7 runs per game is about three runs off both the 4.7 they scored last year and what ZiPS projected for this year, and no hitter in history has made that big of a difference. Read the rest of this entry »

The book on Munetaka Murakami was pretty straightforward when he hit the market this winter. Phenomenal cosmic power – itty bitty contact rate. While acknowledging recent injuries, our writeup noted his contact rates against good velocity (63%) and secondary pitches (50%) as red flags in his profile. And these weren’t little red flags, either. As Eric and James put it, “…if Murakami is only ever the quality of contact hitter we’ve seen the last three years, with no changes or improvements, he basically can’t be a good MLB hitter.”

Through a month of play, Murakami has been a very good MLB hitter, with a 153 wRC+ driven by a 21.5% walk rate and eight homers. But he’s struggled with contact, and that’s putting it mildly. He’s striking out a third of the time so far, with the fourth-lowest contact rate in baseball through Sunday’s action. So what can we say about that? One answer is that it’s too soon to say – either his contact rate will go up or his production will go down. But that’s pretty unsatisfying. To be fair, it’s probably right, but that doesn’t make it satisfying. So let’s break his game down more granularly to see where the whiffs are coming from, where the power is coming from, and how the two are related.

We’ll start with the “can’t hit secondaries” part of the scouting report. In the early going, that has been abundantly clear. Sixty-six batters have swung at 25 or more sliders this season. Murakami’s 59.3% whiff rate is the third highest, behind Max Muncy The Younger and James Wood. If you broaden that out to all secondaries, 201 batters have offered at 50 or more secondary pitches this year. Murakami’s 53.3% whiff rate is the third highest of that group, behind only Matt Wallner and Daniel Schneemann. Read the rest of this entry »

“I thought our story was epic, you know. You and me. Spanning years and continents. Lives ruined and blood shed. Epic.”

Over the last decade or two, internet meme-speak has watered down the word epic to a synonym of awesome, but with an exaggerated grandeur not quite captured by merely saying, “That’s awesome!” Because awesome itself has been watered down over the years, and no longer really implies something awe-inspiring, but instead something more akin to “cool.” And now, due to the fleeting nature of internet trends, the word epic is now outdated meme-speak at that, only used by cringe olds, too self-obsessed to notice that no one talks like that anymore.

But near the end of the second season of Veronica Mars, when Logan Echolls (quoted above) bemoans the way his relationship with Veronica has seemingly fizzled out, he’s using the more traditional, literary definition of epic (a little less Homer Simpson and a little more Homer’s The Iliad). Epic poems are rhythmic, lyrical narratives, known for their vast length and fantastical foes. Veronica immediately pushes back against Logan’s romanticized notion of epic love. Epic should not be an aspirational modifier for one’s love story. In general, epic narratives are pretty unpleasant for everyone with direct involvement, but they make for great television. And baseball games.

Late Saturday afternoon, the University of Northern Colorado Bears earned a walk-off win against the University of St. Thomas Tommies in a 21-inning epic at Koch Diamond in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was the longest game in Summit League history and the eighth-longest game by innings in Division I history.

But the sharp-eyed among you may have noticed a strange detail in the game’s description, aside from the general oddity of its going 21 innings. To understand how the Bears were able to win in a walk-off on the Tommies’ home field, we have to go all the way back to March, when the first bad omen befell the season series between these two teams. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re excited to announce that the latest addition to the FanGraphs Lab is a baseball simulator:

You can click on any of the day’s games to pre-fill the rosters, or build your own using current players. The simulator will then simulate a game 10,000 times. Read the rest of this entry »

Arjun Nimmala has a high ceiling that he is still far away from reaching. No. 2 on our Toronto Blue Jays Top Prospects list, and No. 48 on our Top 100, the 20-year-old shortstop is presently slashing .163/.308/.372 with two home runs and a 94 wRC+ in 52 plate appearances with High-A Vancouver. Last season, he left the yard 13 times while putting up a 92 wRC+ over a full course of games at the same affiliate. But while the production hasn’t been anything to write home about, the potential is clearly there. As Brendan Gawlowski explained in his scouting profile, “We really like the athlete and tools here, and we’re betting the results will follow in time.”

Nimmala’s right-handed stroke projects to produce plus power once he fully matures, and I asked him about it during spring training

“It’s a swing that’s built to do damage,” replied Nimmala, whom the Blue Jays drafted 20th overall in 2023 out of Dover, Florida’s Strawberry Crest High School. “I pride myself in taking good swings. When things are going well, I have a really good idea of the zone and am doing damage to all parts of the field.”

Asked to elaborate, Nimmala said he considers his bat path a plus — “I think it’s been good since high school” — adding that his adjustments since reaching pro ball have mostly been about putting himself in better launch positions. He further explained that he has tweaked his posture and how he lands.

As for reports saying that his swing is a little on the long side, but also quick, he agrees — but only to a point. Read the rest of this entry »

What-ifs are a central part of being a baseball fan. We love to consider how differently things might’ve turned out if a star player hadn’t gotten hurt, or if a team had signed one free agent instead of another. Some what-ifs are the stuff of legend, like the fabled night in the late 1940s when, during a drunken dinner with Tom Yawkey at Toots Shor’s Midtown Manhattan joint, Yankees owner Dan Topping nearly traded Joe DiMaggio to the Red Sox for Ted Williams. Others aren’t revealed until decades later, like when Barry Bonds said on the Opening Night Netflix broadcast last month that he would’ve played for the Yankees instead of the Giants if George Steinbrenner hadn’t given him a take-it-or-leave-it offer.

We all have our own personal picks, too. Here are a few of mine: What if the New York City newspapers hadn’t gone on strike in 1978? What if Eric Gregg hadn’t been the home plate umpire for Livan Hernandez’s start in Game 5 of the 1997 NLCS? What if Dottie Hinson hadn’t dropped the ball, or Jimmy Dugan had just laid off the booze? Some of the most significant what-ifs could’ve had a massive impact on the world beyond baseball. What if the Black Sox hadn’t thrown the 1919 World Series? What if Curt Flood hadn’t challenged the reserve clause? What if George W. Bush had been named commissioner of baseball?

We won’t be examining any of the above what-ifs in this week’s mailbag, but three of the four questions we’re answering below are rooted in an alternate reality, one in which Mookie Betts was always a shortstop, Ford Frick didn’t run Bill Veeck out of baseball, and a starting pitcher was exactly league average at everything except throwing strikes. The lone non-hypothetical question, which is where we’ll begin, looks at whether teams have more success when they hit a grand slam than when they score at least four runs without one. But first, I’d like to remind you that 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 »

On Wednesday, the Detroit Tigers signed rookie shortstop Kevin McGonigle to an eight-year, $150 million contract extension, keeping him under team control through 2034. When McGonigle was going through the draft process, quite a few observers — including me — saw a heady, left-handed-hitting second baseman with average size but a polished, punchy bat, noted that he is from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and thought, “Maybe he’ll be the next Chase Utley.”

As big as the hype around McGonigle has become, that’s still a lofty comp. Utley played 16 years in the majors, made six All-Star teams, produced 61.5 WAR (including five straight seven-win seasons), and appeared in three World Series, winning one. If McGonigle ends up doing all that, I think everyone walks away happy. But after just 17 major league games, McGonigle guaranteed that he would out-earn his childhood hero, who pocketed a mere $125.6 million across his decorated career. Read the rest of this entry »

First things first, I need you to divorce yourself from the notion of marrying strictly for love. Because that’s not how it worked for Evelyn Hugo.

Oh wait. That’s right, some of you probably don’t know who Evelyn Hugo is. Imagine Elizabeth Taylor, Rita Hayworth, and Ava Gardener all rolled into one, and now, in her twilight years, she’s sitting for a longform, tell-all interview spanning her entire career — every marriage, every movie, every divorce. That’s the premise of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, a novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

None of Hugo’s marriages are fairytale romances. For her, they entail more practical considerations. Sometimes love is a factor, but it’s never the sole focus, and rarely the primary concern. Nevertheless, each marriage plays a distinct role in Hugo’s story, in the creation of her final, self-actualized form. Read the rest of this entry »