This one’s going to be a little bit of a mashup. Last weekend, I was watching a Dodgers game when Max Muncy made a slick play over at third base. Then he mashed a two-run home run to put the Dodgers on the scoreboard. That got me to thinking about how impressive Muncy’s career has been – never the prime attraction on a Los Angeles team that has employed many of baseball’s best during its reign atop the league, but always a key cog.

But a Muncy article wasn’t the only idea I left that game with. His two-run homer? It only served to narrow the Dodgers’ deficit from five to three. The Braves tacked on more runs late and won 7-2 for a second straight day, taking two out of three from the two-time defending champs. Then the lowly Giants came to town and split a four-game set. The Los Angeles offense, in particular, has been moribund of late. That sounded like an article topic all on its own. But if two articles are good, one article slamming together points from both is better (he said hopefully).

I don’t think there’s anything sneaky or overlooked about Muncy’s excellent start to the 2026 season. When he comes to the plate, he does the same thing every night: He tries to leave the park. That means he’s looking for pitches to clobber, and also trying to clobber those pitches. The looking part, combined with his great batting eye, means plenty of walks and plenty of deep counts. The “trying to clobber” part means plenty of whiffs and plenty of scorched baseballs. It’s an approach that’s easy to describe, but it’s devilishly difficult in practice to strike the right balance between selection and aggression.

Muncy is now in his ninth season of finding that balance. His consistency is remarkable – year in and year out he’s posted a double-digit walk rate, a strikeout rate between 20-27%, and a batting line in the neighborhood of a 130 wRC+. His wRC+ is 21st among qualified hitters over that span, wedged between Hall of Fame hopefuls Jose Altuve and Paul Goldschmidt. His batting line is a dead ringer for Kyle Schwarber’s. This year, Muncy is off to an excellent start, on pace for his best year since 2018. It’s not so much that he’s found a new gear; you’d have a hard time differentiating between his 2025 and 2026 component statistics. That’s basically my point, though. What he’s doing isn’t surprising, because he’s made it commonplace. He’s hit more or less like this for a decade. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper is Cooperstown bound, and he’ll get there having embraced a relatively straightforward approach. Aggressively selective and with a swing built to do damage, the future Hall of Famer isn’t big on hitting analytics or new-school methods. More than anything, he trusts his raw ability — which he has in great abundance — and basically goes out to bash. It’s hard to argue with his success. Now in his 15th big league season, and eighth with the Philadelphia Phillies, the two-time NL MVP has 373 home runs to go with a .280/.386/.519 slash line and a 141 wRC+ for his career. Moreover, the 33-year-old is showing no signs of slowing down. At the quarter mark of the current campaign, he has 10 round-trippers and a 146 wRC+.

Harper sat down to talk hitting at Fenway Park earlier this week.

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David Laurila: You told me that you’re more so see-ball-hit-ball than a guy who puts a lot of thought into his craft. Can you elaborate on that?

Bryce Harper: “I take my routine into the cage and kind of let that play out. There are days in the cage where you’re going to feel good, and days in the cage where you’re not necessarily going to feel good. I just need to stick with my routine every day, the same routine, understanding what works for me. That’s kind of how I’ve always been. I’ve got little drills that I like to do, which keep me through the ball and in the same path. But video-wise, pitcher tendencies — all that kind of stuff — I mostly throw out the door. I don’t do too much of that.”

Laurila: That said, have you changed at all from when you first broke into pro ball? Stance, set-up, bat path, etc.

Harper: “I’ve had to evolve. Guys are throwing harder. When I came up in 2012, one of the harder fastballs, Jonny Venters’, was like 98 [mph]. [Francisco Rodríguez] threw pretty hard. But now everybody is 95 to 100, up to 102. Each day you’re facing guys who are throwing really hard, from starters to bullpen. So, I’ve had to make sure I get to the baseball in a certain way, staying on plane. High heaters. Making sure that I’m on plane to get to baseballs thrown at a high level.”

Laurila: You need to do that without cheating on fastballs, otherwise you’re going to get beat by a secondary… Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Baltimore Orioles. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our 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 »

Yandy Díaz was in the news last week when he recorded his 1,000 career hit, making him the 20th Cuban-born MLB player to reach that milestone. The plaudits he received were well deserved, and they were also relatively uncommon. Playing in a lower-profile market, the Tampa Bay Rays stalwart flies under the national radar. Be honest. Outside of when he captured the American League batting title with a .330 average in 2023, when was the last time you paid more than a modicum of attention to the player who is arguably the top hitter in Rays franchise history?

You’re excused if you weren’t aware of just how good Díaz’s numbers are. Now in his eighth season with Tampa Bay after parts of two in Cleveland, he boasts a 133 wRC+ with the Rays, the highest in team annals among hitters with at least 1,000 plate appearances. Over 3,627 plate appearances with his current club, the 34-year-old corner infielder/DH has a .291/.373/.447 slash line and 104 home runs.

Díaz was admirably humble when asked about his milestone the following day.

“I never thought I’d get to 500, let alone 1,000,” he told reporters. “When I signed with Cleveland, I honestly never really thought I was going to get to the major league team. I thought, yeah, I was going to be a professional, but maybe I was going to get cut — specifically because it’s a different style of play over in Cuba. I thank God that I made the team and have been able to do it for so long.”

I asked the Sagua la Grande native how much he’s changed — and how much he really hasn’t changed — since coming stateside to play professionally in 2013. Read the rest of this entry »

Since the start of the year, I’ve been watching Jordan Walker mash the ball as I try to figure out something to say about it. As a card-carrying Walker booster – I’ve got a Top 50 Trade Value ranking to prove it – I’m very willing to believe in Walker’s promise. But as a sometime Cardinals fan – being a professional baseball writer makes fandom complicated – I’m afraid of getting burned. Walker has already gone from one of the most heralded prospects in the game to one of its worst-performing full-time players. Now he’s one of the best-performing players? Being a little skeptical is just a matter of self-preservation.

Now that we’re a month and a half into the season, though, I can’t keep myself from investigating. Walker hasn’t had stretches this productive since his rookie year. He hasn’t had stretches where he’s hit the ball on the ground this rarely as a major leaguer, period. He’s been 14.5 runs above average offensively in 2026 – after being 13 runs below average offensively for his entire career before now. If that isn’t screaming for an article, I don’t know what is.

If you know two things about Walker, they’re probably these: He swings hard, and he can’t get the ball off the ground. That makes it easy to think through how he might improve: keep swinging hard and stop hitting it on the ground. When I designed the Squared-Up Explorer for the FanGraphs Lab, Walker was actually one of my favorite examples to use. Look at where his best swings are, compared to another guy who swings very hard:

The bubble size represents frequency, and being further right means more squared-up contact. Before 2026, Walker squared up the ball most frequently on grounders, and he hit a ton of them. For his part, Judge isn’t squaring the ball up every time he hits it or anything, but he’s following a simple recipe. He swings really hard, he gets the ball in the air a lot, and then he profits. The harder you swing, the more valuable hitting the ball flush becomes; Judge doesn’t need to hit it pure every time to clobber dingers at a historic rate. Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I presented some in-depth research on the size of the 2026 strike zone. The results were clear and unambiguous: The called strike zone is smaller this year than it was last year, and most of that shrinking is coming at the top of the zone. But saying that the strike zone is smaller is different than saying that the smaller zone is causing the overall major league walk rate to increase, and walks are up by a lot this season. Last year, batters walked in 8.4% of their plate appearances. This year, through May 8, they’ve walked in 9.5% of plate appearances. Still, walk rates move around all the time for reasons unrelated to the strike zone. That meant I had another question to answer: Are the walks coming from the smaller strike zone, or are they coming from something else?

First, I decided to look for which counts have had the greatest impact on the increase in walks. To do so, I used a technique called Markov chain decomposition. Think of each plate appearance as falling through a Plinko board. Every plate appearance starts at 0-0, and then it progresses in one of four ways: ball, strike, ball in play, or hit-by-pitch. Ball in play and hit-by-pitch results end the plate appearance, of course, but ball and strike outcomes on 0-0 feed into other buckets: 1-0 and 0-1 counts. In each of those counts, the same thing happens, with the next pitch resulting in either a ball, strike, ball in play, or hit-by-pitch. That keeps happening – with foul balls behaving like do-overs in two-strike counts – until you get to three strikes, four balls, a ball in play, or a hit-by-pitch. The reason that this is helpful is because you can start with small events – balls, strikes, balls in play – and build bigger outcomes, like walks and strikeouts. In that way, you can use per-pitch results to learn things about per-plate-appearance results.

That’s a Markov chain. To figure out how much each count’s changing results are contributing to the change in walk rate, we need to do a little decomposition, which means that another example is in order. Imagine a 2-2 count. Next, imagine that the only possible results are ball and strike. Further, imagine that there’s a two-thirds chance of a ball on 2-2, and a 50% chance of a ball on 3-2. You can work out the odds of a walk – one-in-three – and the odds of a strikeout – two-in-three – from those numbers. Now, let’s imagine a world where the walk rate balloons from 33% to 40%.

How can that happen? One of two ways: batters reaching 3-2 more frequently, or batters walking more frequently when they reach 3-2 counts. If 2-2 pitches go from being balls two thirds of the time to being balls 80% of the time, the walk rate would hit 40% without anything at all changing in 3-2 counts. Likewise, if 3-2 pitches go from being balls half the time to being balls 60% of the time, the walk rate would hit 40% without anything at all changing in 2-2 counts. In both of those scenarios, the walk rate goes up by the same amount, but in each case, the change in walk rate can be directly attributed to changing behaviors in a given count. As the likelihood of each individual result in each count varies, a Markov chain can calculate how much that affects the overall results.

In real life, the decomposition is a bit more complex, because there are more intermediate states and more outcomes, and because the results in each count are all changing at once. But that’s really just a matter of more math; it doesn’t alter the core concept. That means that you can look at a change in walk rate between two years and break down which counts are contributing to it the most. I did just that. I took every pitch from the 2025 and 2026 seasons and used them to create Markov chains. Then I decomposed them by count to see what’s going on with more granularity:

There’s an easy story here. Walks aren’t increasing because hitters are recovering from disadvantageous counts more frequently. Walks are increasing because when hitters get ahead in the count, they’re turning that advantage into a walk more frequently. The biggest contributing count is 3-2, with 2-0 and 3-1 close behind. It’s interesting to see 0-0 in the mix, but I think it’s very notable that four of the five counts that are contributing most to the higher walk rate feature more balls than strikes. The only reason 3-0 isn’t on that list is because the count hits 3-0 fairly rarely; it can’t contribute much.

Digging into why results in each count are changing requires leaving our Markov chain behind. If you compare 3-2 counts from 2025 and 3-2 counts in 2026, balls are happening 1.4 percentage points more often. Strikes are happening about one percentage point less often (the reason these don’t match the per-plate appearance results is that foul balls lead to a redo). But that doesn’t tell us why we’re getting more balls. To learn more, we’ll have to start integrating pitch location and batter behavior.

I’d say we should start with zone rate, but we run into a problem right away: “Zone rate” doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. There’s a new strike zone in town. And even putting aside the fact that the zone is being called more tightly, the zones listed by Statcast on each pitch have changed. I did a quick test: I took all the batters who have appeared in both 2025 and 2026, and measured the change in the listed height of their strike zone in those two years. If you weight it by the number of pitches that they faced in 2025, the aggregate league-wide strike zone, as defined by ABS, is about three inches shorter than it was last year, with most of the decline coming at the top of the zone. Only three batters in all of baseball have taller strike zones in 2026 than in 2025.

Since zone rate is a moving target, we’ll have to measure pitch locations relative to one consistent zone. I chose to use the 2026 zone, but really, we could use either. The key here is that we have to make sure we’re comparing apples to apples, as it were. That’s because we need to distinguish between two effects: pitchers throwing to the same place but getting called balls where they used to get called strikes, and pitchers throwing to less central locations.

I broke up the strike zone into 14 regions. There are four “just inside the zone” regions, four “just outside the zone in one direction” regions, four “just outside the zone, on the corner” regions, and then the heart of the zone and far from the zone. Using a consistent zone, pitchers are throwing the ball outside the strike zone slightly more often in 3-2 counts this year:

For the record, “far outside” is defined here as far enough out of the regulation zone that a take will almost never lead to a called strike. I chose one inch as the cutoff for the size of my “just inside” and “just outside” zones, which worked fairly well to differentiate between close calls and easy ones. In 2025, only 2.3% of taken pitches in the “far outside” zone were called strikes. In 2026, only 0.8% of them have been called strikes, out of a sample of more than 3,000 pitches.

Not every one of those “far outside” pitches gets taken, of course. Here are swing rates in each region on 3-2 pitches in 2025 and 2026:

You don’t have to worry too much about the changes in swing rates on corner pitches, because pitchers have only hit the corners a combined 19 times in our 2026 sample. It’s just not a very frequent area of attack on 3-2 – and really, we’re talking about hitting one-square-inch targets, so it’s not a very frequent area of attack generally.

I performed a more complete analysis by working out how many pitches batters took in each region in 2025 and 2026, accounting for both changing pitcher behavior (where they locate the ball) and batter behavior (how often they swing). In 2025, 23.4% of 3-2 pitches resulted in hitters taking a pitch that was located outside the consistent strike zone we defined. In 2026, 24.5% of pitches have resulted in hitters taking a pitch located outside the consistent strike zone. That adds to the rate of called balls, but not by 1.1 percentage points. That’s because not every pitch outside of the strike zone is called a ball, and vice versa:

That’s right: The areas at the fringes of the strike zone are being called differently. It’s not so much that the areas where strikes are most frequently called have moved (with the exception of the area just above the top of the zone, which as previously noted, is where the zone is shrinking). The difference is that balls outside the zone are being called strikes less frequently than before, while balls inside the zone are being called strikes more frequently than before.

Let’s set aside the top of the zone for a moment. On the other three edges, the transition from 2025’s all-umpire strike zone to the 2026 challenge/umpire hybrid zone has been, well, striking. Balls that are just barely in the strike zone on those three edges were called strikes 56.7% of the time in 2025; they’re being called strikes 76.7% of the time in 2026. Balls just off those three edges were called strikes 37% of the time in 2025; they’re being called strikes 13.5% of the time in 2026. In other words, the strike zone is getting less fuzzy. The shape is only changing at the top, but the number of incorrect calls in a given area is declining across the board.

How does that lead to an increase in walk rate? It’s a neat little mathematical relationship. The closer a pitch is to the center of the strike zone, the more likely a batter is to swing, particularly in two-strike counts. That means that an increase in accuracy across the board will add more balls than strikes, because there will be more takes, and thus more chances for the umpire to call a ball or strike, on pitches located outside of the strike zone.

Take the example we just used. Swing rates on the inside, outside, and bottom edges of the zone – but still in the zone – hover around 75%. Swing rates on pitches just off those edges are around 70%. That’s a small but non-negligible effect from a one-inch difference in location – and it’s bigger in counts that don’t feature two strikes, where swinging at a ball in the strike zone is optional. There’s an even bigger difference between pitches over the heart of the plate and pitches outside the strike zone. Centrally-located pitches are being called strikes 1.2 percentage points more frequently in 2026 than they were in 2025, while pitches far outside the zone are being called strikes 1.5 percentage points less frequently. But batters swing at 90% of the strikes and only 40% of the balls, so the net effect is that improving ball/strike accuracy in three-ball counts leads to more walks.

There are three effects driving the change in outcomes on 3-2 counts this year: pitcher/batter behavior, a change in the definition of the top of the strike zone, and increased call accuracy. I mathematically decomposed those into three parts using a simple test. First, I calculated what the walk rate would be if we took all of the actual pitches, swings, and takes from 2026, but used the called strike rates by zone from 2025 (based on the consistent strike zone definition detailed above) for taken pitches. This explains how much the walk rate would increase merely from changes in batter/pitcher behavior with a constant strike zone. A methodological note here: I only considered pitches thrown to batters who appeared in both 2025 and 2026 so that I could standardize the size of the strike zone for our analysis. That means that the overall numbers differ slightly from league-wide rates, though the divergence is minimal.

Next, I took the relevant pitches from 2025 and used the 2026 called strike rates for the top of the strike zone and the 2025 called strike rates for the rest. That gave me the increase in walk rate you’d expect if the only change was the shape of the top of the zone. Finally, I took the relevant pitches from 2025 and the 2026 called strike rates for everywhere except the top of the zone, where I kept the 2025 rates. That gave me the increase in walk rate you’d expect from increased ball/strike accuracy. I found that you can attribute 0.9% of the increased rate of 3-2 balls to changing batter/pitcher behavior, 0.1% to changes in calls at the top of the strike zone, and 0.4% to changes in correct call frequency in the rest of the strike zone.

That analysis explains the change in 3-2 results. To understand the whole picture, I just repeated the calculation for every count. That gave me values for how much changes in batter/pitcher behavior, changes at the top of the strike zone, and increased call accuracy changed the rate of balls and strikes in each count so far this year. Then, to complete the circle, I fed this data back into our Markov chain from above; I ran hypothetical Markov chains for each of the three effects independently, which let me calculate the change in overall walk rate attributable to each.

In the aggregate, you can split the change in walk rate into three parts. One is a change in pitcher/batter behavior. This covers changes in where pitchers locate, how frequently batters swing in each location, how frequently they make contact, and how frequently that contact is fair. Those changes have added 0.5 percentage points to the overall walk rate. Next, changes in the shape of the top of the strike zone have added 0.2 percentage points. Finally, an increase in the accuracy of calls has added 0.4 percentage points to the overall walk rate. That’s the headline finding of this study: Walks are increasing for three different reasons, all working in concert.

The next question I had was how much of that increased accuracy is due to challenges – not the overall challenge system, but specifically the pitches that players have challenged and in some cases overturned. There’s an easy way to test this: I just told my computer to take the original umpire calls instead of the final calls. The results are both interesting and intuitive: ABS challenges themselves have actually decreased the walk rate. That’s not surprising – more balls have been overturned into strikes than the reverse – but it sounds funny when you say it out loud. MLB switched to an ABS challenge system this year, and the direct effect of that system is slightly decreasing walk rates. Also, walk rates have increased by a striking amount, and more than half of that is attributable to changes in the way that balls and strikes are called, which appears to be an indirect effect of the ABS challenge system. Isn’t that weird?

Finally, I performed some analysis to ensure that my findings are robust. I varied the sizes of the slices I used to define the various zones in this analysis. Regardless of how large or small I made those slices, the contribution of pitcher and batter behavior to walk rate was stable at around 0.5 percentage points. But the relative contributions of the top of the zone and of increasing accuracy changed; the larger I defined the top of the zone to be, the more effect it had. For very large definitions of “top of zone,” the effect was roughly equal in magnitude to the effect of increased accuracy. In other words, it’s difficult to disentangle exactly how much of the walk rate increase can be attributed to increased accuracy of an existing zone and how much can be attributed to a change in the size of that zone, but both factors are important, and I think it’s quite likely that the accuracy component is of slightly greater import.

So 3,000 words in, what does it all mean? This year’s strikingly high walk rate isn’t just about pitchers and batters behaving differently, and it isn’t just about the size of the strike zone. It’s both, and it’s also about umpires making calls more accurately. I think that’s why the increase appears so dramatic; lots of things are all changing at once, and they all happen to be changing in the same direction.

This isn’t a stable equilibrium. Both pitchers and batters will continue to adjust to the new way that balls and strikes are being called. Batters are swinging less frequently this year, and pitchers will likely adjust to that by throwing in the strike zone more frequently. Now that the rewards to fishing off the edges have declined thanks to an increase in call accuracy, attacking the zone is being rewarded even further. And batters don’t have to take those potential changes lying down. If pitchers start throwing in the zone more frequently, batters will likely increase their aggression.

I’m not sure where walk rate is headed. But I do feel confident in saying that plenty of this year’s increase comes down to a change in the way balls and strikes are called. I also feel confident that a majority of that effect is about the increased accuracy of calls rather than a change in the size of the strike zone. Finally, challenges themselves aren’t contributing to this change; taken in isolation, they’ve actually decreased walk rate.

As is customary, I’ve included the dataset and Python code used to generate these results here. The study can also be expanded to previous years or run on different data; in fact, I couldn’t upload the 2025 data to GitHub for size reasons, so you’ll need to download that yourself. You can also replace those with your own similarly-formatted data if you’re interested in expanding the analysis.

In his first three seasons, Patrick Bailey carved a niche as one of the game’s top defensive catchers, dominating the Statcast defensive leaderboards and winning two Gold Gloves. The development of his offense has lagged, however, and with the Giants struggling to score runs and sporting one of the majors’ worst records, they’ve decide they can live without Bailey’s glovework. On Saturday, they traded the 27-year-old backstop to the Guardians for 23-year-old lefty pitching prospect Matt “Tugboat” Wilkinson and a Competitive Balance pick in the upcoming draft.

This is the second season in a row that president of baseball operations Buster Posey has shaken up San Francisco’s roster with an early-season trade; last year, it was the mid-June acquisition of slugger Rafael Devers in a blockbuster with Boston. You don’t have to squint too hard to accept that both trades were aimed at upgrading moribund offenses, but when the Giants dealt for Devers, they were 11 games above .500 (41-30), one game behind the Dodgers in the NL West. They felt they’d landed the offensive cornerstone that had eluded them after unsuccessful pursuits of Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, a player who could help them return to the postseason for the first time since 2021. This time around, they entered the day of the trade 15-23, last in the division, and the move appears far more tilted toward the future, as Wilkinson has just gotten his feet wet in Double-A and the draft pick won’t make an immediate impact.

If this trade had occurred just prior to the deadline (August 3 this year), it might have been characterized as a white flag, part of a larger selloff. To these eyes, it’s a shakeup that at worst smacks of panic and at best places a lot of faith that Posey — a likely Hall of Fame catcher who has yet to show similar prowess as an executive — has found a diamond or two in the rough with his two recent catching acquisitions: Jesus Rodriguez, who came from the Yankees in last year’s Camilo Doval trade, and Daniel Susac, who was flipped by the Twins in December after being plucked from the A’s as a Rule 5 pick. Both are 24 years old and have fewer than 10 games of major league experience, with Susac, who turns 25 on May 14, currently on a rehab assignment after being sidelined by neuritis in his right elbow. Eric Haase, a 33-year-old backstop who hit his way out of a starting job in Detroit in 2023, started in Saturday’s 13-3 drubbing by the Pirates — San Francisco’s ninth loss in 11 games — while Rodriguez started Sunday’s 7-6 win, which lifted the team’s record to 16-24, still third worst in the NL. Read the rest of this entry »

Kai-Wei Teng had a limited repertoire when he signed with the Minnesota Twins out of Taiwan in 2017. The right-hander from Taichung possessed just a fastball and a curveball. A lot has changed since that time. Now 27 years old and pitching for the Houston Astros, Teng attacks hitters with a five-pitch mix that includes a sweeper that is not only hard to hit, it is no fun to be on the receiving end of in catch-play.

“It’s insanely good,” Spencer Arrighetti told me last weekend at Fenway Park. “I throw a sweeper. Lance [McCullers] throws a sweeper. We have a couple of other guys who toy around with it. But Teng’s is incredible. Truly. I played catch with him, and it looks like a fastball for 48 feet, then takes a 90-degree left turn. Not all sweepers are created equal. Some of them are a little loopier and bigger, but his is 85 mph. I mean, it’s gross. It really is a great pitch.”

The numbers back that up. Teng has relied on his most-used offering 36.3% of the time this season to the tune of a .118 BAA, a .118 SLG, and a 27.9% whiff rate. His other numbers are impressive, as well. Over 14 appearances, Teng has a 2.35 ERA, a 3.83 FIP, and a 24.7% strikeout rate over 23 innings.

I asked Teng for the story behind his best weapon. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my biggest regrets in the years I’ve been covering baseball is that I never got John Sterling’s list. You see, in addition to our mutual love of baseball, Sterling shared my appreciation for film noir. I don’t remember how it came up, but I learned of Sterling’s noir kick in the summer of 2023, when Yankees beat writer Chris Kirschner, of The Athletic, suggested I talk to the longtime Yankees radio broadcaster about it. I had never met Sterling before, but the next day in the Yankee Stadium press box dining room, I introduced myself. He was so excited to know that this 27-year-old kid also loved noir, and he immediately asked me what my favorites were. Right away, I rattled off In a Lonely Place, Out of the Past, and Double Indemnity, which looking back on it, must have made me seem like a noir novice, as if I said my three favorite Springsteen songs were “Born to Run,” “Born in the USA,” and “Dancing in the Dark.” But Sterling didn’t think anything of it. Or if he did, he didn’t show it. Instead, his face lit up, and in his baritone voice, he beamed about Bogart and Mitchum and MacMurray. We chatted for a few minutes before I asked him for his recommendations. He had to get back to the booth — it was almost game time — but he told me to come find him next homestand and he’d make a list for me. Unfortunately, I didn’t see him for another month or so, and when I did, I didn’t ask him for the list. We didn’t really know each other, and I didn’t want to bother him with something so trivial. He retired early the next season.

Growing up a Yankees fan from the Hudson Valley, I listened to Sterling for most of my life. His voice is woven into the fabric of my baseball fandom. It’s not a stretch to say that all those years spent listening to him on the radio contributed to my becoming a baseball writer. And yet, when I saw the news that Sterling had died on Monday at age 87, the first thing I thought about was the brief time we spent talking about film noir in front of the press box coffee machine that summer day in 2023. I never got the list, but I did get a wonderful memory. I’ll cherish it forever.

There’s no natural transition to the mailbag from there, so let’s just get to it. This week, we’ll be answering your questions about Austin Hedges’ unexpected hot start at the plate, the most efficient pitchers on a per-pitch basis, teams that register a .500 OBP in a game, and the largest percentage of career stolen bases coming in the shortest span of time. 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 »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. Actually, this is a slightly different column: Five Nico Hoerner Throws From Shallow Right Field I’ve Liked This Year Plus Assorted Veteran Cubs Defenders. That’s a little bit less catchy, though, and it’s at least vaguely Five Things formatted, so I’m counting it. Does “plays a single second baseman has made in one area of the field in one month of play” sound like too narrow a topic for not just one article, but five vignettes? It sure does – until you watch Hoerner play. When I voted for him in the Fielding Bible Awards last year, I wrote this: “I actually spent a while reviewing his defense on video. That wasn’t because I seriously considered anyone else for the top spot; it’s just that satisfying to watch him play.” Today, you can be a video reviewer alongside me. Try not to spit out your drink. And of course, what introduction could be complete without credit to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, the inspiration for this column?

1. Calmness Under Pressure
When you’re on the baseball diamond, things won’t always go right. At the big league level, the margins are razor thin. The other guy lives in a big house, too. Half a second late, and there’s no chance for an out. Throw to the wrong base? That’s often going to cost you. But the Chicago infield is packed to the gills with defenders who can tilt the playing field with guile, clawing that razor-thin margin back. A freakishly high chopper, off the bat of Joey Wiemer, gave baserunner Andrés Chaparro a good opportunity to take an extra base on an infield single. Hoerner probably shouldn’t have even attempted to throw him out, but he went for it:

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