You should never worry about spring training results; it’s a small sample against uneven competition, in which the outcome of the game is irrelevant. But it’s not going great for Roki Sasaki. In two Cactus League starts, the Dodgers’ 24-year-old right-hander has allowed half of the 20 batters he’s faced to reach. His ERA is 18.90, and no matter the context, you never want to see a pitcher with a post-Civil War ERA.
For people doing the Chicken Little act about the Dodgers signing every big free agent, Sasaki — not Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Shohei Ohtani, or Kyle Tucker — is the guy who should’ve been scariest. The Dodgers signed a 23-year-old NPB ace even though, by dint of his youth, money was not an issue. If the Dodgers could land Sasaki, perhaps their dominance would become self-perpetuating. Read the rest of this entry »
After the signing of Framber Valdez served as an exclamation point on what had been a fairly quiet offseason, the Detroit Tigers have established themselves as the preseason favorites in the AL Central. With a generally deep lineup and a solid rotation further buttressed by what is likely Justin Verlander’s swan song, you have to like Detroit’s chances, even if you think that the Royals or Guardians could prove to be a bigger threat than Vegas currently does.
But as someone who has now spent decades feeding data into a cold, impersonal machine and watching it spit out projections, I know about as well as anyone that the future is horribly uncertain. Predictions are not destiny, and a team with a 75% chance of making the playoffs still has a one-in-four shot of watching them on TV. Over the next few weeks, the Tigers need to answer as many questions about their team as possible, and one of the biggest is whether their top prospect, Kevin McGonigle, will start the season in Detroit or Toledo. And if the Tigers are truly in win-now mode, McGonigle being in the Opening Day lineup is the absolutely correct move to make.
That the Tigers have made “now” into their most important timeframe isn’t an assertion that I’m just pulling out of nothingness. With the negotiating gap between Tarik Skubal and Detroit on an extension reportedly in the range of $250 million, retaining Skubal’s services for 2026 only makes sense if you’re going for it. If their goal is simply to try to quietly cruise into the playoffs with 86 wins, then they might as well have traded Skubal to a team that is willing to go all-in, and hoped that they’ll do fine with the impressive players they’re likely to get in return. Read the rest of this entry »
If you spend some time poking around the nooks and crannies of FanGraphs, you’ll eventually encounter one weird thing. Go to our Depth Charts Team WAR Totals page, and you’ll see all 30 teams arranged by the amount of WAR we project them to accrue this season. Go to our Projected Standings page, and you’ll see the winning percentage we expect for each team. Sometimes, those two pages seem to be displaying the exact same information. Sometimes, they don’t quite line up.
Take right now, for instance. We project the Padres for 40.8 WAR, the Giants for 38.7 WAR, and the Diamondbacks for 38.2 WAR. Look at the projected standings, however, and we have the Padres down for a .490 winning percentage, the Giants at .504, and the Diamondbacks at .501. That doesn’t feel right. Shouldn’t the team with the most projected WAR also project for the best record? Well, buckle up, because to explain how this works, we’re going to have to do some math.
We’ll break this one down into two parts. First, what does a team WAR projection mean? Most basically, it’s the sum of each player on that team’s WAR projection, but we’ll have to get more specific than that. Our projection systems can spit out a WAR, but that’s not their real output. They project actual on-field baseball results. Manny Machado’s Depth Charts projection is for 644 plate appearances, 28 doubles, 26 homers, 127 strikeouts, and so on. The WAR part of it gets calculated after the fact. Read the rest of this entry »
On Tuesday, Team USA played its first tuneup game before the World Baseball Classic, thrashing the Giants 15-1 in a scheduled 10-inning exhibition. This came on the heels of Monday’s announcement lining up the American rotation for pool play in the WBC.
The WBC is a bit unusual for an international best-on-best sporting tournament in that it takes place during the preseason, rather than during a dedicated break (as in Olympic ice hockey or the 2022 FIFA World Cup) or the offseason. Therefore, the best active managers and coaches for each country are unavailable to coach in the tournament, as they would be in hockey and soccer.
For the first four tournaments, USA Baseball got around this by hiring either unemployed or recently retired managers — Buck Martinez, Davey Johnson, Joe Torre, and Jim Leyland. Highly successful and well-respected managers, in the latter three cases. For 2023, they went with Mark DeRosa. Read the rest of this entry »
A key part of developing as a baseball analyst is knowing one’s own scouting blind spots. So here’s one of mine: I will go absolutely berserk for any prospect who shows even a hint of life against older competition in international play. I can’t help myself.
Brett Lawrie makes the Canadian Olympic team just out of high school in 2008, and plays regularly in the tournament. (This tournament featured lights-out pitching by 21-year-old Hyun Jin Ryu and 20-year-old Stephen Strasburg, the latter the only college player on Team USA.) Lawrie then plays for Canada again in the 2009 WBC, before making his professional debut.
When pitchers and catchers report, joy abounds. Who doesn’t love grainy cellphone video of a pitcher mounting the slab in the early days of February? But as far as I’m concerned, baseball doesn’t truly start until the first pitch plot surfaces on social media. Not much in spring training matters, but pitch data does. One or two pitches is all it takes to establish the birth of a new pitch or velocity peak. Results — ERA, strikeouts — take a while to stabilize, and in any case, they mean little in the “just trying things out” context of spring ball. But the pitch data — that’s real, man. Nobody throws a new pitch on accident. (For the most part.)
And so, like the well-adjusted baseblogger I am, I’ve spent the first week of spring games knee-deep in the data. Would you believe that as of the final day of February, there have been precisely 4,500 unique pitcher/pitch type combinations? That’s a lot of potential trends to suss out. You, reader, surely don’t want to wade through all of that, so let me present you with a handful of things that have caught my attention in the pitch plot portion of spring training. They fall into three categories: under-the-radar prospects with at least one bonkers pitch, established starters soft-launching new shapes, and relievers with limited big league time popping like potential leverage guys.
Okay, this one was slightly more under the radar before Lambert went viral for his “30 raw eggs a day” shenanigans. From that story, you surely learned that he throws a fastball with considerable velocity. But what Anthony DiComo’s excellent report elided was the shape of that fastball. In his lone spring outing, Lambert showed off a 98-mph heater with 21.5 inches of induced vertical break. Outside of Lambert’s arm, that pitch doesn’t exist. Only three pitchers topped even 20 inches of induced vertical break on their heater in 2025 — Alex Vesia, Triston McKenzie, and Yaramil Hiraldo (more on Hiraldo later) — and none of them broke 95 on the radar gun. Read the rest of this entry »
Somewhere in my list of article ideas, I have a theoretical question tucked away. What’s the longest distance you could hit a baseball? Not what’s the longest distance a really strong player could hit a ball, but what’s the longest distance that it’s possible to hit a baseball? I haven’t gotten around to it because I’d need to interview a physicist or a materials scientist or both, but I’m excited about this question. Say you’re an infinitely strong batter with an infinitely fast swing. The distance you can hit the ball isn’t infinite. At some point, you’ll hit the ball hard enough that your bat will shatter, reducing the efficiency of the energy transfer. Or maybe the ball will be the weak link, and you’ll hit it so hard that it will deform into a less aerodynamic shape or explode into a thousand pieces. There’s a limit somewhere.
I will write this article one day (so please don’t steal it), and it will be fun to discover the answer through math and logic, but theory isn’t the only way to solve a problem. Last Thursday, Jac Caglianone tried to find the answer through pure experimentation, which is to say that in the top of the fifth inning against the Diamondbacks, the Royals right fielder turned on a Yilber Díaz fastball and ripped it into the right-center gap at 120.2 mph. The missile made Caglianone just the eighth player to gain entry into the 120 MPH Club in the 11-year history of Statcast.
It’s the hardest-hit ball of Caglianone’s career (officially, anyway; we’ll return to that later). It’s also the hardest-hit ball of spring training, and it’s far from the only fireworks display he’s put on in the past week. With a 116.5-mph double on Saturday and a 115.2-mph homer on Tuesday, Caglianone now owns three of the 10 hardest-hit balls of spring training. More importantly, it’s the 30th-hardest ball ever recorded by Statcast at any level. Thankfully, Statcast is now in every spring training ballpark, or we never would have grasped just how special Caglianone has been this spring. Read the rest of this entry »
Xander Bogaerts is on the verge of multiple milestones. Barring injury, the 33-year-old San Diego Padres shortstop will reach and surpass 400 doubles, 200 home runs, and 1,000 runs scored this season. He also has a shot at 2,000 hits, needing 178 more to arrive at that mark. And then there is the defensive side of the equation. Defying most expectations, Bogaerts is on the doorstep of having started 1,500 games at his middle-of-the-infield position.
As you may recall, Bogaerts’s bat was his calling card when he ranked as the top prospect in the Boston Red Sox system. Few doubted his ability to hit, but the likelihood that he would remain a shortstop was another story. Echoing the opinion of many throughout the industry, our December 2011 writeup of the then-19-year-old Oranjestad, Aruba native included the following:
“Defensively he plays a solid shortstop but he’s expected to slow down and shift over to third base before he reaches the majors.”
I’ve addressed that possibility with Bogaerts multiple times over the years, initially for a print-publication story I wrote when he was in Double-A. Quoting a scout, I titled the piece, “Looks Like a Shortstop to Me.”
All these years later, Bogaerts recalls the conjecture surrounding his future in the field. When I caught up to him at Padres camp last weekend, it was the first thing he mentioned when I posed this question: Had you been told at age 20 that your career would follow the path it has, would anything have surprised you? Read the rest of this entry »
Happy last day of February, everyone. By this time next week, the World Baseball Classic will have begun, allowing us to experience the best of what our global game has to offer. Earlier this month, Kiri Oler previewed the WBC with four team-by-team breakdown pieces, oneforeachpool, and we’ll have more coverage next week leading into the tournament. Also, I’ll be in Miami covering Pool D, which features Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, Israel, and Nicaragua, so if you have any questions related to the first-round action at loanDepot park, you know how to reach me.
Of course, the World Baseball Classic isn’t the only baseball we have to look forward to in March. We are less than four weeks away from Opening Day! This year marks the earliest traditional Opening Day in MLB history, with 14 games scheduled for Thursday, March 26. The night before, the Giants will host the Yankees for the first game of the season. That standalone primetime matchup will air on Netflix of all places, because we all needed another streaming service subscription.
Anyway, in this week’s mailbag, we’ll be answering your questions about the NL Central, the value of a foul ball, a hypothetical Hall of Fame election in which every player regained eligibility for one year, and the most and least valuable baseball last names. Before we do, though, 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 »
Kevin McGonigle Photo: Junfu Han/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. 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 »
