Manny Machado was in the news last week for what got called an anti-analytics rant. This would’ve been a bigger deal 10 or 15 years ago, when front offices were still coming to grips with empirical study as a part of scouting and player development, but that battle’s over now. The nerds are here.

Machado said the game’s getting harder to play, and that there are “too many stats out there. Too many stats, way too many numbers. I don’t even know half of the stuff that goes up there. I look at the board sometimes, and I even ask some of the guys, like, ‘What is WCCVBB, whatever it is?’… It’s crazy to even keep up with.”

As someone who makes his living using WCCVBB, I think Machado’s actually got a point here. I’m an analyst with a social science background: There is no stat so newfangled I won’t poke it to see if it’ll teach me — or better yet, you, the fans — something new about the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Not very much has gone right in Cincinnati this season. Having fought through injuries, slumps from key hitters, and total no-shows from their closer and the back end of their rotation, the Reds sit just under .500, which in the surprisingly competitive NL Central is good for last place. It’s not how the Reds wanted to build on their playoff appearance a year ago.

One of the few bright spots has been JJ Bleday, who’s hitting .270/.363/.568. Despite appearing in just 39 of Cincinnati’s 67 games, he’s third on the team with 11 home runs and tied for fourth in total bases.

Unlike other Reds standouts, like Sal Stewart and Chase Burns, Bleday wasn’t really expected to do much. The Reds picked him up off the street for $1.4 million after the A’s non-tendered him last November. I was about to make a joke about what it says that Bleday couldn’t even stick in Sacramento, but the A’s are actually pretty deep at his position. At any rate, he was just below replacement level in 98 games in 2025 — that’ll get you non-tendered anywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

Once in a while, a player gets to walk off into the sunset at the height of his game. Ted Williams and David Ortiz are two examples of Hall of Famers who retired while still stars. But most players, even many greats, don’t see their careers end on a high note. That much larger list includes Andrew McCutchen, who was released by the Texas Rangers in late May after hitting .197/.277/.260 in 37 games as a part-time designated hitter/outfielder. There’s still a possibility that McCutchen catches on with another team this season as a spare bat off the bench, but in any case, we’re likely seeing the last throes of his career. Time always wins in the end, so this discussion was inevitable, but a decade ago, it looked like this conversation would have Cooperstown-related content.

Going back to early 2016 in the time machine, Andrew McCutchen was a very different player. Still in his 20s, he was a five-time NL All-Star coming off four consecutive Silver Slugger awards and four top-five finishes in the NL MVP balloting, including a win in 2013. It was a better time for the Pittsburgh Pirates as well, having just made the playoffs for the third straight season, winning 98 games in 2015 before being unceremoniously eliminated by the Cubs in the Wild Card game. Always at risk of losing their stars to teams more willing to pay them, the Pirates didn’t have to worry about that yet with McCutchen, who still had three more years to go in Pittsburgh, thanks to the six-year, $51 million extension (with a team option for a seventh year) that he had signed before the 2012 season.

At this stage, McCutchen appeared to be on a pretty good Hall of Fame trajectory. After seven seasons, Cutch was entering his age-29 campaign having already tallied 41 WAR with a .298/.388/.496, 144 wRC+ career line while playing center field. On a historical level, these numbers were quite competitive with some of the best young center fielders in MLB history. Look at how prominently he featured on the leaderboard through his age-28 season:

Note that Mike Trout would eventually move up to third on this list; 2015 was only his age-23 season! It’s also weird to see Rickey Henderson here, but he played mostly center field for the Yankees in 1985-1987, and so he qualified in our database.

Anyway, that’s impressive company, and the vast majority of these players are Hall of Famers or will end up there eventually. ZiPS at the time saw no reason to be particularly suspicious of McCutchen’s performance, and without any red flags, was happy to project him with a fairly typical decline phase for a star outfielder.

As it turned out, 2015 was McCutchen’s last 4-WAR season, and in only one season was he better than 2 WAR (3.6 WAR, 2017) over the next decade. While ZiPS didn’t have any illusions that McCutchen would stay a superstar for another decade, it didn’t expect him to hit a more drastic decline until the early 2020s. Sticking in center for a few more years, with a projected 2,600 hits, 72.7 WAR, and 333 home runs, when combined with his peak, I think this McCutchen would’ve made the Hall of Fame, though it probably would’ve taken him several years on the ballot to creep over the 75% line.

It’s hard to point to the obvious reason for his premature decline. The 2016 campaign was his worst season in the majors at that point, marred by a down June/July while he was playing through a severely jammed thumb. But that wasn’t thought to be a long-term problem, and his offense did bounce back to a degree for the next few seasons. His defense was already trending downward, but he was hardly slow, and, except for 2020 when he was coming back from a torn ACL that prematurely ended his 2019 campaign, he stayed above the 90th percentile in sprint speed through the 2022 season. His contact rate declined, but he still maintained his solid plate discipline and his hard-hit rate remained steady.

I don’t believe McCutchen’s going to do well when he hits the Hall of Fame ballot, but I think the version that we got might be too easily dismissed. He only ranks 30th in Jay Jaffe’s JAWS for center fielders, a place where most players do not get into the Hall. He does fare better using FanGraphs WAR, however, both in seven-year peak fWAR and in fJAWS. McCutchen ranks 13th in peak fWAR among center fielders, compared to 24th in Baseball Reference’s version.

Using FanGraphs WAR, McCutchen ranks 19th among center fielders in JAWS rather than 30th, and that ranking is strong enough that I think you at least need to have a conversation about his Hall of Fame suitability. As noted above, I’m not optimistic; the writers gave very little attention to Jimmy Wynn (19th), Kenny Lofton (12th), and Jim Edmonds (11th), while it took nine ballots to induct Andruw Jones (eighth). McCutchen had a huge peak, but the freshest memories of him will not be of that peak, but of his decade as a middling DH/corner outfielder.

If this is actually the end for Andrew McCutchen, he shouldn’t be remembered for coming up short of Cooperstown. For the better part of a decade, he was one of the very best players in baseball, the biggest name in a Pirates revival that briefly made Pittsburgh feel like a big baseball city again. The second half of his career didn’t dazzle like the first, but he did more than enough to be remembered as something greater than merely a very good player who got old quickly.

Like many baseball nerds, I have been itching to get my sweaty hands on enough ABS challenge data to draw some really strong conclusions. Unfortunately, it’s early in the season and challenges happen so rarely that we don’t have much to go on just yet. But you know what they say about idle hands. I am impatient, and I have been devising devilish ways to dodge the damnable data deficit. I’d like to show you one of them. Today we’re bundling.

Here’s what I did. I went to Statcast’s framing leaderboard and I bundled catchers by their strengths and weaknesses at framing pitches in certain locations. Fortunately, catchers are easy to bundle, because they’re already predisposed toward scrunching themselves into tiny little balls. Finding catchers with similar tendencies allowed me to work in the aggregate, searching for patterns in a more robust dataset. I won’t bore you with my methodology, but it’s not much more advanced than scrolling the leaderboard looking for catchers whose framing runs number is red in one zone but blue in another zone. I ended up with four groups:

• Catchers who are significantly better framers at the top of the zone than the bottom of the zone.
• Catchers who are significantly better framers at the bottom of the zone than the top of the zone.
• Catchers who are significantly better framers on their glove side than their arm side.
• Catchers who are significantly better framers on their arm side than their glove side.

Each group had around 10 members, and there was some overlap. For example, Patrick Bailey is in the Top Framers and the Glove Side Framers. A few catchers were too good to be in any of the groups, like Brandon Valenzuela. A lot more catchers were too bad or average to be in any of them, like Tyler Stephenson. Feel free to skip this part, but just in case anybody’s curious, these are the four groups:

Once my catchers were nice and bundled, I calculated their success rate on challenges both in the location where they’re good at framing and the location where they’re bad. Then I compared those rates to the rates of the catchers who were their polar opposites. I also calculated the average location of the pitches they challenged, in order to get a sense of how different the pitches they challenged really were.

Before we get into the data, let’s think about some possible results and about how we might end up there. The first possibility is that the differences aren’t that big. Just because you’re better at framing in one spot doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be better or worse at challenging there. This challenging stuff is so new that we’re not sure what’s what.

The second possibility is that catchers will be good at challenging in the spots where they’re good at framing. It’s certainly not inconceivable. Maybe you handle those pitches better because you see them better, or you’re better prepared for them, or you know that area of the zone well, so you have a better sense of where the edge is.

The last possibility is the opposite, that catchers will be better at challenging in spots where they’re worse at framing. I can think of a couple explanations for that. The first is that they’ll have juicier pitches to challenge. If you’re bad at framing, say, pitches at the top of the zone, you’re probably getting stuck with a lot of bad calls up there, which leaves you with better opportunities for challenges. We can also come at this from the other angle. Maybe when you’re good at framing in one spot, you feel like all pitches in that spot look really good, so you challenge too frequently. I found something similar when I looked at which parks have the best batter’s eyes. When hitters can see the ball well, their plate discipline doesn’t get better as you’d expect; they get more aggressive because more pitches look good to them.

So those are the possibilities. Let’s see what the data says. We’ll start with catchers who are better on one side of the plate. (Since all catchers throw right-handed, I’ll refer to the third base side of home plate, the inside corner to right-handed batters, as their glove side, and the first base side as their arm side.) The columns below show success rate, and they show the average horizontal location of the pitches challenged, measured in inches from the center of home plate.

Well, the third possibility looks like the right one. Catchers run success rates that are 10 percentage points higher on the side where they’re bad at framing. They’re challenging pitches that are either 0.3 or 0.4 inches closer to the center of the plate.

Now let’s move to the top and bottom of the zone. The columns show success rate on challenges and the average height of the pitches in feet.

Yup, it’s more of the same here. The catchers who are better at framing at one end of the zone are about 10 percentage points worse on challenges in that location. You might notice that the gaps are a bit bigger here, 12 percentage points and 0.7 inches at the top, but only nine percentage points and 0.2 inches at the bottom. If I had to guess, I’d say that’s because the top of the zone is more variable anyway. As I wrote a couple years ago, the knees of short and tall players are much closer in height than their shoulders.

As you can see, the overall success rates are just about identical, and once again, that holds true across the league. The league-wide success rates on challenges at the top and bottom of the zone are nearly identical, just a hair under 59%.

I know this is basic stuff and some of it is fairly intuitive, but I think it already gives us some actionable information. For example, you might also have noticed from the first table that success rates are generally higher on the glove side than the arm side. That actually holds across the entire league. So far this season, catchers are running success rates of 63% on the glove side and 59% on the arm side. Unless you’re a member of our special Glove Side Framers group, you should be more aggressive at challenging pitches to your glove side. That’s all I’ve got right now, but I’ll keep thinking of ways to slice the data.

Last season was the year of the left-handed pitcher. Southpaws combined for a record 142.3 WAR in 2025, and their collective 3.84 ERA was nearly half a run lower than right-handers’ 4.28 mark. That’s the largest difference between righty and lefty run prevention in recorded major league history, surpassing the gap from 1886, when lefties like Toad Ramsey, Lady Baldwin, and Cyclone Miller took the league by storm.

While the names might not have been quite as much fun to say in 2025, the pitchers were just as fun to watch. (I mean, I presume. I’m slightly too young to have seen Ramsey, Baldwin, or Miller in action.) Tarik Skubal took home his second straight Cy Young award, and Garrett Crochet made him earn it. Max Fried signed the richest contract a left-handed pitcher has ever seen, and wasted no time demonstrating why the Yankees thought him worthy of it. Cristopher Sánchez proved he belonged in the conversation with those bigger names, earning himself an extension on top of an extension this spring. And it wasn’t just the stars doing the heavy lifting. You could remove Skubal, Crochet, Fried, and Sánchez from the equation, and lefties still outperformed their right-handed counterparts by more than a third of an earned run. Simply put, left-handed pitchers dominated, and those of us watching couldn’t help but take notice.

A big reason left-handed pitchers were so successful in 2025 was how well they handled right-handed hitters. We expect lefty pitchers to dominate same-handed matchups, and they had no trouble doing so last year. Left-handed pitchers generally hold left-handed batters to a wOBA about 15 to 25 points below the overall league average. In 2025, they held them to a .292 wOBA, while the league average was .313. That’s a 21-point gap, perfectly within the typical range. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that I’m an obsessive chronicler of bunting in the big leagues. Very good and very bad bunts frequently populate my Five Things column. I’ve written about the best and worst bunts you’ll see in a season, the optimal strategy for bunting in extras, and any number of other interesting bunting-related things – or at least, bunting-related things that are interesting to me. And there’s another great bunting topic to write about right this instant. See, bunts are making a comeback, and for once, they’re doing it for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. So let’s celebrate the return of the bunt – and also think about why it’s back.

So far this year, batters have bunted the ball into play (or struck out by bunting the ball foul) 640 times. That’s 0.9% of all the plate appearances in the majors in 2026, and while that might not sound like much, it’s a new high in the universal DH era, 25% higher than the 2025 season, which was itself the bunt-heaviest year in that stretch at 0.7%. There were a lot more bunts in the days when pitchers batted in National League parks, of course. But if you limit the search to American League parks and reach into the past, a clear trend emerges. Bunting declined as teams thought more about how bad sacrificing an out is. But then it bottomed out, and now teams are starting to bunt more often:

This is just a chart of how many bunts there are, not how good those bunts have been. In fact, the reason the bunt started to decline in the first place is that many bunts were counterproductive. Sacrificing a runner from first to second at the cost of an out is usually a bad decision on the run-scoring front. It might be a fine fail case – if you fail to bunt for a hit and accidentally sacrifice, that’s not so bad – but pure surrender bunts only make sense in very limited circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2026 season has not gone the way the Houston Astros envisioned. After Sunday’s loss to the Athletics, the Astros are 30-37 and in fourth place in the AL West. The only reason they’re even within shouting distance of first place is because the entire division has been mediocre so far. However, that doesn’t mean that everything’s gone wrong for them. One thing that has gone decidedly right for Houston is Yordan Alvarez’s comeback season. A fractured hand cost the three-time All-Star nearly four months of the 2025 season and, combined with a sprained ankle in September, limited him to a total of 48 games, his fewest since a torn patellar tendon wiped out all but two games of his 2020 campaign. But now he’s back with a vengeance, hitting .316/.431/.650 in 65 games for 3.3 WAR. He also leads the American League in home runs, RBI, and is second in batting average, behind only Yandy Díaz, at .325. We’re well into the third month of the season, which means the Triple Crown discussion is more than just silly speculation. Not that I’m above that, of course.

It’s true that two of the three Triple Crown stats have lost a significant amount of their analytical heft in recent decades, but it’s still a rare achievement for a player to finish the season leading his league in batting average, home runs, and RBI. More than that, though, Triple Crowns are cool. In the nearly 60 years since Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski won the AL Triple Crown in 1967, only Miguel Cabrera has managed to pull it off, in 2012 with the Tigers. No NL player has secured a Triple Crown since Joe Medwick in 1937.

For better or worse, Alvarez has tended to be overshadowed by Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani when the masses talk about baseball’s most feared sluggers. It’s hard for a huge power hitter on a successful franchise to be underrated, but I’d argue that Alvarez is actually one of those few examples. His 165 wRC+ ranks 11th in baseball history and fourth in the expansion era among players with a minimum of 3,000 plate appearances, and while that is bound to come down during his eventual decline phase, he’s set himself up nicely to be one of baseball’s all-time-great sluggers. He offers little defensive value, but he’s an incredibly well-rounded offensive player; he’s not a swing-and-miss hacker like many huge power hitters, and his production doesn’t diminish against left-handed pitchers. In fact, as Matt Martell explained in a Members-only mailbag column in January, Alvarez is the best left-on-left hitter since Barry Bonds. And even when we lower the minimum to 1,000 plate appearances, Alvarez is fifth in batting average among active players. Read the rest of this entry »

Jesús Luzardo has been pitching better than you might think. The 28-year-old Philadelphia Phillies left-hander is an uninspiring 4-4 with a 4.56 ERA over 13 starts covering 73 innings, but his surface stats only tell part of the story. Luzardo has a 3.40 FIP — it was a sparkling 2.77 prior to his most recent outing — while his 26.7% hard-hit percentage ranks second lowest among qualified pitchers. Moreover, he misses his fair share of bats. His 25.6% strikeout rate ranks in the 73rd percentile, while his 30.7% whiff rate is in the 86th. Good fortune simply hasn’t been on his side. At .343, Luzardo has the highest BABIP among qualified pitchers.

The lefty’s lack of luck isn’t what I wanted to talk to him about when the Phillies visited Boston in mid-May. Rather, I was interested in how he has evolved as a pitcher since we first spoke nine years ago. At the time, Luzardo was a 19-year-old Oakland Athletics prospect who was playing for the New York-Penn League’s Vermont Lake Monsters. A lot of water having gone under the bridge, change was inevitable.

———

David Laurila: We talked back in 2017 when you were getting your feet wet in short-season ball. Just how much have you changed as a pitcher since that time?

Jesús Luzardo: “I have a little bit different repertoire now. I’ve added some pitches. I’ve fine-tuned my mechanics. Along the way, I’ve just matured as a pitcher. I mean, I feel like I still have a long way to go, that I can get even better. I haven’t reached my full maturity as a pitcher. But I’m definitely a lot more polished. I know more about myself, what makes me me.” Read the rest of this entry »

Shane Baz features a five-pitch mix: a four-seam fastball and a knuckle curve being the most prominent in terms of usage. The Baltimore Orioles right-hander also throws a cutter, a curveball, and a changeup. And then there is the offering that reluctantly remains in his back pocket. Baz would love to one day unleash his knuckleball on major-league hitters.

“I threw one when I was a kid, up until I was probably 13 or 14,” explained Baz, who was a big Tim Wakefield fan while growing up in Tomball, Texas. “It was my only off-speed pitch up until then — I was just fastball/knuckleball — so I’ve got a lot of experience with it. I actually try to throw it in every bullpen [session]. I’ll definitely get it into a game, eventually. I just have to convince [pitching coach Drew] French to let me throw it. Maybe next spring training I’ll be able to mix some in and show him what it looks like in a game. I mean, it’s pretty good.”

Baz went on to say that that he threw his pet pitch with a three-finger grip — “fingers on the horseshoe, right by the label” — in his younger days, but once his hands got bigger he went to “the traditional two-finger knuckleball.” And while he basically stopped throwing it in games once he matured and developed more pitches, he’s never lost his affinity for baseball’s butterfly.

At 96.1 mph, Baz’s four-seamer is above average for velocity, but while extra oomph is advantageous for heaters, that isn’t the case for low-spin floaters.

“I can get it up to about 80, but those aren’t as good,” Baz said. “I think it’s best when it’s like 70 to 75. That’s when I have the best control of it and can keep the spin really low. When I’m trying to throw it hard, it starts spinning more and not having as much knuckle effect.”

His overall understanding of the pitch is impressive, and that includes spin properties. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Sunday, the White Sox defeated the Tigers, 2-1, to complete a weekend sweep on the South Side of Chicago. With the win, they pulled their playoff odds up to 20.3%. It was the first time those odds had been above 20% since April 12, 2023. The Sox dropped back below the 20% threshold on Monday with a loss to the Twins, and they enter their weekend series against the Phillies in Philadelphia with a 17.4% chance to reach the postseason, so it’s still way too early to declare them true contenders.

But unlike some of the other American League clubs off to unexpected hot starts, such as the Rays and Guardians, Chicago’s underlying performance supports its strong showing thus far. The White Sox have outperformed both their Pythagorean and BaseRuns records by just one win. The Rays are six and seven wins ahead of their Pythagorean and BaseRuns records, respectively, while the Guardians have exceeded their Pythagorean record by three wins and their BaseRuns mark by five. The A’s, the other AL team that surprised over the first two months of the season, endured a brutal 2-7 stretch to close out May and bring their record closer to their peripherals. Even so, all three of those teams enter the weekend with better playoff odds than the White Sox: the Rays at 83.1%, the Guards at 77.7%, and the A’s at 37.4%. That makes sense. Remember, a team’s Pythagorean and BaseRuns records only account for what’s already happened. Our Playoff Odds project future performance and factor in far more than just the first 10 weeks of play. Understanding that shouldn’t undermine the excitement that Sox fans are feeling right now; if anything, it should provide them with greater incentive to enjoy their team’s success while they can, for however long it lasts.

That’s the last you’ll read about the 2026 White Sox in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions on the best system for bringing amateur talent into baseball, whether the Mets are paying more per win than any team ever, the new Hall of Fame pitching golden ticket, and more. 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 »