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 »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the San Francisco Giants. 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 »

If you’re a casual follower of great relief seasons, this year has probably been all about Mason Miller for you. That’s eminently reasonable. It’s June 4, and his strikeout rate is still above 50%. If there’s a second name in the running, it’s probably Cade Smith, whose 21 saves pace the big leagues. Maybe Cleveland just has a “dominant closer” machine in the clubhouse somewhere. Who needs Emmanuel Clase? But the reliever atop our leaderboards isn’t either of those guys. (They’re second and third, mere hundredths of a win behind, but let me have my bit.) It’s rubber-armed October stalwart Louis Varland, who is most famous for being available a lot.

Varland pitched in nearly every game of the Blue Jays’ playoff run last year, which made him something of a folk hero in Canada. Those appearances weren’t notable for their outrageous quality – he had a middle-of-the-road 3.94 ERA and a 5.01 FIP in 16 innings – but for how impressive it was to take the ball day after day, no matter the situation, and give his team valuable innings. No Toronto reliever entered in more important spots, and while Varland had zero win probability added in the aggregate, that availability was just cool, and particularly noticeable in today’s splintered world of playoff pitching.

This year, Varland is still throwing a ton of innings. He’s 11th in relief innings pitched, but the guys in front of him are pretty much all long relievers. He’s also tied for 11th in relief appearances. Consider this: No reliever who has appeared as often as Varland has thrown as many innings as him, and no reliever who has thrown more innings has appeared more often. You can rack up a lot of innings pitched if you throw multiple frames per appearance. You can rack up a lot of appearances by being a short-stint guy. It’s pretty difficult to be both, but Varland accomplishes it. Read the rest of this entry »

Reasonable people can disagree on who the best draft prospect of the 21st century is. I think there’s a pretty good case for Adley Rutschman: A switch-hitter with patience and power, a plus defender at a premium position, a College World Series champion who’d been tested repeatedly against the toughest amateur competition in the world and come out on top routinely.

I get why you’d want the tantalizing upside of Bryce Harper, Stephen Strasburg, or Mark Prior, but to me no other prospect combined a big league starter-level floor with the ceiling of a superstar the way Rutschman did. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. 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 »

I’m not sure whether it’s called the Effectively Wild rule or not, but I learned a fun rule of thumb from that podcast: Statistical samples are only stable after Mike Trout leads the league in WAR. Until then, it’s still too early. This rule made more sense a decade ago, when Trout was the clear best player in the sport, but the sentiment applies today. When Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Bobby Witt Jr. are near the top of the leaderboard, it’s probably been long enough to believe the statistics. If they aren’t, it’s too early.

Ohtani and Witt are indeed atop the combined WAR leaderboards, but Judge isn’t even in the top 30. And the rest of the names are kind of strange, too, particularly if you limit yourself to the hitter’s leaderboard and leave Ohtani’s singular two-way nature behind. Oh, there’s a Dodger in the top five, but it’s Andy Pages. There’s a Yankee, but it’s Ben Rice. Two rookies are in the top 10, and they’re both behind Xavier Edwards. It’s an odd leaderboard, no matter how you look at it, and it got me wondering two things. First, is that Mike Trout rule generally true? And second, what does it say about 2026 if so?

I settled on one thing first: no two-way players. That might annoy the Ohtani fans out there, but I had two good reasons. One, he’s been around for a while now, so it’s not like this is some special consideration that only applies to 2026. Second, pulling all these numbers is hard work. I didn’t want to handle corner cases in every year, so I stuck with the pure hitting leaderboard. Given that I wanted to look at the whole 21st century and see how often hitters stay atop the heap from one year to (early in) the next, I opted for a simple definition and only looked at hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

Corbin Carroll is the best left-on-left hitter in baseball right now.

It’s been a tremendous year for Carroll, however you want to split up the data. He has a 152 wRC+. He has 2.6 WAR. It’s looking like his best-ever season — a perfect follow-up to his best-ever season last year.

That Carroll appears to be taking another step forward in 2026 isn’t quite newsworthy. But the way he’s doing it certainly is:

Carroll is all of a sudden crushing lefties. He was just average against them the first few years of his career. Last year, he was fairly good in left-on-left matchups, though that improvement seems to stem more from his overall growth at the plate rather than a specific step forward against lefties. Read the rest of this entry »

“You can’t win the pennant in the first month of the season, but you can lose it.” We’ve heard that axiom a million times, but by God the Chicago Cubs were out to prove it wrong. By close of business on May 8, the Cubbies were 27-12, having just wrapped up their second discrete 10-game winning streak of the season.

Our preseason playoff odds had the Cubs, Pirates, and Brewers in a close three-way fight for the NL Central, all with odds between 24.3% and 35.6%. The Reds and Cardinals were in the single digits, but by no means without hope. Chicago’s odds of winning the division peaked on May 7 at 63.4% — a mighty statement in a division expected to be competitive.

But shouldn’t it have been higher? The Braves got off to just as hot a start, and their odds for winning the division have been in the 80s since the last week of April. The Yankees’ division-winning odds peaked around the same time as Chicago’s, but about 20 points higher. Read the rest of this entry »

In early February, just before camps opened, the Tigers added both Framber Valdez and Justin Verlander to their rotation. After a rather underwhelming winter full of speculation as to whether they would trade two-time Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal, a pending free agent, the moves kept them in win-now mode, making them the favorites in the AL Central. Yet injuries to Skubal, Verlander, and several position players have hamstrung Detroit, and after playing .500 ball through the end of April, the team crashed and burned in May, losing eight series in a row while going 6-22 due to an utterly inept offense. At this point, the Tigers have dug themselves a big enough hole that trading Skubal may be a necessity.

This past week was particularly bleak. First, the Tigers dropped two out of three at home to the Angels, the only AL team who had a worse record than them. After Thursday’s 7-1 defeat, the two were both 22-35, and the Tigers followed that by getting swept by the White Sox over the weekend. On Friday night, after Troy Melton and Will Vest held Chicago to one run through eight innings, Kyle Finnegan allowed the tying run in the ninth. And then, once the Tigers retook the lead with a run in the top of the 10th, Drew Anderson served up a walk-off two-run homer to Miguel Vargas. It was Detroit’s seventh walk-off loss this season, the most in the majors. On Saturday, the Tigers were trounced, 7-1, and then on Sunday, when manager A.J. Hinch pulled starter Keider Montero after he’d thrown six scoreless innings on just 65 pitches, Anderson came in and served up a game-tying solo shot to Colson Montgomery, then yielded three more singles and the go-ahead run. The Tigers lost 2-1, for their 21st loss in 25 games. They’re now 5-13 in one-run games — the most losses of any team in that context — and, at 22-38, are tied with the Rockies for the majors’ worst record.

This is just about the last thing anyone expected of the Tigers. Led by Skubal, they claimed back-to-back Wild Card berths in 2024 and ’25, surging over the final two months of the former season to snag a playoff spot, then spending most of last year in first place, though they faded late and lost the division title on the final day. Both times, they won their Wild Card Series before being bounced in a five-game Division Series, including last year’s squeaker against the Mariners, which took until the 15th inning of Game 5 to decide. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. This is the third installment of that series. You can read all of the entries here.

April 19
So we have this app on our phones where we track baby things. At our first doctor’s visit, the only things the pediatrician specifically told us to do were to feed Derek Jr. every three hours and to keep an eye on how many times a day she was peeing. That’s enough to make sure she’s not hungry or dehydrated. But several people recommended this app, and now we’re neck deep in it.

We track when Derek Jr. pees. We track when she poops. We track when she boths. We track when and what and how much and how long we feed her. A few days ago, we started tracking her sleep too. You wouldn’t believe what other information the app wants; it has a color palette to choose from for each time your baby goes to the bathroom. I am not sure I like all this. (To be clear, I am very sure that I don’t like the part where the app wants to know what color the baby’s poop is. That’s between her and her god, the Diaper Genie.) We’re new parents. All we do is think about the baby and, specifically, worry about the baby. Now we can feed our anxiety with something that presents itself as hard data. The app has totals and averages and graphs and charts. It all looks very certain and official. It could very reasonably be called inFantGraphs. Read the rest of this entry »