We’re 10 years or so into the launch angle revolution, and the reasoning behind it hasn’t changed much. Groundballs have a .228 wOBA this season, while all other balls in play are at .462. Hit the ball on the ground, and you’re Christian Vázquez. Hit it in the air, and you’re Aaron Judge. Players are gearing their swings for damage in the air. They’re optimizing their bat path for an upward trajectory. They’re meeting the ball farther out in front. They’re looking to hit the bottom third of the ball. Knowing all this, I doubt you’d be surprised to learn that 2025 is shaping up to set the record for lowest groundball rate since 2002, when Sports Info Solutions first started tracking such things. But you might be surprised to learn just how extreme the shift has been.

So far, I’ve talked about all the reasons that batters have tried to put the ball in the air more, but that’s only half the story. Five years ago, Ben Clemens wrote a great article in which he tried to determine whether batters or pitchers exert more control over groundball rates. After separating the batters from the pitchers, he split each group into quartiles based on their 2018 groundball rates and then looked at the results when each group faced off in 2019. He found that the effect was nearly identical. When you moved the batter up one quadrant, the groundball rate of the new pairing went up by an average of 5.2 percentage points. When the pairing moved up a quadrant in the pitcher pool, the groundball rate went up by 4.8 percentage points. Knowing that, let’s not blame this all on the batters. Are pitchers as responsible as batters for the shrinking groundball rate across the majors? Let’s start by updating my 2023 league-wide update on pitch mix.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since July 1, three major league offenses have been head and shoulders above the rest of the field. First, the Toronto Blue Jays, who have benefited not only from a white-hot Bo Bichette, but from having the opportunity to slather a hapless Rockies pitching staff in runs this week. Third in wRC+ but second on this list for editorial purposes: The Athletics, whose offensive run is mostly Nick Kurtz. That’s an exaggeration, but not by much; Kurtz alone is responsible for 2.6 of the vagabonds’ 6.7 position player WAR since July 1, and 39 of their 165 weighted runs created.

The other member of this trio is the Milwaukee Brewers, a team with limited name recognition, whose offense has been propped up by (among other things) a 28-year-old rookie who got cut loose from the Rockies’ minor league system in 2022.

Here’s one of those other things propping up Milwaukee’s offense: Andrew Vaughn, one of the greatest college hitters of the 2010s and a former top-three pick, but also a legendary draft bust as of eight weeks ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Friends, Red Sox fans, FanGraphs readers, lend me your ears,
I come to analyze the contract extension, not to bemoan it.
The free agency status that teams despise lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their luxury tax penalties.

Here, under leave of Meg and the rest,
For they are honorable editors,
Come ZiPS to speak at Anthony’s signing,
It is my computer, faithful and just to me.

While the Red Sox have quite the mixed record of letting players leave in free agency or trading them before they can sign elsewhere, the organization has been fairly aggressive at signing players with limited service time in order to buy out free agent years in advance. Brayan Bello is signed through 2030, at least if a club option is picked up, and both Kristian Campbell and Ceddanne Rafaela, well short of arbitration status, are under club control into the 2030s. When the Red Sox acquired Garrett Crochet, they didn’t muck around either, making sure he’d be kept in town on a six-year, $170 million contract extension that he signed a few months after the trade.

Now it’s Roman Anthony’s turn. The guaranteed portion of the contract calls for $130 million over eight years, beginning next season, with $125 million total in salary through the 2023 campaign and a $5 million buyout on a $30 million club option for 2034. If the Red Sox pick up the option, the total value of the deal would be nine years and $155 million. There is also a Halloween bucket full of various incentives that could net Anthony a maximum $230 million over the next nine years. However, that high-end figure will be quite hard to meet. As MassLive’s Chris Cotillo points out, for Anthony to earn that $230 million maximum, he would have to finish top two in the Rookie of the Year voting this season, make the All-Star team in all eight seasons of the extension and also in the option year, and win the next nine MVP awards — one for every year of the extension, plus the option season. Nobody has ever won nine MVPs; Barry Bonds has the most, with seven. So, in order to hit every incentive in his new contract, Anthony would have to become, without exaggeration, the best baseball player ever. If, in the pretty-much-impossible event that this happens, the Red Sox would be getting literally the greatest of all time for less money than the Angels are paying Anthony Rendon. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a fan of a large-market team that has recently been struggling to score runs, you may be eligible for compensation. Wait, no – that’s not right. You may be eligible to complain about your team in my weekly chat? Not quite it, either. Let’s try it one more time… If you’re a fan of a large-market team that has recently been struggling to score runs, you are eligible to read this article and see to what extent your team has let you down and to what extent it’s just a narrative.

The Yankees and Mets have been having a tough time of late, which always brings out doubters, both fans and rivals. I don’t quite know what to tell those grumpy souls. You’re upset with the Yankees offense? Well yes, sure, absolutely, carry on, but they do have the highest team wRC+ in baseball. The Mets let you down? Without a doubt, they’re the Mets, so on and so forth – but they’re top 10 in baseball in wRC+, too. Orioles offense bumming you out? Yeah, I mean, they’ve been a bummer, but they’ve also been impacted by injuries, which seems hard to blame them for.

I came up with a quantitative test for how much teams have disappointed relative to preseason expectations. I took the actual playing time that each team has allocated so far. Then, I used preseason projections to come up with the offensive numbers we’d expect from each team given who has played and how good we projected them to be. I compared that to how good the team has actually been. The difference between those two numbers is the aggregate overachievement or underperformance that can’t be attributed to injury.
Read the rest of this entry »

I used to have a bit that one of the joys of the postseason was watching the wider baseball-watching public discover a previously unknown Rays pitcher when he mowed down the Astros in the first nationally televised game of his career.

It’s a little harder to pull that off as a position player: Go from complete unknown to key regular on a playoff team. In fact, a lot of the most important position players in this pennant race — Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Schwarber, Manny Machado — were names before they even joined their current teams.

On the other hand, you’d be forgiven for not knowing Isaac Collins. Read the rest of this entry »

How likely do you think the Reds are to make the playoffs? I’m not asking you to guess what our Playoff Odds say about them. I’ll tell you that in the next paragraph. I’m asking you to put your own number on it, based on what you know and think about both the Reds and the playoff picture. They are 59-54 with 49 games to play. They’re three games back of the Padres for the final Wild Card spot and four behind the Mets for the second spot. Got a number in your head? Then we’re ready for another paragraph.

Thank you for playing. As of this writing, our Playoff Odds give the Reds a 12.4% chance of reaching the postseason. I imagine that feels a little light to at least some people. Baseball Reference gives the Reds a 36.3% chance of making the playoffs. They’re within four games of both the Mets and the Padres. They’re also within five games of the Phillies, the first-place team in the NL East. If the Reds keep playing like they’re playing and any one of those teams has a late-season swoon, they’re in. According to Pythagorean Win-Loss expectancy, they should have the same record as the Mets right now and a better record than the Padres. They just added at the deadline. Hunter Greene looks like he’ll be back soon, and Elly De La Cruz sure looks like the kind of player who can put a team on his back for a couple weeks and carry it over the finish line.

Then again, I’m sure that number feels high to some people. You can understand why the numbers don’t like the Reds. Baseball Reference gives them such a high chance because it ignores roster composition, and, well, the Reds have a weaker roster than the teams ahead of them. They rank 22nd in position player WAR, and they didn’t add as much at the deadline as the Phillies, Mets, or Padres. In fact, according to ZiPS, they actually became 3.2% less likely to make the playoffs when the deadline dust settled, because of doubts about Ke’Bryan Hayes and presumably because the other teams added so much more. They’ve had the fifth-easiest schedule in baseball to this point in the season, and they’ve got the toughest schedule in baseball from here on out. They’ve overperformed their xwOBA by six points, the second-highest such gap in baseball. Not only do our projections have the Reds missing the playoffs, they have them finishing at 82-80, one game above .500 for the season and seven games behind the Padres in the standings. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot has happened in the past week. When times were simpler, back when the Phillies signed David Robertson three lifetimes and somehow only two weeks ago, I raised the possibility that we might bring back the We Tried tracker for the trade deadline. It wasn’t a sure thing, because the trade deadline isn’t really the time for We Trieds. They tend to happen over the offseason, when news is slow and multiple teams are bidding on free agents – which is why Robertson had so many reported suitors – rather than when teams are trying to swing trades. Loose lips can sink the many relationships involved in trades, and in the aftermath of the draft and deadline, everyone’s too busy to reach out to a reporter with an unattributed attempt to assure fans they made an effort. At least that’s how it normally works. This deadline featured a record-setting number of trades, and a surprising number of We Trieds to go along with all the actual action.

I’m sure I didn’t catch every We Tried, mostly because I spent the entirety of the deadline with my head down writing up transactions, listening to intense film scores in order to push me to write faster. I didn’t have much time to comb headlines and social media, but I did have help from some friends. I offer special thanks to readers JD, Elizabeth, Joel, and Fox Mulder Bat Flip for sending We Trieds my way. If you’re aware of any that I missed, as always, you can let me know on Bluesky or by email at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com. Read the rest of this entry »

You’re probably pretty good at baseball if you end up on this list:

I get it. “Doing damage when you elevate the ball” isn’t the only skill that’s necessary to be a good major league hitter. It’s not even close to the only necessary skill. On the other hand, look at that list! It goes 10 hitters deep, and they’re all great. The worst guy on that list is probably Christian Yelich, and he’s having a nice year despite dealing with his chronic case of can’t-ever-get-the-ball-off-the-ground-itis.

Psh! Who cares about wOBA? What even is wOBA? First of all, good news, here’s an article explaining it in great detail. Second, fine, let’s use a different statistic then. Here’s slugging percentage, same minimum of 100 batted balls:

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Red Sox acquired Dustin May from the Dodgers at Thursday’s trade deadline, they brought on board a starter with a pair of elbow surgeries in his rearview. The 27-year-old right-hander had Tommy John in 2021, then needed to have a flexor tendon repaired in 2023. Boston also brought on board a pitcher who has matured admirably since he was drafted 101st overall in 2016 out of a Justin, Texas high school.

“As a pitcher, I haven’t changed a whole lot,” May told me prior to the trade. “My stuff is pretty comparable to what it was before. But off the field, I’ve changed a lot. A lot of life changes have happened through the surgeries — a lot of good things — and I feel like I’ve definitely improved as a person and as a husband.

“We’re all very blessed, and talented, to be here,” he added. “Stuff can be taken away from you in an instant, and you can have no control over it. No matter how hard you work, or what you put into it, life can come at you very fast at times.”

A serious health scare last summer is an example. May suffered a torn esophagus that required emergency surgery. Less scary, but nonetheless troublesome, was his not bouncing back from TJ as well as he’d hoped. Read the rest of this entry »

Thirty-six trades in a span of 18 hours. A deadline day record. This after there were a whopping 16 swaps the day before, for an astronomical two-day total of 52 — that’s also a record, and nine more than there were over the final two days before the deadline last year.

Conceptually, the numbers are staggering. But as I sit here writing this mailbag after 7 PM on Friday, the reality of what we all experienced is starting to sink in. And I don’t know about all of you, but after a marathon of editing trade analysis pieces for the better part of the last 48 hours, I’m twitching from what can only be described as an unholy cocktail of caffeine and adrenaline, and I can feel the comedown coming. I’m both absolutely riveted and utterly drained, and the only thing keeping me upright is a keen sense of anticipation for all of the great baseball still to come.

We won’t be covering any trade news in this week’s mailbag. If you want to catch up on or relive the chaos of the last few days, you can find everything we wrote about the trade deadline linked within this roundup post. Instead, we’ll lean a little more evergreen. Before we get to your questions, though, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, 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 »