Mike Stanley was C.J. Nitkowsk’s biggest nemesis. In seven career plate appearances versus the now-Atlanta Braves broadcaster, Stanley homered twice, hammered a double, and walked four times. That added up to a 4.333 OPS. Of the 592 batters Nitkowski faced over 10 big-league seasons, no one was more injurious to his stat sheet.

Somewhat surprisingly, the pair of gophers — one at Tiger Stadium in 1996, the other at Fenway Park in 2000 — aren’t what the southpaw most remembers about his matchups with the slugging catcher/first baseman. What stands out is the two-bagger.

“I have a story about Mike Stanley,” explained Nitkowski, who made 336 MLB appearances, 213 of them with Detroit, while pitching for eight teams from 1995-2005. “As a kid who grew up in New York and was a Yankees fan, I always knew who he was. He was a Yankee when I was in high school. When I got drafted and went down to Orlando for my first spring training [with the Cincinnati Reds in 1995] — I went early to get out of the cold — I was working out with Chad Mottola, who is now the hitting coach for the Rays. He was my first roommate in professional baseball.

“Chad lived down there,” continued Nitkowski. “Mike Stanley happened to live in the same neighborhood, and they worked out together once in awhile, so I met him. I was 21 or 22 years old, so it was a big deal. You meet a big-leaguer and are trying to play it cool — you’re a professional now — but it was Mike Stanley. That’s cool. I thought it was kind of a big deal. I got to know him a little bit.”

Fast forward to August 12, 2000. Stanley was playing for the Oakland Athletics, while Nitkowski was pitching in relief for the Tigers. A request was made in the dugout during the sixth inning. Read the rest of this entry »

The most important thing to know about the initial proposals for baseball’s next collective bargaining agreement is that they were designed to be rejected. It’s the end of May, meaning we still have a little more than six months to go before the current CBA expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on December 1. That’s when the owners are expected to lock out the players and initiate the game’s second work stoppage of the 2020s, but if the last CBA negotiation is any indication of how this one will play out, it’ll take at least another month and a half from then for bargaining to begin in earnest.

The purpose of the initial proposals released this week, by the MLB Players Association on Wednesday and MLB on Thursday, was to set the starting line from where each will slowly, but inevitably, concede ground. We likely won’t see much movement for a while, but once the owners and players start inching toward one another, they’ll point to their proposals from this week as evidence of their efforts to make a deal. Theoretically, in a labor negotiation, you want to set your starting point far from where you want to end up, so that you can abandon some of what you were asking for and still end up with a favorable agreement. So just because, in the words of Ben Clemens, “opposing sides aren’t speaking the same language” right now doesn’t mean we’re any more or less likely to miss games next season. That said, it also doesn’t mean that there’s nothing for us to learn from the proposals. Rather, as Ben explains, “these early offers are revealing of what each side cares about most. The specific numbers quoted are unlikely to survive multiple rounds of bargaining, but the concepts and structures that each side favors at this stage could tell us a lot about what an eventual compromise looks like.” In his piece from Friday, which you can find here, Ben does a great job of laying out everything you need to know about the start of bargaining. You should definitely check that out.

That’s the last we’ll talk about baseball labor in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions on overlooked MVP candidates, how different baseball would be without Tommy John surgery, and which pitchers actually benefit from throwing first-pitch strikes. Before we do, 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 »

It’s May 29, roughly two full months into the regular season, which means, given the year, that it’s time for everyone’s favorite pastime: parsing competing proposals for a new collective bargaining agreement. Wednesday, the MLBPA released its first proposal for a new agreement. Thursday, MLB followed suit with a proposal of its own. Both are best thought of as opening offers, likely to be heavily modified as the negotiations heat up ahead of the existing agreement’s December 1 expiration. But that doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. I think these early offers are revealing of what each side cares about most. The specific numbers quoted are unlikely to survive multiple rounds of bargaining, but the concepts and structures that each side favors at this stage could tell us a lot about what an eventual compromise looks like. So without getting too bogged down in the details, let’s peruse both proposals and try to tease out what each side is trying to accomplish.

The MLBPA’s Proposal
The players’ first salvo focuses on two things: revenue sharing and early-career pay. Revenue sharing is going to be a key point of discussion in this negotiation. The league has raised competitive balance concerns for years, and it’s clear that there’s public interest in leveling the playing field. Collectively bargained labor agreements don’t solely play out in the court of public opinion, but making the sport more interesting and marketable is a benefit for both sides, so a more balanced system of distributing revenue seems like a clear path towards sustaining the game’s recent growth.

The central piece of the MLBPA revenue sharing proposal is a redistribution of TV money. Currently, teams share a flat 48% of all local revenue, TV included. The MLBPA proposal would change that significantly. In their framework, the first $50 million from each team’s local TV contract, and two-thirds of the amount above $50 million, would be pooled centrally, along with all national TV revenue. Read the rest of this entry »

After posting an excellent 125 wRC+ over his first two seasons, James Wood is establishing himself as one of the best hitters in baseball this year. The 23-year-old National is running a 169 wRC+, third best among qualified batters, and he’s on pace for 43 homers, 26 stolen bases, and 7.2 WAR. Everybody knows the parameters of Wood’s game by now. He’s 6-foot-6, extremely choosy at the plate, and so spectacularly powerful that his proclivity for whiffs and groundballs barely holds him back. This year, he’s improved on both fronts, dropping nearly 10 percentage points from his groundball rate and adding nearly four points to his contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. It’s huge news – James Wood-huge even – and if he can hold on to even some of those gains, he’s going to live at the top of the leaderboards for a long, long time. Today, however, we’re going to talk about a leaderboard where Wood ranks dead last.

If you head over to Baseball Savant’s new ABS challenge leaderboard, you’ll find Wood all the way at the bottom. A big caveat before we get going: The challenge system is very new, and because each player challenges so few times, the sample sizes are very small. Moreover, everyone involved is still adjusting to the system, so the trends we’re seeing now are likely to change. In this article, I’m going to be overreacting to these early numbers. It’s way too soon for big proclamations. However, I don’t think it’s too soon to look for patterns and draw some early conclusions about players who stand out as starkly as Wood does. End of caveat.

Now let’s go to the leaderboard and sort by either Net Overturns or Net Runs. There’s Wood, dead last. According to Statcast’s reckoning, an average batter who saw the same pitches Wood has seen would have made 4.8 more successful challenges and netted their team 1.4 more runs. No player has been worse, and even if you ignore the advanced numbers for a moment, Wood’s record tells you all you need to know. He’s made 13 challenges. He’s won three of them and lost 10. For those of you keeping score at home, that stinks. The average batter has won 47% of their challenges, twice as many as Wood. Read the rest of this entry »

This year, I’ve mostly been focused on minor league coverage — those pesky lists don’t write themselves — but with the draft on the horizon and four conference tournaments happening in one metro, I flew down to Phoenix last week. Eric split his time between the Mountain West, West Coast, and WAC tournaments while I sat on the Big 12’s signature event in Surprise. It was a strange week in some respects. The top two, and maybe even top three, guys on my pref list aren’t eligible until next year’s draft, thanks in part to injuries that knocked a couple of the league’s best prospects out of the tournament entirely. Moreover, the relatively brief nature of a single-elimination tournament means I didn’t come away with a complete impression of a lot of players, including guys who will presumably be drafted relatively early.

With that in mind, I encourage you to consider this a rundown of what I saw rather than a definitive list of the top prospects from the league. These are just my observations from the field, and do not reflect a more holistic evaluation process. Eric and I will do more work on the Draft Board as we get closer to July, a process which may shift how I or we think about some of the players covered below, and we’ll likely add other players from the Big 12 into the mix. With a nod to how short the look was in some cases, where applicable, I’ll share the questions I have about some of these players going forward alongside my notes.

2026 Draft Class

As mentioned above, a few of the league’s top dogs were stuck in the kennel. Sawyer Strosnider, arguably the Big 12’s most projectable hitter, missed TCU’s one-and-done after injuring his ankle in practice the week before. His teammate Chase Brunson, another potential high pick, missed the game with knee trouble. Finally, Kansas was able to lift the trophy without first baseman Brady Ballinger, who was nursing a hamate injury. He’s a power hitter who entered the season with draft helium, though he has seen his stock take a bit of a tumble after only hitting seven homers as a junior. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Ryan is about as steady a pitcher as you’ll find in the big leagues. Since his first full season in the majors, 2022, Ryan has never made fewer than 23 starts. He’s never thrown fewer than 135 innings nor more than 171, and his season-by-season WAR has stayed between 2.2 and 3.1. He hasn’t been a front-end starter, but he’s making just $6.2 million, which is a tremendous bargain. He was a hot commodity who somehow stayed put during the Twins’ fire sale last summer; if Minnesota is out of contention again, you’ll probably hear his name come up at this coming deadline, as well.

It also helps that Ryan is having a career year at the right time. He’s already at 2.1 WAR on the season, and we’re only about a third of the way through the calendar. That puts him fifth in the league. He’s also sixth in FIP, 12th in strikeouts, and 10th among qualified starters in K-BB%. Read the rest of this entry »

At 2:26 a.m. ET on Tuesday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that the Athletics intended to call up their top pitching prospect, Gage Jump. First of all: Sweet Jesus, Jeff, go to sleep. If you keep burning the candle at both ends like this, you’re not going to be presentable for TV come October.

The A’s didn’t make the move official until Tuesday evening; Jump wasn’t on the 40-man roster, so they had to clear a roster spot by putting Aaron Civale on the IL with shoulder tendinitis and sliding Denzel Clarke over to the 60-day IL. The debut itself was a little rocky, as Jump allowed four runs and nine hits in five innings, but it’s exciting to see him in the majors all the same. And not just because of what it means for writers who traffic in song-lyric headlines. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a good year for walks. Whatever you want to attribute it to – and trust me, I’ve done a lot of attributing – batters are drawing free passes more frequently than they have for a long time. Well, most batters. The San Francisco Giants didn’t get the memo. As a squad, the Giants have walked only 5.8% of the time this year. That’s last in baseball by a mile. The gap between them and the 29th-place Rockies is as large as the gap between the Rockies and the league average. What gives?

My investigation started with the 2025 Giants. Walk rate is a stable statistic on the whole. If you walk a lot in one year, you’re likely to walk a lot the next year. But the Giants were no slouches when it came to taking a free base in 2025. In fact, they had one of the highest team walk rates in baseball – 9.2%, fourth in the majors. In the second half of the year, they walked 8.7% of the time. The 10 Giants who batted most frequently had a combined 9.6% walk rate. Four of those players are no longer on the team, but they were actually hurting the average – the six remaining Giants who batted most frequently in 2025 posted an aggregate 10.2% walk rate.

Let’s start, then, with those six players:

As Keanu Reeves memorably put it: Whoa. These six have taken 61.5% of the Giants’ plate appearances this year. If they were walking at the clip they did last year, that would add a whopping three percentage points to the team’s overall walk rate, placing San Francisco squarely in the middle of the pack instead of historically low. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday night, the Astros celebrated Memorial Day by no-hitting the Rangers. Throwing to catcher Christian Vázquez, pitchers Tatsuya Imai, Steven Okert, and Alimber Santa combined for the 18th no-hitter in a franchise history that dates back to 1962. According to the great Sarah Langs, not only is that the most no-hitters over that period, but the second-place Dodgers are a full five no-nos behind with 13. Imai was making just his sixth major league start. Santa was making his major league debut. There must be something in the water in Houston.

I didn’t catch any of the game live. I saw a supercut that shows all 27 outs the Astros got. This is it. You don’t have to watch it to enjoy this article, and it’s seven minutes long, but I at least wanted to give you the chance to experience the game the way I experienced it.

Several things jumped out at me at the beginning of the video. It starts with an establishing shot of Imai. He’s toeing the rubber before he throws his first pitch, and his stats are overlaid on the screen. They are yucky. He’s 1-2 with an 8.31 ERA, a 1.79 WHIP, a 3:2 walk-to-strikeout ratio, and a 4.64 xFIP. With the Seibu Lions in NPB, Imai ran an ERA below 2.50 in each of the last four seasons. He was unhittable. But his first five-start stretch stateside was abysmal. He hit the IL with arm fatigue after three outings, got lit up in his first Triple-A rehab start, then got lit up again in his first start back with the big club. In the start after that one, on May 18, Imai put up a game score of 41. Somehow, it was his second-best mark of the season. He previously threw a curveball, splitter, and regular changeup, but he seems to have abandoned them entirely. “Command,” wrote The Athletic’s Chandler Rome, “has been somewhere between spotty and nonexistent.” All of this is to say that, to this point in his short MLB career, Imai has not looked like a guy with no-hit stuff. 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 first installment of that series. The introduction can be found here.

April 13
It’s somewhere around 9:30 PM and Derek Jr. is asleep. I am, briefly, watching baseball for the first time since she was born two weeks ago. The Mets and Dodgers are in the eighth inning. The main thing I notice is Joey Gerber’s delivery. I’ve never heard of Gerber before, but my daughter is wearing a Gerber brand onesie, and I sincerely hope he’s the heir to that particular fortune. His leg kick is a joy to behold:

It would be a grave understatement to say that Gerber has a high-energy delivery. Brendan Gawlowski called him funky. Eric Longenhagen said he had an “odd, chicken wing arm action.” I’m inclined to go with Ricky Conti, who called the delivery “violent, with tons of effort and recoil.” When you think of a pitcher’s leg kick, you think of, say, Justin Verlander smoothly raising his knee up toward his chest, his lower leg pointed straight down toward the rubber. Even Juan Marichal’s legendary leg kick started roughly the same way. He raised his knee, and at first, his lower leg merely came along for the ride. What made the leg kick famous was that Marichal’s foot just kept on rising long past the point where other pitchers’ stopped. He reared way back, intimidating the batter with the bottom of his spikes, and catapulted down the mound, the ultimate tall-and-fall delivery. Read the rest of this entry »