Hello. I have missed you. I have been on paternity leave for the past two months because — and I’m told this is the most common reason people go on paternity leave — my wife and I had a baby. Mostly, my wife had the baby while I said things like “You’re doing great,” and “I’m so proud of you,” and “Hey look, a baby,” but this is very much a team sport. Our free agent acquisition arrived loaded with tools like spiky hair, world-weary eyes, and a trapezoidal mouth with a cute little dimple just beneath it, but she’s a little short on big league experience. We’ll have to coach her up.

So now we have this baby girl. It’s unclear whether she’s a bouncing baby girl — we haven’t dropped her yet — but she certainly seems healthy enough. I’m looking at her right now. She’s sleeping in her crib all swaddled up like a salami. She is, as babies tend to be, adorable. She is also — and again I’m informed that this is standard — somewhat labor intensive.

While laboring over this novel life-form for the past two months, I have watched precious little baseball. I have done precious little anything other than care for my wife and child (or, as I am still getting used to calling it, my family). As a result, I am wildly underinformed about the latest developments in my field of expertise. The stray missives that reached my ears often left me with more questions than answers. Did somebody Monstars the NL East? Are we sure this is the same Ildemaro Vargas? When did all these bodies get so loose? Read the rest of this entry »

Erik Tolman has a remarkable backstory. Currently playing for the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings, the 26-year-old left-hander threw to one of baseball’s most prolific pitchers as a prep, and that is a comparatively insignificant part of his past. His level of perseverance is nothing short of remarkable. Tolman has overcome debilitating injuries on his journey to the doorstep of the big leagues.

His travails began in 2021, the year the Washington Nationals drafted him in the 14th round out of Arizona State University. He had the first of two Tommy John surgeries, costing him all but three games in his final collegiate campaign — and his bad fortune was only just beginning.

“I tore my UCL again at the end of my rehab,” Tolman explained. “Fourteen months after having surgery, in my last live ABs, I felt my elbow go again. It was a sad moment, honestly. But I talked to my family, and I believed in myself — I thought I could still be a big-leaguer — so I kept at it. Unfortunately, on my fifth start back, in August 2023, I dislocated my knee. That made for a whole new mountain that I’ve had to climb.

“The injuries have driven me to have a work ethic, and a mental fortitude, of just going balls to the wall,” he added. “I figured I could either struggle coming back from the injuries, playing baseball, or struggle out in the real world. At the end of the day, we’re the ones responsible for our lives and careers. If you get hurt, are you going to cave, or are you going to overcome?”

Tolman did far more than simply dislocate a knee after returning from the second TJ. What happened was not only catastrophic: it was hard to fathom. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to know what to expect from a pitcher returning from a serious injury. In addition to velocity and spin rate, pitching is also about rhythm and feel, and that can take time to come back after a long layoff. But there was little rust for Gerrit Cole to shake off when he made his season debut Friday night at Yankee Stadium. In his first major league start since undergoing Tommy John surgery on March 11, 2025, Cole silenced the first-place Rays, allowing just two hits and three walks while striking out two across six scoreless innings. His only real trouble came in the first inning, when he gave up a leadoff single to Chandler Simpson and walked Junior Caminero to put two on with nobody out. After a Jonathan Aranda fly out, Cole picked the speedy Simpson off second base and then struck out Yandy Díaz looking at an inside fastball to end the inning. From there, he got in a groove. He averaged 96.1 mph with his four-seamer, and he threw 50 of his 72 pitches for strikes.

Cole left the game with the lead, but the Rays scored four runs in the top of the eighth inning to take the first game of the series, 4-2. They now lead the Yankees in the AL East by 5.5 games. Watching the Rays play Friday night, I couldn’t help but think about how annoying they would be to play against. They pitch well, put the ball in play, and are aggressive on the bases. One Yankee told me before the game that they remind him of last year’s Blue Jays because of their pesky bottom of the lineup and refusal to strike out. I’m still not sure how good the Rays are, but I get the feeling that they are always going to be better than I think.

In this week’s mailbag, we discuss another surprising team over the first two months of the season. We’ll also answer your questions about how many players in baseball have the ability to win MVP, how good Randy Johnson and other all-time-great starting pitchers would’ve been as closers, and why the 9-9-9 challenge beers are so small. 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 Boston Red Sox. 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 »

Last year was a rough time for the best pitchers of the early 2020s. Zac Gallen cost himself untold tens of millions of dollars with a brutal walk year. Aaron Nola got hurt, and even when he was available, he was little more effective than a batting practice machine. Spencer Strider made 23 starts, but nearly doubled his FIP from his 20-win campaign in 2023.

Sandy Alcantara, like Strider, was coming back from a torn UCL that wiped out his 2024 season, he also had a rough go of it. Alcantara’s ERA was over 7.00 at midseason, leaving the Marlins unable to cash in on their former Cy Young winner at the trade deadline. Even with a strong stretch run, Alcantara ended 2025 with a 5.36 ERA, and an xERA and FIP in the mid-4.00s. Read the rest of this entry »

As the resident FanGraphs playoff odds watcher, I spend a lot of time looking at our playoff odds and trying to figure out both what they’re seeing and what they’re missing. Over the years, I’ve written many audits of how well our odds perform. Last fall, I described a Bayesian method that does slightly better than any of our existing models at predicting playoff teams. It’s particularly useful early in the season, when the headline FanGraphs mode (using projections) can be slow to pick up on new information and the season-to-date mode is prone to overreaction. A Bayesian filter does a good job balancing those two – or so I found last year.

If you’re looking for a detailed technical description of the way that I’m blending up our existing playoff projections to churn out different odds projections, you can find it at the bottom of the article. But first, let’s take a Bayesian trip through the league and highlight the divisions where reconsidering our odds in light of how much the results so far have diverged from preseason expectations matters the most.

AL East

Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite sticks to beat the White Sox with (and over the past few years, there have been plenty) has been the Erick Fedde trade of 2024.

You know the one: Chicago was en route to a record-breaking number of losses, and with the season in the tank, GM Chris Getz flipped three of his best-performing players — Michael Kopech, Tommy Pham, and Fedde — in a three-way deal with the Cardinals and Dodgers. The 2024 White Sox were enduring a lost season that redefined the term; trading those guys was obviously the right thing for Getz to do. My objection was the return.

The headliner for the White Sox was Miguel Vargas, who at the time was the Dodgers’ second-best utility infielder named Miguel, behind a 35-year-old for whom the Marlins had no need. The Dodgers not only got Kopech, they managed to finagle Tommy Edman, the best player in the deal, as well. Kopech immediately slotted in as a leverage reliever, Edman won NLCS MVP, and the Dodgers won the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were perusing the Padres’ team stats, you might do a double-take when comparing your first impressions of their performances to date against their standing in the National League West. Fernando Tatis Jr. is slugging .273 and has yet to homer, Manny Machado’s batting average is below the Mendoza Line, and two of their five players with a wRC+ of at least 100 are part-timers. On the other side of the ball, just three of their starting pitchers have ERAs below 5.00, one of whom (Nick Pivetta) has been out since mid-April due to a flexor strain. While closer Mason Miller has been lights out, their higher-leverage relievers have not been uniformly dominant. And yet with all of this, the Padres took over first place in their division on Monday night, after Michael King and friends stifled the Dodgers, 1-0, at Petco Park, the season’s first game between the two teams.

Contending teams have become the expectation in San Diego despite near-constant instability, with the Padres claiming Wild Card spots in four of the past six seasons under three different managers, now all departed in favor of first-year skipper Craig Stammen. They raised their payroll as high as $255 million in 2023, third highest in the game, before cutting back dramatically in the wake of owner Peter Seidler’s death in November 2023 and a subsequent battle for control of the franchise among his survivors. This year’s projected $209 million payroll ranks ninth. Yet somehow through the turmoil — including the pending sale of the team to Chelsea Football Club co-owner José E. Feliciano and his wife Kwanza Jones — the Padres are giving the Dodgers another run for their money.

But how? As you might have guessed given those subpar stats I cited above, the Padres are playing well above their heads relative to their raw numbers. At 29-18, they’re 11 games above .500 despite outscoring opponents by just eight runs, 196-188. They’re a major league-high 4.6 wins above their Pythagorean-projected winning percentage of .519, and five wins above their BaseRuns-projected winning percentage of .510, second to only the Rays. Based on their per-game BaseRuns numbers, the Padres have overachieved on the offensive side, scoring 0.22 runs per game more than their expected 3.98, but they’ve underachieved slightly on the pitching side, allowing 0.1 runs per game more than their projected 3.90. Read the rest of this entry »

In high school statistics, we got one rule beaten into our heads over and over again: Don’t extrapolate outside the bounds of your data. Then, when we were done learning that one, we got another rule: Outliers tend to revert towards the mean. Gee, thanks a lot, Mr. Gilliam – how am I supposed to explain Cristopher Sánchez using those two rules?

Look at this table of pitching statistics. Clearly, extrapolating past the edge of Sánchez’s performance seems fine:

We have all of these ERA estimators – FIP, xFIP, xERA, SIERA – because merely looking at someone’s ERA can be misleading. ERA is noisy. Between inherited runners, sequencing, scoring decisions, and just plain old variance, knowing a player’s ERA in one year doesn’t necessarily mean you know how well they played. The whole alphabet of advanced pitching statistics comes down to trying to solve that noise problem by focusing on indicators with greater stability.

In other words, advanced ERA estimators tend to move around less than actual ERA. It follows naturally that changes in ERA estimators are more predictive of future results than changes in ERA. When all of these markers are moving in tandem – and moving by a lot, to boot – the aggregate picture looks very different than your average pitcher with a shiny ERA early in the season. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners didn’t expect to call up Colt Emerson, but they had no choice.

Emerson made his big league debut Sunday in the Mariners’ 8-3 loss to the Padres. It wasn’t a particularly eventful day in the box score. He flied out to right field in his first at-bat, drew a walk in his second, and flied out to right field again in his third. But at just 20 years old, he became the youngest Mariner to reach the majors since Félix Hernández in 2005.

General manager Justin Hollander told reporters that calling up Emerson wasn’t a move he anticipated making when he woke up that morning. However, Emerson was next on the depth chart, and once it became clear that Brendan Donovan needed time on the injured list, Hollander felt it was the only choice to make. Read the rest of this entry »