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

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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 »

It would be inaccurate to say that that Blake Snell saw what teammate Edwin Díaz and fellow two-time Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal both had and decided he wanted in. Clusters of injuries, such as the wave of broken hamate bones from this spring or the more recent outbreak of loose bodies in pitchers’ elbows, are just coincidences instead of sudden fads or outbreaks. Nonetheless, like Díaz and Skubal before him, Snell will undergo surgery on Tuesday, with the expectation that he’ll return this season.

This is already the second interruption to Snell’s season, and the third time that the now-33-year-old lefty has landed on the injured list since signing a five-year, $182-million deal with the Dodgers in November 2024. Last season, Snell made just two starts for the Dodgers before inflammation in his left shoulder forced him to the IL in early April. The Dodgers’ depth and focus on having their top starters available for the postseason allowed him to take his rehab slowly. He missed four months and made just 11 regular season starts, posting a 2.35 ERA and 2.69 FIP in 61.1 innings, then followed that by pitching brilliantly in the first three rounds of the playoffs, allowing just six hits and two runs in 21 innings against the Reds, Phillies, and Brewers, highlighted by eight innings of one-hit shutout ball in the NLCS opener against Milwaukee. His two starts against the Blue Jays in the World Series were less successful; he pitched his way into jams that neither he nor the Dodgers bullpen could escape unscathed, and was charged with five runs in each. He did come out of the bullpen to get four very big outs in the eighth and ninth innings in Game 7 before yielding to the heroics of Yoshinobu Yamamoto.

In January, Snell admitted that he felt “exhausted” at the end of the World Series. Mindful of his injury history — this is a pitcher who’s made more than 27 starts in a season just twice — and his lingering shoulder soreness, the Dodgers had him delay his offseason throwing program to the point that he didn’t even pitch in the Cactus League. He began the season on the injured list before going out on a rehab assignment on April 22, and totaled just eight innings over three starts, maxing out at four innings and 55 pitches before being brought to Los Angeles. Read the rest of this entry »

Just because the Athletics are leading their division while the Astros are well below .500 doesn’t mean that the AL West is entirely upside-down. Once again, a catcher is having such an incredible season at the plate that his offense is worth talking about, and if the season ended today, he’d be in the MVP discussion. This time around we’re not talking about Cal Raleigh — who just landed on the injured list shortly after snapping an 0-for-38 slump — but Shea Langeliers. At this writing, the A’s catcher is currently hanging with the big boys on the batting leaderboards and doing things that are worth keeping an eye upon.

The 28-year-old Langeliers entered Friday hitting .340/.397/.623, which is not just great for a catcher, but it’s one of the best lines in baseball. His 179 wRC+ ranks third in the majors behind only Ben Rice and Yordan Alvarez, one point ahead of Aaron Judge, and his slugging percentage is third in the AL, nestled among those same four hitters. He leads all catchers with 12 home runs, tied for eighth among all major league hitters. But what really caught my eye is that his batting average leads the AL.

Yes, batting average is the least important of those slash stats, but as I’ve maintained before, at a time when .300 hitters have become an endangered species — the NL had just one last year, Trea Turner — it’s worth giving a damn about batting average again. Batting average is fun; batting average has entertainment value. When batting averages are low, the game is more static, and right now the 30 teams as a whole are slashing a combined .240/.319/.389, down from .245/.315/.404 last year. If maintained over a full season, this year’s batting average would be the third lowest since 1901, ahead of only 1968 (.237) and 1908 (.239). Read the rest of this entry »

This one’s going to be a little bit of a mashup. Last weekend, I was watching a Dodgers game when Max Muncy made a slick play over at third base. Then he mashed a two-run home run to put the Dodgers on the scoreboard. That got me to thinking about how impressive Muncy’s career has been – never the prime attraction on a Los Angeles team that has employed many of baseball’s best during its reign atop the league, but always a key cog.

But a Muncy article wasn’t the only idea I left that game with. His two-run homer? It only served to narrow the Dodgers’ deficit from five to three. The Braves tacked on more runs late and won 7-2 for a second straight day, taking two out of three from the two-time defending champs. Then the lowly Giants came to town and split a four-game set. The Los Angeles offense, in particular, has been moribund of late. That sounded like an article topic all on its own. But if two articles are good, one article slamming together points from both is better (he said hopefully).

I don’t think there’s anything sneaky or overlooked about Muncy’s excellent start to the 2026 season. When he comes to the plate, he does the same thing every night: He tries to leave the park. That means he’s looking for pitches to clobber, and also trying to clobber those pitches. The looking part, combined with his great batting eye, means plenty of walks and plenty of deep counts. The “trying to clobber” part means plenty of whiffs and plenty of scorched baseballs. It’s an approach that’s easy to describe, but it’s devilishly difficult in practice to strike the right balance between selection and aggression.

Muncy is now in his ninth season of finding that balance. His consistency is remarkable – year in and year out he’s posted a double-digit walk rate, a strikeout rate between 20-27%, and a batting line in the neighborhood of a 130 wRC+. His wRC+ is 21st among qualified hitters over that span, wedged between Hall of Fame hopefuls Jose Altuve and Paul Goldschmidt. His batting line is a dead ringer for Kyle Schwarber’s. This year, Muncy is off to an excellent start, on pace for his best year since 2018. It’s not so much that he’s found a new gear; you’d have a hard time differentiating between his 2025 and 2026 component statistics. That’s basically my point, though. What he’s doing isn’t surprising, because he’s made it commonplace. He’s hit more or less like this for a decade. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper is Cooperstown bound, and he’ll get there having embraced a relatively straightforward approach. Aggressively selective and with a swing built to do damage, the future Hall of Famer isn’t big on hitting analytics or new-school methods. More than anything, he trusts his raw ability — which he has in great abundance — and basically goes out to bash. It’s hard to argue with his success. Now in his 15th big league season, and eighth with the Philadelphia Phillies, the two-time NL MVP has 373 home runs to go with a .280/.386/.519 slash line and a 141 wRC+ for his career. Moreover, the 33-year-old is showing no signs of slowing down. At the quarter mark of the current campaign, he has 10 round-trippers and a 146 wRC+.

Harper sat down to talk hitting at Fenway Park earlier this week.

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David Laurila: You told me that you’re more so see-ball-hit-ball than a guy who puts a lot of thought into his craft. Can you elaborate on that?

Bryce Harper: “I take my routine into the cage and kind of let that play out. There are days in the cage where you’re going to feel good, and days in the cage where you’re not necessarily going to feel good. I just need to stick with my routine every day, the same routine, understanding what works for me. That’s kind of how I’ve always been. I’ve got little drills that I like to do, which keep me through the ball and in the same path. But video-wise, pitcher tendencies — all that kind of stuff — I mostly throw out the door. I don’t do too much of that.”

Laurila: That said, have you changed at all from when you first broke into pro ball? Stance, set-up, bat path, etc.

Harper: “I’ve had to evolve. Guys are throwing harder. When I came up in 2012, one of the harder fastballs, Jonny Venters’, was like 98 [mph]. [Francisco Rodríguez] threw pretty hard. But now everybody is 95 to 100, up to 102. Each day you’re facing guys who are throwing really hard, from starters to bullpen. So, I’ve had to make sure I get to the baseball in a certain way, staying on plane. High heaters. Making sure that I’m on plane to get to baseballs thrown at a high level.”

Laurila: You need to do that without cheating on fastballs, otherwise you’re going to get beat by a secondary… Read the rest of this entry »