Matt Strahm making the All-Star team as a setup man with no saves is a bit of an anomaly. Especially because he didn’t take the Aaron Crow route — his team had its proverbial bases covered.

The Phillies are no. 1 in baseball in pitcher WAR. They’re no. 1 by a huge margin in starter WAR, and no. 2 (a tenth of a win behind a team that has both Emmanuel Clase and 16% more bullpen innings) in reliever WAR. So it’s no surprise that Philadelphia sent five pitchers to Texas among its NL record-tying eight All-Star representatives.

The fact that Strahm is third in his own bullpen in ERA, behind Jeff Hoffman and Orion Kerkering, is mostly a testament to how good that unit has been overall. Strahm is second among relievers in FIP and tied for third in WAR. It’s not bad for a player who was an afterthought when the Phillies acquired him on the free agent market in December 2022, the same week Trea Turner and Taijuan Walker joined the organization. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine an auction that takes place between three bidders. The item in question? An envelope filled with money. All three bidders employ teams of analysts that attempt to ascertain how much money is in the envelope, based on a variety of evidence that isn’t important for this analogy. Each bidder thus arrives at an estimate of the fair value of the envelope. Then they place a single sealed bid. The highest bidder out of the three gets the envelope.

What bidding strategy would you employ? Here’s a bad one: Just bid what your team of analysts calculates as the expected value of what’s in the envelope. The reason this is bad is known as the winner’s curse. If each bidder comes up with an estimate of fair value and bids that number, the winner will be the one with the highest estimate of fair value. In other words, you’ll only win if your estimation of the envelope’s value is higher than everyone else’s, and since you’re always paying exactly what you’re hoping to gain, you’ll tend to lose in the long run.

Allowing for a lot of approximation, this situation describes free agency in major league baseball. Every free agent has an unknowable amount of expected future production. Teams employ armies of analysts who attempt to estimate that production. Then, armed with that knowledge, they make contract offers to that free agent, in competition with other teams.

As I said, there’s a ton of approximation and simplification going on here. Players aren’t envelopes filled with money. Team context matters. Players don’t have to accept the highest bid. Tax regimes aren’t equal, and non-monetary incentives matter, too. Contracts are complex, and there’s no requirement that they be the same number of years, have the same number of options, no trade clauses, or anything of the sort. There’s no agreed-upon universal value system; different players present different value to different teams.

But that doesn’t mean the abstracted case has no use. As we approach the trade deadline, I think there’s one clear one: dispelling the myth that teams refuse to give up much to trade for a player who just signed a big free agent deal — after all, if they valued them enough for a blockbuster, they would have just offered a bigger contract, right? That’s a great soundbite, so you hear it all the time, but it doesn’t jive with established economic theory. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the fun things about baseball (that’s also one of the fun things about life in general) is that at any moment you can look for and find something that you alone are seeing, that you alone are paying enough attention to notice, that you alone care about. Last Wednesday, the Twins finally lost to the White Sox. The Twins had won their first eight matchups with the South Siders, and they would beat the Sox again later that day. In fact, if not for the opportunity to pummel the White Sox at frequent intervals, Minnesota’s first half would look much different and much darker. But just this once, in the first game of Wednesday’s doubleheader, the Twins lost to the White Sox.

The bird showed up sometime during the first inning. It wasn’t there when Carlos Correa slapped the 11th pitch of the game through the right side for a single, but in the bottom of the inning, when Andrew Vaughn grounded into a 5-4-3 double play and the camera whipped around the horn to follow the ball, there it was — perched on a steel cable right above the on-deck circle as if it had been there forever.

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The Cleveland Guardians made history at the Fort Worth Stockyards on Sunday night, drafting Oregon State second baseman Travis Bazzana first overall. I planted my flag on Bazzana Island back in February, and noted that he could become the first Australian player drafted no. 1 overall, as well as the first player born and raised anywhere other than the U.S. or its dependencies. Keith Law pointed out that because no. 2 overall pick Chase Burns was born in Italy (though raised in Tennessee), 2024 marked the first time that both of the top two picks were born outside the U.S.

Had the Guardians chosen University of Georgia third baseman Charlie Condon, a different kind of history could’ve been made. Condon would’ve been the third no. 1 overall pick from Marietta, Georgia, after Dansby Swanson and Kris Benson, which would’ve given that city of some 60,000 people the distinction of being the only municipality in America to produce three no. 1 overall picks. Read the rest of this entry »

For those who enjoy the loudest, simplest, most dopamine-drenched form of baseball, today is a special day. It’s Derby day, and even better, the silly hats are not mandatory. The MLB Home Run Derby takes place at 8:00 p.m. ET at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. What the Costco-coded ballpark lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in bulk. According to Statcast’s park factors, Globe Life yields more home runs than the average park both for righties (120) and for lefties (110), so we should be in for a show. You can watch on ESPN, but if you’re a nerd – and you’re reading FanGraphs right now, so I’m sure you can do the math on this one – you’ll probably prefer the Statcast broadcast over on ESPN 2.

As in any year, there’s a laundry list of Derby-worthy players who won’t be participating, with Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, and Elly De La Cruz at the top. Still, this a solid sampling of swatters, and nearly every participant figures to have a legitimate shot at winning. Either we’ll have a first-time winner or Pete Alonso will take home his record-tying third title.

The field features three of the top six home run hitters in baseball this season — Gunnar Henderson, Marcell Ozuna, and José Ramírez — and two of the game’s brightest young shortstops: AL MVP candidates Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr.. It also includes three sluggers who take the Derby much more seriously than your average participant — Alonso, Henderson, and Teoscar Hernández — and two others who’ve won derbies at lower levels: Witt and Alec Bohm. Finally, there’s Adolis García, an electrifying slugger whose historic power display during the Rangers’ World Series run last season is sure to keep the crowd at full throat. In the sections below, I’ll break down all the new rules and I’ll try to make a case for why each candidate has a shot at the crown. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is a team-by-team analysis of last night’s draft activity. Remember that you can find more detailed scouting reports and tool grades for the players drafted yesterday over on The Board. The positions below are what the player was announced as, not necessarily what I have them projected as on The Board. For pitchers, I have a role designated below: starter (SP), or single-inning or multi-inning reliever (SIRP and MIRP). Read the rest of this entry »

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Josh Rojas has turned himself into a plus defender. My colleague Ben Clemens chronicled that advancement last month, citing the Mariners infielder’s improved ability to go to his left as a primary reason for his markedly-better metrics. Exactly what type of adjustments have allowed the 30-year-old third baseman to turn the proverbial corner with his glove? I happened to be in Cleveland when Seattle began a road series against the Guardians on the day Ben’s article ran, so was able to get the answer right from the horse’s mouth.

“It was a matter of adjusting what works best for me reacting to balls left and right,” Rojas told me. “It has to do with my preset. Not getting down too early, not getting down too late. Picking up contact points. Another thing that helps is knowing how the ball usually comes off guys’ bats when certain pitchers are throwing. There is constant communication between me, the pitching coaches, and Bone [infield coach Perry Hill] on what the plan is for the series.”

The preset is what I was most interested in, so I asked the erstwhile Arizona Diamondback — Rojas became a Mariner at last July’s trade deadline — if he could elaborate. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the defending World Series champion Texas Rangers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth 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 »

Clubs have begun their pre-draft meetings, with some teams already about a week into theirs, while the last team to start them (Milwaukee, as far as I know) begins today. The number of people in draft meetings varies significantly from team to team. Some have more than 20 people in the room, others five or so. When any one person in the draft room learns something new, whether it’s from a scout buddy with another team or during a conversation with an agent or media person, the other folks in the room tend to also learn that thing. It is during this window that the dope starts to flow in a way that makes a more specific, full-round mock draft more feasible.

Below are notes I’ve compiled across the last couple of days from conversations with scouts, front office people, and agents. There isn’t intel on every single team or first round player out there in the ether right now. In spots where I’m making an educated guess based on a player’s fit with past team or decision-maker behavior, I try to make it obvious that’s what I’m doing. I let you know when rumors are coming from industry sources, while being vague enough to not burn a source. I also have some thoughts peppered in that aren’t specific to teams’ picks, but instead what the arc of the first round of this draft might look like based on the nature of this year’s class. For more info on the players below, head over to The Board for scouting reports, tool grades, and rankings. Read the rest of this entry »