At one point or another, most of us have done the thing where we go to the refrigerator in search of a snack, decide nothing looks appealing, close the door, then come back 15 minutes later to check again and somehow feel annoyed when the contents remain unchanged. It’s a near-universal experience despite the illogical nature of the whole thing. And when we relate this experience to others, it’s always the refrigerator, even though we could just as easily choose to re-check a cabinet or the pantry. But I think this is where we do get some credit for being slightly logical. The contents of a refrigerator are far more transient than the dry and canned goods stored elsewhere in the kitchen. The fridge is where we keep the perishables, the food that by definition isn’t meant to last long. Food in the refrigerator comes and goes, rots and gets tossed, all at a much faster rate than elsewhere in the kitchen.

Park factors work a little like a refrigerator. They present a single value that contains within it the influence of several different components that vary from park to park, much in the way my refrigerator is two-thirds beverages and cheese, while yours probably has fruits and veggies and maybe some leftover ham from Easter that you should definitely throw away. Some of the components captured by park factors are static and easily measured, like surface dimensions and wall height. They’re the condiments that remain consistently stocked in the fridge door.

But sometimes you throw open the door to a park’s refrigerator and get whacked in the face with a stench of unknown origin. And that stench becomes all the more potent as it mingles with a to-go box of leftover Thai and a carton of milk growing more questionable by the day. Likewise, wind speeds, the daily dew point, and the angle of the sun at different points relative to the solstice all fluctuate and interact in a way that a scientist with the right expertise could tease out and quantify, but that remain a bit fuzzy to the casual observer.

It was these squishier components of park factors, the ones that ebb and flow as weather cycles in and out and the seasons change, that sparked my curiosity about how park factors might vary over the course of such a long season. Traditionally, park factors are calculated over multiple full seasons of data (though sometimes single-season park factors are useful for capturing more recent trends), and that’s not just a sample size consideration. A full season of data is needed to ensure a balanced schedule where every opponent faced on the road is also faced at home and vice versa. This ensures that when comparing runs per game at home to runs per game on the road, the team quality is consistent in both subsets. Read the rest of this entry »

I spend a lot of time saying the word “April.” It’s a convenient excuse to wave away any notion of changing my mind drastically on a player after two or three weeks of the season. But April isn’t actually meaningless, and as we head toward June, we’re already nearly a third of the way through the season. A lot of the stuff we’ve seen isn’t just a rough patch or a freak BABIP, but career trajectories changing, and that has consequences for the players and their teams. One of the most common questions about players I get in chats is some variation of “What does ZiPS think now?” I can’t answer them all, mainly because “doughy middle-aged nerd talks to his magical baseball box for an hour” sounds like the worst episode of Black Mirror ever. That said, because I do full in-season runs of ZiPS in the middle of every month, now seems like a good time to get some projectionist changes of heart for the overachieving and underperforming players.

So whose changing fortunes are most likely to lead to changed destinies? Well, to get an idea of which trajectories have changed the most, I took the current 2026 projected numbers for each player and compared them to the 2026 ZiPS projections from before this season began. We’ll start with the good news, because I’m a Baltimore native and an Orioles fan, so I need something sunny first. These are park-neutral projections, and I eliminated anyone who is projected as below replacement level, since we’re focusing on major league-relevant players. Today, we’ll cover the position players before moving on to the pitchers tomorrow.

Here are the players whose 2026 ZiPS projections have improved the most since the beginning of this season, sorted by the greatest gains in projected WAR: Read the rest of this entry »

As we get further and further into the month of May, signs of summer are popping up all around us. Allergies are flaring, you can start to trust the major league stat leaderboards, and colleges across the country are wrapping up their spring semesters.

That last point is important, because summer is the season of study abroad. Every year around this time, thousands of American undergraduates get on planes, learn to navigate a foreign country, meet new people, and discover that their Spanish gets way better after three or four beers. It’s a marvelous experience, and I want to bring it to you, the FanGraphs readers.

Welcome to the 2025 FanGraphs Fan Exchange Program.

For one week, I want you to put your favorite team on the shelf and follow a different one. Do whatever you do in the normal course of being a fan, but do it for another ballclub. Read the rest of this entry »

I sometimes worry about overusing the words “for a catcher” in my writing. I don’t like overusing words. Case in point, I hate that I have already overused the word “overusing” (and the word “words”) in the first two sentences of this piece. Yet the “for a catcher” qualifier is often necessary. Catchers aren’t as fast as other position players. He runs well… for a catcher. They aren’t as agile as other position players. He’s athletic… for a catcher. They need more time off than other position players. He plays a lot… for a catcher. Above all else, they tend not to hit as well as other position players. Say it with me now: He hits well… for a catcher.

Catcher is the most demanding defensive position, and as a result, offensive standards for backstops are lower. The average wRC+ at catcher is typically about 10% worse than the big league average. That means that a team whose catchers produce a 100 wRC+ will usually rank among the majors’ top third, even though you wouldn’t want to see those catchers batting higher than the bottom third of the order. This is so often the case that most of us take it for granted. For instance, if I were chatting in a sports bar instead of writing for FanGraphs, I might say that Austin Wells (101 wRC+), Bo Naylor (99 wRC+), or J.T. Realmuto (102 wRC+) has hit “pretty well for a catcher” this year, without even bothering to check how well the average catcher has actually performed. Unfortunately for those guys, I’m far more comfortable sitting behind a computer than sitting in a bar, so I did look into how well catchers have hit in 2025. What I discovered is that, at least for now, I’m at no risk of overusing the phrase “for a catcher” after all. Just past the quarter mark of the 2025 season, catchers have a 101 wRC+.

With a .246/.318/.396 slash line, catchers are slightly outperforming the league average in all three triple slash categories. If they can keep this up, the 2025 season will be the first since at least 2002 (as far back as our positional splits go) in which catchers outperformed the league average in any one of the triple slash statistics, let alone all three. Read the rest of this entry »

Which players most often hit the ball to the positions that they themselves play when they’re in the field? It’s a simple question, but it also begs larger, murkier philosophical questions. Is hitting the ball to your own position the height of baseball narcissism? Or is it that hitting the ball to your special spot just feels right? Maybe the batter just stands at the plate, surveys the great green-and-brown expanse before them and gets overwhelmed. “What shall I do?” they ask themselves as the pitch clock ticks down and the hot dog vendors emit their indecipherable warblings. Then they see an oasis of familiarity, the one patch of earth that has welcomed them through a lifetime of baseball-related activities. Hitting the ball there just might feel like coming home. “I know just what I’ll do,” they think, twisting their gloved hands against the handle of the bat. It is their pen, and with it they will write what they know.

So who does that the most? Before I dug into the numbers, I put the question to my colleagues. None of us got it right. I thought I was pretty clever by picking Steven Kwan. He’s a contact maven who specializes in dumping the ball into left field, a position famously played by none other than multiple Gold Glove winner Steven Kwan. I felt all the more clever when Ben Clemens picked Kwan, too. We were wrong. So were Jon Becker, who picked Bo Bichette, Jay Jaffe, who picked Luis Rengifo, and Jake Mailhot, who picked Nico Hoerner. None of the players we picked was even at the top in his respective position, either on a counting basis or a rate basis. Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Fluharty is flying under the radar as one of baseball’s most effective lefty relievers. Since making his major league debut with the Toronto Blue Jays on April Fools Day, the 23-year-old southpaw has a 1.96 ERA and a 2.94 FIP over 18 appearances. Moreover, he’s allowed just seven hits in his 18-and-third innings, and prior to surrendering a solo home run to former Jay Danny Jansen this past Tuesday he’d retired 21 consecutive batters. All three of his decisions are in the win column.

His initial two outings were especially challenging. The first batter Fluharty faced in the bigs was Washington Nationals 2024 All-Star CJ Abrams, who lined a run-scoring double. Three days later, the first batter in his second outing was Juan Soto; the New York Mets superstar also stroked a run-scoring double.

I asked the 2022 fifth-round pick out of Liberty University about those welcome-to-the-big-leagues ABs prior to his third appearance.

“Get put into the fire and see what happens,” said Fluharty, who later that same day faced Rafael Devers [E-6], Alex Bregman [K], and Rob Refsnyder [DP]. “I’m glad they have faith in me. While I obviously would have preferred better outcomes in those first outings, it’s all about adjusting. This game is hard.”

The pitches that were turned around for two-baggers? Read the rest of this entry »

If motor preferences were the final word on pitcher performance, Nathan Eovaldi would be sitting on a beach somewhere.

Eovaldi throws from a low slot, releasing his pitches from an average arm angle of 30 degrees. (Zero degrees is fully sidearm; 90 degrees is straight over the top.) Many low-slot pitchers have a supination bias. There are downsides to being a supinator — their preference for cutting the baseball tends to produce crummy four-seam fastballs — but they usually have no trouble throwing hard breaking balls; they can also more easily harness seam-shifted wake to throw sinkers, sweepers, or kick-changes. Low-slot supinators, like Seth Lugo, can basically throw every pitch in the book. High-slot pronators like Ryan Pepiot or Lucas Giolito don’t have that sort of range, but make up for it with excellent changeups and high-carry fastballs.

Eovaldi is, tragically, a low-slot pronator. Not many low-slot pronators make it to the big leagues. The pronation bias blunts their ability to throw hard glove-side breakers, and the low arm angle obviates the pronator’s nominal advantage, killing the carry on their fastball. As Tyler Zombro of Tread Athletics (now a special assistant of pitching for the Cubs) said in his primer video on motor preferences, “I know in stuff models and just off of Trackman alone, this arsenal with this slot is not that attractive.” Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, the Rocket City Trash Pandas shut out Pensacola, 9-0, in the Southern League. In the Midwest League, the Quad Cities River Bandits eked out a 7-6 win over the Dayton Dragons. And in the big leagues, television cameras captured an enormous raccoon traipsing through the Citi Field seats during the seventh inning of the Mets-Pirates game. It was a good day for raccoons at the ballpark.

The major league raccoon went down one row of seats in center field, then back across the next row up, looking for all the world like it was just searching for its seat. “I’m scared of raccoons,” said SNY broadcaster Ron Darling, stammering slightly. The brief clip makes it look like the Citi Field raccoon was simply out for a late-night stroll, not bothering anybody. It turns out there’s more to the story. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Milwaukee Brewers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

Marcus Semien was a promising prospect heading into the 2013 season, but he was far from a high-profile player. When that year’s Baseball America Prospect Handbook was published, the 2011 sixth-round pick out of the University of California-Berkeley was ranked just 14th in a light Chicago White Sox system. (At the time, in-depth scouting reports were still in their nascent stages here at FanGraphs.)

In the 12 years since then, the 34-year-old Semien has gone on to exceed those modest expectations. He reached the big leagues with the White Sox in September 2013, then established himself as an everyday player after they traded him to the Athletics before the 2015 season. Now in his fourth year with the Rangers after six seasons in Oakland and one in Toronto, the Bay Area native has three All-Star selections, two Silver Sluggers, and a Gold Glove on his résumé. Scuffling in the current campaign — Semien has a 47 wRC+ over 176 plate appearances — he nonetheless has 1,533 hits, including 241 home runs, to go with a 108 wRC+ and 36.1 WAR over his major league career.

What did Semien’s Baseball America scouting report look like in the spring of 2013? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out, I shared some of what then-BA contributing writer Phil Rogers wrote, and asked Semien to respond to it.

———

“The son of former California wide receiver [Damien] Semien, Marcus was a three-sport standout in high school who followed his father’s footsteps to Berkeley, where he focused on baseball.”

“I actually just played basketball and baseball in high school,” Semien replied. “I was part of a state championship runner-up in my senior year, so I missed probably the first three weeks of my [baseball] season. Once I graduated high school, I knew that baseball was all that I was going to play in college.” Read the rest of this entry »