Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. Today that title is a bit of a misnomer; I got back from vacation Monday night, so I saw very little baseball before Tuesday. That said, I didn’t need to see very much to have a great time. This week has been awesome. Home runs both mammoth and inside-the-park, great baserunning by slow guys, bad baserunning by slow guys, reflex plays and dekes; the list goes on and on. We might need the All-Star break just to catch our collective breath before a bustling trade deadline and sprint to the finish. For now, though, let’s just marvel at the week – after my customary nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, of course.

1. Unconventional Double Plays
Cody Bellinger has been great addition to the Yankees after they acquired him for peanuts over the winter. He is flashing the offensive prowess that has come and gone over the years, and with Trent Grisham manning center, he is playing the corner outfield more than he has in the past. His glove isn’t as good as it was at his peak, but putting a center fielder in left is still a plus for your team defense, as the Mets learned on Sunday. This Juan Soto line drive would have been a hit against almost anyone else:

Statcast gave it a 25% catch probability, and I think it was probably even harder than that. Catch probability measures how far Bellinger had to run and how much time he had to do it, but that ball was absolutely scalded and had so much topspin that it was hooking down hard in the brief time it was in the air. He caught it by the very end of the webbing; “baseball is a game of inches” is usually about the bat hitting the ball or a bang-bang play, but in this case, one inch separated a catch from extra bases:

Oh yeah, then this happened:

That throw is as good of a play as the catch! At full extension, stretched out awkwardly to secure the ball, Bellinger still managed to find first base on the run and unleash an absolute seed that hit Paul Goldschmidt right in the glove on the fly. Making that catch was hard enough. Making it without falling was even harder. Making it without falling and then throwing a frozen rope on target? Almost unthinkable.

Even after that catch, even with that throw, you might wonder why Francisco Lindor got doubled off. Partially, he couldn’t believe anyone could catch that line drive. Partially, too, he got deked. Goldschmidt no-sold the play, barely moving his glove until he absolutely had to. This isn’t the body language of a guy desperate to turn a double play:

That’s not the perfect angle, but you get the idea. The rhythm of this play, to Lindor, didn’t feel like the kind where he’d need to sprint and dive back to first. When someone makes a play that good, you turn around and go back, but what are they going to do, unleash an off-balance missile while the first baseman you’re staring at barely moves? Apparently, yes!

2. Irrational Exuberance
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is not a good baserunner. That’s not an opinion. He’s been below average in each year of his major league career. He has 24 career steals and has been caught stealing 12 times. He’s slow, and he hits into a lot of double plays. But despite all that, Vlad likes to run. Give him the chance, and he’ll take off. Take Wednesday, for example. Guerrero took advantage of an errant pickoff throw to scamper to second:

You’ve seen that play a million times. Everyone was pretty relaxed about it; in the game audio, you can actually hear Jays first base coach Mark Budzinski calmly telling Vlad “go ahead, go ahead.” But the play wasn’t over:

Yeah, don’t do that. I’ve already mentioned that Guerrero isn’t fleet of foot, but it also took him forever to get moving; acceleration isn’t a strength either. Watch his feet – his first step was actually backwards, out into right field. Adrian Houser was on the wrong side of the mound, but Vlad just didn’t have enough straight line speed to make it matter. To make matters even worse, that was the third out of the inning, at third base, with Addison Barger — one of the teams’ hottest hitters — at the plate. Against the White Sox! Don’t do this.

Don’t do this either:

Now, to be fair, this is a tougher play than before. The underlying cause, though, is similar: a belief that baserunning is easier than it actually is. Elite runners might be safe there. That said, elite runners are a lot faster, and better at sliding, and they’d probably take two steps to their left to better block the throwing lane. That should be an extremely difficult throw for a right-handed first baseman, instead of the easy pitch-and-catch that it was. And once you’re dead to rights, well, hitting the brakes and retreating is a better option than starting your slide so early. You probably won’t survive the rundown, but you might stay in it long enough to give the runner on third time to score before you’re tagged for the final out of the inning.

To Guerrero’s credit, he did try a nifty maneuver at second that nearly rescued the whole thing:

Again, though, leave the high-difficulty baserunning stunts for the high-talent baserunners. Both of these decisions would be excellent if, say, Trea Turner had made them. Knowing what you can accomplish is a key part of accruing value on the bases. Watching what happens when that crucial step doesn’t occur sure is fun for a neutral observer, though.

3. One-up-manship
Kyle Schwarber had himself a game on Tuesday night. He went 2-for-4 with a double and a home run, and that homer was outrageous. Not only did he hit it into McCovey Cove, but he did so more or less flat-footed:

He even showed off another facet of his game an inning earlier, swiping second base off a distracted Robbie Ray:

That brought Schwarber to nine steals on the year, with only one caught stealing. He’s one of the slowest runners in baseball, but he understands the proper application of that speed, generally stealing bases off pitchers who forget about him. He’s not a particularly good baserunner overall, but he’s been picking smart spots to go this year.

One batter later, though, Schwarber tried to double up on his baserunning feat by swiping third. Enter Patrick Bailey:

Schwarber had a great read on Ray; he got an excellent jump in a great spot to steal, with the batter screening the catcher at the plate. Bailey just did everything he had to do that much better:

Watch his footwork there. He cleared batter Alec Bohm and got his lead foot planted at the back of the batter’s box while he was catching the ball. The catch and transfer were both perfect, letting him throw in rhythm. The throw? A laser beam to Matt Chapman’s glove for a tag that got Schwarber by an inch or two. I don’t think Schwarber could have done anything better; he just got beat by perhaps the best defensive catcher in the game.

Bailey is having a miserable season at the plate, but he even outdid Schwarber there, too. The Schwarbomb in the seventh put the Phillies up 3-1, and the score stayed there until Bailey batted with one out in the ninth. Then, well:

It’s hard to imagine a more exciting walk-off than that, and it made for the perfect kicker to this game. Sure, Schwarber had a stolen base and two-run homer, but Bailey had a caught stealing and a walk-off, three-run, inside-the-park homer. Real “anything you can do I can do better” vibes.

4. Two-Way Excellence
Oh, you like inside-the-park home runs? Northern California has your back:

That’s Lawrence Butler leading off the home half of the first for the A’s with an only-in-Sacramento play. It involved the ball kicking off of a chain link fence section of the wall and eluding the entire Braves outfield. That let Butler score even with one of the most nonchalant starts to an inside-the-parker you’ll ever see:

That’s the stride of someone who thought he hit the ball out of the park, but the crazy carom and Butler’s speed made it all work in the end. That’s been a hallmark of his game this year, in fact. He’s not the best defender in the world, but he’s got enough range and instincts to make up for a scattershot arm. He has plenty of swing-and-miss in his game, but he has enough plate discipline to keep his strikeouts from capsizing his offensive contributions. He’s a savvy baserunner capable of hitting top speed faster than you’d think. And he has enough power to make up for any small flaws elsewhere:

Inside the park? Outside the park? Butler has the speed/power combination to accomplish both. He looks like a nice building block of the next good A’s team – not this year’s team, of course, but maybe next year’s. After 1,000 major league plate appearances, it seems pretty clear that he’s a solid all-around player but not quite a star. That’s just fine for both the contract and the prospect pedigree, though – and as a huge bonus, he’s tremendously fun to watch. More home runs like these, please.

5. Raw Power
More home runs like these, too. Jac Caglianone was playing college baseball last year. The sixth pick in the 2024 draft, he looked more like a developmental stash than a plug-and-play star. He played both ways in college, though he was clearly a lot better offensively, and the Royals drafted him with that in mind. But he was raw, with iffy command of the strike zone and a swing-first mentality that led to ugly swings over sliders.

A whirlwind tour of the minors – 158 wRC+ in Double-A, 164 in Triple-A – convinced Kansas City to call him up at the beginning of June. Through just over a month of play, the results have been disappointing; Caglianone is hitting .151/.205/.286, for a 31 wRC+. But the results are lying. He’s been much better than I thought he’d be, to be quite honest. He’s running a 22% strikeout rate, far lower than I would have expected given that he’s chasing 41% of the pitches he sees outside the strike zone, one of the worst marks in the big leagues. The stats might be rough, but the process isn’t; by xwOBA, he’s been about an average hitter, rather than 70% below average, thanks to his prodigious exit velocities.

In other words, over the long run. Caglianone is going to hit for a lot of power. He’s already hitting the ball very hard, in fact, he just hasn’t quite harnessed that into doubles and dingers. But oh my god, have you seen what it looks like when he gets hot? Tuesday night, he did this:

If you want to know how scalded that ball was, watch the outfielders. Those are courtesy jogs, not “maybe I can get this one” sprints. That was 114 mph off the bat, the kind of home run that only the Judges and Stantons of the world can consistently pull off. When you hit the ball that low (19 degrees), it’s hard to leave the stadium. Caglianone is part of that group of elite power hitters already.

One hard-hit ball often begets another. His results so far have been poor, but he’s clearly close to unlocking something. If you leave a pitch over the middle of the plate against Caglianone, it’s going to travel a long way. Look at this nonsense from the next day:

That’s not a reasonable place to hit a home run. It went 466 feet, some real Bo Jackson stuff. I had the volume cranked up on this game, and the crack of the bat was so thunderous that the entire crowd went “ooooh” in unison. He might not have hit that ball quite as hard as the previous one, but he got it at the perfect angle and still tattooed it. His power binges are park-proof; Kaufmann Stadium is the stingiest stadium in baseball for left-handed power hitters, but if you hit the ball as hard as Caglianone does, it doesn’t matter where the fence is.

I didn’t think Caglianone was going to hit the majors this quickly. I’m still kind of surprised at how well he’s adapted to big league pitching; he’s getting attacked relentlessly on the inside part of the plate and chasing 40% of the time, and yet still running reasonable strikeout rates. But I’m not at all surprised at how fun he is to watch – and I can’t wait for more rainmaking home runs, and more mob movie celebrations in the dugout:

The most electrifying moment of the NCAA Tournament came in a game that was all but out of reach already.

Tennessee left-hander Liam Doyle, on his third team in as many seasons, was not present for the Vols’ College World Series title in 2024. But over a short time in Knoxville, he’d nudged his way into a very select group: Along with Florida State’s Jamie Arnold and LSU’s Kade Anderson, Doyle is a candidate to be the first college pitcher taken in the draft.

Doyle entered the game, Tennessee head coach Tony Vitello said at the time, more or less on his own volition. By the time Wake Forest’s Luke Costello came to bat with two outs in the eighth inning and Tennessee leading 10-5, the game was well in hand. Doyle was still bouncing off the walls anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Miami Marlins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my 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 »

A month ago, I checked in on Spencer Strider’s worrisome return from internal brace surgery. After four starts, Strider was 0-4 with a 5.68 ERA and a 6.40 FIP. His fastball had lost two ticks. His arm angle had fallen by seven degrees. He wasn’t getting chases. He wasn’t missing bats. In short, he didn’t look like Spencer Strider. “There’s no way for us to know how long it might take Strider to get back up to speed,” I wrote, “but the longer he looks like this, the more reason there is to worry.” One month later, I return to you with good news. Strider has made six more starts, and over the last five, he is starting to look different. He’s run a 2.70 ERA and a 2.35 FIP. His strikeout rate is up and his walk rate is down. You might even say that Strider is halfway back.

Once again, the velocity is the big ticket item, so let’s not waste any time:

Read the rest of this entry »

On last Monday’s episode of the Rates and Barrels podcast, Derek VanRiper raised a curious contradiction. “[Riley Greene is] first percentile in squared-up percentage, but 97th percentile in barrel rate, which — I’m sure there’s an explanation, I don’t know what it is just yet.” In response, Eno Sarris asked, “How can he barrel it without squaring it up?” It was a great question. In colloquial use, a squared-up ball is synonymous with a barreled ball. So what’s going on here, exactly?

The first thing to know: A squared-up ball is not necessarily a well-hit ball, as Davy Andrews highlighted when these stats were first made public last June. To understand why, one must first become acquainted with the Statcast definition of squared up. The MLB glossary entry for squared-up rate defines it thusly: “A swing’s squared-up rate tells us how much of the highest possible exit velocity available (based on the physics related to the swing speed and pitch speed) a batter was able to obtain – it is, at its simplest, how much exit velocity did you get as a share of how much exit velocity was possible based on your swing speed and the speed of the pitch.” If a hitter generates 80% of their possible exit velocity on a given swing and the ball is put in play, the batted ball is considered squared up.

We might quibble over the simplicity of that definition. In any case, as Davy showed, squared-up balls can be hit at super low speeds — if all it means is that a hitter channelled 80% of the potential exit velocity, then 80% of a half-swing is not very much exit velocity.

It’s also possible to do damage without making frequent flush contact; Greene shows us how. As Ben Clemens wrote just a couple of weeks ago, Greene is posting yet another excellent offensive campaign despite one of the higher strikeout rates among qualified hitters. He’s doing it unconventionally, swinging a ton in early counts to maximize damage. He’s also unconventional in another sense: He barrels the ball a ton while hardly ever squaring it up.

Part of the explanation for how this works is tied to the nature of swinging hard. When the bat speed statistics first dropped, it immediately became clear that there is a strong negative relationship between bat speed and the ability to square the ball up, at least by the Statcast definition. Click over to the bat tracking leaderboard, and the first thing you’ll see is this image, which shows the negative correlation between these two variables:

That’s no surprise. By the Statcast definition of a squared-up ball, slow swingers will always come out on top, because swinging slower allows for greater barrel accuracy. But it’s not all bad news for hard swingers. They also tend to produce the most valuable type of batted ball: a barrel.

Naturally, bat speed is correlated — positively — with barrel rate. A barrel, by the Statcast definition, is any type of batted ball where the expected batting average is at least .500 and the expected slugging percentage is at least 1.500. Barrels tend to be clustered in a pretty narrow exit velocity/launch angle range, somewhere north of 100 mph in terms of exit velocity and between 15 and 40 degrees or so of launch angle:

As the scatterplot below shows, the relationship between bat speed and barrel rate is extremely tight:

Greene’s average bat speed — 75.2 mph — is in the 91st percentile, so on some level, a high barrel rate and a low squared-up rate is to be expected. Even so, the spread between these two metrics is striking. His barrel rate is higher than his squared-up rate! Only one other hitter has a lower squared-up-minus-barrel rate — Aaron Judge. And that gives a hint into how, exactly, Greene is pulling this off.

Judge racks up an obscene number of barrels. Already, he’s mashed 60 this year, good for a 25.9% barrel rate. Like Greene, his squared-up rate is low — not as low, but comfortably a standard deviation below the mean. But also like Greene, Judge is amazing at converting his squared-up balls into barrels.

Nobody comes particularly close to Judge in this metric. Nearly 40% of his squared-up balls are converted into barrels, by far the highest rate in the league. (The league average is 13.6%.) As you might have guessed, Greene also excels here, ranking fifth among all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances:

So that’s the first part of this equation. Greene might not square the ball up that often, but when he does, it’s frequently crushed. The other part of the equation? Greene hits a ton of foul balls.

Greene’s 315 foul balls rank fifth among all hitters. When Greene makes contact with the ball, it goes foul 56% of the time. That mark ranks 11th out of all hitters with at least 150 plate appearances; besides Cal Raleigh, nobody else in Greene’s squared-up-to-barrel cohort fouls off nearly as many balls:

All of those foul balls — in addition to his seventh percentile whiff rate — contribute to the squared-up percentage denominator, sinking Greene’s squared-up rate to the very bottom of qualified hitters. Importantly, foul balls are not part of the barrel rate denominator. The barrel rate that shows up on the Savant player page popsicles is a measure of barrels per batted ball event. A bunch of foul balls do nothing to affect a hitter’s barrel rate, but they’ll go a long way toward tanking a squared-up rate.

It isn’t necessarily intuitive to think that a hitter could be so good at barreling the ball and so bad at squaring it up. But breaking it down in this fashion, I think it starts to clarify this ostensible conundrum. Barrels are hard to come by. Even Judge, the barrel GOAT, hits one just over a quarter of the time he puts a ball in play. To be a barrel king like Judge or Greene, you don’t need to crush that many baseballs, at least on an absolute basis. But you better make sure that when the ball is in play, it gets smushed.

More than anything, I think these two data points paint a compelling picture of the modern hitter. Greene, perhaps more than any other hitter, goes for broke, almost like the anti-Luis Arraez. His swing tilt is the steepest in the sport. He mishits a bunch of pitches. He whiffs a ton. But when he connects, he does damage. And even though those damage events are relatively infrequent, they’re valuable enough to make him one of the better hitters in baseball.

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Washington Nationals. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my 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 »

Since 2021, Ke’Bryan Hayes is the leader in OAA among all infielders. As one of the best defenders in the sport, his floor is very high. Even with his career 87 wRC+, he has still been worth about 3 WAR per 162 games. If he could be a consistently average offensive player, he’d be one of the most valuable players at his position. This is a story we all know. With his name swirling in trade rumors, you have to imagine other teams are thinking about the possibility more so now than in the past. His issues stem from his suboptimal swing path, and if he’s traded, that will be what his new hitting coach tries to fix.

In the last calendar year (459 plate appearances), Hayes has a 60 wRC+. That is bad! But despite those struggles, it’s not like he is completely lacking offensive ability. His bat speed is only a little below average. His strikeout and whiff rates are better than league average over the past three seasons. He hits the ball hard more often than not, and he chases at about an average rate. Those are all things you could work with if you’re trying to manufacture a league average hitter. But if you’re doing all this and your path is rarely working in an ideal direction, you’ll always have limitations on what you do when you actually make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

A piece that ran here at FanGraphs just over a week ago elicited a good suggestion. Commenting on A Conversation With Max Scherzer on the Importance of Conviction, reader muenstertruck wrote the following:

“If you’re taking follow up questions, I’d like to hear how he differentiates intention and conviction from physical effort. How difficult is it to mentally commit to the pitch but only give it 90% so you keep some gas in the tank? Is it even possible to do so?”

Fortuitously, an opportunity to circle back with the future Hall of Famer came just a few days later when the Blue Jays visited Fenway Park for a weekend series. As expected — Scherzer likes talking ball — he was amenable to addressing said followup.

“Effort level and conviction are different,” Scherzer answered. “You can throw a pitch at 100% effort and still be mentally indecisive about it. You can also put out less than 100% effort and be mentally convicted in what you’re doing. Can things go hand-in-hand? Yes, but it’s not ‘more effort means more conviction.’ You can just be more mentally convicted.”

Scherzer had opined in our earlier conversation that you’re more likely to miss your spot when not fully convicted. What about throwing with full conviction at a 90% effort level? Does that make it easier to pinpoint your command? Read the rest of this entry »

Hello FanGraphs Members and readers. I hope all of you here in the U.S. are enjoying your holiday weekend. I’ve spent much of this week on vacation, so I didn’t get to watch as many games as I usually do. Still, I followed some of the action from afar, enough to see Clayton Kershaw record his 3,000th strikeout, the Yankees fall out of first place, and the All-Star Game’s starters be named.

This week’s mailbag is a bit more evergreen than our previous ones, when we’ve answered your questions about the Rafael Devers trade and the impact of his contract, Jacob Misiorowski and perceived velocity, and the weirdness of the Twins. Instead, today we’ll discuss how we watch baseball, players of the past who could still mash in the modern game, and so much more.

Before we get to all that, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, 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 next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve now passed the mathematical halfway point of the 2025 season, which serves as a good time to check in on the ZiPS projected standings and analyze the ways in which reality has torn the preseason prognostications to shreds. While our depth charts utilize the ZiPS projections in the daily standings, this full ZiPS run utilizes the most robust methodology that I can assemble without pulling out what’s left of my increasingly dwindling supply of hair.

The ZiPS projected standings are the product of a million seasonal simulations. In order to get a better estimate of the upside and downside of the team, ZiPS takes an important additional step in simulating the roster itself before it ever considers a single game on the schedule. For example, in most of the New York Yankees’ simulations, Aaron Judge continues destroying pitchers on his merry way to what ZiPS projects will be an 11-WAR season, playing somewhere between 80% and 95% of the remaining games. Sometimes he regresses less from his current 13-WAR pace; other times, he drops off the pace a little bit more. Sometimes he’s dinged up a bit and misses time, and once in a while, he misses the rest of the season due to a serious injury. After an injury simulation, ZiPS fills in the depth charts in each sim based on who is available. When Judge is injured, the Yankees roster strength is typically made with more Jasson Domínguez, sometimes more Everson Pereira or Bryan De La Cruz, maybe some Spencer Jones, or as in simulation no. 111,535, a whole lot of Brennen Davis and Duke Ellis somehow. There’s a lot of PC power (I made an upgrade in May!) and a distressing amount of linear algebra involved.

Once ZiPS has a simulated distribution of a team’s roster strength, it then simulates the results of the rest of the season a million times. (Here I’ll note that a million simulations was not enough to get the Rockies into the playoffs.)

Below are the updated ZiPS projected standings through the games played on July 2. We’ll start our look with the AL East:

The Yankees offense slowed down considerably in June, which if you believe parts of Reddit, is somehow due to too much analytics. The more likely cause is that the Yankees are extremely reliant on Judge playing like a demigod, and when he has an ordinary month — a 157 wRC+ qualifies by his standards — the lineup has trouble absorbing what were down stretches for other key parts of the offense. ZiPS still sees the Yankees as the AL East team with the fewest potential problems over the next three months, even if it doesn’t think that Max Fried and Carlos Rodón will keep up their blistering pace.

The Blue Jays’ improvements this year should serve as a reminder (though they probably won’t), that people are too wedded to recent terrible/great performances. Coming off a 74-88 season in 2024, the Jays didn’t do a whole lot to really change the nature of their team, and the biggest thing they did do — signing Anthony Santander — hasn’t worked out yet. Sometimes gravity takes care of things!

The Rays have done their usual excellent patchwork job, but ZiPS isn’t really sold on the lineup maintaining wRC+ of 109 over the rest of the season. The computer is optimistic about Boston’s pitching staff, but the divisional math is getting difficult, and this is a team that didn’t really aggressively chase the playoffs when similarly situated in the race the last few years. ZiPS still thinks the O’s are a good team, albeit one with serious rotation issues, but they’ve banked so many losses that it’s getting hard to say that their current long shot odds are enough to keep 2025 a going concern.

Turning to the AL Central:

The Tigers have pretty much ended this race, and with an excellent rotation headed by the best pitcher in baseball right now, Tarik Skubal, this is an extremely dangerous playoff team. Detroit’s projected final win total has increased more than any other team in the baseball, jumping from 81 wins to 93.

ZiPS still sees the Guardians and Twins as legitimate playoff contenders, though it doesn’t have a great deal of enthusiasm for their rosters. I don’t expect either team to be particularly aggressive at the trade deadline.

Jac Caglianone has struggled in the majors so far, and while I fully expect him to overcome his growing pains, it also means that he hasn’t done much to resuscitate an abysmal offense. Kansas City’s pitching has been excellent, but it’s simply not enough. The White Sox are projected to finish with a 12-win improvement compared to 2024! That’s… something, I guess. Somehow, the pitching has been approximately league average, and if they can actually finish the season that way, maybe pitching coach Ethan Katz deserves the Cy Young award.

Looking to the AL West:

The Astros’ penchant for middling starts showed itself again this year, but as has been the case in the past, no other AL West team took the opportunity to build up a big cushion in the division. A seven-game lead at this point of the season isn’t an insurmountable one, but most teams with that kind of lead end up finishing with it. That’s especially the case when the team holding the comfortable lead is also likely the “true” best team in the division. The Astros are no juggernaut, but they can ride Hunter Brown and Framber Valdez, and the offense has been better than it had any right to be given the de facto loss of Yordan Alvarez and the de jure one of Kyle Tucker.

The Mariners have been surprising in that their offense has been a lot better than their pitching, and while ZiPS sees that flipping to a degree, they have enough holes that they still look like a .530-.540 team; that won’t be enough in most situations unless the Astros collapse. ZiPS is projecting a lot more Jacob deGrom innings these days than it was in March, but the holes in the lineup and at the back end of the rotation and bullpen leave Texas projected as merely a second-tier Wild Card contender.

Despite a near .500 record, ZiPS is still bearish on the Los Angeles Angels. Elsewhere, ZiPS thought the A’s had a pitching problem, and that’s basically what has transpired; the team’s early contention was a mirage.

Shifting to the National League, staring with the East:

The Phillies have been tested by Aaron Nola’s poor start and subsequent injury, but this was always a compelling unit and they’ve carried on without serious trouble. They do need to score more runs to keep holding off the Mets, and Bryce Harper’s injury highlighted the fact that he, Kyle Schwarber, and Trea Turner have been holding up the lineup.

The Mets have cobbled together an impressive rotation seemingly from spare parts, and ZiPS is actually fairly confident they’ll be fine after a rather gloomy June. ZiPS sees the Mets as being as strong as the Phillies, but the Phillies get a projected edge by virtue of an easier schedule (ZiPS says .497 vs. .505 for the Mets) and the two-game “head start” on the second half.

ZiPS still thinks Atlanta is a very competent team, but even if you assume that there aren’t more nasty pitching injury surprises waiting and that there’s nothing fundamentally broken about Ozzie Albies or Michael Harris II, the team has a 39-46 record, and is at the point where they have to consider short-term retooling.

The computer thinks the Nationals are better than the Marlins, but are now too far behind to be a factor in the playoff race.

Moving to the NL Central:

ZiPS was a massive believer in the Cubs in the preseason, being head-over-transistors in love with the team’s offense and defense, and not absolutely hating the pitching staff. That’s about how the team has played, so the projections naturally haven’t changed too much. ZiPS also saw the Brewers as the biggest danger to the Cubs, and again, it hasn’t moved off that position.

St. Louis and Cincinnati are both above .500, but the computer still sees the Cards as too broadly mediocre and the Reds as having too many positions that have been chasms for either to be a divisional threat without some things going their way. Both are plausible Wild Card teams.

The projections are actually bullish on the Pirates scoring more runs in the second half, with much of the lineup underperforming their peripheral numbers, but it’s largely in the category of “too little, too late.”

Lastly, let’s look at the NL West:

ZiPS was always skeptical of the notion that the Dodgers ought to be projected for a crazy number of wins, with the preseason projections thinking that the biggest benefit to come from the team’s offseason was protecting itself from injury downside. I don’t always agree with my creation, but I did in this case. That’s sort of how things have played out; the injuries hit the pitching as hard as they usually have, but the high-end offensive talent has compensated, and team is on a 102-win pace. I’ll note that this ZiPS run was a late-night one, and does give a pretty big hit to Max Muncy’s playing time after the grisly injury he sustained in yesterday’s game. In reality, the Dodgers have a large enough lead that his exact timetable shouldn’t change the projections significantly.

The Padres have been solid and are a first-tier Wild Card candidate, but they’ve probably fallen too far behind to scare the Dodgers. It doesn’t help that they’ve gotten basically no offense out of left field and designated hitter this year. The Giants are hitting their projections after falling short the last few years, but they have a similar problem to the Padres and have gotten sub-.700 OPS performances at prime offensive positions (first base, right field, and DH).

The Diamondbacks have disappointed, in large part due to a number of serious injuries, and the team, seeing the writing on the wall, has been hinting about being short-term sellers this summer. If they aren’t, however, ZiPS still thinks that they’re good enough to end up with a Wild Card spot without anything ridiculous happening.

For their part, the Rockies can be content with the fact that they’re one of the 30 best teams in the majors.