In 1981, when a seven-week players’ strike split the season into two “halves,” and in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic shortened the season to 60 games, teams with sub-.500 records snuck into the postseason via expanded playoff formats created to accommodate the unique and extraordinary circumstances. No team finishing below .500 over the course of a full schedule has received a playoff berth, but the possibility looms large this year. With five and a half weeks and about 35 games per team still to play, the American League has just five teams above .500, including one — the AL West-leading Astros — that entered Wednesday right at that mark before beating the Angels. It’s not out of the question that two sub-.500 teams could make the playoffs, but for all of the owners’ carping about a lack of competitive balance, messy free-for-alls such as this are just what Major League Baseball wants.

If the postseason were to start today, the Rays (76-50) would win the AL East by five games and White Sox (66-60) the AL Central by four games, with both earning first-round byes. The Yankees (71-55) and Red Sox (68-59) would qualify as the top two Wild Card winners; as the fourth and fifth seeds, they would square off in a best-of-three Wild Card Series as they did last season. But from there, things get ugly. The Astros (64-63) are currently clinging to a two-game lead over the Rangers (62-65) atop the AL West, but with a projected win total of 82 wins according to our Playoff Odds, they don’t have much margin for error when it comes to clearing the .500 bar, and could join or surpass the 2005 Padres (82-80) and 1973 Mets (82-79) in terms of mediocre division winners. The 1994 Rangers were a whopping 10 games below .500 at 52-62 but one game ahead of the A’s (51-63) when the players’ strike put them both out of their misery, though MLB does not consider any first-place teams from the shortened season to be official division winners. That’s how the Braves, who trailed the NL East-leading Expos by six games when the strike hit, are still considered to have won 14 consecutive division titles from 1991–2005 (an assertion I take issue with, but that’s an argument for another day). Read the rest of this entry »

As an inveterately unhappy middle-aged man, I don’t like pointing out when things get better. So when I say that the 2023 MLB rule changes massively improved baseball as a spectator experience, you can rest assured that I’m not making that assertion lightly.

You know what I’m talking about: The shift ban, the pitch clock, and the pizza box bases. Back in the olden days, a sufficiently daring and athletic ballplayer could rack up 50, 60, or even 100 steals in a season. But the response to that era has been a gradual tightening up of baserunning tactics.

First, the roided-up giants of the 1990s got too stiff and meaty to run and slide. Even those athletes who maintained their springiness didn’t want to run into an out when the guy at the plate could use his 25-inch forearms to drive them in from anywhere. In the 2000s, an army of Theo Epstein wannabes took over baseball operations en masse. These men, with their locust-like commitment to efficiency, discouraged risky baserunning behavior even further. While their Harvard MBA classmates were killing the American housing market, they killed the stolen base. Read the rest of this entry »

I say this with nothing but charity in my heart: It’s generally not a good sign when your team has a load-bearing Derek Hill. When the Phillies traded for Hill in June, he was arguably less valuable than the international bonus money they picked up in the same deal.

Hill is a career fifth outfielder with a strikeout rate (31.5% in 806 career plate appearances) that would make almost any hitter unplayable, especially a hitter with a career .281 on-base percentage and a career .132 ISO. But he can run, he can play center field, and he can hit lefties a bit. Best of all — and again, I’m not trying to be unkind here — Hill could not have dreamed up a scenario in which the bar for success was lower. Read the rest of this entry »

Tommy John spent 26 seasons pitching in the majors from 1963–74 and then 1976–89, more than any player besides Nolan Ryan, but his level of fame – and indeed, his contribution to the game — stems as much from the year that cleaves that span as it does from his work on the mound. As the first recipient of the most famous sports medicine procedure of all time, the elbow ligament replacement surgery performed by Dr. Frank Jobe in late 1974 that now bears his name, John endured an arduous year-long rehab process before returning to pitch as well as ever. His recovery gave hope to generations of injured pitchers whose careers might otherwise have ended.

By the count of analyst Jon Roegele, keeper of the Tommy John Surgery List, over 2,700 professional players have undergone some variant of Jobe’s pioneering surgery on John during either their amateur or professional careers. That list ranges from Brent Strom — who did not make it back to the majors after becoming the second recipient of Jobe’s ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction technique but went on to become a successful pitching coach — to Hunter Greene, who just underwent his second Tommy John last week. So far, only three are in the Hall of Fame, namely Paul Molitor (the first position player to undergo the surgery), John Smoltz, and Billy Wagner, but Justin Verlander, Chris Sale, and Shohei Ohtani will almost certainly follow in their wake, with more to come. By Roegele’s accounting, over 39% of all major league pitchers in 2025 had undergone Tommy John surgery.

On the mound, John was the epitome of the “crafty lefty,” so good at his vocation that he arrived on the major league scene at age 20 and made his final appearance three days after his 46th birthday. His 700 starts and 288 wins are both more than any other 20th- or 21st-century pitcher outside the Hall of Fame except Roger Clemens, but John’s longevity, his more dominant cohorts — including six 300-game winners — and the surgery that bears his name have overshadowed the rest of his on-field accomplishments. Between going 0-for-15 on BBWAA ballots (where he topped out at 31.7%) and 0-for-5 on Era Committee ballots (where he peaked at 43.8% on the 2025 Classic Baseball ballot), he never came particularly close to election, though in 2013, he got a share of the spotlight when the Hall honored Jobe. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of great statistics in baseball these days. They measure everything! Swing path tilt? Contact point against center of mass? Exit velocity? Hard-hit rate on opposite field line drives? You can get a report on any of those things at the wave of a few fingers. Expected wOBA? Barrel rate? There are acronyms and stat blends and projection aggregates for days. It’s analysis paralysis; the hard part isn’t finding stats to describe hitters, but figuring out which ones not to use.

I don’t have a foolproof method for seeing through all the noise for you. But I do have a fun experiment in how to work with statistics in such an overwhelming environment. I want to suggest a method that I call, These Things Are Good. Basically, it boils down to this: Come up with some statistics that you think are good without pre-determining which players you’re looking for, measure how good the entire league is at your statistics in question, and see what shakes out.

How should we do this in practice? I started by saying that I think pulling the ball when you hit it in the air is good. That gives me the first statistic I care about: air pull rate. I turned that into standard deviations for every player in baseball so that we could compare apples to apples across multiple statistics, then started looking for who the standouts were across all categories.

Air pull rate is nice, but it’s certainly not the only statistic that I’m interested in. Next, I wanted guys who hit the ball hard when they put it in the air. After all, exit velocity matters far more when batters can elevate. I did the same thing and put that in z-score terms via standard deviations. If you’re wondering what kinds of hitters these two categories identify, Kyle Schwarber, Griffin Conine, and Junior Caminero are the top three. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers are not the best team in baseball right now.

It’s been a tough go of late for the team supposedly breaking the sport. The Dodgers began August with a seven-game losing streak, and they’ve played two games below .500 since the All-Star break. They just dropped three of four to the Brewers over the weekend, ceding their standing as the top team in the majors.

Most slumping teams are slumping at the plate, and that’s certainly the case for the Dodgers. Their 93 wRC+ in the second half ranks 18th in the majors, after reaching the All-Star break with a best-in-show 115 wRC+. Their walk rate has dropped about three points, and their slugging percentage has dropped about 30 points. They’ve really struggled to get runners on, and when they do, the threat often ends in a popup or double play — sometimes even both. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who has heretofore been referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

This is the last entry in the Early Shift. Starting today, I’m back on paternity leave for four more weeks, so I’ll see you in September. Thank you for reading and for all of your lovely, supportive comments.

June 21
At 3:40 AM, Derek Jr. awakes, screaming. It is Father’s Day.

I’m going to have to stop keeping this journal. I hope I can jump back in with updates from time to time, but I haven’t been able to keep up since I returned to work. I can’t seem to get more than a few sentences down before something more pressing forces me to stop or before I exhaust my meager supply of focus. I wrote so many of these entries in the early hours of the morning, and I can’t keep doing that when I’ve got to get up just a few hours later and do good writing. I’m not sure how many of those previous entries were substantive enough to get published, so let me tell you what you may have missed over the past month or so.

Derek Jr. is 12 weeks old. She is healthy. She is enormous. Like all the babies in both my family and my wife’s, she has big, chunky cheeks. When she’s been outside napping in the stroller for an hour or two, they get so rosy that it feels like Mike Elias will pop up any second to inform us that she’s been drafted by the Orioles. Even if she weren’t enormous, though, she’d still seem enormous to us. One thing I’ve learned about babies is that they always feel so heavy. They’re always growing, which means every single time you pick them up, they’re a little bit heavier than they were the last time, which means you’re always, every day of their lives, surprised by how heavy they are.

Derek Jr. is happy. She is such a happy baby. She smiles at us all day long. She laughs. She wants to play. Honestly, it’s a problem sometimes. It’s hard to put her down to sleep, because as I rock her, she’s looking up at me and smiling. Just seeing my face gets her too excited to sleep. Not that this means I’m special. Once I do get her to sleep, she’ll wake up 30 minutes later and stay awake because she’s too busy smiling up at her friend the ceiling fan. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Rainer is one of the game’s most promising prospects. Currently No. 25 on The Board and No. 3 in our Detroit Tigers rankings, the 21-year-old shortstop boasts elite bat speed — eye-opening exit velocities are part of his profile — as well as arm strength that Eric Longenhagen has described as “incredible.” Our lead prospect analyst’s preseason report elaborated that Rainer was “pumping mid-90s gas off the mound in high school.”

His pitching background is what I wanted to hear about when I sat down with Rainer last month. After beginning the campaign with a smattering of games at Low-A Lakeland, Rainer has put up a .267/.374/.455 slash line and a 118 wRC+ with the.High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. His left-handed stroke has produced a dozen home runs across 358 trips to the plate with Detroit’s Midwest League affiliate.

Just how good was the 11th-overall pick in the 2024 draft when he was toeing the rubber for North Hollywood’s Harvard-Westlake High School?

“I don’t really love talking about myself,” Rainer replied when posed that question. “That’s kind of how I was brought up when it comes to interviews, but now that I don’t pitch anymore, I will say that I enjoyed my time on the mound. It was fun. I threw pretty hard and was successful at it.”

Pressed for radar readings, the humble ex-hurler affirmed that he indeed sat mid-90s, adding that he would occasionally reach the upper 90s. Repertoire-wise, he was fastball/curveball/slider/changeup. As you’d expect, scouts for a multitude of MLB organizations were keeping close watch when he stood atop the bump. Read the rest of this entry »

I made my first trip to Oracle Park earlier this week to catch the final two games of a three-game set between the Giants and Astros. I was in San Francisco reporting a different story, but I was eager talk about Yordan Alvarez with his teammates, his opponents, and pretty much anybody else who was interested. I’ve long compared him to Willie McCovey because of his overwhelming physical stature and profile at the plate — it helps that Alvarez, like McCovey, also bats left-handed and wears no. 44 — and I considered myself fortunate to get to see the Astros DH play in San Francisco. I hoped I’d get to witness him launch one into McCovey Cove. That didn’t happen, but it was still fun to watch him during what’s turning into a career year.

One of the players I talked to about Alvarez was Houston outfielder Taylor Trammell. His response, to a question about what makes Alvarez so good, is worth sharing. “He is the most efficient player I’ve ever seen,” Trammell said. “He does exactly what he needs to do to get himself ready to play well, and then does nothing more. His preparation seems so effortless because he has so much confidence in his routine. He’s shrunken it all into a box.” Trammell also bats left-handed, yet he said he can’t study Alvarez to figure out what to do in the box because “pitchers throw differently to him. They throw him the pitches they don’t throw to anyone else just to try something to get him out.” He said Alvarez sees changeups from pitchers that he didn’t even know had changeups, and while that might’ve been a slight exaggeration, it worked to explain the helplessness that opposing pitchers must feel when Alvarez is in the box.

That’s the last we’ll discuss Alvarez here today, but if you want to read more about his MVP-worthy season, I’d encourage you to check out Dan Szymborski’s post from Monday breaking down Alvarez’s odds of winning the American League Triple Crown. Instead, in this week’s mailbag, we’re answering your questions about a pair of Cardinals pitchers who are greatly outperforming their peripherals, whether strong plate discipline translates to successful ABS challenges, the final franchise to (maybe) register a 100-loss season, and more. 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 »

I might have a thing for guys who throw a lot of different fastballs. Earlier this week, I looked into Drew Rasmussen’s novel approach to pitching: just make the entire arsenal out of fastballs. Rasmussen used to mix four-seamers and cutters, but then he added a sinker and kicked things up a notch. The multi-fastball approach has swept baseball in recent years, in fact, to the point where pitchers with only one option in their toolkit now stand out to me. But I think I’ve seen a new variation. Ben Joyce throws two fastballs, and one of them is an offspeed pitch.

You probably think of Joyce as one of the hardest throwers in baseball, if you think of him at all. He was a standout at Tennessee, showing big league velocity while closing games for the Vols. He threw a pitch 105.5 mph in 2024, still one of the five fastest pitches recorded in the Statcast era. He’s always been a little wild. He reaches back for everything he possibly has. It’s the kind of profile that makes you wonder what he’s going to pair with that absurd fastball.

In 2024, Joyce started experimenting with a splinker, a splitter/sinker hybrid. He turned to that pitch partway through the year after discussing sinker grips with some of the other Angels pitchers, and he spent a lot of that season playing with the different ways he could throw it. It was very much still a work in progress – he changed the shape and velocity of it quite a lot as he learned the grip – but adding something that sat between his fastball and slider was a great success, so much so that Michael Baumann blogged about his two fastballs way back in January 2025. Then Joyce got hurt five games into the year, had shoulder surgery, and missed the rest of the season. Read the rest of this entry »