What a difference a week makes. With plenty of teams streaking up and down the standings, the playoff picture in both leagues is as murky as ever. We’re also at the point in the season where we can start thinking about which teams are positioned to play spoiler down the stretch.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.

The Rangers continued their red-hot August with series wins against the A’s and Giants last week. They’re just three games behind the Orioles for the best record in the American League and have held off the surging Astros and Mariners to maintain their grip on the AL West.

The Braves emerged from their most congested portion of their schedule with five wins in eight games last week. They outscored the Mets 34–3 over the first three games of their four-game weekend series before losing on Sunday night, 7–6. Matt Olson took over the MLB home run lead by blasting four last week; he’s now up to 43 on the season, already a career high.

All of a sudden, the Rays are facing all sorts of woes. On Saturday, they placed Shane McClanahan on the 60-day IL with a forearm injury that will cost him the rest of the season. For a team that’s already lost Drew Rasmussen and Jeffrey Springs to season-ending injuries (not to mention the back issue that forced Tyler Glasnow to miss his start last week), it’s another unfortunate hit to the pitching depth. Then, on Sunday, reports emerged that Wander Franco was being investigated regarding some concerning social media posts.

The Blue Jays have struggled with consistency all season long; to wit, they split a series with the Guardians and lost a series to the Cubs last week, allowing the surging Mariners to come within a game and a half of the final Wild Card spot in the AL. With Hyun Jin Ryu back from his Tommy John surgery and Yusei Kikuchi in the middle of the best run of his career, Toronto optioned Alek Manoah back to Triple-A to continue working out his issues. Bo Bichette still looks like he’s a couple of weeks away from returning from his knee injury, though Jordan Romano and Kevin Kiermaier look like they’ll be back from the IL this week.

The Dodgers have lost just once in August and pushed their current win streak to eight games with a sweep of the Rockies last weekend. They didn’t have the splashiest of trade deadlines, but Lance Lynn has surprisingly provided some stability to a starting rotation that is only just now getting healthy again, and Clayton Kershaw was activated from the IL last week and contributed a solid start on Thursday. Los Angeles now has a commanding 8.5-game lead in the NL West, a shocking gap considering it wasn’t even in first place at the All-Star break.

Wednesday was a night of celebration for the Phillies: Weston Wilson crushed a home run in his first major league plate appearance; Nick Castellanos blasted two home runs, the second of which was his 200th career dinger; and as the headlining act, Michael Lorenzen fired a no-hitter in his first start in Philadelphia since coming over at the trade deadline. They couldn’t keep the good vibes going over the weekend, scoring just once over their final two games against the Twins. Still, the struggles of every other NL Wild Card hopeful have given the Phillies a three-game lead in that race.

The Giants barely avoided a sweep at the hands of the Rangers with a dramatic, walk-off win in the tenth inning on Sunday. That victory salvaged a 2–4 week and helped them stay 1.5 games ahead of the Marlins in the NL Wild Card race. That series against Texas began an extremely tough stretch of schedule against playoff contenders that includes the Rays, Braves (twice), Phillies, Reds, Padres, and Cubs before finally easing up in September.

The Padres are quickly running out of opportunities to turn their season around at the last minute. After a particularly lackluster performance in a losing effort in Seattle on Wednesday, there were some pointed comments from Juan Soto after the game. They bounced back in their first game against the Diamondbacks in a huge weekend series but lost on Saturday and Sunday and are now 5.5 games back for the final wild card spot. They’ll have another shot at Arizona this weekend, which now seems like a make-or-break series.

After an ugly 2–8 stretch to start the month, the Red Sox have gotten back on track with series wins against the Royals and Tigers last week. Trevor Story, Chris Sale, and Garrett Whitlock are back off the IL, and Triston Casas is powering the offense nearly singlehandedly. That’s a lot of last-minute reinforcements for Boston, which has a lot of work to do to get back into the AL Wild Card race.

The Angels showed some signs of life in a series win against the Giants early last week, but they were short-lived; the Astros handed them back-to-back 11–3 defeats over the weekend, and Los Angeles barely avoided a sweep with a close 2–1 victory on Sunday. The Angels’ postseason hopes are hanging by a thread, and they’re almost at the point where they need to start looking toward an Ohtani-less season next year. They’ll have plenty of opportunities to affect the playoff picture by playing spoiler down the stretch, but they need to find ways to get some of their youngsters more playing time to assess what they’re working with moving forward.

The four-way race for the final NL Wild Card spot ended this week with the Marlins a half-game ahead of the Reds and Cubs. They got there thanks to a series win against Cincinnati earlier in the week and then a dramatic series win against the Yankees capped off by a walk-off victory on Sunday. All four teams won their series over the weekend, though Arizona is at a significant disadvantage thanks to its slide down the standings earlier in the month.

The race for the final two protected draft lottery picks is probably going to come down to these five teams. They’re separated by just a single game in the standings, and each of them looks stronger than the bottom four teams in the standings (though the Nationals are actually ineligible to receive a lottery pick since they earned one last year). These five teams are also the most likely to play spoiler down the stretch, since all of them can put together a competitive performance on any given night.

If there’s one thing Rockies fans could enjoy about their team during these lean years, it was a winning record at home. Over the last decade, Colorado has posted a losing record in Coors Field twice, and one of those years was the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. They’re at risk of losing that home field advantage this year, having gone 25–30 so far. They still have home series against the Diamondbacks, Braves, Blue Jays, Cubs, Giants, Dodgers, and Twins on the docket, which means they could play a significant role as a spoiler down the stretch — but only if they can turn Coors Field back into a tough place to play in.

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Kenley Jansen was a 19-year-old catching prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization when he played for the 2007 Great Lakes Loons. Sixteen years and 417 saves later, he looks back at his time in Midland, Michigan fondly. The All-Star closer didn’t hit much — his conversion to the mound in 2009 came for a reason — but the overall experience shaped who he is today.

“I loved everything about that city, man,” said Jansen, a native of Curaçao who also called Midland home in 2008. “It was cold, but probably also my favorite city from my time in the minor leagues. We played at Dow Diamond and that place was packed every night. The fans were great. I lived with Rob Wright and Lori Wright — Danny Wright, too — and I don’t even consider them my host family anymore; they’re part of my family now. I didn’t play very well, but a lot of good things came out of that whole experience. Great Lakes helped transition me from being a kid to being a man.”

The 2007 season was also notable because of his manager and a pair of teammates. Longtime Detroit Tigers backstop Lance Parrish was at the helm of the Midwest League affiliate, the club’s primary catcher was Carlos Santana, and a teenage left-hander was the most-prominent member of the pitching staff. Read the rest of this entry »

A large portion of every season’s prospect-related transaction activity takes place between the draft and the trade deadline, a window that, since the draft was moved to July, spans just a few weeks. We can use the way the FanGraphs farm system rankings are calculated to track movement during this period on the baseball calendar and hopefully come to more fully understand how successful rebuilds are born. Over time, we can better contextualize trade and draft hauls by using this methodology to build a historical understanding of prospect movement. Mostly though, these rankings track the depth and impact of talent in each farm system at a specific moment in time. Or, in the case of the below links and tables, four moments in time. There are some methodological caveats to pass along (I’ll get to those momentarily), as well as some very specific examples where the movement communicated in the tables below does not properly capture team activity during the last month of trades and draft signings (which I get into throughout this post).

Let’s start with some basic disclaimers. Remember that while the Craig Edwards research that facilitates this approach is empirical, my subjective player evaluations (and their resulting Future Values) feed the formula that spits out the farm rankings. Just one significant over- or under-evaluation of a player can shift the way a team lines up in these rankings pretty dramatically, especially if you’re focused on the ordinal rankings. The monetary values, in addition to providing an approximate measure and reminder of how the draft and international amateur processes suppress what these guys might earn on an open market, illustrate the ways systems are spaced and clustered with more nuance. If I’m way too light or way too heavy on any single impact prospect, I’m basically infecting a list with half a standard deviation’s worth of error in this regard because Craig’s math favors top-heavy systems rather than ones with depth. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday night in Philadelphia didn’t start off as a celebration of Michael Lorenzen. Making his first home start after joining the team at the trade deadline, he struggled to get comfortable on the mound. The first batter of the game, CJ Abrams, smashed a pitch to the warning track in the deepest part of the field. The next three batters worked full counts, with one walking. Keibert Ruiz worked another walk to lead off the second inning. Lorenzen threw 53 pitches in the first three frames. Through four, he had three strikeouts and three walks.

Luckily, he didn’t need to be the focus, because a celebration in Philly was happening one way or another. Weston Wilson smashed a home run in his first major league at-bat. Nick Castellanos popped a two-run shot in the first and followed up with a solo shot in the third. The Phillies were romping over the Nationals on a glorious summer evening. And that’s leaving the best part for last: Ryan Howard was in the booth to celebrate opening a new chicken and waffles stand in the stadium.

I won’t lie to you; those waffles looked good. John Kruk was nearly rapturous as he contemplated them. At one point, he openly begged Alex Call to finish an at-bat quickly so the booth could go to commercial and he could eat. Howard seemed happy, too, and the Phillies continued to pile up runs while he recapped the genesis of his foodie vision. After four innings, the Phillies led 6-0, and the celebration was in full swing.

Obviously, though, you aren’t here to read about Howard’s chicken and waffles, or to learn, as I did, that Kruk avoids spicy food. You’re here because a funny thing happened in the back half of this game. Lorenzen, staked to an enormous lead, started attacking the strike zone. He dared the Nationals to swing – four-seamers middle-middle and belt-high sinkers, calling out to be swung at. When he fell behind in the count, he fired one down the pipe and said “hit it.”

This being the Nationals, they mostly didn’t hit it. Calling their offense punchless might be going too far, but they’re towards the bottom of the league in every offensive category, and that doesn’t account for the fact that they traded their best hitter at the deadline. Abrams is coming on, and Lane Thomas has been good all year, but we’re not quite talking about Murderers’ Row here.

Suddenly it was the seventh inning, and the Nationals were still hitless. Lorenzen pulled his secondary pitches back out; he buried Jake Alu under a pile of changeups for his fourth strikeout and then mixed four-seamers high with changeups low to coax a groundout (smashed, great play by Rodolfo Castro) out of Ildemaro Vargas. Seven innings, 100 pitches, no hits – was this happening?

That last out of the seventh inning awoke the Philadelphia crowd from its post-homer lethargy. They’d been enjoying a casual demolishing of the little brothers of the NL East. Now, they might be witnessing history. A roar broke out, and the crowd rose to its feet to collectively cheer Lorenzen as he strode off the field. Six outs, six measly outs – surely he could do it.

Lorenzen came out sharp in the eighth – by which I mean, he threw some good pitches when the count made that possible and otherwise made the Nationals beat him by putting the ball in play. It was a brilliant plan all night; the Phillies recorded 15 outs in the air, few of them threatening to be anything more than cans of corn. Most importantly for Lorenzen, that eighth inning took only 11 pitches, which gave him enough runway to come back out for the ninth.

I’ve spent a lot of this writeup talking about Lorenzen’s ability to adapt his pitching to the situation, and that was on display in his last inning of work. The strike zone widens when no-hitters near the finish line. Hitters’ pulses rise – you don’t want to be on that highlight reel, you know? Lorenzen aimed for the corners to get ahead, then snapped off ridiculous breaking balls whenever he had the chance, hoping for a miserable flail from a desperate opponent.

That plan dealt with Thomas and Joey Meneses, the latter a victim of a called strike three that was both clearly outside and clearly a pitch you have to swing at in the ninth inning of a no-hitter. That left only Dominic Smith, but he wasn’t going down easily. After falling behind 1-2, he took and fouled his way back to a 3-2 count. Lorenzen looked gassed. “One more pitch,” Kruk breathed on the broadcast, almost a mantra. And Lorenzen left it up to the gods of contact one more time. He threw a slider right down main street at 85 and dared Smith to do his worst:

After the momentous end to the seventh inning, Citizen’s Bank Park had turned raucous. That energy carried right through to the end of the game. The place positively shook when Meneses struck out, and erupted even more when Johan Rojas squeezed Smith’s fly ball for the final out. Sorry Weston, and sorry Ryan; it was Lorenzen’s night now, and the crowd bathed him in applause as he exulted in his achievement.

If you didn’t know he hadn’t allowed any hits, Lorenzen’s line wouldn’t turn any heads. Five strikeouts, four walks; it’s not exactly the stuff of aces. But Lorenzen has never been an ace, and he wouldn’t tell you otherwise. He’s never been a high octane strikeout pitcher, and now that he’s transitioned from the bullpen to the rotation, he’s leaning more than ever on his savvy. Tonight was the crowning achievement of that style.

As the stadium roared and Lorenzen’s mom beamed from the crowd, the team mobbed him. What a glorious feeling it must be to combine the pinnacle of individual achievement with your first real taste at team success. Lorenzen has played for a winning team exactly twice in his major league career – the 2020 Reds went 31-29 and the 2021 edition finished 83-79.

This year’s Phillies are a cut above that – the defending National League champions, near-locks to make the playoffs and another run at the title. And he’s one of them now, indelibly linked with this team, this city. You won’t be able to tell the story of the 2023 Phillies without mentioning this night, which means you won’t be able to tell it without mentioning Lorenzen. How wonderful that must feel after nearly a decade in the wilderness, hoping to start, then getting your wish only to toil in obscurity.

Baseball is about a lot of things. It’s about the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd, the beauty of close plays and the shocking speed and strength of grown men wearing ridiculous pajamas. Increasingly, it’s about numbers too – teams are getting smarter and smarter about separating what seems important from what is important. But regardless of the numbers, tonight was important. Baseball isn’t just about who wins the trophy at the end of the year. It’s about nights like these, and players like these. What a glorious night for Lorenzen, and what a wonderful celebration of baseball.

Monday night, my wife posed a baseball question I couldn’t immediately answer. As the Angels and Giants went to the eighth inning with the Halos up by a run, she had a simple question: How often does a team that’s losing after seven innings come back and win? I guess I could have gone to our wonderful WPA Inquirer, a fun little tool for hypotheticals. That tells me that the Giants had around a 25% chance to win heading into the eighth. But I took her question as a broader one, concerned not just with that specific game, but with all games. How likely is a comeback?

I didn’t know the answer offhand, and I couldn’t find it on Google either (secret professional writer tip: use Google). So I did what anyone in my situation would do: I said “I don’t know, but now I’m going to write an article about this.” Two days later, here we are.

I’m hardly the first person to do research on comebacks. Russell Carleton has been looking into comebacks for a while. Rob Mains has too. Chet Gutwein investigated comeback wins and blown saves here at FanGraphs in 2021. Everyone loves to write about comebacks. Baseball Reference even keeps a list of the biggest comeback wins. They’re memorable games, and fertile ground for investigation. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small samples. Full seasons result in specific numbers that have minimal predictive value, such as BABIP for pitchers. The predictive value isn’t literally zero — individual seasons form much of the basis of projections, whether math-y ones like ZiPS or simply our personal opinions on how good a player is — but we have to develop tools that improve our ability to explain some of these stats. It’s not enough to know that the number of home runs allowed by a pitcher is volatile; we need to know how and why pitchers allow homers beyond a general sense of pitching poorly or being Jordan Lyles.

Data like that which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s more elemental, such as exit velocities and launch angles and the like — things that are in themselves more predictive than their end products (the number of homers). StatCast has its own implementation of this kind of exercise in its various “x” stats. ZiPS uses slightly different models with a similar purpose, which I’ve dubbed zStats. (I’m going to make you guess what the z stands for!) The differences in the models can be significant. For example, when talking about grounders, balls hit directly toward the second base bag became singles 48.7% of the time from 2012 to ’19, with 51.0% outs and 0.2% doubles. But grounders hit 16 degrees to the “left” of the bag only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, and toward the second base side, it was 9.8%. ZiPS uses data like sprint speed when calculating hitter BABIP, because how fast a player is has an effect on BABIP and extra-base hits.

ZiPS doesn’t discard actual stats; the models all improve from knowing the actual numbers in addition to the zStats. You can read more on how zStats relate to actual stats here. For those curious about the r-squared values between zStats and real stats for the offensive components, it’s 0.59 for zBABIP, 0.86 for strikeouts, 0.83 for walks, and 0.78 for homers. Those relationships are what make these stats useful for predicting the future. If you can explain 78% of the variance in home run rate between hitters with no information about how many homers they actually hit, you’ve answered a lot of the riddle. All of these numbers correlate better than the actual numbers with future numbers, though a model that uses both zStats and actual ones, as the full model of ZiPS does, is superior to either by themselves.

And why is this important and not just number-spinning? Knowing that changes in walk rates, home run rates, and strikeout rates stabilized far quicker than other stats was an important step forward in player valuation. That’s something that’s useful whether you work for a front office, are a hardcore fan, want to make some fantasy league moves, or even just a regular fan who is rooting for your faves. If we improve our knowledge of the basic molecular structure of a walk or a strikeout, then we can find players who are improving or struggling even more quickly, and provide better answers on why a walk rate or a strikeout rate has changed. This is useful data for me in particular because I obviously do a lot of work with projections, but I’m hoping this type of information is interesting to readers beyond that.

As with any model, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and there are always some people that question the value of data such as these. So for this run, I’m pitting zStats against the last two months and all new data that obviously could not have been used in the model without a time machine to see how the zStats did compared to reality. I’m not going to do a whole post for this every time, but this is something that, based on the feedback from the last post in June, people really wanted to see the results for.

Starting with zBABIP, let’s look at how the numbers have shaken out for the leaders and trailers from back in June. I didn’t include players with fewer than 100 plate appearances over the last two months. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday afternoon, the Astros had an off day before the start of a series in Baltimore, so they did what most defending World Series champions have done under those circumstances, and swung by the White House. There, Dusty Baker and his merry men were fêted by President Joe Biden, who commiserated with the beloved Astros manager over having to wait decades to reach the pinnacle of their respective professions.

What a lovely event, one that raises two questions. First: What the hell, Mr. President, I thought you were a Phillies fan? Between this and the similar ceremony for the Braves a year ago, Biden has used two of his three championship soirees to celebrate a hated division rival and the team that beat the Phillies in the World Series. The Bidens are already on thin ice after the First Lady showed up to watch a white-hot Phillies team in Game 4 of the World Series, only for them to get no-hit and lose three straight to end the season.

That leads into the second question: Encountering a sitting president has to be a provocative experience, even for a professional athlete. What effect does going to the White House have on a defending World Series champion? Read the rest of this entry »

Cole Hamels retired from baseball on Friday, causing significant consternation to people who read that headline and thought they’d been transported back in time to the winter of 2019. (Buy a house now, while you still can, and be sure to stock up on hand sanitizer.)

It’s been four years since Hamels pitched effectively in the major leagues; before the 2020 season, he signed a one-year deal with the Atlanta Braves, and was limited to just 3 1/3 innings by injuries to his triceps and shoulder. Two further comeback attempts, with the Dodgers and his hometown Padres, came to nothing. Hamels never quite recovered from a 2021 surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff, and was still unable to throw without pain when he decided, at age 39, that he’d finally had enough.

Hamels, the 2008 NLCS and World Series MVP, will probably appear on just one Hall of Fame ballot. But few players’ reputations suffered more by comparison to their immediate surroundings than Hamels’ did; he was one or two breaks from giving a speech in Cooperstown someday, even if nobody realized it at the time. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackson Jobe has added a cutter to the power arsenal that helps make him one of the top pitching prospects in the Detroit Tigers system. Every bit as importantly, he’s returned to full health following a back ailment that landed him on the shelf from early April to mid June. The recently-turned 21-year-old right-hander had incurred an L5 (i.e. bottom left vertebra) stress fracture, an injury he attributed to “rotating fast and throwing hard at a young age when I wasn’t really strong enough to support that.”

The pitch now augmenting his fastball/slider/changeup combination was portended in a conversation I had with him last August. As his second full professional season was concluding, Jobe told me that he wanted to develop something new, “probably a cutter,” and he went on to do just that.

“I added it in the offseason, and on paper it’s a really good pitch,” the third-overall pick in the 2021 draft explained prior to his last start, which came on Friday with the High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. “I dive into all the TrackMan stuff — the vertical movement, horizontal movement, the spin efficiency, the tilt — and use the data in pitch-design. The cutter has performed pretty well.”

Asking the analytically-minded hurler about the metrics on his cutter elicited a response that was preceded by a pregnant pause. Read the rest of this entry »

Ranked and briefly analyzed below are the prospects who have been traded during the loosely defined “2023 deadline season,” which for simplicity’s sake I consider all of July. Most of the deals these prospects were part of have been analyzed at length on this site. An index of those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “Trade” column below, which will take you to the relevant article. I’ve moved all of the 35+ FV and above players listed here to their new orgs over on The Board, so you can click through to see where they rank among their new teammates and read their full scouting reports. Our Farm System Rankings, which update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up following the draft and the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »