Sal Stewart made a promising showing when the Reds called him up last September, clubbing five home runs in 18 games while helping Cincinnati reach the postseason for the first time since 2020. His 2026 campaign is off to a flying start, as well. Not only did he bank NL Player of the Week honors for the season’s opening week, but his performance underscores the notion — supported by both scouting and statistical projections — that he’s leveled up significantly.

Through the Reds’ first six games, the 22-year-old first baseman has put up video-game numbers, batting .474/.615/.947 (313 wRC+) with two homers in 26 plate appearances. His hot streak began with an eventful Opening Day; while the Reds lost to the Red Sox, 3-0, it was hardly his fault. He went 3-for-4, including a pair of bases-empty doubles, one apiece off starter Garrett Crochet and reliever Garrett Whitlock, as well as a single to right field off Crochet with men on first and second. With third base coach Willie Harris wary of testing two-time Gold Glove winner Wilyer Abreu’s arm, lead runner Matt McLain was held up and ultimately stranded.

Stewart also survived a scare in the fifth inning, when a 110-mph liner off the bat of Roman Anthony hit his left wrist as he tried to backhand the ball. He was shaken up but remained in the game, and reassuringly collected two of his three hits after being drilled. Read the rest of this entry »

Tarik Skubal commanded the zone while dominating the San Diego Padres on Thursday. Making his third straight Opening Day start for the Detroit Tigers, the reigning back-to-back Cy Young Award winner threw 49 of 74 pitches for strikes, including 17 of 22 to start an at-bat. Moreover, he mixed with aplomb. Skubal garnered 14 called strikes, 10 of them on either his four-seamer or sinker, as well as 11 whiffs, nine coming on changeups. He departed after six innings having surrendered just three hits, with six strikeouts and nary a free pass.

His M.O. for attacking the strike zone? I asked the 29-year-old southpaw about that following one of his spring training outings earlier this month. As it has become increasingly common for pitchers — particularly power pitchers — to aim middle and let their stuff play from there, I wanted to know how precise he is with intended location.

“My changeup, I throw down the middle, but that’s because when I throw it down the middle, the result is down and away,” replied Skubal. “And when I throw my slider down the middle, the result is glove-side and down. So, there are pitches I throw down the middle, but that’s just visually, as opposed to what I’m actually doing.

“I feel like I do a good job of throwing strikes,” continued Skubal. “As far as really executing every pitch that I throw… I don’t know. There is probably a metric on it. I’d like to think I’m a little bit above average, but I don’t know what the numbers say.“

Measuring command is an imperfect science, so where Skubal ranks depends on your metric of choice. According to our PitchingBot model, he was among the best of the best. Last season, Skubal graded out at 64 (on a 20-80 scale) tying him with Seattle’s Bryan Woo at the top of our botCmd leaderboard. Read the rest of this entry »

We did it everyone! We made it through the long offseason. Regular season baseball is back, and it has already delivered the goods. I attended Mets-Pirates at Citi Field on Opening Day to witness the highly anticipated pitching matchup between reigning NL Cy Young winner Paul Skenes and new New York ace Freddy Peralta. Naturally, Skenes had the worst game of his career thus far, failing to make it through the first inning, and Peralta didn’t pitch well either. The two teams combined for 18 runs in the 8 1/2 innings of play. I wrote about the Skenes start, the two defensive blunders by Oneil Cruz in center field that contributed to Pittsburgh’s first-inning fiasco, and the lineup’s surprisingly strong showing. You can read that here.

Because I was covering that contest, I didn’t get a chance to watch any of the other early games and saw only a portion of the later ones. That means I missed White Sox catcher Edgar Quero successfully challenge three ball calls in the first two innings before finally getting one wrong in the sixth inning. In that same game, which the Brewers won 14-2, Jacob Misiorowski struck out 11 Chicago batters. I also didn’t catch the pitcher’s duel between Orioles lefty Trevor Rogers and Twins righty Joe Ryan; Baltimore won, 2-1, and Adley Rutschman, not to be confused with Badley, went 2-for-4, though Tyler O’Neill’s Opening Day home run streak was snapped at six. In the later afternoon games, the Cardinals scored eight runs in the bottom of the sixth inning to secure a comeback win over the Rays, after allowing Tampa Bay to plate six runs in the top of the frame. JJ Wetherholt, who went 1-for-4 with a home run and two RBI in that game, was one of a number of prospects who shined in their big league debuts. Kevin McGonigle had four hits in the Tigers’ 8-2 win over the Padres, and Justin Crawford went 2-for-4 in the Phillies’ win over the Rangers. I actually got to see Mets right fielder Carson Benge blast his first homer, this after a dead bird had fallen in front of him in right field. It wasn’t technically his first major league game because he debuted in the postseason last year, but Cleveland’s Chase DeLauter bopped two home runs in a 6-4 win over the Mariners.

I ran through all those games up top because that’s the last we’ll be covering the Opening Day action in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about Matt McLain’s strong spring, Aaron Judge’s low squared-up rate, players who might benefit the most from ABS, and Tony Vitello. 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 »

Trey Yesavage profiles as a strong Rookie of the Year candidate, but he won’t have a chance to begin building his case in the near term. The 22-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander landed on the injured list due to shoulder impingement and won’t be ready when the season gets underway later this week. His return is expected to come sooner rather than later — fingers are crossed throughout Canada — but for now, Yesavage is on the shelf.

Five months ago he was turning heads in the World Series. With just six MLB outings under his belt — three in the regular season, and three across the ALDS and ALCS — Yesavage bedeviled LA batters with an array of high-riding heaters and diving splitters. He was especially dominant in Game 5, fanning a dozen Dodgers while allowing three baserunners and a lone run over seven frames.

His meteoric rise and eye-popping postseason performances raised his public persona, but the Pottstown, Pennsylvania native hasn’t otherwise changed since being drafted 22nd overall in 2024 out of East Carolina University. He’s still polite and unassuming, and his overpowering arsenal has remained in place.

“I’m pretty much the same dude,” Yesavage told me at Blue Jays camp last week. “The pitches are the same. The velocity and movement are the same. I also don’t look at [the metrics] all that much. Whenever Trackman is up on the board, all I really look at is the vert on my heater, and the velo. The only questions I’ll ask my pitching coach are to make sure that my most-used pitch is in line.”

That would be his four-seam fastball, which averaged 94.7 mph and 19.5 inches of induced vertical break across his smattering of regular season outings. Thrown at a 45.2% clip, the offering was augmenting by a slider (28.4%) and a splitter (26.4%), the last of those offerings being the righty’s most lethal weapon. A quintessential complement to his well-elevated heaters, Yesavage’s splitter induced a 57.1% whiff rate and a .111 BAA against big-league hitters.

He began tinkering with his signature pitch in the middle of his three collegiate seasons, but it wasn’t until his draft year that the efforts bore fruit. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting rotations have five slots.

Yes, every once in a while a team will pretend to have four or six slots, but that team must inevitably confront the truth: Starting rotations have five slots. It’s a matter of policy, preference, and just plain practicality, Mariners general manager Justin Hollander said last year in an interview with Lookout Landing.

“The unfortunate thing about the roster rules is you only get 26 spots, and you only get 13 pitchers. And when you add a sixth starter, you take away a reliever. When you add a sixth starter, sometimes your starters pitch every six days, sometimes they pitch every eight or nine days. Starting pitchers are fussy. They don’t like that. They like to stay on a regular schedule. They like to know when they’re pitching.”

I’ve been thinking about the fixed-nature of rotations lately after reading this discussion between Eno Saris and Jen McCaffrey in The Athletic. They compare the rotations in Detroit and Boston by assigning each pitcher a label (one, two, three, four, five), sizing them up horizontally and vertically, and confronting the trade-offs in quality and depth. This reflects how many of us compare rotations in the abstract, and I wanted to see if this could be applied more broadly. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Reds sent Hunter Greene for imaging on his throwing elbow. Never a good sign for the no. 1 starter on a team that made the playoffs last season. In those situations, we on the outside are usually conditioned to fear the worst, or at least Tommy John surgery, recovery from which — while all but routine these days — takes more than a year.

Only in that context could Tuesday’s news be taken as positive: Greene will have surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. (In fact, as you read this, he may have already undergone the procedure.) The recovery time is expected to be on the order of three to four months, but losing an ace until the trade deadline is much better than losing him until 2027.

This is a banner year for bone chips and loose bodies. The Braves alone have two starters — Hurston Waldrep and Spencer Schwellenbach — on the IL after receiving similar treatment. Actually, since we’re talking about bone chips, this feels like a good excuse to talk about Dazzy Vance. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s something even more satisfying than spending your hard-earned money, it’s spending someone else’s money that you didn’t earn. When we’re talking baseball, unless you’re an extremely high-net-worth individual who can casually spend hundreds of millions of dollars — if this describes you, call me and we can totally hang out or something — you only have the option to spend other people’s cash. I mean, I haven’t technically asked American Express to up my credit limit to $300 million, but I’m guessing the answer would be no. Every year around this time, I make a whole piece out of it, naming seven players I think teams should attempt to sign to long-term contracts now, rather than waiting until later. There are some additional complications, of course, with a lockout likely coming after this season, but teams and players could be willing to act with more urgency to sign contracts now before all the uncertainty ahead of them.

I’ve (hopefully) chosen seven players whose possible extensions would benefit both the player and the team, as all good contracts ought to do. I’ve included the up-to-date ZiPS projections for each player, as well as the contract that ZiPS thinks each player should get, though that doesn’t necessarily mean I think the player will end up with that figure or even sign an extension. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy last day of February, everyone. By this time next week, the World Baseball Classic will have begun, allowing us to experience the best of what our global game has to offer. Earlier this month, Kiri Oler previewed the WBC with four team-by-team breakdown pieces, one for each pool, and we’ll have more coverage next week leading into the tournament. Also, I’ll be in Miami covering Pool D, which features Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, Israel, and Nicaragua, so if you have any questions related to the first-round action at loanDepot park, you know how to reach me.

Of course, the World Baseball Classic isn’t the only baseball we have to look forward to in March. We are less than four weeks away from Opening Day! This year marks the earliest traditional Opening Day in MLB history, with 14 games scheduled for Thursday, March 26. The night before, the Giants will host the Yankees for the first game of the season. That standalone primetime matchup will air on Netflix of all places, because we all needed another streaming service subscription.

Anyway, in this week’s mailbag, we’ll be answering your questions about the NL Central, the value of a foul ball, a hypothetical Hall of Fame election in which every player regained eligibility for one year, and the most and least valuable baseball last names. Before we do, though, 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 »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Konnor Griffin’s openness to an extension with the Pirates and a weird Wilyer Abreu check-swing broken bat, then preview the 2026 Boston Red Sox (20:00) with The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier, and the 2026 Cincinnati Reds (1:08:36) with The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans.

Audio intro: Kite Person, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to FG post on Scherzer
Link to FG post on Sale
Link to Misiorowski video
Link to article about video
Link to FG post about video
Link to Griffin report
Link to MLBTR on Griffin
Link to Griffin’s wedding
Link to Griffin’s homers
Link to MLBTR on his bonus
Link to Skenes WBC quote
Link to Skubal start news
Link to Abreu video
Link to Abreu article
Link to definition of swing
Link to team payrolls page
Link to Red Sox offseason tracker
Link to Red Sox depth chart
Link to team SP projections
Link to Pete Abe post
Link to Red Sox HR projections
Link to Red Sox 2B projections
Link to Cora on the projections
Link to FG post on Duran
Link to Alex on Gonzales
Link to Alex’s author archive
Link to Reds offseason tracker
Link to Reds depth chart
Link to 2025 team SP WAR
Link to C. Trent on Marte’s catch
Link to Statcast park factors
Link to Votto post 1
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Link to The Simpsons quote
Link to C. Trent’s author archive

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It took all the way until February, but the last few free agency dominos are starting to fall. The Reds were one of the first teams to dip their toes into the market this winter, signing Emilio Pagán to a two-year deal at the start of December. Now they’ve made it a bookend set – over the weekend, they signed Eugenio Suárez to a one-year, $15 million deal, as first reported by Jeff Passan.

I missed high on my contract estimate for Suárez. I had him down for two years at $25 million a year, while our crowdsourced projections thought he’d get three years at $20 million each. The lowest public-facing projection I found for him was two years at $22.5 million per. In other words, Suárez settled for less than predicted, and he signed late as a result. It’s a classic example of the fact that free agents who sign later sign for less.

At a top-line level, seeing Suárez sign for this little is surprising. He isn’t some flash in the pan seeking a 10-year deal. He’s been one of the best power hitters in baseball for quite a while now. The 2025 season was the fourth out of the last five where he’s topped 30 homers. He socked 49 while spending half the year in a home run graveyard in Seattle, though he did most of his damage before the trade; he posted a 91 wRC+ as a Mariner. Teams pay for projection, not performance, but Suárez’s wRC+ over the last three years is better than his career mark. But that power didn’t overwhelm a host of other question marks. Read the rest of this entry »