I once spent what felt like a lifetime arguing with a colleague who hated the German soccer player Mesut Özil and would not be moved no matter what statistical evidence, stunning highlights, or expert analysis he consumed. For years, my friend insisted Özil was trash, and for years he was wrong.

Then, Özil finally lost a step, fell out with his coach, and got benched. Rather than admit circumstances had changed, my friend claimed victory, as if he’d prophesied the truth instead of stumbling into it after the fact. Which I’m totally fine with, by the way, and in no way still so pissed about that I’m bringing it up for an audience that likely knows or cares little about semi-retired European soccer playmakers and even less about my onetime debate partner. No, sir. Anyway, this experience taught me an important lesson about sports takemanship: If you hold on to an opinion long enough, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, sometimes the mountain comes to Mohammed.

In that spirit, I’m declaring that I was right about Ryne Stanek all along. Back in 2012, I was a huge Stanek fan. In his days at the University of Arkansas, he was one of the top candidates to go first overall in the 2013 draft. I saw his fastball velocity and wipeout slider and imagined him as a future no. 1 starter. And when Stanek continued to worry scouts his junior year — he fell all the way to no. 29 in the draft, despite posting a 1.39 ERA as a starter in the SEC — I was unmoved. Stanek would come good, I insisted.

For nine years, I kept the faith. Through injuries, through command problems, through a move to the bullpen. When Stanek finally started a handful of major league games, it was as an opener, the Blaster to Jalen Beeks’s Master. He was effective in short bursts, but a trade to the Marlins in mid-2019 and a month-long bout with COVID in 2020 brought his career to the brink of dissolution.

Suffice it to say, things have changed. Last year, Stanek became a key part of the Astros’ bullpen, appearing in 13 of Houston’s 16 playoff games, holding batters to a .139/.184/.333 line, and posting a positive WPA in the first 12 of those outings. This year, well, here’s a list of the top reliever ERAs in baseball this season:

It took nine years, but Stanek is finally as dominant as he was at Arkansas. A 1.17 ERA in 58 appearances for the top seed in the American League might not be a 200-inning Cy Young season, but it’s close enough that I can claim to have triumphed in the marketplace of ideas.

Many of these names above will be familiar to you from a piece Ben Clemens wrote last week about how the top relievers in baseball are especially dominant. Among the players he mentioned are the ones you’ll remember in several years’ time: Helsley chucking the rock at 104 mph, Díaz storming in to trumpet fanfare like a Roman consul, Clase cuttering through opponents like Mariano Rivera, plus six ticks. But Stanek, who’s second among relievers in ERA, didn’t merit a mention. As if he’s not actually elite.

The Astros don’t seem to think so either, or at least they’re not using him that way. Among the six Astros relievers with at least 40 innings pitched, Stanek is only fourth in gmLI, at 1.22, which places him in the range of important middle relievers, but hardly a high-leverage fireman or closer. Some of that is down to Houston having a loaded bullpen: in addition to closer Ryan Pressly, the Astros have invested significant resources in the past 18 months to sign or trade for Héctor Neris, Will Smith, Phil Maton, and Rafael Montero. They’ve all pitched well, as has Bryan Abreu. And Houston’s surfeit of rotation arms will bolster the bullpen in the playoffs — Justin Verlander acolyte Hunter Brown has already moved over, and one or both of José Urquidy and Luis Garcia is likely to join him there as October rolls on.

The other reason Stanek’s exceptional run prevention season is going unnoticed is that it’s most remarkable in one specific way: The sheer number of fluky season red flags he’s managed to hit. In an era when the best relievers are striking out tons of batters and walking no one, Stanek is a throwback to the Matt Mantei–Armando Benitez-type relief ace who gets outs but walks so many guys you end up watching his appearances through your fingers. I’m not complaining — everything that was cool when I was a middle schooler is coming back into style, it seems. Just today I saw a TikTok about how to make your hair look like Shawn’s from Boy Meets World. But I digress. Let’s take a look at some of Stanek’s stats:

The Statcast-derived metrics are no more flattering:

Calling Stanek’s season fluky feels unkind, and it’s certainly not my intention to denigrate the fine work he’s done this year. The F-word is usually tagged to players whose superficial stats look good but are actually bad. Stanek, based on the underlying numbers, is a good reliever whose ERA makes him look like Dennis Eckersley.

What is he, then? Well, basically the same pitcher he was last year: A good middle reliever with an above-average strikeout rate and a slightly concerning walk rate. He’s much less homer-prone this year, but that’s about it. His improved LOB% and inherited runner strand rate (up to 41% from 19% in 2021) come despite very similar performance with runners on base (.257 opponent wOBA in 2021, .267 this year). But it bears repeating that he was a workhorse in the playoffs for an Astros team that nearly won the title, and with the LDS and LCS both losing an off day, more of this postseason than ever will be decided by teams’ fourth- and fifth-best relievers.

Players like Stanek, in other words. As much as the Astros need star performances from Verlander, Pressly, and so on, they need their entire pitching staff to show up. Lucky for them, for the seventh and eighth innings they have an ace, just as I predicted all those years ago.

This morning, on your way to your local coffee shop or the train station, you probably passed two guys writhing around on the sidewalk, one screaming “Aaron Judge!” while trying to wrap up his counterpart in a figure-four leg lock; the other, attempting valiantly to squirm out of his predicament and refusing to tap out, shouting “Shohei Ohtani!”

Such is the nature of this year’s AL MVP discourse, the most spirited awards debate since the halcyon days of Mike Trout vs. Miguel Cabrera a decade ago. And that’s appropriate — these are two of the most recognizable names in the sport, both accomplishing things we only see once every few decades, and both doing it in major markets. (I’m framing it this way on purpose in order to provoke a second argument: Is Anaheim really part of the Greater Los Angeles area, or is it something else?)

But they name three MVP finalists, not two, which leaves us a little less than two months from a hilarious television moment: Judge and Ohtani, on MLB Network, awaiting the results of this contentious election while the host runs down the credentials of some joker with no shot at all of taking home the hardware.

So who should that joker be? Read the rest of this entry »

This is Leo’s first piece as a FanGraphs contributor. Leo is a Philadelphia sports fan, but he lives in Toronto, meaning he is subjected to the agony of watching Joe Carter’s 1993 World Series-winning walk-off home run replayed on a loop every single time he attends a Phillies game. Nevertheless, his love of the game has persevered. He has written for sites across the web, including Baseball Prospectus, Inside the Phillies, PitcherList, and The Good Phight. He is also a comedy writer and occasionally tries his hand at mixing baseball and humor. Sometimes it goes well; sometimes his work is called “bad satire” and “a waste of time.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but Framber Valdez is having a historic season.

Earlier this year, Justin Choi wrote about Valdez and his historic groundball-to-fly ball ratio through the first six weeks of the season. Valdez has always been good at inducing groundballs and limiting fly balls, but his 10.00 GB/FB ratio over his first seven starts was on another level.

Unsurprisingly, Valdez himself was on another level, too. Through May 18, he posted a 2.93 ERA and 3.33 FIP in 40 innings pitched. His journey from middle-relief prospect to top-of-the-rotation starter was complete. Groundballs were always his super power, and fly balls had long been his kryptonite, so it made perfect sense he was thriving after increasing his GB/FB ratio. Since mid-May, however, his GB/FB ratio has slowly been coming back to Earth. It now sits at 4.20, which is still excellent to be sure, but not exactly sky-scraping. Yet Valdez is still having a historic season – just in a different way. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Raymond has fond memories of June 13, 2012. Then in his final year as a broadcaster for the Houston Astros, the now TV play-by-play voice of the Texas Rangers got to call a historic pitching performance — and it wasn’t even his biggest thrill of the day. Prior to the game, he was in the presence of a legend.

Raymond had an inkling that the season would be his last with the Astros. He was in the final year of his contract, and an ownership transition was resulting in numerous changes throughout the organization. With his future up in the air, Raymond decided that he was going to “hit all the high notes,” making sure to enjoy aspects of his job that can sometimes be taken for granted. That’s how he met Willie Mays.

“In San Francisco, Willie was always down in the clubhouse, just available to chat,” recalled Raymond, who graduated from Stanford University before becoming a broadcaster. “I’d never wanted to bother him all those years, but I decided to make it a point to talk to him, whether that was for five minutes, 10 minutes, or whatever. So I went to the ballpark early, hoping to ask him some questions and hear a few stories. For instance, he’d hit his 500th home run at the Astrodome, and they’d brought him a cake afterwards.”

The hoped for five-to-10 minutes ended up being far longer. Mays held court for hours, to the point where Raymond had to tell the iconic Hall of Famer that he needed to head upstairs, as the game was about to start. As he was getting up to leave, he added that the Astros would be returning to San Francisco right after the All-Star break, and maybe they could talk again. Mays responded by saying, “Well, you’ve got to come over to my house then.” Read the rest of this entry »

Back in April, 23 of our writers and contributors made predictions about the 2022 season. When guessing who would be the AL Rookie of the Year, nine different players were named, with Bobby Witt Jr. and Julio Rodríguez leading the pack. Not found among those nine names was the starting shortstop for the Astros, a rookie faced with the difficult task of replacing incumbent Carlos Correa, who had gone to the Twins. Jeremy Peña wasn’t pegged as a ROY frontrunner, but for much of the early season, he looked like a sudden superstar. However, he’s struggled offensively in recent months, raising some questions about whether the real Peña is the player with the .878 OPS through mid-May, the one with a .586 OPS since the All-Star Game, or somewhere in the middle.

Back in May, Witt, the preseason favorite, wasn’t even in the top 15; Rodríguez only put up a .544 OPS over April; and Adley Rutschman was days away from even debuting in the majors. While Peña wasn’t making Astros fans actually forget about Correa, he certainly did his best to alleviate any lingering worries about their former franchise building block heading to the AL Central. But since May 17, he has seen his control over the AL leaderboard disappear:

That’s not to say that Peña hasn’t continued to be a solid overall player, but his largest contributions in recent months have been with leather rather than wood. With his range measured at five runs above average at shortstop by Statcast’s RAA and a total of nine runs over all facets of defense by our estimate, he hasn’t disappointed defensively, which has enabled him to remain a legitimate starter even with his offense dropping to disappointing levels. But he’s a far more exciting player with his spring offense, so what went wrong there? Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe this isn’t charitable, but I picture Alex Bregman as being a lot like me. See, when I play a game – whether a sport or a board game – I’m always thinking about the most efficient way to win, what game actions are the most valuable, and how I can do those things more often. The best games don’t have clear best options at all times, but there’s almost always some strategy you can lean on to get ahead, and I greatly enjoy figuring that strategy out.

Bregman treats baseball like I treat Taverns of Tiefenthal, my favorite board game. He knows what the most valuable things to do in baseball are, and he does them more frequently than everyone else. If you look at his Statcast page, you’ll come away unimpressed. Hard hit rate? He’s in the 42nd percentile across the majors, below average. Think that hard hit rate is misleading? He’s average when it comes to maximum exit velocity (53rd percentile), barrel rate (50th), and even average exit velocity (59th). He’s well below average in sprint speed. It doesn’t sound like he should be an outstanding hitter, at least by the measurables.

Early in Bregman’s career, that would have been a laughable claim. He totaled 16.2 WAR on the back of a 162 wRC+ between 2018 and ’19, staking a claim as one of the best hitters in the game. But in the next two years, both injury-shortened, he fell back to earth. His .261/.353/.431 line was good for a 115 wRC+, a far cry from his earlier form. Was he a creation of the juiced ball? Sign stealing? Did pitchers figure him out? Read the rest of this entry »

Speculating about the playoffs in August always feels strange. The regular season isn’t over. It isn’t nearly over, either – the 45 or so games remaining on each team’s schedule will change how we think about them. The best two records in baseball belong to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros right now, but some team could go 35-10 and wrest that title away from them.

Still, today I’m going to speculate about the playoffs. Whether the Dodgers and Astros hold onto their top spots or not, they’re both playoff locks – our Playoff Odds give them both 100% odds of reaching the postseason. In the past week, they’ve also each gotten rotten injury news that will affect their playoff rosters. So suspend your inherent skepticism of articles in August that talk about October as we consider the playoff impact of losing Walker Buehler and Michael Brantley. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Verlander wasn’t quite at his best on Wednesday night, yielding three runs in six innings against the Rangers in Houston — his first time surrendering more than two runs since June 24. Even so, the 39-year-old righty continued an impressive comeback following nearly two full seasons lost to injuries — first a forearm strain and then Tommy John surgery. In fact, he leads the American League in both wins (15) and ERA (1.85), and while those don’t carry the same currency at FanGraphs as they do elsewhere, it’s not hard to imagine him adding a third Cy Young award to his trophy room if he keeps this up.

Verlander won the award for the first time in 2011, when he went 24-5 with a 2.40 ERA and 250 strikeouts in 251 innings; by leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and ERA, he also claimed the pitching triple crown and added the AL MVP award as well. Over the next seven seasons, he finished as the runner-up for the AL Cy Young three times (2012, ’16, and ’18) but also endured some ups and downs, including a 4.54-ERA season (2014), an injury-shortened one (2015), and a late-season trade to the Astros that helped him claim a World Series ring (2017), albeit on a team that was later sanctioned for its illegal electronic sign-stealing efforts.

After narrowly losing out to Blake Snell for the award in 2018, Verlander finally won another Cy Young in 2019, going 21-6 with a 2.58 ERA and an even 300 strikeouts; in the same game he reached that plateau, he also became the 18th pitcher to surpass the 3,000-strikeout milestone. It’s taken more than two years to follow that up, however. After a spring in which he suffered both lat and groin strains, Verlander underwent surgery to repair the latter shortly after Major League Baseball was forced to postpone Opening Day due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When he finally did take the mound roughly four months later for the Astros’ season opener, he suffered a forearm strain, and after experiencing pain during a simulated game while rehabbing, he was diagnosed with a torn UCL and underwent Tommy John surgery in late September, which cost him all of 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the day after the trade deadline, which always means one thing: baseball writers begrudgingly cleaning up their gross, sparkling-water-can-filled workspaces. Oh, wait, actually it means two things: that, and a flood of “who won the trading deadline” articles.

This year, I’m going to do something slightly different. I won’t claim that I’ve re-invented the wheel, but I’ve always thought that those winner/loser columns are too deterministic and don’t leave enough room for nuance. I thought about listing each team that made a trade as a winner, with a “maybe” appended to indicate that we don’t know what will happen in the future; if you really want to know who won and who lost, check back in October… or maybe in October of 2025. I thought about making each team a “loser (maybe)” for the same reason. In the end, I settled on some broad archetypes. I’ll throw a subjective grade on how much I like the move, and also endeavor to explain the risks around each team’s deadline. You can find all of our deadline coverage here. Let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves made their biggest headlines on Monday with the announcement of Austin Riley’s 10-year, $212 million extension, but they did make a pair of trades to shore up their roster in advance of Tuesday’s deadline. They fortified their rotation by acquiring righty Jake Odorizzi from the Astros, and added outfield depth by getting Robbie Grossman from the Tigers.

Both deals were single-player swaps. For the 32-year-old Odorizzi they sent 33-year-old lefty reliever Will Smith to the Astros, while for the 32-year-old Grossman they sent 20-year-old lefty prospect Kris Anglin to the Tigers.

After a season in which he was about league average in 23 starts and 104 innings for the Astros last year, Odorizzi has improved to a 3.75 ERA and 3.61 FIP in 12 starts this year, averaging exactly five innings per turn, and bouncing back from what initially looked like a season-ending ankle injury suffered while running towards first base against the Red Sox on May 16. At the time, there was concern that he had ruptured his Achilles or fractured his ankle, but he didn’t break anything, and the damage to his tendons and ligaments did not involve his Achilles and wasn’t nearly as serious as initially feared. He missed seven weeks, and since returning on July 4, he’s had rough starts against the Royals and A’s but also two seven-inning scoreless starts against the A’s (whom he’s faced in three of his five post-injury games) and Mariners, including a two-hit effort with a season-high eight strikeouts against Seattle on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »