The Phillies won their ninth straight game on Sunday. Cristopher Sánchez started and Kyle Schwarber hit a game-winning home run.
There are home runs and then there are home runs, and even by Schwarber’s standards, this one was a tank: straight out to dead center, over the batter’s eye. Read the rest of this entry »
The hottest pitching prospect in baseball joined the coldest pitching staff in baseball over the weekend.
Mariners left-hander Kade Anderson was solid in his major league debut on Saturday. The Cubs weren’t the softest landing, entering the day as the best lineup in the majors with a 111 wRC+. But the top prospect kept the Chicago batters off balance for five innings, striking out five with minimal resistance. Manager Dan Wilson left Anderson in to face the top of the order for a third time to begin the sixth — a controversial decision, but perhaps a necessary one given Seattle’s pitching implosion over the last two months — and he was quickly slugged out of the game. It was a sour note to end an otherwise strong debut, although dogpiling with his new teammates following a walk-off home run by Randy Arozarena certainly improved the mood.
The Mariners took Anderson third overall out of LSU last year. He got his first taste of pro ball this spring and blew through the competition in Double-A, posting a 1.06 ERA, a 1.78 FIP, a 40.5% strikeout rate, and a 3.9% walk rate over 93 1/3 innings. He made it as high as third overall on our Top 100 Prospects list, definitively the best pitching prospect in baseball at the time of his debut. He might have been called up sooner, but, well, I’ll get to Seattle’s pitching mess soon enough. Read the rest of this entry »
Jonah Cox had never set foot in Wrigley Field prior to June 5th of this season. It turned out to be a day he won’t soon forget. Six games into his MLB career, the 25-year-old San Francisco Giants outfielder went 3-for-3 and left the yard for the first time at baseball’s highest level. In front of an announced crowd of 39,060, the visitors ran roughshod over the Chicago Cubs by a count of 18-3.
His initial impression of the Friendly Confines?
“It’s one of those stadiums you see in movies, like Rookie of the Year, so when you walk out there it’s like ‘Oh my gosh,’” the Colorado native told me earlier this week. “Knowing the history and the fanbase, it’s just a really cool place to play.”
“Oh man, the ball was flying,” Cox went on to say of the contest, which featured eight home runs, seven of them by the Giants, “It was a ton of fun watching guys swing and have so much success. Then I got the call to come in and face Hoby Milner, the lefty [in the sixth inning with the Giants leading 9-0]. I was excited to get in there, and one thing led to another.”
Did it ever. The rookie recorded his second hit of the game — and just his third in the majors — in that same inning, which ended with the Giants on top 16-0. Then came the top of the ninth. With Cubs catcher Carson Kelly toeing the rubber, Cox cleared the ivy. Read the rest of this entry »
As you all probably know, at the start of every season, the FanGraphs staff puts together our bold predictions for the coming year. Each is, to varying degrees, plausible but unlikely, which is what makes it such a fun exercise. Anyway, entering the 2025 season, my bold prediction was: Corbin Carroll will become the fifth-ever 20/20/20/20 player — 20 doubles, 20 triples, 20 home runs, and 20 stolen bases in a single season — joining Frank Schulte in 1911, Willie Mays in 1957, and Curtis Granderson and Jimmy Rollins, who both did it in 2007. Carroll ultimately fell just three triples short of the threshold, while tallying 32 doubles, 31 homers, and 32 steals.
I decided not to run it back this year, figuring that wouldn’t be as fun, though I am very much still rooting for it to happen. The 20/20/20/20 Club is one of the most exclusive baseball has to offer. Pulling it off requires a precise combination of power, speed and instincts, and it has to happen at the exact right moment in a player’s career. As I wrote in my bold prediction: “A player needs to have enough pop to hit 20 homers, but not so much that the majority of his extra-base hits land in the seats. He also needs the speed to steal bases and stretch singles into doubles and doubles into triples. His instincts must be sharp, so he can know when to attempt the extra base without running into outs.”
Last Saturday, when I saw that Carroll had doubled and tripled in a 10-3 Diamondbacks win over the Braves, I pulled up his player page to check on his progress. He was up to 26 doubles, 15 triples, 18 homers, and 16 steals. He stole a base the next day, and after going without an extra-base hit in Arizona’s three-game series against the Red Sox, Carroll entered play Friday at 26 doubles, 15 triples, 18 homers, and 17 steals with 34 games left to play. This prompted my own question for this week’s mailbag, which I will get to momentarily. We’ll also answer your questions on the worst player to ever hit three home runs in a game, the biggest drop-off for a player in the season after finishing second in the MVP voting, and teams missing the playoffs despite leading the league in run differential. 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 »
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For the New York Mets, the 2026 season has been an almost unmitigated disaster. Widely expected to compete for the NL East crown, the Mets got off to a brief hot start. And by brief, I mean brief, as the season’s high point was knocking out Paul Skenes in the first inning on Opening Day against the Pirates. From there, the season unraveled like the finances of Mike Campbell from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Gradually and then suddenly.
The Mets ambled around the .500 mark for another week or so, until a 12-game losing streak knocked them firmly into the league basement, where they have mostly stayed. By the time the calendar flipped to August, they had long come to terms with the idea that they would be sellers at the deadline. Recently, though, the Mets have gone on a tear, winning 11 of their 15 games since their deadline fire sale, giving some fans an excuse to dream on a miracle wild card run. That almost recently won’t happen, but their abysmal season doesn’t have to signify the start of a long rebuild. In fact, New York teams with massive payrolls aren’t generally extended much rope, with the hope being that the club will find its way back to contention quickly. Can the Mets do that in 2027? Read the rest of this entry »
If the 2026 regular season finished today, not only would a sub-.500 team qualify for the playoffs, but Shohei Ohtani’s run of three straight Most Valuable Player awards — the last two in the National League, since signing with the Dodgers — would probably end. Pete Crow-Armstrong has been absolutely on fire since late May, as substantial adjustments to his mechanics and approach have helped his offense catch up to his already-elite defense. The 24-year-old center fielder has overtaken Ohtani on the WAR leaderboard at a time when the two-way superstar has been shut down from pitching, and this week, he put himself in the history books in a few different ways.
On Monday night at Wrigley Field, Crow-Armstrong put on a particularly entertaining show against the White Sox, going 4-for-5 with a pair of home runs, a stolen base, two runs scored, and three runs batted in. Batting leadoff for the Cubs, he began the home half of the first inning by homering on Luis Castillo’s first pitch of the evening, a four-seamer on the inner edge of the plate. He singled off Castillo in the second, and after taking strike three looking on a sinker in the fourth, he drew a walk against reliever Tyler Schweitzer in the sixth, doubled off Trevor Richards in the eighth, then capped his night with a walk-off two-run homer off a hanging slider from Hagen Smith in the 10th. Read the rest of this entry »
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 »
Noah Schultz remains a work in progress. Fifteen outings and 65 1/3 innings into his major league career, the recently-turned-23-year-old southpaw has a 3-9 record to go with a 6.06 ERA and a 4.86 FIP since debuting in April. Ranked second in the Chicago White Sox system coming into the season, Schultz is currently doing more fine-tuning in Triple-A, having been sent down to Charlotte earlier this month.
Two days before his August 8 demotion, I caught up to the 6-foot-10, high-ceiling hurler to ask how much he has learned about pitching since being drafted 26th overall in 2022 out of an Oswego, Illinois high school.
“A ton,” Schultz replied. “I didn’t know anything when I signed. I didn’t know anything about metrics. I knew that spin rate was good — I knew that I spun the ball well — but that was about it. Velo and spin rate. So, I’ve definitely picked up a ton over the past few years.”
Enough that he would now consider himself a data nerd? Read the rest of this entry »
CJ Abrams’ ambitions as a fielder have fallen short, but the future remains bright for the Nationals star.
Washington over the weekend announced Abrams will move from shortstop to second base. That’s not a surprise. Abrams has been terrible at shortstop for his career, ranking as one of the worst fielders ever recorded by Baseball Savant’s fancy player-tracking technology. What is a surprise, however, is that a minor-career update for Abrams is newsworthy enough to justify an article, a testament to his tremendous breakout at the plate in 2026.
Abrams this year has posted -17 Outs Above Average at shortstop, which is the worst mark in the majors at any position. This isn’t an outlier for him. Since his debut in 2022, Abrams has played almost exclusively shortstop, putting up OAA marks (chronologically) of -8, -9, -18, and -11 before the -17 mark so far in 2026. His career -64 OAA makes him the sixth-worst fielder — at any position — ever recorded by the system, which dates back to 2016. Read the rest of this entry »
