Controversy surrounding José Caballero’s pre-pitch routine struck twice in the Bronx this week, with the first time prompting the benches to clear and the second causing unnecessary confusion. In the eighth inning of the Yankees’ 8-5 win over the Pirates on Monday night, Caballero did what he usually does — he dug into the batter’s box and didn’t look up at the pitcher until there were eight seconds left on the pitch timer. The idea is to disrupt the pitcher’s rhythm. Pittsburgh reliever Dennis Santana took exception to Caballero’s tactic — which, again, he has done many, many times for the last four seasons — and yelled at him after getting him to ground into a double play. The benches emptied, and the Pirates complained to MLB about it.
Turns out, the griping worked. After the game, the league told the umpires to more strictly enforce the rules requiring batters to engage with the pitcher with no fewer than eight seconds left on the clock. Instead of warning the batter, and then calling an automatic strike for a repeat violation, the umpires were directed to assess a strike to Caballero for attempting to deceive the pitcher, no matter how much time was left on the pitch timer. Both Caballero and the Yankees claim the league did not notify them about the change. As crew chief Adrian Johnson told a pool reporter after, “He’s been warned all season. We were instructed not to warn him. We were instructed to violate him. That’s what it is. It’s a violation.” Along with Johnson’s poor phrasing, the sudden change in enforcement is quite jarring and, in my opinion, inappropriate. If what the Yankees said is true — that the league didn’t tell them about the change — then I think this is an overstep by MLB to single out a player. Caballero accused the umpires and the league of “picking on” him. But even if MLB did give the Yankees and Caballero the heads up, I think the escalated enforcement is an incorrect interpretation of the rule. I love that Caballero uses the pitch clock to his advantage; pitchers can hold the ball and run down the clock to zero, so why shouldn’t batters be allowed to wait their full allotted time before engaging with the pitcher? Moreover, I also don’t know how Caballero is deceiving the pitcher by doing something he does so frequently. He’s certainly trying to annoy the opposing pitcher, but that’s not deception — that’s good gamesmanship.
Anyway, that’s the last you’ll read about Caballero in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about Esmerlyn Valdez’s heater, Gunnar Henderson’s woes against fastballs, how to fix the Angels, and whether anyone will break Jesse Orosco’s record for games pitched. 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 »
They might still play in a minor league ballpark, but things were looking up for the Sacramento-ish Athletics coming into the 2026 season. The franchise hadn’t had a winning record (and typically hasn’t even been close) since 2021, with their last stretch of playoff relevance ending after the COVID-shortened 2020 season. The 2025 A’s only went 76-86, but an offensive core of Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, Brent Rooker, Tyler Soderstrom, and Jacob Wilson seemed to give the club a good chance to score runs this year. The A’s entered the season with 21.4% playoff odds, their best in some time.
The team’s most plausible breakout scenario involved leaning on a good offense while cobbling together just enough pitching to keep from being on the short end of a bunch of slugfests. The A’s were even confident enough to be on the other side of a salary dump for once, picking up Jeff McNeil over the winter. Unfortunately, things haven’t gone exactly to plan. The A’s are 43-59 entering play on Friday. The offense has been middling, and though they’ve gotten a few promising pitching performances from J.T. Ginn, Hogan Harris, and Gage Jump, the staff has more holes than a wheel of Emmentaler after a run-in with a shotgun. Read the rest of this entry »
Fifty-one weeks ago, the San Diego Padres traded a king’s ransom in prospects to the Athletics in exchange for depth starter JP Sears and hard-throwing relief ace Mason Miller.
Ordinarily, I would’ve abhorred such a move. The top prospect who went the other way, Leo De Vries, came in at no. 6 overall in the Preseason Top 100 Prospects list, and in my mind there’s no more overrated commodity in baseball than team control for a reliever. What the Phillies gave up for two and a half years of Jhoan Duran, immense a haul as it seemed at the time, was a fraction of what four and a half years of Miller cost.
As we approach August, now is a good time to take a fresh look at the farm systems of some of the clubs we expect to be buyers at the trade deadline. These teams are both contending for a playoff berth and in clear need of a significant upgrade, the kind that will likely require parting with a top farmhand or two. We’ll begin today with the Atlanta Braves. In tandem with an evaluation of the team’s needs and deadline posture, we’ve updated Atlanta’s Top Prospect list to account for the graduations of Didier Fuentes and JR Ritchie, incorporate the new draftees, and reflect a number of promising developments on the farm. If you were solely to evaluate a farm system by its performance relative to expectations, the Braves have a case for the top spot in the league, and that newfound depth looms as a key factor in the club’s playoff push.
The Situation
For a while, the Braves seemed poised to boat race the NL East. The club went 40-20 over the first two months of the season and built a 10-game lead over the Phillies. The Mets, also projected to be strong contenders in the division, languished even less threateningly in dead last. 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 will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 21
So Jose Siri made the coolest play I’ve seen in a while. He’s on the Angels now, a fact I had missed entirely, even though I now realize I saw him pinch-running against the A’s just two nights ago. When you think about Jose Siri, you think of great center field defense (and one million strikeouts), but that great center field defense usually comes in the form of great jumps and fantastic athletic catches. Tonight, however, he racked up an out with a combination of savvy and a perfect, powerful throw. A’s right fielder Carlos Cortes hit a routine single back up the middle. There was nothing notable about that whatsoever, but the Angels must have a scouting report that says Cortes likes to take aggressive turns when he singles. Whoever wrote it deserves a raise.
Siri played the ball normally right up until the moment when he didn’t. He intercepted it at a slow jog. It looked like he wasn’t taking the threat of Cortes going for a double seriously, but what he was actually doing was baiting Cortes, while also allowing the slow route to let him field the ball with his momentum still pushing him to his left, toward first base. That way, when he came up firing behind Cortes, he was able to got everything he had behind the throw. First baseman Nolan Schanuel was clearly in on it too. He lurked in foul territory, out of view of both Cortes and the first base coach so as to avoid arousing any suspicion, then popped back onto the field in time to catch the throw and apply the tag.
Pete Alonso is known as a slugger, and for good reason. Now in his eighth major league season — and first with the Baltimore Orioles — the 31-year-old first baseman has 285 home runs and a .511 slugging percentage to go with a 132 wRC+ over 1,111 career games. His right-handed stroke produced 53 round-trippers in 2019, and he also boasts single-season totals of 45, 40, 38, and 37. Only in the truncated COVID campaign has he finished with fewer than 30.
It would be unfair to pigeon-hole the University of Florida product, and erstwhile New York Met, as simply a slugger, though. That’s especially true when it comes to Alonso’s approach at the plate, as well as his overall understanding of the craft. While the term “student of hitting” is arguably overused, it fits Baltimore’s top basher to a T.
In the latest installment of our Talks Hitting series — now 125 deep — Alonso addresses his self identity, the subtle adjustments he’s made over the years, and the studious manner in which he attacks pitchers. Our conversation took place at Fenway Park over the weekend.
———
David Laurila: How would you define yourself as a hitter?
Pete Alonso: “I’d like to consider myself a line drive hitter that has strength, puts up really good professional at-bats, and can spoil pitches. I can kind of set traps. Ultimately, I’m a line drive hitter with strength.”
Laurila: You’re generally viewed as a power hitter. Do you like that label?
Alonso: “I love the label. Power is based on results. If you hit a ton of home runs and a ton of doubles, consistently, you’re a power hitter. It doesn’t matter what your physical stature looks like. If you get the power results, then you’re a power hitter.
“Honestly, I’m just trying to hit a hard line drive. That’s really all it is. Hit a hard drive, and not necessarily out in front. I’m better at just meeting the ball where it’s pitched and putting a swing on that. I’m not trying to produce power. I’m just trying to produce pure contact. I think chasing and producing pure contact is the best thing anyone can do. All good things happen on the sweet spot of the bat.”
Four weeks ago, the 2026 Red Sox appeared to be dead and buried. At 32-46, the team not only owned the AL’s worst record, but also the franchise’s worst record through 78 games since 1966 (28-50). Ace Garrett Crochet hadn’t pitched since April 25 due to shoulder problems; that appearance proved to be manager Alex Cora’s final game at the helm, as he and five coaches were fired after a 10-17 start. Roman Anthony had been out since May 4 due to multiple hand injuries as well. Things looked bleak, but since then, the Red Sox have gone on a major league-best 20-3 run that has carried them into the third AL Wild Card spot. On Wednesday, in the opener of a doubleheader against the Orioles at Fenway Park, they won their 15th consecutive game, tying a franchise record set in 1946, though their streak came to an end when they lost the nightcap.
Remarkably, the Red Sox have pulled off this streak despite missing not only Crochet and Anthony, but also Trevor Story and Ranger Suarez; that’s four of their seven highest-paid players in terms of average annual value, and four of their top nine in terms of preseason projected WAR. Among those helping to pick up the slack have been several rookies and a couple of unheralded utilitymen, with interim manager Chad Tracy leading the way. It’s been an unlikely run even for a team projected to have a 60.8% chance of making the playoffs at the outset of the season.
Cole Sulser has a future as a pitching coach — or coordinator — if he chooses to go that route. A graduate of Dartmouth College with a degree in Engineering Sciences, the 36-year-old right-hander has not only toed the rubber for five major league teams, but also his current club is the ever-progressive Tampa Bay Rays. As much as any hurler in the game, Sulser is well-versed in his craft.
His pitching education predates his July 2024 arrival in St. Petersburg. Ditto his providing insights here at FanGraphs. Then a Baltimore Oriole, Sulser shared thoughts on changeup development, and later on pitch design, in pieces that ran in August 2021. In want of further perspectives from the analytically savvy hurler, I caught up with him when the Rays visited Fenway Park this past weekend.
———
David Laurila: How much has pitch design grown since we spoke five years ago?”
Cole Sulser: “I think it has grown a ton. Our understanding is a lot more comprehensive than it was five years ago. Certain teams were maybe ahead of it more than others, but it was definitely a little more surface level. We were looking at some of the more generic aspects in terms of overall spin rate, and maybe just a little bit of efficiency. Now it seems like teams have gotten a lot more in depth in terms of the gyro degree, what your body naturally does, and which pitches may complement that. Instead of searching for specific pitches, they are more looking at what you do naturally, and try to complement that with pitches that would come easier to you.”
There’s still a chance Tarik Skubal pitches for the Detroit Tigers in the postseason this year.
Trading Skubal before the 2026 deadline makes sense for the Tigers. I think that’s pretty well established. Detroit has a losing record, less than one-in-three odds to make the playoffs per our odds, and one of the best players in the league on an expiring deal. This is the ideal trade deadline scenario.
But things have become more muddled in recent weeks. The Tigers are hot, having gone 25-16 since June 1. They finally look like the team we projected to win the AL Central before the season began. Still, they’d need to go 9-2 to even reach the deadline with a .500 record, underscoring the depth of the hole they dug early in the year. With less than two weeks before this crucial decision point, the Tigers have stumbled upon a universal truth: Being alive is complicated.
The Tigers’ season started well enough. They snuck out of April with an even 16-16 record and a positive run differential. They even began May by taking two of three from the Rangers. But on May 4, Skubal landed on the IL with loose bodies in his elbow, the latest in a string of injuries to the rotation. They lost that night and began a brutal 4-21 stretch that saw them sink to the worst record in baseball by the end of the month.
It wasn’t really the absence of Skubal that was the issue, as Jay Jaffe wrote at the time. In May, their batters posted a league-worst 69 wRC+ — nobody hit fewer homers, and only the Angels struck out more. When the offense did manage a lead, it was quickly given up by a shallow bullpen, which turned in 24 meltdowns in May. There aren’t many enjoyable brands of losing baseball, but slogging through a 1-0 game only to implode at the end is among the most frustrating. Attention understandably turned to Skubal’s return, and his seemingly inevitable departure at the deadline.
Then the calendar flipped to June. The Tigers began the month with a sweep of the first-place Rays, scoring 25 runs on 10 homers in three games, and they haven’t cooled since. Their 109 wRC+ in the last 41 games is top 10 in baseball, and their 72 homers are the most of any team. The lineup now has one of the best trios in the majors. Dillon Dingler (4.6) and Kevin McGonigle (4.0) each rank in the top 10 by WAR, and Riley Greene (2.8) ranks in the top 30. Colt Keith is on a hot streak, smacking eight homers since June 1 after going the first two months of the season without hitting any. The Tigers also just got Gleyber Torres and his 127 wRC+ back from an oblique injury on Monday. It’s suddenly a good, competitive lineup.
The bullpen has also been better of late. Their 3.19 ERA since June 1 is fifth in the majors. It’s a shallow group, and the end of games can still feel a bit dicey while closer Kenley Jansen runs a walk rate (14.7%) nearly double his career mark (7.9%). But the offense finally scoring a few runs has helped alleviate some of the pressure. In May, the Tigers bullpen faced the sixth-highest Leverage Index when entering games; since June 1, they’ve faced the lowest of any team. Again, it’s not a great bullpen, and this is likely the area the Tigers will want to address at the deadline assuming they add. But they’re asking less of them these days.
A competitive lineup and bullpen is all the Tigers should need with their rotation, which has allowed the fewest runs in the majors over this hot stretch. But that’s where the narrative of this article and the Tigers’ season recently became more complicated. Casey Mize pitched on Sunday, looking to continue his breakout season (his 2.79 ERA and 2.62 FIP would each be career bests), but he left the game early with the same groin tightness that’s landed him on the IL twice this year; he’s now day-to-day. Jack Flaherty pitched on Monday, hoping to build on a month-long hot streak (a 2.67 ERA and 3.25 FIP in seven starts since the beginning of June); he pitched poorly and was placed on the injured list with right flexor inflammation after the game. On Tuesday, Framber Valdez couldn’t make it out of the first inning in what ended up being an 11-2 blowout loss to the Cubs; he’s not known to be hurt, but he’s having the worst full season of his career, with a 4.57 ERA and 4.16 FIP in 20 starts.
Still, this has been one of the best rotations in the majors all season, even as they’ve dealt with injuries and inconsistency. They could still be that going forward… assuming Skubal remains their ace. He’s been great. He had solid numbers in seven starts before the IL stint (2.70 ERA and 2.11 FIP), he’s had solid numbers in seven starts after the IL stint (2.97 ERA and 3.66 FIP), and I assume he’ll have solid numbers the rest of the year, regardless of who he’s pitching for. He has been a little homer-prone, allowing 1.09 per nine innings, compared to 0.71 between 2022 and 2025. But his stuff and command metrics look the same as ever, and he hasn’t given up more hard contact or barrels overall. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s a sample-size blip, though it’ll certainly be something teams assess ahead of the deadline.
Again, while Skubal’s absence wasn’t the Tigers’ main issue in May, we can see they’ve largely played like a playoff-bound team the days he’s been on the active roster:
We can also see the Tigers have maybe been a bit unlucky to this point. They are six games under their pythagorean record — the largest discrepancy in the majors this year. That’s driven in part by a 10-17 record in one-run games. In games decided by more than one run, they’re an even 37-37 with a +31 run differential; they’re 20-12 with a +62 run differential since June 1. And so the Tigers seem to be better than their record would indicate, and they are indeed gaining ground. But at 6 1/2 back of the Guardians and White Sox in the Central, and five back of the Red Sox for the third Wild Card, they’re running out of time to make this a legitimate playoff push.
The Tigers must weigh what that long-shot postseason push is worth. They have a young, team-controlled core that could be competitive for years to come. Trading Skubal could obviously help add to their future ambitions. They also don’t technically need Skubal to get to the 2026 postseason. They’d still have an above-average rotation without him (depending on the health of Mize and Flaherty), and some of the players they’d get back in a trade could potentially help them this year. Plus, even if they do get to October with Skubal, it doesn’t guarantee they’ll advance — the Tigers lost both games he pitched in last year’s ALDS. Holding on to such a potentially valuable trade chip only to narrowly miss the postseason or suffer an early exit could generate some hard feelings and hot seats.
Still, this is a legitimate chance for the Tigers. This is the bird in the hand. It’s a fairly important bird, too. Skubal probably doesn’t have the longevity in Detroit to be considered the “best” pitcher in franchise history, but he’s the rare, era-defining player — one still largely in the prime of his career. This is the type of chance a front office typically builds toward, not away from. A late-season comeback and a deep playoff run on the shoulders of a franchise icon has to be worth something beyond long-term efficiencies in team building. And the Tigers will likely extend Skubal a qualifying offer this offseason, meaning they’d at least receive an extra draft pick should he sign elsewhere (assuming the system remains the same under the new CBA, of course). Sure, their midseason stumble raises questions about the team’s potential in 2026, but it should also raise questions about its potential in 2027 and 2028 and 2029. Nothing is guaranteed in baseball, especially when a player like Skubal walks out the door.
Last month, Ben Clemens declared 2026 to be The Year of the Bunt. “Bunts are making a comeback,” he wrote, and then he backed that contention up with numbers and graphs and such, because while the FanGraphs style guide doesn’t have a hard target for words per article, we’re generally expected to use more than five. Ben was right, of course. That’s what the graphs and the words were for. Bunts have gone from 0.7% of plate appearances in 2025 to 0.9% in 2026. We’re talking about very small numbers here, but that’s still a year-over-year increase of nearly 23%.
Not only are teams bunting more often, but they’re also bunting in optimal situations and laying them down more successfully. This year’s bunts have a .533 batting average, compared to .468 last year. Unsuccessful bunts, which result in neither a hit nor a sacrifice, are down from 22% to 19%. According to Baseball Savant’s Run Values, last year’s bunts were worth 13 runs. This season’s bunts are already at 50 runs, and we’ve still got a couple months left! Over the winter, the whole league seems to have finally figured how and when to bunt. But not the Detroit Tigers.
The Tigers have laid down eight bunts this year. Eight. That works out to just under one bunt every 12.5 games. In this article, I will show you all eight of them. It will not take long. The Tigers have more triples than bunts. The Rays have bunted 10 times more than the Tigers. Every team except the Phillies has bunted at least twice as often as the Tigers. Twenty different individual players have bunted more than the Tigers. The Tigers recognize The Year of the Bunt as a fad, and they want no part of such ephemeral frivolities. They didn’t attempt to bunt for the first time until May 4, their 36th game of the season. It, uh, did not go well.
