At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contending clubs. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds around 10%), I’ve also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the fourth full season of the universal DH, 0.6 WAR represents the median, with 10 teams below zero, 11 between zero and 1.0, and eight with 1.0 or more, with only four of those eight reaching 2.0. By comparison, at this time last year, half the teams in the majors were at 0.0 WAR or less. DHs as a group have hit .239/.322/.422 for a 108 wRC+ this season, the last of which matches 2024’s final figure.

It does appear that an increasing number of teams are investing more playing time in a single DH. From 2022 (the first full-length season with the universal DH) to ’24, the number of players reaching 450 plate appearances in the DH role increased from three to four to seven; this year, we’re on pace for 10. That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances.

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In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters. Yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing mediocre production to fester at the risk of smothering a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2007 book, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets and have adapted it at FanGraphs in an expanded format since 2018.

When it comes to defining replacement level play, we needn’t hew too closely to exactitude. Any team that’s gotten less than 0.6 WAR from a position to this point — prorating to 1.0 over a full season — is generally in the ballpark, though my final lists also incorporate our Depth Charts rest-of-season projections, which may nose them over the line. Sometimes, acceptable or even above-average defense (which may depend upon which metric one uses) coupled with total ineptitude on offense is enough to flag a team. Sometimes a club may be well ahead of replacement level but has lost a key contributor to injury; sometimes the reverse is true, but the team hasn’t yet climbed above that first-cut threshold. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography, I know replacement level when I see it. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into 2025, you might not have expected Alejandro Kirk and Ernie Clement to play central roles on a playoff contender. Neither player was an above-average hitter last season; in fact, each hit for a 93 wRC+ while playing regularly for a team that won just 74 games. Yet the pair rank first and second in position player WAR on the Blue Jays, thanks not only to improved offense but exceptional glovework, with Kirk battling the Giants’ Patrick Bailey for the top spot in two catching metrics, and Clement ranking among the best third basemen while also posting strong metrics in limited duty at the three other infield positions. The pair have not only helped the Blue Jays to a 47-38 record and the top AL Wild Card position, but also the top ranking in my annual midseason defensive breakdown.

Kirk and Clement aren’t Toronto’s only defensive stalwarts. Second baseman Andrés Giménez and center fielder Myles Straw, a pair of light-hitting glove whizzes acquired from the Guardians in separate trades this past winter, have been strong at their respective positions, with the latter helping to cover for the absences of Daulton Varsho. A Gold Glove winner last year, Varsho missed the first month of this season recovering from right rotator cuff surgery, and returned to the injured list on June 1 due to a strained left hamstring. Even in limited duty, Straw, Varsho, and Giménez — who missed about four weeks due to a quad strain, with Clement filling in at second for most of that time — have all rated as three to five runs above average according to Statcast’s Fielding Runs Value (FRV), and five to eight above average according to Defensive Runs Saved (DRS). Clement has totaled 12 DRS and 10 FRV at the four infield spots; in 359.2 innings at third, he’s second in the majors in both DRS (7) and FRV (5).

This is the third year in a row I’ve taken a midseason dip into the alphabet soup of defensive metrics, including Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), Statcast’s Fielding Run Value (FRV), and our own catcher framing metric (hereafter abbreviated as FRM, as it is on our stat pages). One longtime standby, Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR), has been retired, which required me to adjust my methodology. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Texas Rangers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Any fan, analyst, or baseball executive would be hard-pressed to say that the Rangers pitching staff has failed to do its job in 2025. The rotation has been especially solid, ranking first in baseball in ERA, seventh in FIP, and sixth in WAR. If the bullpen hasn’t been as dominant, they’ve also improved significantly compared to last season, already accumulating almost as many wins above replacement as they did in the entire 2024 season. And yet the Rangers, less than two years removed from soaking each other with champagne to celebrate a World Series championship, sit below .500. A losing season here would be the franchise’s eighth in the last nine years, its worst showing since the move from Washington to Texas. The bats have let the team down, ranking near the bottom of baseball, and what’s worse, the underperforming offense consists mainly of players who the Rangers wanted in their lineup. So is there hope for a turnaround, or will the Rangers need to find new solutions to their run-scoring woes?

First, let’s assess just how lousy the offense has been. Well, ranking 25th in the majors in runs scored is their sunniest number. The Rangers rank 28th in on-base percentage, 27th in slugging percentage, and 28th in wRC+ at 80. The latter number outpaces only the Pirates and Rockies, two teams you don’t especially want to model your ballclub after. While the team has played solid defense, the abundance of leather hasn’t come close to making up for the shortage of wood, leaving the Rangers’ position players 25th in the league in WAR. What little offense there has been has come in very short bursts:

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Mikey Romero has hit a few speed bumps since the Boston Red Sox drafted him 24th overall in 2022 out of California’s Orange Lutheran High School. A back injury limited the 21-year-old multi-position infielder to just 34 games in 2023, and he then didn’t return to game action until last May. He also missed time in August after suffering a concussion.

When healthy, it’s been mostly smooth sailing for the former first-rounder. [Boston took Roman Anthony 16 picks later the same year]. Romero’s last-season ledger included 16 home runs and a 125 wRC+ over 362 plate appearances between High-A Greenville and Double-A Portland.

He’s off to a strong start in the current campaign. Back at the higher of those levels, Romero is swinging to the tune of a 134 wRC+ in 154 trips to the plate. Fully half of his 34 hits have gone for extra bases. The San Diego native’s smooth left-handed stroke has produced 10 doubles, a pair of triples, and five home runs.

As the season was getting underway, I asked the promising youngster how he’s grown as a hitter since joining the professional ranks. Read the rest of this entry »

Way, way, way back in December 2023, the Rangers signed Tyler Mahle to a two-year contract. Absolutely nobody cared at the time, mostly because the news dropped the same day as Shohei Ohtani’s first press conference with the Dodgers. But also because Mahle, then recovering from Tommy John surgery, was expected to play a trivial part, at best, in the 2024 season.

Mahle had been a bit of a hipster favorite as an upper-mid-rotation starter in Cincinnati and then briefly in Minnesota — far from a household name, but from 2020 to 2022, he’d been quite good, and in high volume. Over those three seasons, he’d averaged 27 starts, 146 innings, and 3.0 WAR per 162 team games, with an ERA- of 90. For two years and $22 million, the Rangers were conceding that he’d rehab on their dime for most of 2024. But he would’ve been available for the 2024 playoffs if they’d made it that far, and if everything worked according to plan, they’d have a workhorse no. 3 starter under contract for 2025 at a fraction of what that kind of production usually goes for.

At least in 2025, everything has been working according to plan. Mahle has made 11 starts so far this season, with the past 10 lasting at least 80 pitches and five innings. Until his most recent outing, he hadn’t allowed more than two runs in any start. Even then, he allowed only three runs in his season-worst outlier. His 1.80 ERA is fifth best among all qualified starters. Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Schwellenbach had just two big-league games under his belt when he was featured here at FanGraphs early last June. The most recent of them had come a few days earlier at Fenway Park, where he’d allowed six runs and failed to get out of the fifth inning. Two starts into his career, the Atlanta Braves right-hander was 0-2 with an 8.38 ERA.

Those initial speed bumps quickly became a thing of the past. Schwellenbach allowed three runs over his next two outings, and by season’s end he had made 21 appearances and logged a 3.35 ERA and a 3.29 FIP. Counting this years’s 10 starts, the 24-year-old Saginaw, Michigan native has a 3.41 ERA and a 3.41 FIP over 185 innings. Moreover, he has a 23.5% strikeout rate and just a 4.7% walk rate. Relentlessly attacking the zone with a six-pitch mix, Schwellenbach has firmly established himself as a cog in Atlanta’s rotation.

On the eve of his returning to the mound in Boston last Sunday, I asked the 2021 second-round pick out of the University of Nebraska what has changed in the 11-plus months since we first spoke.

“Honestly, when we talked last year I was just throwing the ball to the catcher,” claimed Schwellenbach, who was a shortstop in his first two collegiate seasons and then a shortstop/closer as a junior. “It was really only my second year as just a pitcher, so I was very young-minded with how I pitched. Now that I’ve got 30 or so starts, I have an idea of what I’m trying to do out there. Being around guys like Max Fried, Charlie Morton, and Chris Sale last year was obviously big, too. I learned a lot from them, as well as from [pitching coach] Rick Kranitz.”

Morton, who is now with the Baltimore Orioles, helped him improve the quality of his curveball. Their mid-season conversation was the genesis of a more efficient grip. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I’ll keep the introduction short today, because I’m getting ready to travel to St. Louis for a game with my dad and uncle. There’s a Masyn Winn bobblehead ticketed for my memorabilia shelf – and a pile of enjoyable plays to recap before I can go get it. So, of course, thank you to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose NBA columns of likes and dislikes inspired this one, and let’s get started.

1. The Weekend of Wilmer
I have a soft spot for Wilmer Flores through a sheer fluke of geography. I lived in New York during his Mets tenure, and I moved to San Francisco around the same time he did. His walk-up music has been the same for the last decade: the Friends theme song. It’s a fan favorite and even comes with a good story. He’s the quintessential role player, a guy that most teams would love to have but no team needs to have. He’s been pitching in across the diamond, albeit in decreasingly difficult defensive roles, that whole time. With the exception of a down 2024, he’s been consistently valuable, but he’s never been a star – the closest thing I know to a Wilmer Flores highlight is his charming sadness when he thought he was getting traded.

For just one weekend, though, that all changed. Flores has been improbably dueling with Aaron Judge for the major league RBI lead throughout the first eight weeks of the season. RBI might not be a great predictive stat, and it might not be a great stat overall, but it definitely matters to players. Fancier versions of measuring contextual offense – WPA, RE24, and so on – all think that Flores has been a top 10 run producer this year, too. He’d fallen behind Judge by just a hair in those races – and probably has no chance at keeping up all season. I mean, have you seen Aaron Judge? But none of that mattered when the Giants played the A’s last weekend.
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If motor preferences were the final word on pitcher performance, Nathan Eovaldi would be sitting on a beach somewhere.

Eovaldi throws from a low slot, releasing his pitches from an average arm angle of 30 degrees. (Zero degrees is fully sidearm; 90 degrees is straight over the top.) Many low-slot pitchers have a supination bias. There are downsides to being a supinator — their preference for cutting the baseball tends to produce crummy four-seam fastballs — but they usually have no trouble throwing hard breaking balls; they can also more easily harness seam-shifted wake to throw sinkers, sweepers, or kick-changes. Low-slot supinators, like Seth Lugo, can basically throw every pitch in the book. High-slot pronators like Ryan Pepiot or Lucas Giolito don’t have that sort of range, but make up for it with excellent changeups and high-carry fastballs.

Eovaldi is, tragically, a low-slot pronator. Not many low-slot pronators make it to the big leagues. The pronation bias blunts their ability to throw hard glove-side breakers, and the low arm angle obviates the pronator’s nominal advantage, killing the carry on their fastball. As Tyler Zombro of Tread Athletics (now a special assistant of pitching for the Cubs) said in his primer video on motor preferences, “I know in stuff models and just off of Trackman alone, this arsenal with this slot is not that attractive.” Read the rest of this entry »