Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Angels unexpectedly announced that longtime owner Arte Moreno had agreed to sell the organization to Stan Kroenke, the icositetra-billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL, the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, the Colorado Avalanche of the NHL, the Colorado Rapids of MLS, the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League, and Arsenal Football Club, both the men’s team of the English Premier League and the women’s team of the Super League. The deal is reportedly for $4 billion, a record price for the sale of a controlling stake in an MLB franchise, surpassing the $3.9 billion sale of the San Diego Padres to Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano earlier this summer.

Forbes estimates Kroenke’s net worth to be $24.3 billion, making him the new wealthiest MLB owner, ahead of Steve Cohen, who’s worth about $23 billion. Ben Clemens wrote about the sale on Wednesday, and I’d encourage you to check it out for everything that you need to know about the Angels under Moreno and the ever-increasing values of MLB franchises. That second part is what I want to stress, especially as it pertains to the seemingly inevitable lockout coming this offseason. Rob Manfred and the 30 team owners are going to push for a salary cap, and to support their case, many of them will both cite the need for competitive balance and claim that baseball is a bad business. When they do, think back on the two record-setting sales from this year and understand the real reason why management has shut down the sport. But let’s not get too caught up in the doom and gloom right now, because the upshot of the sale is the Angels’ future looks a whole lot more promising under Kroenke than it did under Moreno.

That’s the last we’ll talk about the business of baseball today. Instead, in this week’s mailbag, we’ll answer your questions about teams that finished the season below .500 with a positive run differential, the single-game feat most correlated with career success, the pitchers who had the longest careers while pitching their first and last games on the same field, and the ideal hot dog per game ratio. 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 »

It’s been a dismal and deflating season in Detroit. The Tigers, who entered the year as favorites to win the AL Central after signing both Framber Valdez and Justin Verlander in February, played middling baseball through the first five weeks of the season before hitting the skids in May, at one point losing 16 out of 18 games. Instead of loading up for the stretch run ahead of the August 3 trade deadline, they dealt away both Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize to other contenders. While the team has actually outscored opponents by 47 runs (610 to 563), the Tigers are currently 11 games below .500 at 64-75, and in danger of making some dubious history by falling short of their Pythagorean-projected win total by the largest margin of any Wild Card-era team.

Misery loves company, and the Tigers are not alone in undershooting their target. The Giants, who at the outset of the season looked to have a reasonable chance of claiming a Wild Card berth, are not only 24 games below .500 (58-82) but in danger of falling short of their BaseRuns-projected win total by the largest margin of any team since 2002.

If you’re not familiar with either of these concepts, a Pythagorean projection is one of the most enduring Bill James creations, introduced in his self-published 1980 Baseball Abstract. James showed that simply by knowing a team’s runs scored and runs allowed, one could estimate its winning percentage with a reasonable degree of accuracy via the formula Winning % = RS^2 /(RS^2 +RA^2). The use of the squares, reminiscent of the Pythagorean formula to calculate the length of a right triangle’s hypotenuse, is what gives the stat its name. Further refinements by James and other sabermetricians showed that using a slightly smaller exponent increased the accuracy of the estimate. The Pythagenpat formula, where the exponent itself is a function of the scoring environment via the formula X = ((RS + RA)/G)^0.287, is the one we use for our Projected Standings pages, which now have all major league seasons dating back to 1871 (damn those underachieving Rockford Forest Citys). Read the rest of this entry »

In a team sport, everyone involved — players, media, fans — has their own outlook on individual awards. Personally, I think they mean a lot. Yes, the player’s ultimate goal is to serve the team, but when individual effort is only tenuously related to team success, I think it’s worthwhile to recognize outstanding individual performances when they come.

But even I struggle to get too worked up about MLB’s Player of the Week awards. I get the press release in my inbox every week, but I usually check the headline, mark it read, and forget about it forever. As far as I know, there’s no cash prize or physical trophy involved; winning Player of the Week is more like getting all A’s on your report card than winning an Olympic medal. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Jacobs is emerging as a prospect to watch in the Detroit Tigers system. A third-round pick last year out of Arizona State University, the 22-year-old southpaw is currently on a five-game run at High-A West Michigan in which he has fanned 33 batters while allowing just 10 hits and two runs across 26 frames. Moreover, he has gone 15 scoreless over his last three starts.

His overall numbers are solid. On the season, the erstwhile Sun Devil has logged a 34.4% strikeout rate, a 3.50 ERA, and a 3.80 FIP over 87 1/3 innings, all but 16 2/3 of them with his current club. Jacobs made his professional debut with Low-A Lakeland in April, but earned a promotion by the end of the month.

He entered the year with a relatively low profile. When our 2026 Tigers Top Prospects list came out in late February, Jacobs ranked just 24th with a 40 FV. Fast forward six months and it’s hello helium. Recently asked for a scouting update, Eric Longenhagen called the Huntington Beach native an “arrow up guy,” adding that he now merits a 40+ FV.

How has Jacobs changed since signing with the Tabbies last summer? Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I took a two month hiatus from writing this column because we had a heavy summer of evaluating baseball, and as it turns out, it’s tough to both analyze baseball and watch it entirely out of a sense of whimsy. But now the tables have turned. There are no more studies to do on prospect valuation. The trade values have been tabulated. The deadline has passed. The playoffs are still a month away. There’s not much to do other than watch baseball and enjoy, whether it’s playoff races, dominant performances, exciting debuts, or just the beauty of a well-played game on a warm summer evening. So kick back, relax, and join me in thanking Zach Lowe of The Ringer for the article format that I’ve been riffing on for the past four years.

1. Rangy Infielders
During the peak of the infield shift, 5-3 double plays had a brief heyday. With three defenders on the right side of the infield against most lefty batters, the third baseman played a de facto shortstop for large portions of most games. When those lefties grounded out to short with runners on, third basemen somewhat frequently fielded the ball, stepped on second, and threw to first to complete the play. But with two infielders now required to be on each side of second base, it wouldn’t make any sense for a third baseman to get the ball and then sprint past the shortstop to tag the base and make the relay throw.

Or would it? 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 »

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 »

On Saturday, the Detroit Tigers pulled off a truly delightful 1-5-4 double play. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and a video even more, so I’ll save everyone a lot of work and show it to you.

If you’re reading this, and you’re old enough to have lived through the war between small ball and sabermetrics in the early part of this century, you’re probably delighted to see a sacrifice bunt go awry like this. I lived through college baseball in the early-to-mid-2010s — if there was a war over sabermetrics, college ball at this time was its Stalingrad — so that was definitely my first reaction as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Rainer is one of the game’s most promising prospects. Currently No. 25 on The Board and No. 3 in our Detroit Tigers rankings, the 21-year-old shortstop boasts elite bat speed — eye-opening exit velocities are part of his profile — as well as arm strength that Eric Longenhagen has described as “incredible.” Our lead prospect analyst’s preseason report elaborated that Rainer was “pumping mid-90s gas off the mound in high school.”

His pitching background is what I wanted to hear about when I sat down with Rainer last month. After beginning the campaign with a smattering of games at Low-A Lakeland, Rainer has put up a .267/.374/.455 slash line and a 118 wRC+ with the.High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. His left-handed stroke has produced a dozen home runs across 358 trips to the plate with Detroit’s Midwest League affiliate.

Just how good was the 11th-overall pick in the 2024 draft when he was toeing the rubber for North Hollywood’s Harvard-Westlake High School?

“I don’t really love talking about myself,” Rainer replied when posed that question. “That’s kind of how I was brought up when it comes to interviews, but now that I don’t pitch anymore, I will say that I enjoyed my time on the mound. It was fun. I threw pretty hard and was successful at it.”

Pressed for radar readings, the humble ex-hurler affirmed that he indeed sat mid-90s, adding that he would occasionally reach the upper 90s. Repertoire-wise, he was fastball/curveball/slider/changeup. As you’d expect, scouts for a multitude of MLB organizations were keeping close watch when he stood atop the bump. Read the rest of this entry »

The Detroit Tigers are one of the hottest teams in baseball. Since the calendar flipped to August, they’ve gone 7-3, scoring more than six runs per game in the process. In a muddled American League, that puts them right in the thick of the AL Central and Wild Card races. That, in turn, means they’re back in the hunt for a World Series ring. This burst of activity has them about as likely to make the playoffs (and win a ring) as they’ve been in the last few months, in fact; they’re back above 30% to reach October after dropping as low as 18% the day they traded Tarik Skubal.

That feels weird! Less than two weeks ago, the Tigers traded their best player, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, for three prospects. They followed that up by trading Casey Mize, who had briefly inherited the title of top Tigers pitcher. It was a classic deadline sale – not a thread-the-needle plan with some additions and some subtractions, but a declaration that the plan was to get ‘em next year, and the years after that.

Does this mean the Tigers shouldn’t have traded Skubal and Mize? I’m not here to opine on that (OK, fine I’ll opine at the end of the article, but you have to read it first). But they did make those trades, and they did go on that hot streak, so here we are. The Tigers can’t un-trade those guys. MLB doesn’t have a takebacks rule. But I can’t help but wonder how the Tigers would look if they hadn’t made any moves at the deadline, and so I decided to write about it.
Read the rest of this entry »