FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: July 18, 2026
I’ve been thinking a lot about the baseball calendar in recent days, specifically how we use it to both mark the passage of time and look ahead to the possibility of what’s yet to come. As fans, we slice up the season to make it easier for us to discuss noteworthy performances, evaluate trends, and justify our irrational faith that our team just might turn things around. As analysts, we know that we shouldn’t draw grand conclusions from these individual slivers — the sample sizes are just too small — but we also recognize the benefits of using these otherwise arbitrary segments to understand the season as it unfolds.
I mention all of this because this weekend is start of the second half of the season. Of course, we all know that the All-Star break hasn’t been the season’s true midpoint for some time now, as Opening Day is scheduled earlier in the year than it used to be while the All-Star Game continues to be played on the second Tuesday of July. Even so, there are three reasons that I continue to find value in splitting up the season in mid-July. First, pausing the regular season for a few days provides a natural demarcation point. Second, with playoff field now expanded to 12 teams, the postseason lasts longer than ever before. Because the team that wins the World Series could play up to 22 additional games, the All-Star break ends up being much closer to the halfway point on the journey from Opening Day to the decisive game of the Fall Classic. Finally, the three-week stretch after the All-Star Game is a frenetic rush to the trade deadline that then rolls right into the Dog Days of August and the strenuous sprint of September. The games after the All-Star break are much more demanding than the ones before it, thus making the few days of respite in July feel like a more representative dividing line than Game 81 in late June.
Anyway, in this first mailbag of the second half, we’re answering your questions on what it would be like if MLB had a loan mechanism like professional soccer, Kyle Karros’ breakout, the longest time a team has spent within a half-game of .500, and what Anthony Rendon’s career might have been. 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.
Matt is the associate editor of FanGraphs. Previously, he was the baseball editor at Sports Illustrated. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Men’s Health, Baseball Prospectus, and Lindy’s Sports Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @ByMattMartell and Blue Sky @mattmartell.bsky.social.
I don’t think the Karros situation was that complicated. He was underperforming his expected stats by a fair amount earlier in the year. And now he’s about even on the year, which means that he probably over performed them later. This probably means his batted ball profile was predictable enough that fielders were grabbing a lot of his balls in play and that it has changed.
Whether any of this is predictive is another matter, but I’m pretty high on Karros in general. I got to see him play earlier this year and the defense really popped out. The “eye test” suggests something like 65 field or maybe even 70.
That’s closer to his 2025 numbers than his 2026 fielding. Combine that with league average hitting and you have something like a 4 win player, and now he’s on pace for 3. He, Cole Carrigg, and maybe Hunter Goodman (he has fewer years of team control) look like they will be an important part of the next good Rockies team. It’s been a while since we could say that with a straight face about a Rockies player.
Everything about European professional soccer is designed to keep the top teams on top. Relegation, transfers, player loans. If baseball in the US had similar systems it would end up with the same teams winning all the time just like soccer. “Oh look. Barcelona and Manchester City are good again! Who saw that coming? And Bayern Munich seems to being quite well also.”
Honestly why I dont like it (well, 70% is the flopping and the boring ass “keep away” great teams employ when they’re up). As an American, any team I pick to follow feels like a bandwagon pick.
Kind of made me think of what would happen if the opposite were true and Euro soccer had the MLB system.
The Euro relegation system and the American Big League/Minor League systems each have their strengths and weaknesses. Yet I find that Europeans have a strong, almost religious preference for the relegation system while most Americans are vaguely appalled by it. Since Americans and Europeans are otherwise comparable in terms of ability to reason and the like, I have come to the conclusion that people generally think that the system they grew up with is the best sytem. (I am no exception to that rule…)
England showed the world the dangers of ‘keep away’. Has to be the stupidest managing decision I’ve ever seen in the sport.
I do think it would be fun to have (some) teams be fan-owned. And also nice to not have them moving all over the place to secure the best stadium deal.
But the results are bad, and they would be bad here too. The only way there would be any semblance of competitive balance is if medium-large to small markets weren’t willing to join the league to get beaten up by the top 10 markets or so and hold out for revenue sharing. And if the team’s fans of the 10 most profitable franchises (who would also have the most members) seceded, the other 20 franchises would have to resist the temptation to go with them or else you’d recreate the exact system here.
Isn’t that the Green Bay Packers? Seems to be working for them.
Honestly, this is more or less the situation the Yankees had with the Kansas City Athletics for many years, with Roger Maris only the most famous example of the wealthy team buying the players they needed from their junior partner.
Thanks for answering my question, Jon (and Matt)!
It broke the bounds of the question, but according to Baseball Reference the Pittsburgh Baseball Club was 10910-10910 entering the season, so during their streak they were also within a half game of .500 all-time.
(Oh also, the reason for my display name is that I used to have the name “matt w” registered and then I lost the login.)
I’m trying to figure out how the Cubs streak didn’t start at 0-0. Same for a few other teams, where 0-0 didn’t seem to count, but that’s clearly .500.
In a similar vein, 2019 Nationals somehow started their streak at 1-3 according to the table. I may have forgotten a lot of basic math over the years, but I am pretty certain that’s not within 1 game of .500.
For the first question, I’m guessing that the query grabbed days where the team was half a game within .500 at the end of the game. 0-0 didn’t wind up getting counted since it wasn’t at the end of the game. For the spirit of my question I’d count it, but fortunately it doesn’t change the top rankings.
The Nationals thing just looks like a typo to me–it should say 2-3 and then everything would be correct.
How is it that the Rockies are abysmally terrible every single year? Their last 70 win season was 2021. Last sub-100 loss season 2022. They’re just so bad, And that Tovar contract never looked good but it’s looking brutal now. How is it every big move they make backfires?
The actual answer to that question is very long, but the short answer is that at least until he hired DePodesta:
(1) The owner always made personnel decisions (across the organization) based on how much he liked having them around, which meant that
(2) He didn’t like going outside the organization for new voices, limiting the options.
(3) Even when the current person in a role was an improvement on the previous holder, it wasn’t enough because the other teams in MLB improved dramatically over the same period.
(4) The last GM was a perfect example of the Peter Principle
But Josh Byrnes is a good front-office executive with a ton of experience, so if he’s allowed to hire his own people it will probably work out. But the scouting operation is still being run by the old crew, and the owner’s son is part of that group. If he can reassign them to other parts of the organization I think things will get better.
Quick thought on loan arrangements: the teams involved have agreements that the loaned player won’t be used in matches against their original team. When Tim Howard first got to Everton, it was on a loan from Man United, and he didn’t play against them. That would make for quite a scene in the playoff situation mentioned. I’m not sure how you get around that.