FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: May 16, 2026
Earlier this week, we crossed the quarter mark of the season, and while 40 games is hardly a large sample size, the round number makes for an easy occasion to reflect on what’s happened thus far and consider how that could impact what’s still to come. My favorite bit of trivia is that it’s been a month since an NL Central team had a losing record. That team, remarkably, was the Cubs, who were last below .500 on the morning of April 15 and are now in first place after rattling off two separate 10-game winning streaks. Meanwhile, both the Brewers and Cardinals have never spent a game below .500. Only three other teams in baseball have not had a losing record this season: the Yankees, Braves, and Dodgers. Notice that quintet includes just one team in the American League, which has been underwhelming overall through the first quarter of the season. Entering play Friday, only five teams in the AL had winning records. In addition to the Yankees, the other four teams, hilariously, are the Rays, Guardians, White Sox, and Athletics. Just as we all expected.
On the individual side of things, many of the usual suspects rank near the top of the offensive leaderboards. There’s Aaron Judge, Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Schwarber, and Matt Olson all within the top 10 for wRC+, with Olson, Judge, and Alvarez also in the top 10 when sorting by WAR, along with Bobby Witt Jr., the leader. But there are also some unexpected names alongside this cohort. Ben Rice (193 wRC+), Shea Langeliers (179), Mickey Moniak (170), Jordan Walker (166), and Brice Turang (166) have emerged as top-10 hitters so far this season, and while it’s not a shock to see a Dodgers duo in the top 10 for position player WAR, it is a surprise that the two players in the pair are Andy Pages and Max Muncy (both at 2.0 WAR). By his standards, Shohei Ohtani has struggled at the plate — he’s slashing .240/.370/.427 with seven home runs and a 122 wRC+ entering Friday — but he’s offset that by turning into the best pitcher in baseball, at least by ERA. Through seven starts and 44 innings, he has a 0.82 ERA and 1.6 WAR, with the latter figure ranking seventh among major league pitchers. He’s the only pitcher with a top-10 WAR who has thrown fewer than 50 innings. Of the six pitchers above him, pitcher WAR leader Cam Schlittler (2.4) and Davis Martin (1.9 WAR) stand as the most surprising.
So the natural question is this: How much of what we’ve seen so far should we expect to continue? I’d say at least one NL Central team will finish the year below .500, as will the White Sox. I said two weeks ago that I wasn’t buying the Rays and A’s as true contenders, and I stand by that. But I do think Langeliers and Walker can sustain most of their production at the plate, and none of us should doubt Ohtani at this point. Otherwise, I’d rather not prognosticate further. We’ve got a mailbag to get to, and that’s way more fun that anything I have to say about Mickey Moniak. 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.
The question of the most forgettable *current* MLB franchise is going to depend a lot on how old people are but for most people I am guessing it is the Rays.
The recency of the franchise hurts them. But they haven’t won a World Series like the Diamondbacks or Marlins, and they don’t have any Hall of Famers associated with the team like the Rockies (no Wade Boggs doesn’t count). And it doesn’t look like there are any future Hall of Famers who would be associated with them. They don’t even have any MVPs in their team history. (They do have two Cy Young award winners, about what you would expect over a franchise with a 30 year history but still fewer than Justin Verlander).
The anonymity seems to have accelerated in recent years since Friedman left. There was a somewhat-recognizable set of players last decade like with Evan Longoria, David Price, James Shields, Ben Zobrist, and Carl Crawford. From 2016 forward there are only four players who have more than 2000 PAs for the Rays out of 200 in MLB. They zero pitchers who have pitched 600 innings for them in that time frame out of 78 for other single teams. Their innings leader in that time frame is Ryan Yarbrough. Their PA leader is Yandy Diaz. These are actually good players but they are also very anonymous.
This is all super unusual (impressive?) because the team has won a huge number of games. I think they have won 90 games 9 times since 2008. They have made the World Series twice, and the playoffs another 7 times. But they have also not been historically inept recently like the White Sox or garnered huge amounts of negative attention for their stadium woes like the Athletics. How many columns were written about the A’s playing in a minor league stadium last year versus the Rays? Their former future franchise player is currently awaiting trial for a pretty serious crime and very few baseball even remember he exists unless prompted.
Some of this is them being in a small market, and some of this is that they have a reputation for trading players before they reach free agency (or get expensive). Hard to build name recognition that way. They don’t sign recognizable players in free agency, and the ones they do are buy-low opportunities. It’s a small fan base in a division with three kaiju-sized fan bases and the Orioles, which have a ton of history. They are the most anonymous team in MLB.
Even their Cy Young winners are forgettable, which helps your point. I remembered Snell, and he’s gotta be among the most frustrating pitchers in the club of multi-Cy winners, but I totally forgot about David Price winning one due to his decline phase. If you asked me to name a famous Ray, I got Longoria off the top of my head and nothing else. Had to look up to remember Zobrist (one of the most unheralded great players ever, perfect for this thought exercise), and Carl Crawford (who again had a very disappointing back half).
Longoria and Arozarena would have been the only 2 coming to mind for me.