Cam Schlittler brought his A-game on Sunday. Facing the Mets in the rubber game of the Subway Series at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees’ fireballer was nearly untouchable over the course of six scoreless innings, striking out eight while allowing just one hit, a fifth-inning double by Brett Baty. Meanwhile in Baltimore, the Blue Jays’ Dylan Cease worked around five walks to allow just one run over five innings while striking out nine. The two righties are engaged in an intriguing race for the AL Cy Young Award, one that could go down to the wire. The NL race is a tight one as well, with the Brewers’ Jacob Misiorowski the favorite but hardly the only one under consideration.

The 25-year-old Schlittler and 24-year-old Misiorowski are undeniably the frontrunners in their respective leagues, from both statistical and narrative standpoints. They lead in our Tom Tango-modeled Cy Young projections, and as of mid-August, they dominated polls taken by MLB.com. Nonetheless, the statistical races that can influence both our perceptions and voter behavior aren’t entirely decided, and with less than two weeks to go in the regular season, the races are worth a closer look.

The 6-foot-7 Misiorowski and 6-foot-6 Schlittler share similarities beyond their impressive heights. Both are in their first full major league seasons, after arriving in mid-2025 and helping their teams to the playoffs while showing poise beyond their years; this October, they’ll be seasoned postseason veterans. They’re the majors’ two hardest-throwing starters, with Misiorowski breaking velocity records all over the place. His average four-seam velocity — a mind-blowing 100.6 mph — not only leads the majors, but it’s also the fastest single-season velocity by a starter in the pitch-tracking era (from 2008 onward), hardly surprising given that he owns the (scrolling, scrolling, scrolling) 117 fastest pitches by a starter in pitch-tracking history — including a record-setting 105.5-mph heater to the Cubs’ Pete Crow-Armstrong on June 26 — and 353 of the 394 pitches of at least 102 mph thrown by a starter. Hunter Greene is the only other one in double digits (12). Schlittler merely ranks second among all starters this year, with an average velocity of 98.0 mph, which is still good for fifth in the pitch-tracking era. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! After a couple weeks of scheduling conflicts, this chat is back, baby.

12:01

Jay Jaffe: I’ve got a piece in the editorial pipeline regarding the two leagues’ Cy Young races. The consensus points to Misiorowski and Schilttler, and the impressions may be locked in, but their statistical edges aren’t as clear-cut as you might think.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Last week, I wrote about the Teoscar Hernández revival (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-well-timed-teoscar-hernandez-revival/), the playoff picture (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/this-still-aint-team-entropy-but-both-leag…) and some AL East center fielder injuries (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/a-bad-weekend-for-al-east-center-fielders-…)

12:05

Jay Jaffe: The Red Sox have continued to deal with center field issues, with Eli White — who had done a decent job replacing Ceddanne Rafaela — landing on the IL with a right foot ligament injury

12:07

Jay Jaffe: (sorry, dealing with editorial queries)

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The first five months of Teoscar Hernández’s season were largely forgettable. The 33-year-old left fielder scuffled through the first seven weeks before catching fire during the second half of May, only to suffer a left hamstring strain that knocked him out for over a month. Upon returning, he was a major drag on the offense for the better part of two months. But lately, Hernández has been tearing the cover off the ball, rising to the occasion to help a banged-up Dodgers squad — one that just placed Shohei Ohtani on the injured list and called up top prospect Josue De Paula — reel off a season-high seven-game winning streak.

Hernández has hit safely in his last 10 games, from August 30 through September 9, batting .514/.595/.829 (285 wRC+) in 42 plate appearances, with two home runs and 14 RBI. On 28 batted balls during that stretch, he’s produced a 97.1-mph average exit velocity, a 25.0% barrel rate, and a 60.7% hard-hit rate, with a .441 xBA and a .786 xSLG. Fifteen of those 28 batted balls have been hit at least 100 mph; seven of them, all 108.7 mph or higher, rank among his nine hardest-hit balls all season, capped by a 112.6-mph screamer he hit for a three-run homer against the Reds’ Brandon Williamson on Monday night.

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With the passing of Labor Day, the 2026 regular season has less than three weeks remaining. While neither league’s playoff races are as turbulent as the AL Wild Card race appeared to be just a couple of weeks ago — to say nothing of the Before Times, when Major League Baseball used actual tiebreaker games instead of math to settle ties, and rooting for end-of-season chaos was a whole lot more fun — it’s time for a check-in to outline what’s at stake.

Right now, in four of the six division races — all but the NL Central and NL West, where the Brewers and Dodgers both have comfortable margins — the first-place team leads by four games or less. That said, the hill that the Phillies (81-64) have to climb to catch the Braves (85-60) is steeper than it appears, because Atlanta clinched the season series with a 5-4 win this past Sunday and owns a 7-3 advantage, with the two teams set to play their final three games starting on Friday at Truist Park. Thus, if the two teams finish the regular season tied, the Braves would be the division winner and the Phillies a Wild Card team. Philadelphia has to overtake Atlanta to claim the NL East flag, something our Playoff Odds suggest has just an 8.2% chance of happening. Read the rest of this entry »

The long weekend was a particularly rough one for center fielders in the AL East. On Saturday, the Yankees’ Trent Grisham landed on the injured list with a Grade 2 strain of his right hamstring, and then on Sunday, both Luis Robert Jr. of the Orioles and Ceddanne Rafaela of the Red Sox joined him on the sidelines, the former due to a low-grade left hamstring strain and the latter because of a right quad strain. Their absences could have some impact as the teams jockey for position in the AL Wild Card race, where Baltimore’s chances have taken a major hit due to a recent six-game losing streak.

The most serious injury is that of the 29-year-old Grisham, who left Friday’s game against the Padres at Petco Park in the middle of the third inning. Reportedly, he initially felt tightness in his hamstring while being thrown out trying to steal second base in the top of the second, after drawing a leadoff walk against Padres starter Walker Buehler. In the bottom of the frame, he got a very late jump on a bloop by Xander Bogaerts that landed for a two-out RBI single, the game’s first run. After the inning, the YES Network broadcast showed Grisham in the dugout talking to Michael Schuk, the team’s director of sports medicine and rehabilitation, who then followed him into the clubhouse.

Right fielder Spencer Jones shifted over to center to replace Grisham, with Heliot Ramos entering the game in right. Both wound up figuring in the Yankees’ 3-2 defeat, when Jones led off the top of the 10th inning with an RBI single but was thrown out trying to steal third base as Ramos swung through an 88-mph slider from Mason Miller for strike three. The Yankees ended up losing when Luis Campusano hit a walk-off two-run homer off Paul Blackburn in the bottom of the 10th. Read the rest of this entry »

This season was supposed to be something different for the Giants. Following last year’s 81-81 finish, president of baseball operations and franchise icon Buster Posey went outside the box to hire manager Tony Vitello straight from the college ranks, and added free agents Luis Arraez and Harrison Bader to upgrade a couple of the lineup’s dead spots. Throw in a full season of mid-2025 acquisition Rafael Devers, and the team had reasonable hope of reaching the playoffs for the first time since 2021, and just the second time in the past 10 seasons. Instead, the 2026 Giants haven’t spent a day over .500, and at 58-83, they own the National League’s second-worst record. Like the Tigers, they’re in danger of making some dubious history, in their case by falling short of their BaseRuns-projected win total by the largest margin of any team since 2002.

As I explained on Thursday, the Tigers are nearly 11 full wins short of their Pythagorean-projected win total, an estimate based upon their totals of runs scored and runs allowed using the formula Winning % = RS^2 /(RS^2 +RA^2). Out of all the teams playing full seasons in the Wild Card era (not the strike-shortened 1995 season or the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but including 2026 for the purposes of comparison), that’s the third-largest shortfall.

Where Pythagorean projections use actual runs scored and allowed to calculate an expected winning percentage, BaseRuns uses estimated runs scored and allowed, derived from familiar statistical components such as hits, walks, hit-by-pitches, stolen bases, and so on. Those run estimates are then plugged into the Pythagenpat formula — a variant of Bill James’ Pythagorean formula where the exponent itself is a function of the scoring environment via the formula X = ((RS + RA)/G)^0.287 — for a second-order estimate of winning percentage. Both the Pythagorean and BaseRuns estimated winning percentages provide useful if imperfect ways of measuring teams’ underlying performance and helping to identify outliers in either direction. 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 »

On Sunday, Red Sox infielder Andruw Monasterio took the mound against the Yankees with one out in the eighth inning of a 10-1 game — one that had already sent a Red Sox broadcaster over the edge — and proceeded to allow six more runs. On Monday, Twins top prospect Walker Jenkins hit his first major league home run off a 37-mph eephus lob from Tigers utilityman Zach McKinstry, while the Cubs set a team record with nine homers in one game, the last three of them off Brewers first baseman Andrew Vaughn. Amid complaints on social media and sports talk radio calling for a ban to the practice, the reality is that managers are putting position players on mop-and-bucket duty more frequently than ever, enough to suggest it’s time to revise the rules limiting their usage.

Once upon a time, position players pitching was a rarity. The first 21 seasons of the Wild Card era (1995–2005) featured seasons where you could count such appearances on one hand; there was one in 2005 and none in ’06, and by the end of that stretch, it was still something that happened less than once a week throughout the majors. As a beat, it was a fun one to cover because of the novelty, particularly with pitch tracking allowing everyone to gawk at the low-velocity junk thrown under such circumstances. Did you know Todd Frazier had a knuckleball? How about that Willians Astudillo eephus? Eventually, however, the beat became less enjoyable as the practice proliferated to the point that Major League Baseball had to codify when teams could do it; while the occasions themselves remained appropriately light-hearted, the novelty had long worn off. Now, even with more restrictive rules governing their usage, the situation is worth revisiting.

The Monasterio and McKinstry appearances were garden variety affairs, with position players taking the mound in the eighth inning of road games where nobody would need to pitch the bottom of the ninth. Monasterio’s outing was Boston’s first such appearance this season, a sidelight to a game that included a controversial fifth-inning no-catch call of a Jazz Chisholm Jr. bloop by center fielder Ceddanne Rafaela and then an unprofessional tirade in the booth by WEEI broadcaster Will Flemming, who called Chisholm a “bush league player” who “plays the game the wrong way” after Chisholm walked and stole second and third base in the eighth inning of a 7-1 game. The steals, which were ordered by manager Aaron Boone, became moot after reliever Jovani Morán served up back-to-back home runs to Austin Wells and Paul Goldschmidt to run the score to 10-1, leading manager Chad Tracy to crank up the Monasterio. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, and welcome to the first chat of September! Which means that yes, you’ve been called up to the majors and added to the roster.

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about Tristan Peters, a former Savannah Banana (from their days in wood-bat collegiate summer leagues) and unheralded prospect who’s been one of the top rookie position players in the game this season. This was a fun one to put together https://blogs.fangraphs.com/tristan-peters-has-gone-bananas/

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Last week, I did my annual Hall of Fame progress update, dividing players into those who have had rough seasons that have hurt their cause (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/cooperstown-notebook-a-rough-year-for-gian…) and those who have helped their cause (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/cooperstown-notebook-chris-sale-and-others…)

12:05

Jay Jaffe: I’m mulling writing something about position players pitching, which is on the rise again. So, let’s do a quick, unscientific poll…

12:07

Jay Jaffe: Position Players Pitching It’s fine, please chill out (40.9% | 36 votes)   Never, except in an extra-innings emergency (30.6% | 27 votes)   The rules (trailing by 8 or more, up by 10 or more in 9th) need to be tighter (28.4% | 25 votes)   Total Votes: 88

12:07

Jay Jaffe: Let’s see how that does with our readers here (small sample size noted)

Read the rest of this entry »

Tristan Peters was hardly on anyone’s radar entering the season. A lefty-swinging 26-year-old center fielder playing for his fourth organization since being drafted in 2021, he didn’t land on any preseason top prospects list or even project to see much time in the majors, where in his brief career he’d gone 0-for-12. Yet Peters — whose résumé includes a stint with the Savannah Bananas in 2021, when they were a competitive collegiate summer league team instead of a barnstorming sensation — has become one of the season’s biggest and most pleasant surprises. While helping the AL Central-leading White Sox pull off an already-unprecedented turnaround, he landed on the All-Star team and ranks high on the rookie WAR leaderboard. Last week, he even earned a spot in the record books by homering in five consecutive games.

Peters began his binge — which took place entirely at Guaranteed Rate Field against the Mets and Rangers — on August 22 with a solo home run off New York’s Christian Scott, then followed it up the next day with a wall-scraping walk-off solo shot off Kodai Senga, breaking a 1-1 tie. Peters hit both blasts while using a yellow bat — a nod to his time with the Bananas. The streak continued with a two-run tater off Texas right-hander Kumar Rocker on August 24 (Chicago’s only runs in an 11-2 drubbing), then a solo homer off Peyton Gray the next night, and finally a two-run dinger off Robby Ahlstrom on August 26.

That 406-foot homer off Senga was Peters’ only one during this stretch with an estimated distance of at least 400 feet, and just his second to travel at least that far this season; he had a 410-footer off A’s righty Justin Sterner on July 10, the day he hit for the cycle. On that note, Peters finished a triple shy of the cycle on both August 25 and 26; the first of those efforts included a two-run double off Jacob deGrom. All told, he went 10-for-18 with three walks, three strikeouts, nine RBI, and a 1.500 slugging percentage during that five-game run, not too shabby for a guy whose last prospect report, under the Rays’ 2025 unranked “Depth Starters and Outfielders” section, referred to him as one of the team’s “smaller, contact-oriented corner outfielders at the upper levels without meaningful power.” Read the rest of this entry »