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The Mets swept the Phillies this week, which made headlines for two reasons: First, the Mets have now won 10 straight against the Phillies at Citi Field, dating back to last September, and including Games 3 and 4 of last year’s NLDS. If the Phillies don’t win a game there in the playoffs, they don’t face the Mets in New York again until the last weekend of June 2026. A potential 21-month losing streak at a divisional rival is tough to swallow, though it’s good to see that everyone’s being super normal about it.

Second, it kept the NL East race alive. The Phillies entered this division matchup seven games up with 32 to play; had they won the series, they would’ve basically had the division title in the bag. As it stands now, they’re up five, with the Mets coming to Philadelphia for a four-game set in mid-September. The Phillies are still 3-to-1 favorites, according to our playoff odds, but it’s a real pennant race now.

But this sweep is most important for a reason that went a little under the radar. While the Mets were beating seven shades of you-know-what out of the Phillies, the Dodgers were doing the same to the Reds in Los Angeles. Read the rest of this entry »

“You told me to flump off,” said umpire Derek Thomas. He pulled home plate duty for Monday’s game between the Cardinals and the Pirates, and it turned out to be a tough assignment. In the bottom of the seventh, Thomas rang up designated hitter Willson Contreras on a called strike three. He didn’t like what he heard as Contreras walked back to the dugout, so he ran him too. The flabbergasted Contreras asked why he’d been ejected, then raced back toward home plate and asked Thomas to repeat himself. The debate that ensued was short but spirited, and packed with dazzling rhetorical flourishes.

“You told me to flump off,” Thomas said again before turning to manager Oliver Marmol. “He told me to flump off.”

“No,” said Contreras. “I did not. I did not.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I did not.”

“Yes, you did.”

Diplomatic relations finally reached their breaking point. Contreras decided that if he was going to be punished for telling Thomas to flump off, he might as well get his money’s worth. He told him to flump off with gusto. “How is that?” he shouted. He repeated himself again and again, exploring various intonations while ratcheting up the intensity to make sure the message sank in fully. It was a powerhouse performance. Inspired, Marmol told Thomas where to flump as well. At that point, a less resolute individual probably would’ve just flumped off.

Contreras threw his helmet, then his bat, which ended up hitting a coach. The pièce de résistance came in the form of a large pail of Hi-Chew, which Contreras retrieved from the dugout and tossed onto the field:

Watching all this, I couldn’t help but be amazed. They have Hi-Chew in the dugout! Did you know they have Hi-Chew in the dugout? I watch a fair amount of baseball, and I definitely did not. For the uninitiated, Hi-Chew is Japanese candy that comes in a wide variety of fruit flavors. I love Hi-Chew. Everyone loves Hi-Chew. But it’s candy. It’s not bubble gum, which has storied history in baseball and may even improve athletic performance. And it’s not sunflower seeds, which have their own storied history, not to mention protein and electrolytes that confer their own plausible nutritional benefits. It’s just regular candy.

Every year or two, we get a few articles oohing and aahing at the state of nutrition for professional athletes. I will confess that I eat these articles up. I love them all. A catalog of the new, healthy snacks in the dugout? Don’t mind if I do. A deep-dive into the NBA’s love affair with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? I’ll take a dozen. Puff pieces about the Marlins nutrition team, the Angels dietitian, the Twins dietitians, a minor league dietitian, or the Mets kitchen staff? Keep ‘em coming. Every one of these articles makes me want to be a major leaguer, starting my day with a protein shake designed to suit my exact metabolic needs, drinking tart cherry juice to aid my recovery, and eating healthy meals that are also delicious because they’re designed and prepared by world-class professionals. I’d also get to enjoy the odd bit of cotton candy:

That part’s actually important. All of the cooks, dietitians and nutritionists interviewed in these articles go out of their way to acknowledge that they’re fine with the occasional treat. They don’t want to be the junk food police, and athletes burn through so much energy between practice, warmups, workouts, and the actual games that they have absurdly high caloric needs anyway. (Left unsaid in most of these articles is the fact that these are hyper-athletic 20-somethings who could probably subsist on a diet of Cocoa Puffs anyway, even if it wouldn’t necessarily optimize performance.) Instead, they detail the many ways they’ve replaced junk with healthy options. Energy comes from sources like fruit, nuts, string cheese, and jerky. Cookies are out; Honey Stinger stroopwafels are in. Nutri-Grain bars, which are essentially a prayer to the god of Type 2 Diabetes, have been replaced by Rx Bars. And so on. With so many lesser evils available, players can indulge without wrecking their carefully-calibrated dietary regimens.

All of this makes sense. None of it is compatible with the big, surprisingly aerodynamic tub of Hi-Chew in the St. Louis dugout. There’s no decades-long history here. Hi-Chew is just a big cube of glucose. I’m going to pull a few quotes from the articles I linked to above, but I’ve doctored them just a little bit. It’s subtle, but see if you can tell what I changed.

“Everything in our clubhouse is geared toward helping promote recovery and reduce inflammation. We try to stick to snacks and foods with good nutrition. That’s why we provide Hi-Chew, which is 61% sugar and 10% fat. What’s the other 29%? I shudder to think.”

…

“How do we get the right energy in them in order to optimize their performance during the game? Also, how do we dispose of this giant tub of Hi-Chew my uncle gave me for my birthday?”

…

“Obviously, not feeding your body with the right stuff is not going to be able to help you maintain your body and your energy levels throughout the whole year, because it’s a long year. Except for Hi-Chew. Hi-Chew is fine.”

This article is not about how Hi-Chew got in the dugout. That article has already been written more than once. The story goes that as the least-tenured reliever on the Red Sox in 2012, Japanese-born Junichi Tazawa was in charge of keeping the bullpen stocked with gum. He added his own supply of Hi-Chew, which proved so popular that he couldn’t find enough to keep up with clubhouse demand. He asked the manufacturer if he could buy in bulk. Instead, the manufacturer sent it for free, then started sponsoring teams. There are big tubs of Hi-Chew in dugouts around the league because the players like it, but mostly because Hi-Chew pays for that privilege. I imagine they’re preparing to send Contreras the world’s sweetest care package in exchange for all the free publicity.

No, this article is my attempt to find out what’s actually being eaten in major league dugouts. Hi-Chew can’t be the only transgressor that somehow failed to come up in the dozens of empty-calorie articles about big league nutrition that I’ve consumed over the years. Here I should confess that this is a subject near to my heart. I was a ravenous child. I ate seeds and chewed gum during baseball games when I was younger. By middle school, I was loading boxfuls of Pop-Tarts and Fruit by the Foot in my bag at the beginning of each week. My spikes would inevitably crush the Pop-Tarts and shred their thin foil wrappers. By the end of the season, my bag would be covered in a fine, inch-deep mélange of dirt, pastry crumbs, and brown sugar filling. It smelled heavenly.

I used a brute force research methodology, hunting for sweets through thousands of photo service pictures of dugouts, bullpens, Dubble Bubble celebrations, and Gatorade baths. The hit rate was infinitesimal. Unless they’re taking a few establishing shots of gum and sunflower seeds during spring training, there’s no reason for photographers to waste their time on the snacks in the dugout. The pictures I found were usually candids, players who happened to be photographed holding a bag of seeds, dumping snacks on the player who just hit a walk-off, resting in front of the Hi-Chew tub, or digging through it looking for a very specific flavor. Behold:

I found enough pictures of Dubble Bubble and sunflower seeds to make your head spin, though that big pail of Dubble Bubble in the dugout has changed with the times too. The next time you see a player hit a walk-off homer and receive a Dubble Bubble shower, keep an eye on the individual pieces of gum. If they’re wrapped in paper with the ends twisted, that’s regular gum, but if it’s in a plastic wrapper, that’s the sugar-free version. The Orioles also stock Dubble Bubble gumballs, along with the largest bucket of Hi-Chew in the entire league. Contreras would’ve thrown out his back trying to toss this monster:

It’s hard to account for the ubiquity of Dubble Bubble. It’s not the official gum of Major League Baseball. So far as I can tell, Bubble Yum is the only gum that has ever borne that distinction, taking the mantle in 1998 and presumably setting it back down again at some point in the past couple decades. And it can’t be because Dubble Bubble is a pleasure to chew. If you’ll allow me to editorialize for a moment, Dubble Bubble is trash. It tastes sugary and delicious for approximately two and a half seconds, and then it turns into a tough, bitter lump in your mouth. It’s as poorly suited for blowing bubbles as it is for human consumption. (According to a 2017 Mercury News article by Andrew Baggerly, the trick to creating a wad that produces impressive bubbles is to mix the regular and sugar free versions.)

I saw more pictures of sunflower seeds than any other dugout snack. However, I was surprised not to see any David brand seeds. David was once the official sunflower seed of MLB. It provided seeds to teams for many years, and it also seemed to be the only game in town. No longer. The brand Giants is now ubiquitous. Apparently, Giants became the official sunflower seed of the Twins in 2004, and visiting players were so taken with them that other teams started ordering them too. Giants took the league by storm, but amazingly, it would take another 11 years before it became the official sunflower seed of the San Francisco Giants. According to a 2019 article, Giants ships two or three pallets of seeds to every major league stadium each year. Why were visiting players so into Giants sunflower seeds? Because they are actually giant. They’re bigger than normal sunflower seeds, and apparently that’s a desirable trait. It also provides the delightfully rare case of a giant David taking down a goliath named David.

Here’s Hunter Greene comparing two bags of seeds. In his right hand are roasted and salted pumpkin seeds. In his left are salt and pepper sunflower seeds with grilled steak seasoning:

What makes this picture fun is that Greene is very clearly comparing the nutrition facts on the back of the bags, and he’s doing so with the help of Ashley Meuser, Cincinnati’s director of major league nutrition. I imagine if you grabbed someone off the street in 1970 and asked them what a major league nutrition director does, this is exactly what they’d picture.

I did find plenty of pictures of honest-to-goodness healthy snacks. We’ve got an apple and a smoothie in an adorable little smoothie pouch:

And we’ve got bananas. We’ve got lots of bananas. Oneil Cruz’s giant hand absolutely dwarfs this banana, but he nonetheless looks as if he’s about to launch into a soliloquy about its virtues as snack:

What could be more wholesome than that? And just look how happy Adam Engel is to be eating this banana. Surely that’s not the facial expression of a man who wishes it were still acceptable for a professional ballplayer to crush a hoagie between innings:

I also found some pictures of those healthy-ish stroopwafels, but that’s where the health foods stopped. Here’s Alec Marsh eating a salted caramel Honey Stinger stroopwafel (Honey Stinger calls them “energy waffles”) between innings during a game last May. But take a look at what’s in the bin in the foreground:

There’s a blue bag of seeds of course, but does that yellow package behind it look at all familiar? I am genuinely embarrassed to say that I instantly recognized what it was. That might not say anything good about me. Computer, enhance!

That’s right. That is a family size bag of Sour Patch Kids. Despite their atrocious taste in gum, major leaguers really know their gummy candies. Also, your eyes are not deceiving you. The back of the package really does encourage you to bake cookies with Sour Patch Kids in them. Even contemplating such a revolting concoction is an affront to the senses, and despite what the package shouts in all caps, it absolutely is not a thing.

Our last batch of pictures comes courtesy of the 2023 Phillies, which shouldn’t be all that surprising, as they were one of the loudest, most fun teams in recent memory. Here’s Jake Cave chowing down on another salted caramel stroopwafel at the urging of Brandon Marsh. While his teammates gave postgame interviews, Marsh made a habit of being the one to dump alarming combinations of foods and beverages on them. He would then pressure them into eating an often-soggy snack, all while the interview was still going on. It was usually easier to give in and eat the thing than to fend off Marsh while on live television:

During Cave’s interview, Alec Bohm heaved handfuls of sunflower seeds at him from the dugout. Someone else lobbed a steady stream of Dubble Bubble at his head. Marsh and Bryson Stott crept behind Cave holding two paper cups each. Marsh held the stroopwafel between his teeth. After he and Sott emptied their cups, and Bohm chipped in a perfectly timed long-distance pumpkin seed strike, he ripped the wrapper open. “Here’s a Honey Stinger,” he said, proffering it to Cave. “You have to eat it.” This picture was taken the moment Cave took a bite, and you can see how happy it made Marsh. But what I really want you to notice Cave’s hat. Marsh dumped water, while Stott dumped solids. You can see the inescapable Dubble Bubble, but I also spy a rainbow, a blue moon, a red ballon, and a green clover. The Phillies have Lucky Charms in the clubhouse! And that’s not all.

Here’s Trea Turner 10 days later, on the receiving end of gum, water, dried mango from Whole Foods, Lucky Charms, and Cinnamon Toast Crunch:

As someone who has literally recorded an entire album about the monster cereals, I was genuinely taken aback by this picture. There is a big gap between having some candy available in the dugout and stocking multiple sugar cereals in the clubhouse. Candy can be an occasional indulgence. Having both Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Toast Crunch on hand is something else entirely. I have no idea whether the Phillies are a little laxer in the kitchen or whether they’re the only team whose sugar cereal habit we know about because they’re the only ones raiding the pantry every time they celebrate a win. Either way, it’s possible that big league clubhouses aren’t exactly the high-performance cathedrals that they’re made out to be.

I never would not have expected Cinnamon Toast Crunch to be anywhere near a major league baseball team. It’s genuinely hard to think of something that could be worse for a human body. Even as a child, you felt like you were getting away with something when you had Cinnamon Toast Crunch for breakfast. Or at least you felt that way until 10:30 AM rolled around and the sugar crash kicked in. It doesn’t stop at Lucky Charms and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, either. After a victory a few weeks later, Marsh and Stott dumped a cooler of Gatorade on Turner, then Stott handed him a stick of beef jerky.

“It’s wagyu,” said Marsh. “It’s wagyu. Eat it!”

“I’m not eating that,” Turner replied. “That looks terrible. It’s wet.”

“It’s wagyu,” said Marsh.

After the celebration ended, photographer Bill Streicher had the presence of mind to capture a shot of the unholy accumulation of makeshift confetti that had rained down on Turner and settled into the dirt like a pop art depiction of the night sky:

You can see crushed ice, various Dubble Bubble flavors, the wagyu wrapper, and a packet of energy gel. You can see cookies-and-cream flavored Made Good granola minis, a classic example of the replace-something-terrible-with-something-not-so-bad approach. But you can also see a Cinnamon Toast Crunch breakfast bar. I didn’t even know such a thing existed, but allow me to say the most damning thing I possibly can about it: This is the kind of thing I would’ve put in my baseball bag as a high schooler. It’s basically a brick of loose Cinnamon Toast Crunch squares that have been glued together with sugar. There’s nothing less healthy that it could have possibly replaced, except maybe an actual brick, but apparently it’s part of a complete breakfast over in Philadelphia.

You might also notice some green and brown rectangles in that picture. Those are sugar and stevia packets, the kind you’d put in your coffee. Unsurprisingly, the people who get the most joy out of dumping comestibles on their teammates also get a lot of joy out of making whatever they’re dumping both as eclectic and as gross as possible. Here’s MJ Melendez emptying an entire coffee urn into a cooler of Powerade that will soon unleash its repulsive contents on the Royal unfortunate enough to have been the star of the game:

I still love those those puff pieces about the nutritional advances in the big leagues. I will always love them, and I genuinely believe that the nutritionists, dietitians, and chefs involved do great work. They have dragged the game past the days of between-innings hot dogs. I’m just as certain that the vast majority of players put a huge amount of thought into how they fuel themselves. Still, it’s nice to know that in addition to all the healthier options, you can also walk into a clubhouse and get your fill of the very worst the culinary-industrial complex has to offer. Besides, it could be worse. They could start feeding the players Sour Patch Kids cookies.

Justin Verlander’s 2025 season isn’t going to be one for the history books. After his second stint with the Astros ended with a whimper (17 starts and a 5.48 ERA in 2024), he signed a one-year deal with the Giants that felt like a potential career capstone. At 42 and with a résumé that’s already a stone cold lock for Cooperstown, this year was never going to be about accumulating more statistics. When he started the year 0-8 with a 4.99 ERA, it felt like the final act of his career. No one fights off time forever, not even the seemingly ageless Verlander.

Anyway, here’s a leaderboard of the pitchers with the most WAR in the last 30 days:

Now, did I leave ERA out of this table on purpose? I sure did – ERA is noisy in small samples anyway, but mostly Verlander’s is just less impressive than the rest of this group. He’s at 4.18 in that span and 4.55 for the season, despite solid strikeout, walk, and home run numbers. He’s certainly not one of the best 10 starters in baseball, regardless of what that leaderboard says. But he’s been a solid big league starter, undoubtedly, and that in itself is pretty remarkable given how things looked a few months ago. Read the rest of this entry »

To put it delicately, Giancarlo Stanton’s stint with the New York Yankees hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. To put it less so, Stanton has amassed fewer WAR in eight years in New York than Aaron Judge did in 2024 alone. When the Yankees acquired Stanton in late 2017, the expectation was that he’d be the foundation of the team’s lineup for the next decade as he finished assembling his Hall of Fame case. However, since a solid if mildly underwhelming debut season in the Bronx, Stanton has suffered through a parade of injuries that has left him with only a single 120-game season, and his deity-level exit velocities have rapidly become his main offensive skill. Five hundred home runs, which once would have seemed like a disappointing final milestone for Stanton, increasingly looked liked the happy result.

Stanton’s health has remained a problem, as he missed a large chunk of this season with a severe case of tennis elbow in both elbows. But the results he’s gotten when he has been available have been of classic Marlins vintage: a .313/.388/.663 line with 17 home runs and 1.9 WAR in 51 games, with the WAR total his best tally since 2021. With Judge first out with a flexor strain and then missing his usual power since his return, having Stanton bust out to this degree has kept the Yankees’ current spate of problems from becoming even greater.

So, how has he done it? Rather than revolutionize his game, Stanton is playing like the most Stantonified version of himself. His average exit velocity and hard-hit percentage are at their highest levels ever, and his out-of-zone swing percentage is the lowest it has been in years. The attack angle on his swing has ticked up a couple of degrees, enough to give him an ideal attack angle 65% of the time, up from 60% in 2024 and 57% in 2023. We don’t have bat tracking data further back, but we do know that Stanton has a career-high rate of flyballs and a career-low rate of grounders. Read the rest of this entry »

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It’s been a rough season for Francisco Alvarez — and specifically his hands. The 23-year-old catcher fractured a hamate in his left hand while taking batting practice on March 8, and after undergoing surgery, missed the first four weeks of the regular season. He scuffled upon returning, to the point that the Mets optioned him to Triple-A Syracuse in late June, but particularly since returning in late July, he hit well until he sprained the ulnar collateral ligament of his right thumb (as opposed to the UCL of his elbow) while making a headfirst slide on August 17. The injury, which requires surgery to fix, appeared to be season-ending, but to the Mets’ surprise, Alvarez has been able to swing the bat without pain, so he began a rehab assignment with Triple-A Syracuse on Wednesday. Unfortunately, in his third plate appearance of the game, he was hit on the left pinkie by an 89-mph sinker and had to leave the game.

Alvarez, who also missed seven weeks last year due to surgery to repair a torn UCL in his left thumb, was sent for testing after being removed. At this writing, the Mets have yet to reveal his prognosis, but this may set back his return, and he’ll still need another surgery this offseason. When available, he’s been one of the Mets’ more productive hitters, a big step up from the team’s other catchers on the offensive side. In 56 games, he’s hit for a career high 125 wRC+ (.265/.349/.438) with seven homers in 209 plate appearances, good for 1.4 WAR. Luis Torrens, who hit well while serving as the team’s regular catcher during Alvarez’s early-season absence, has slumped to the point that he’s batting .218/.282/.320 (73 wRC+) in 245 PA, and third-stringer Hayden Senger has been even less productive, hitting .180/.227/.197 (22 wRC+) in 67 PA.

[Update: On Thursday afternoon, Alvarez revealed that his pinkie is fractured. He said he hopes to play again this season, but a timeline for that has yet to be determined.]

The Mets, who are now 72-61, just swept a three-game series against the Phillies (76-57) at Citi Field to pull within four games of the NL East leaders. They’ve won eight of their last 11 games after losing 14 of 16 from July 28 to August 15, a skid that bumped them down to third in the NL Wild Card race, though they now have a 4 1/2-game cushion over the Reds (68-66). They’ve got some other injuries that could affect their drive for a playoff spot, but in that, they’re not alone. What follows here is a roundup of fairly recent injuries among NL contenders, some that slipped through the cracks in our coverage during recent weeks and others that merit mention so long as we’re on the topic; an alarming number of these involve fingers. I’ll go division-by-division, and follow this with a similar AL roundup. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And thus the chat began. Suspiciously, it began on time as well.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I didn’t do an article on the topic, but I did run the numbers and at the time, they dropped from 11.7 to 9.8 in ZiPS purely for the Wheeler injury

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I hope Nashville gets one. That’s purely for selfish reasons – gives me yet another park five hours or less away!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: And I like excuses to visit Nashville. The state of hot chicken in SW Ohio, at least in the Dayton area, is truly sad.

Read the rest of this entry »

When he was first featured here at FanGraphs in August 2022, Emmet Sheehan was 22 years old and pitching for the High-A Great Lakes Loons. A sixth-round selection the previous summer out of Boston College, the right-hander had been assigned a 40 FV and a no. 25 ranking when our 2022 Los Angeles Dodgers Top Prospects list came out a few months earlier. But his stock was clearly rising. Sheehan boasted a 2.72 ERA, and he had fanned 93 batters while allowing just 39 over 59 2/3 dominant innings.

His ascent was rapid. Sheehan reached Los Angeles midway through the 2023 season, and enjoyed some immediate success. Debuting against the San Francisco Giants, he hurled six scoreless innings without surrendering a hit. He then went on to finish the year 4-1 with a 4.92 ERA and 4.85 FIP in 13 appearances comprising 60 1/3 innings. But the hard-throwing righty subsequently hit a speed bump. Sheehan opened last season on the IL due to forearm inflammation, and ultimately underwent Tommy John surgery in May. He didn’t return to the mound until this May.

He’s been rock solid since rejoining the Dodgers rotation. Over eight starts and a pair of relief outings, Sheehan has a 3.56 ERA, a 3.23 FIP, and a 27.6% strikeout rate over 48 innings. Moreover, he shoved his last time out. This past Monday, the erstwhile BC Eagle dominated the Cincinnati Reds to the tune of 10 strikeouts, allowing just three baserunners over seven scoreless innings.

Sheehan sat down to talk about his return to action when the Dodgers played at Fenway Park in late July. A night earlier, he’d allowed a pair of runs over five frames in a 5-2 win over the Red Sox.

——-

David Laurila: You’re back after missing a year due to Tommy John surgery. Has anything changed, or are you basically the same pitcher as before?

Emmet Sheehan: “I’m similar. With the rehab process and having a year to think about things, that has changed me in some ways. Obviously, learning from these guys up here has changed me, too. Getting to be around guys like Kersh [Clayton Kershaw], Glass [Tyler Glasnow], Yama [Yoshinobu Yamamoto]… all of them are amazing pitchers. I try to pick stuff up from them, just find little things. We’re all different, but we still do some things similarly.

“Pitch-wise, the one big change was my changeup. Before, it was really big. I was rolling it a lot, like really over-pronating and maybe dropping the slot a little bit, trying to get more depth on it. Coming out of rehab, pronating hard didn’t feel great in my elbow, so we tried the kick-change grip — I’m doing the little spike with my middle finger. And it’s been great. For one thing, I can sell it more like my fastball.” Read the rest of this entry »