Author’s note: Five Things will return next week. In the meantime, enjoy an article about one of my favorite players.

Do you want to know how much Carlos Santana loves playing baseball? From 2020 through 2023, he played for five teams, got traded midseason twice, and compiled a 94 wRC+. He was 37, had earned more than $100 million in his career, and didn’t have an obvious everyday starting job lined up. He could have hung up his spikes right then – but he took a one-year, $5.5 million deal with the Twins and turned back the clock with a 114 wRC+. Then he signed another one-year deal, this one for $12 million with the Guardians, and kept the train rolling. Through the first third of the season, he’s on pace for his best year in more than half a decade.

What’s his secret? As a fellow 39-year-old, I wanted to find out – for, you know, mostly professional reasons, but also because sometimes my knees hurt after going on a particularly brisk walk. Bad news for me, though. I’ve found out one thing that Santana has done in 2025 to rejuvenate himself, and I’m not sure that I can replicate it in my personal life.

Let me explain. If you look at Santana’s Baseball Savant percentile rankings, you won’t come away impressed:

Yes, we get it, the man has an elite sense of the strike zone, and he’s still great at defense — no big surprise — but it’s a bit of a bummer if we look only at the bar graphs above Chase%; there’s not a ton of loud contact, not a ton of squared-up contact, and he’s rarely hitting the ball on the sweet spot. That’s a lot of blue for a guy running a 123 wRC+ and getting an article written about his late-career resurgence. Read the rest of this entry »

Lawrence Butler does a lot of things well, but he cannot hit a high fastball. Entering play on June 2, Butler had just one career barrel against an elevated fastball: A deep fly out off an 87.5 mph Trevor Williams “heater” in the dog days of 2023. In 2025, he’s whiffing on over half his swings at high heaters, per the Baseball Savant-defined shadow zones at the top edge of the strike zone. (That’s attack zones 11, 12, and 13 for the Savant search heads.)

Most of the hitters with high whiff rates on top-rail four-seamers have steep swing planes. (Aaron Judge and Luis Robert Jr. are two notable examples.) Not Butler: His 31 degree swing tilt is actually a bit flatter than the major league average. Butler’s primary issue is timing — his average attack direction on these pitches is oriented 18 degrees toward the opposite field; his zero degree attack angle is perfectly flat. Whatever the reason, it’s a clear hole, and certain pitchers are primed to exploit it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Pete Alonso’s performance since they marveled at his hot start, the return of Craig Kimbrel, Max Muncy’s tale of two seasons, how hitters fare after LASIK, the Mets’ “secret sauce” against Shohei Ohtani, whether the Dodgers’ injury woes will hurt their capacity to recruit pitchers, Brandon Pfaadt’s “yes hitter,” the latest step toward the challenge system, Eric Anthony’s dad discovery and nature and nurture in player development, the underrated Willie Davis and Reggie Smith, and more, plus a combined Meet a Major Leaguer/Stat Blast segment (1:19:39) on Nic Enright and Christian Montes De Oca (and the rule-altering signing of the 13-year-old Jimy Kelly).

Audio intro: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to previous Pete banter
Link to Pete before
Link to Pete after
Link to Muncy before
Link to Muncy after
Link to Muncy article
Link to MLB LASIK study
Link to secret sauce article
Link to Spahn quote
Link to Cup of Coffee
Link to FG on Casparius
Link to “yes hitter” post
Link to “yes hitter” Stathead
Link to Ben on no-hitters 1
Link to Ben on no-hitters 2
Link to challenge system news
Link to Anthony and Davis story
Link to B-Ref new debuts
Link to The Athletic on Enright
Link to Guardians prospects list
Link to phantom player wiki
Link to 1972 scouting article
Link to Montes de Oca wiki
Link to Montes de Oca name
Link to Diamondbacks prospects
Link to MDO article 1
Link to MDO article 2
Link to MDO article 3
Link to MDO article 4
Link to Kelly at B-Ref
Link to MiLB.com on Kelly
Link to SI on Kelly
Link to EW Stanky draft
Link to Mexican League article
Link to Koo video
Link to Bois on Koo
Link to Kenny Jackelen
Link to player signings spreadsheet

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I owe Red Sox catcher Carlos Narváez an apology. In my preseason write-up of Boston’s backstops, I called him “organizational depth.” I lumped him in with Blake Sabol and Seby Zavala as the uninspiring backup catcher options for the team with the worst projected WAR at the position in the American League. That was in March. Now it’s June, and the rookie is slashing .288/.356/.456 with five home runs and a 126 wRC+ through 47 games. Thanks to strong framing, blocking, and throwing skills, he has earned himself 6 DRS and a +6 FRV. The only catcher who has him beat in both metrics is defensive wizard Patrick Bailey. By WAR, Narváez is one of the top-30 position players in the game. Among catchers, he ranks fifth, and if you only consider WAR accumulated as a catcher, he ranks second. If he keeps this up for a few more weeks, he’ll have a compelling case to be Cal Raleigh’s backup at the All-Star Game this summer.

Regardless what happens from here on out, Narváez has already been far more than just depth for the Red Sox. I was wrong, and I will readily eat crow or humble pie, though I’d really prefer the pie. At the same time, I can’t blame myself too much for overlooking him. After all, it took more than eight years from the day he signed with the Yankees as an international free agent for him to appear as anything more than an honorable mention on one of our organizational top prospect lists. Even then, Eric Longenhagen ranked him 32nd in the Yankees system (35+ FV) entering 2024, with the words “third catcher” closing out his write-up. Meanwhile, Narváez didn’t appear on a Baseball America list until this past offseason, when the publication ranked him 29th in the Red Sox organization. Neither Baseball Prospectus, nor The Athletic mentioned him on their top-20 Red Sox prospects lists this winter.

While I might have been wrong about who Narváez would be, I wasn’t wrong about who he had been when I called him “unknown” and “hardly… a top prospect.” Still, I used his reputation, or really his lack of a reputation, to let myself off the hook from learning more about him. Relying on reputation is often a necessary heuristic technique – if we all had to verify everything for ourselves, we’d never accomplish anything – but that doesn’t mean it can’t lead to mistakes. With more than 100 catchers to consider for the Position Power Rankings, I needed to find ways to reduce my workload. So, I glossed over Narváez because he didn’t have enough of a reputation to attract more of my attention. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

When I wrote a few weeks ago about how Kyle Schwarber deserves to be the first player in baseball history to get not his own bobblehead doll, but rather his own bobble helmet doll, I neglected to mention one thing. Schwarber has been brilliant this season. He’s off to the best start of his entire career. Schwarber is currently running a 164 wRC+, which makes him the eighth-best qualified hitter in baseball. His 19 home runs and 16% walk rate both rank in the top five. That excellent spring is all the more impressive considering that Schwarber is, relatively speaking, something of a slow starter. He owns a career 110 wRC+ in March and April, followed by a 115 mark in May, then a 145 mark in June. This season, he just started out hot and got even hotter. Here’s a table that shows his wOBA in March and April through his entire career:

Schwarber has had plenty of hot streaks like this one before, but never to lead off a season. Moreover, the way he’s doing it is different. With Joey Gallo attempting to reinvent himself as a pitcher, Schwarber stands alone as the game’s foremost practitioner of the Three True Outcomes, but he’s doing his best to abandon one of those outcomes. He’s currently running a 24.4% strikeout rate, which would represent the lowest rate of his career and a drop of more than four percentage points compared to last season. In addition to lowering his strikeout rate, Schwarber is doing more damage than ever when he puts the ball in play. His .499 wOBAcon and .531 xwOBAcon are the best marks of his entire career. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Greetings, FanGrapheteers!

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I don’t actually know; there’s a lot of data on our proejction probabilities, but I don’t have access to our historical numbers of game vs. game.

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I imagine they’re best when the teams are closely matched, since they’re game state based.

12:06

Dan Szymborski: At some point, we’ll have a ZiPS in-game version of this installed (you may have seen the beta in the playoffs), and that will know more about the relative strengths of the team

Read the rest of this entry »

In early April, Davy Andrews penned an article that ran here at FanGraphs and began with the following: “You may have noticed that this is the Year of the Kick-Change.” My colleague went on to explain the pitch, which by now most people reading this are well familiar with. Our own coverage of the popular offering also includes an interview with Davis Martin and Matt Bowman from last September, and a feature from this spring on Hayden Birdsong, who throws a kick-change, and his teammate Landen Roupp, who does not. The pitch is thrown exclusively (at least to my knowledge) by supinators such as Martin, who explained that spiking his middle finger on a seam allows him to “kick the axis of the ball into that three o’clock axis [and] get that saucer-type spin to get the depth that a guy who could pronate a changeup would get to.”

Thinking about the pitch recently, a question came to mind: What would happen if a natural pronator tried to throw a kick-change?

In search of an answer, I queried three major league pitching coaches, as well as Tread Athletics’ Leif Strom, who in addition to having hands-on knowledge of the kick-change is credited with coining the term. Their responses varied. Moreover, they meandered a bit — but in a good way — as they offered insight into the science of throwing a baseball from a mound.

Here is what they had to say.

The following answers have been lightly edited for clarity.

———

Desi Druschel, New York Mets

“There are a couple of ways to look at the kick-change. Most people interpret it as, ‘the spike kicks the axis,’ but I’m not necessarily convinced. Another thought is that [the middle finger] is just out of the way, and the ring finger kind of swipes below it. You’re kicking the axis, for sure, but I don’t know if it’s always kicking it how people might think. That would be on the one where there is more supination. Read the rest of this entry »

About six weeks ago, Eric Longenhagen published his Dodgers Top Prospects list. It ran 51 players deep, and was headlined by some of the trendiest names in prospect circles: Roki Sasaki, Dalton Rushing, Zyhir Hope. Down at no. 24, headlining the 40 FV group, was a blurb that started with the following phrase: “Low Leverage Ben.”

Ben Casparius is a bulk reliever. He is now what the fifth starter in a four-man rotation was 40 years ago. Most baseball fans know him as the rookie who got called on to make a spot start in Game 4 of last year’s World Series. He’s the guy you call on when Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Jack Flaherty, and Walker Buehler have all taken their turns in the rotation, and Clayton Kershaw is hurt. And so is Tyler Glasnow. And Tony Gonsolin. And Bobby Miller. And River Ryan. And Gavin Stone. And Emmet Sheehan. And (ironically) Kyle Hurt. And Shohei Ohtani, or half of him, anyway.

I guess when you’re in the double digits on the Dodgers’ starting pitcher pecking order, getting “Low Leverage” as a nickname is an occupational hazard. But I don’t like it. Mostly because it’s one short of the three-beat alliteration that made “Late Night LaMonte” roll off the tongue so felicitously. (My condolences to LaMonte Wade Jr. on his recent DFA.)

But also because it’s not true. Read the rest of this entry »