It’s entirely possible, dear sir, that I simply misheard you given the permeating hubbub in this, our fair city’s modern-day Colosseum, but just a moment ago I was left with the odd impression that you might have pronounced me out. At the risk of contravening such an esteemed authority as yourself, I aver that I must have misheard you, owing to the fact it surely was clear to one and all that the only sensible course of action under a circumstance such as this one would be to adjudge the ball foul. The only fair call is a foul ball (if you’ll forgive the indulgence), but as I say, these ears love nothing so much as to play their little tricks on me from time to time, so if the issue at hand is a simple case of misapprehension, then simply say the word and off I’ll scurry. It would be my genuine pleasure to gather my lumber, as it were, and assume once more the ready position here in the right-hand rectangle, for I do adore a tussle. Read the rest of this entry »
Anthony Santander might be the most underrated hitter in the American League, at least from a national perspective. Overshadowed by the young talent on his own team, the 29-year-old Baltimore Orioles outfielder has 102 home runs and a 123 wRC+ over the past three seasons. This year’s numbers are especially impressive. A reliable cog in manager Brandon Hyde’s lineup — he’s played in 145 of the team’s 151 games — the switch-hitter from Margarita, Venezuela, has hit 41 homers while putting up a 129 wRC+ and a club-best 95 RBI this season.
The degree to which he remains under the radar is relative. Santander enjoyed his first All-Star selection this summer, and he is currently getting increased attention due to his forthcoming free agency. Accolades have nonetheless been in shorter-than-deserved supply, and that includes our own coverage here at FanGraphs. As evidenced by his player page, Santander’s name isn’t in the title of any piece we’ve published prior to the one you’re reading. As good as he’s been, that is something that needed to be corrected.
Santander sat down to talk hitting one day after smacking his 40th home run of the season last week at Fenway Park.
———
David Laurila: How did you first learn to hit, and what has been your development path from there?
Anthony Santander: “My dad introduced me to baseball when I was 4 years old, and when I was young I was a pure right-handed hitter. I didn’t start switch-hitting until I started working to become a pro when I was 15 or 16. That took a little bit, because it was new for me.”
I was writing from the heart. When the Nationals designated Victor Robles for assignment back in May, I wrote about what it was like to wait for him to make it to the big leagues; and then, once he arrived, to wait for him to turn into a star; and then, when it became clear that he wasn’t going to turn into a star, to wait for him to turn into a solid contributor; and then, as the likelihood of that outcome grew more and more faint, just to wait.
Fans reserve a special kind of affection for players like Robles. They don’t do it on purpose; it’s just how people tend to work. Superstars, with their reliable excellence, are easy to love. They’re big, warm Labrador retrievers with their tails waggling like Gary Sheffield’s bat as they wait impatiently for you to open the front door every night. They give you exactly what you want, and the love they inspire is beautiful and simple. When they move on to another organization, the loss you feel is deep, yes, but its edges are clearly defined because something pure has been taken from you.
When you’ve been watching and waiting and hoping for a player to figure things out for the better part of the decade, the feelings involved are a lot messier. Even if your love and your loss aren’t as profound, their edges are a lot more ragged. You’ve spent years pinballing between highs and lows, hopes and fears, anxiety and joy and despair, sometimes all at once. In other words, it’s a lot more like real life and real love. By the time a player like that moves on, you’ve invested way too much of your well-being in them to simply stop caring. It’s hard to imagine a single Nationals fan anywhere who wasn’t rooting for Robles to finally figure things out once the Mariners gave him the change of scenery he so clearly needed, who wasn’t truly happy to see him get off to a hot start in Seattle. But we all have our limits.
Back on August 6, over at Baseball Prospectus, Mikey Ajeto broke down all the mechanical adjustments that Robles has made since he joined Seattle. (Yes, the same Mikey Ajeto who writes exclusively about pitchers. Honestly, the biggest miracle that Robles has performed isn’t magically going supernova the moment that he turned the W on his hat upside down; it’s getting Ajeto to pay attention to a hitter for once.) He’s dropped his hands, ditched his leg kick, and added a scissor kick and a mini-squat before the pitch. Because Ajeto covered those more technical topics, I can continue to focus on the surface-level numbers. And you know what happened to the surface-level numbers after the publication of that article, which was entirely devoted to documenting Robles’s sudden improvement as the plate? They didn’t just keep getting better, they exploded.
I was wishing as hard as anyone for Robles to succeed with the Mariners, but I didn’t mean like this. I was thrilled to see him land a two-year extension worth a guaranteed $9.75 million, but he wasn’t supposed to instantly turn into the best player in baseball, like moving moving from a district named Washington to an actual state named Washington was all it took to break a powerful curse cast by some old Issaquah-based witch who fell into the Reflecting Pool during her mock trial team’s trip to DC in ninth grade and never got over the humiliation. And no, I’m not exaggerating. From June 5 to August 17, Robles turned his season around, running a 118 wRC+. Since August 18, Robles has literally been the best player in baseball: He’s put up a 230 wRC+ and accrued 1.8 WAR, more than whichever Cooperstown-bound MVP candidate you’d care to name. Sure, it’s fair to point out that he’s running a comically high .527 BABIP over that period, but his .386 xwOBA still ranks 19th among qualified players during that stretch. It’s starting to look like the simplest explanation for why Robles never lived up to his potential is that cherry blossoms are his personal kryptonite.
Somehow Robles left this ragged hole in the hearts of Nationals fans, but arrived in Seattle a gleaming superstar. The chaos has only reared its head lately. Robles is playing through a hip issue, and left his last two games due to different injuries: leg soreness on Sunday and a right hand contusion after getting hit by a pitch to lead off last night’s game, an 11-2 loss to the Yankees. Before Robles was removed against New York, his wildness on the basepaths finally caught up with the Mariners, with whom he’d previously gone 25-for-25 on stolen base attempts. He was caught stealing home in the bottom of the first inning, taking the bat out of Justin Turner’s hands with the bases loaded, two outs, and a 3-0 count.
I’m not saying all this is going to last, no matter how much Robles loves the Puget Sound. Since he arrived in Seattle, he’s run a 34.4% hard-hit rate and an 86.7-mph average exit velocity. The former is much better than Robles has put up in any previous season, but the latter isn’t and both are still well below league average. The real change is his barrel rate of 8.6%, which is miles above anything he’s accomplished in previous years. But keep in mind that we’re talking about just 13 barrels out of 151 balls in play, and neither his launch angle nor his GB/FB rate represents much of a departure from his career numbers. We’ve moved past any-batter-can-do-just-about-anything-over-60-plate-appearances territory, but we’re not all that far off either.
Robles has made some honest-to-goodness adjustments to his swing that have had an immediate, dramatic effect — frankly, the effect was so immediate and so dramatic that the Nationals should be looking closely at every single one of those adjustments and asking themselves what the Mariners saw that they didn’t — and we should probably adjust our priors going forward. But I haven’t seen anything (yet) to convince me that he’s going to keep running a BABIP above .500 from here on out. Further, Robles has been dealing with a hip issue in addition to the leg soreness (which is a separate ailment) and the hand injury that forced his early exit from the last two games. As someone who spent something like a quarter of my life rooting for Robles to finally put it all together, I sincerely hope his nagging injuries turn out to be no more than just that, and that when Robles finally does come down to earth, he finds a comfortable spot that’s situated well above sea level. But as long as he’s spending whole months with a wRC+ above 200, I reserve the right to be a little jealous.
This all started because I hate losing. Especially to Ben Lindbergh.
Just before the season started, I took part in the annual Effectively Wild preseason predictions game, in which Meg Rowley, the Bens (Lindbergh and Clemens), and I each made 10 bold predictions about the 2024 campaign. The listeners voted on which ones they thought would come true, and we’d be awarded points accordingly — the more outlandish the prediction, the greater the reward if it happened.
One of my 10 predictions was that Spencer Strider would strike out 300 batters in 2024. As my predictions go, this one felt pretty conservative. Strider had struck out an absurd (and league-leading) 281 batters in only 186 2/3 innings last season. I attended Strider’s Opening Day start in which he debuted a new breaking ball and punched out eight Phillies in just five innings. I was feeling good.
Then Strider’s elbow started barking in his next start, and by mid-April it was announced that he’d need Tommy John surgery and would take no further part in the 2024 season. Scorekeeper Chris Hanel marked that prediction down as incorrect, and took 42 points from my score. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and FanGraphs’ Dan Szymborski banter about Ben’s timing in respect to Declan Cronin’s homerless streak, the perils of podcasts, predictions, and regression to the mean, the White Sox cutting payroll and their projections for the rest of this season, next season, and beyond, Gerrit Cole’s ignominious intentional walk, Alex Cora’s seeming admission that the Red Sox threw at Aaron Judge, Farhan Zaidi’s future in San Francisco, Heliot Ramos’s historic splash hit, Mike Trout’s possible position change, the Dodgers’ injury-plagued pitching staff, and the breakout of Bowden Francis. Then (1:21:27) Ben talks to Tigers TV voice Jason Benetti about how Detroit has made a late run despite selling at the trade deadline, the franchise’s outlook, and Jason’s job change, plus a postscript (1:58:10).
Projecting the future is always difficult and full of inevitable misses, and I’m not just saying this because I have a vested interest in having you think I’m good at my job. We have a vague idea of a player’s broad future, enough so that nobody would trade Jackson Holliday for, say, Patrick Corbin. However, there’s always a great deal of uncertainty in prognosticating, and assuming for the sake of this opening paragraph that multiverse theory is correct, there will be planes of existence in which Corbin wins the NL Comeback Player of the Year award in 2025 when the Dodgers somehow fix his slider after a five-minute conversation. That’s not the way to bet, of course, and it’s likely that struggling rookies, especially ones with immaculate pre-2024 credentials — such as Holliday — will see this season as a bump in the road rather than a nasty car-destroying pothole.
Turns out, this was the season for longshot Rookie of the Year picks, especially in the American League. Of the top 17 AL rookies based on the preseason Rookie of the Year betting odds, only two players, Colton Cowser and Wilyer Abreu, ever had a plausible argument for being in the conversation once games started. Luis Gil and Austin Wells were nowhere to be found. For the table below, I’ve included 15 of the 17 players who were given AL Rookie of the Year awards odds by DraftKings before the season, sorted by their preseason ranking in descending order, along with their actual 2024 stats. I’m citing these rankings to get a general sense of who the favorites were back in March, not because I think they are more or less accurate than any other sportsbook odds.
(I’ve excluded the two other players, outfielder Everson Pereira and pitcher Ricky Tiedemann, because neither of them have reached the big leagues this season.)
Top AL Rookies Preseason 2024 vs. Actual Performance
Only six of these 17 players played even a half-season’s worth of games in the majors. It’s not just sportsbooks and bettors that got it wrong; by the time voting is official, we will have gone 0-for-25 here at FanGraphs.
I’ve done the same thing for the 19 NL players who were given preseason Rookie of the Year odds, with one table for hitters and another for pitchers. (All of the AL rookies who received preseason odds and actually played in 2024 are position players.) Things went significantly better for senior-circuit rookies.
Top NL Rookies Preseason 2024 vs. Actual Performance (Hitters)
So, what’s next for the rookies who are out of the awards picture? To get an idea of the change in their futures, I re-ran their projections for the next five years to compare to what their outlooks were during the preseason, using data as of Tuesday morning. I left out the players who have at least two WAR in 2024, as well as Matsui, who is a reliever and performed right in line with expectations, giving us a group of 21. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a National League Rookie of the Year voter this year, so I will not express any of my personal feelings regarding who should win that award.
ZiPS Projections, Preseason vs. Today
Player
2025 WAR
Preseason
Chg
2025-2029 WAR
Preseason
Chg
Evan Carter
1.7
2.6
-0.9
9.7
15.2
-5.5
DL Hall
0.8
1.6
-0.8
5.4
9.8
-4.4
Jasson Domínguez
1.0
1.7
-0.7
7.3
11.4
-4.1
Wyatt Langford
2.6
3.1
-0.5
14.9
17.2
-2.3
Hunter Goodman
0.4
0.7
-0.3
2.7
4.9
-2.2
Nolan Schanuel
1.4
1.9
-0.5
9.0
10.4
-1.4
Max Meyer
1.3
1.5
-0.2
7.0
8.2
-1.2
AJ Smith-Shawver
1.3
1.5
-0.2
8.8
9.8
-1.0
Jung Hoo Lee
2.2
2.6
-0.4
11.1
12.0
-0.9
Kyle Harrison
1.5
1.7
-0.2
9.2
9.9
-0.7
Jackson Holliday
3.5
3.6
-0.1
20.7
21.3
-0.6
Ceddanne Rafaela
2.1
2.2
-0.1
13.0
13.3
-0.3
Coby Mayo
2.6
2.6
0.0
17.2
17.0
0.2
Tyler Black
2.0
1.9
0.1
10.5
10.2
0.3
Brooks Lee
1.8
1.7
0.1
10.5
9.8
0.7
Junior Caminero
1.3
1.0
0.3
9.0
7.8
1.2
Parker Meadows
2.3
1.7
0.6
11.5
9.4
2.1
Kyle Manzardo
1.9
1.5
0.4
11.5
8.4
3.1
James Wood
2.5
1.7
0.8
16.1
12.6
3.5
Heston Kjerstad
1.9
1.3
0.6
8.8
5.2
3.6
Dylan Crews
2.2
0.5
1.7
13.6
2.8
10.8
In the projections, Evan Carter took the biggest hit. With a rather short, walk-heavy pedigree, ZiPS already saw him as riskier than the other top projected rookies, and then he had a rough early-season performance and a back injury that ruined his 2024. Taking all of this into account, ZiPS drops his 2025 line to .244/.338/.399; with a decent glove, that’s enough to be an average corner outfielder in this offensive environment, but well short of his preseason .259/.358/.412 projection. Carter’s teammate, Wyatt Langford, was a source of much projection disagreement entering the season, with Steamer and ZiPS quite excited, and THE BAT being rather meh about the situation. So far, meh has been closer, though he has hit much better (.258/.326/.424 in 91 games) since returning from an injury in late May.
Jasson Domínguez mainly makes this list for two reasons, more time on the injured list, causing ZiPS to take a foggier view of his health, and the fact that he didn’t have the major breakout yet, which is one of the things that ZiPS was banking on for him. His performance in Triple-A was good, but minor league offense is still crazy; ZiPS has his minor league translation at .263/.320/411, compared to his actual .309/.368/.480 line. That said, Domínguez should be starting every day for the Yankees over Alex Verdugo.
ZiPS is definitely bearish on Nolan Schanuel, and it’s increasingly confident that he won’t develop enough power, or enough secondary skills to compensate for his lack of power, to be a real plus at first base. The projections never bought into Hunter Goodman; he hit even worse than expected this year, and is not particularly young. I’m actually surprised DL Hall didn’t take an even bigger hit; back in a starting role, the walks came back with a vengeance, to the extent that returning to the bullpen for good might be the far better fit for him now.
Jackson Holliday’s numbers didn’t take a big hit for a few reasons. First, and most importantly, despite a really lousy debut in the majors, he played well enough in the minors — plus he’s so young and his résumé is so strong — that his small-sample struggles barely register. By reverse-o-fying Holliday’s major league woes into an untranslated minor league line and including it in his overall Triple-A production, ZiPS estimates that he would’ve had a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A this season, down from his actual mark of 142. A 20-year-old shortstop with a 118 wRC+ in Triple-A would still top everybody’s prospect list.
Several of these players simply didn’t get enough playing time to make a real impression. Coby Mayo and Heston Kjerstad never really had significant chances to grab starting roles with the Orioles this year, and James Wood and Dylan Crews were both midseason call-ups. Even so, the two Nationals rookies received some of the biggest bumps in their new projections. For Crews, the improvement was massive, largely because ZiPS has very little to go on and didn’t translate his college numbers as positively as Wyatt Langford’s, meaning that with a good first impression, Crews had a lot of room to grow in the eyes of ZiPS. Wood added nearly 200 points of OPS at Triple-A from his previous season — a combined .874 mark between High- and Double-A — at the time of his call-up; it was such a drastic improvement that if I had re-done the ZiPS Top 100 prospect list then, he would have come out on top.
None of these 21 players is in contention for the Rookie of the Year awards that will be announced in a few months. But for most of them, the lack of hardware in 2024 doesn’t represent a setback that changes their future outlooks too much.
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my first chat of September. I apologize for that — this current time slot hasn’t worked out well lately with dad duties and so I’m going to explore moving to a 12 pm time slot
Jay Jaffe: A lot of times that I miss the chat it’s because I have to pick up my daughter from school or (in the summer) camp. Just tough to get around needing to happen in the middle of a chat.
The Twins still have a hold on the third AL Wild Card spot — for the moment. After blowing a 3-0 lead against the Guardians in Monday’s series opener in Cleveland, they’ve lost 18 of their past 27 games. They haven’t won a series against a team with a winning percentage of .500 or better in over a month, and now lead the surging Tigers by just a game and a half in the Wild Card standings. This past weekend, Minnesota activated both Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa from the injured list following lengthy absences, but the two stars by all accounts are playing at less than 100 percent, and sadly for manager Rocco Baldelli, they aren’t likely to provide innings out of the bullpen when they’re not in the lineup.
As of August 17, the Twins were 70-53, a season-high 17 games above .500. At the time, they were running second in the AL Central, two games behind the Guardians, and second in the Wild Card race, a game and a half behind the Orioles but two games ahead of the Royals, from whom they’d just taken two out of three (that aforementioned last series victory against a winning team). Since then, the Twins have gone just 9-18 (.333), outdoing only the White Sox (5-21, .192) and Angels (7-19, .269) among all major league teams; even the worst NL team in that span, the Marlins, has gone 10-17 (.370). The slump has pretty much closed the door on Minnesota’s chances of claiming the AL Central, and meanwhile, the Tigers have gone 17-9, tied for the majors’ best record in that span, to poke their noses into the Wild Card picture.
Twins Change in Playoff Odds
Date
W
L
W%
Div GB
WC GB
Div
Bye
WC
Playoffs
Win WS
August 17
70
53
.569
2
+5*
36.8%
33.9%
55.6%
92.4%
6.4%
September 17
79
71
.527
7.5
+1.5*
0.2%
0.1%
76.6%
76.7%
3.2%
Change
9
18
.333
-36.6%
-33.8%
+21.0%
-15.7%
-3.2%
* = lead over top non-Wild Card team.
During this slide, the Twins have lost series to the Padres, Cardinals, Braves, Royals, and Reds, splitting one with the Rays, and beating only the Blue Jays and Angels — not exactly a performance befitting a playoff-bound team. In that span, the offense has scored just 3.81 runs per game while the pitching staff has allowed 5.22 per game. It’s not what you want. Read the rest of this entry »
Heading into the year, everyone thought this would be the season that Shohei Ohtani, rehabbing from elbow surgery and DHing only, stepped aside and yielded MVP to someone else before resuming his place as the de facto favorite for the award in 2025. Instead, Ohtani decided to make a run at the first ever 50-homer, 50-steal season. The other primary competitor for NL MVP is Francisco Lindor, who isn’t chasing any statistical milestones and plays for a team whose most interesting narratives involve an amorphous fast food mascot, the musical endeavors of a part-time utility infielder, and the failure to extend Pete Alonso. And yet, Lindor’s position atop the NL WAR leaderboard demands consideration.
The marginal difference between Lindor and Ohtani’s WAR totals (7.4 and 7.0, respectively, at the time of this writing) creates a virtual tie to be broken based on the personal convictions of voters and anyone else with an opinion and an internet connection. For most, the choice between the two distills down to whether Ohtani’s 50/50 chase overrides his DH-only status. I’m not here to disparage Ohtani for not playing defense, but if you find that disqualifying for MVP recognition, I feel that. Then again, WAR includes a positional adjustment that does ding Ohtani with a significant deduction for not taking the field, and he’s still been keeping pace with Lindor on the value front anyway, so there’s not much more analysis to do there.
Instead, I want to explore how Ohtani’s one-dimensional role interacts with the value of a roster spot and the limitations that it places on how Los Angeles constructs and deploys the rest of its roster. In a two-way Ohtani season, he brings tremendous value to an individual roster spot as a frontline starter and an elite hitter who takes 600 or so plate appearances. But this year he contributes only as an offensive player. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
After taking a look at the qualifying offer decisions that have to be made shortly after the conclusion of the World Series, I figured now would be as good a time as any to run down the team and player option decisions. We’ll start with the National League, with the American League following on Friday. Here’s what’s on the table. Read the rest of this entry »
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Jay Jaffe
