Justin Verlander did not have a good night on Sunday against the Diamondbacks in Houston. The 41-year-old future Hall of Famer retired just nine of the 19 batters he faced, allowing eight runs in three innings in one of the worst starts of his 19-year career — and not an isolated one, either, as he’s been struggling since returning from his second stint on the injured list. For as difficult as it is to believe, even in a rotation that’s been beset by injuries this year, Verlander might not be one of the Astros’ starters when the playoffs roll around.

At Minute Maid Park on Sunday evening, Verlander worked a scoreless first inning, getting ahead of all four hitters he faced and allowing just one baserunner; he hit Joc Pederson on the left leg with a two-out, two-strike curveball. His second and third innings were another story, however, as he allowed seven runs on a pair of homers by Pavin Smith, and, well, you can do the math as to the traffic that preceded them.

Struggling to command his fastball and not fooling anyone with his secondaries, Verlander netted just four swings and misses from among his 75 pitches, all on his four-seamer, and got just six called strikes from his curve, slider, and changeup combined (18% CSW%). For just the fifth time in 523 career starts and the first time since July 2, 2017, he didn’t strike out a single hitter. The eight runs he allowed were one short of his career high, set on April 15, 2017; he hadn’t allowed exactly eight runs since June 26, 2016. Read the rest of this entry »

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Statistically speaking, Joey Loperfido has gotten off to slow start in his major league career. Over his first 222 plate appearances, the lefty-hitting outfielder is slashing just .229/.281/.371 with four home runs and an 86 wRC+. Those numbers are split fairly evenly between two organizations; the 25-year-old Loperfido was traded from the Houston Astros to the Toronto Blue Jays shortly before July’s trade deadline as part of the four-player Yusei Kikuchi deal.

He’s projected to produce more than he has thus far. The Duke University product put up a .933 OPS in Triple-A prior to making his major league debut at the end of April, and as Eric Longenhagen explained in mid-June, Loperfido “has done nothing but perform since breaking into the pro ranks.” Our lead prospect analyst assigned Loperfido, who was selected in the seventh round of the 2021 draft, a 45 FV while ranking him third on our 2024 Astros Top Prospects list.

Loperfido sat down to talk hitting when the Blue Jays played at Fenway Park in late August.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite ice-breaker questions in this series: Do you approach hitting as more of an art or as more of a science?

Joey Loperfido: “I think it’s somewhere in between. When you look back at it, you can see the parts that would be considered more of a science. But when you’re doing it, and as you’re feeling it, a lot of it is an art. There are a lot of calculated actions and movements, and for me that’s kind of the question of feel versus real.”

Laurila: How has that perspective evolved over the years? When you’re a kid, you’re basically just up there swinging a bat… 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.

The final stretch of the season is now upon us, and it sure is going to be fun. The Orioles and Yankees are jockeying for the AL East title, with a first-round bye almost certainly going to the winner. The NL Wild Card is a beautiful mess, with four teams fighting for the three spots and two other clubs, the Cubs and Cardinals, still lurking in the distance. And the under-the-radar Tigers are roaring, trying to pull out a last-minute postseason berth after selling at the trade deadline.

Last month, when I wrote about the players who were added off the waiver wire, I mentioned that another batch of waiver claims would come at the end of August, after more teams fell out of contention. So now that we’re well into September, let’s take a look at some of the notable players who’ve switched teams over the last few weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re running out of season. With the field of contenders winnowed to the point that only two teams have Playoff Odds between 8% and 80%, much of the intrigue beyond jockeying for seeding concerns a race against the clock. Players have only so much time to recover from injuries, particularly new ones, and so some returns are in doubt. Their availability could very well affect how the playoffs unfold.

On that front, it was a weekend featuring bad news for some contenders as they reckoned with their latest bad breaks, figuratively and literally. Gavin Stone, the unexpected stalwart of the Dodgers rotation, landed on the injured list due to shoulder inflammation, while Jeff McNeil, one of the Mets’ hottest hitters, suffered a fractured wrist. Whit Merrifield, who’s done good work filling in at second base for the Braves, broke a bone in his foot, and, if we shift focus to the fringes of the Wild Card race, the Mariners Luis Castillo strained a hamstring. Each of these situations deserves a closer look, so pitter patter, let’s get at ‘er. Read the rest of this entry »

With three weeks left in the regular season, it looks like there’s just one true playoff chase remaining: the National League Wild Card race. That said, there’s the possibility that the American League Wild Card race could get a lot more interesting if the Twins keep faltering and any of the Tigers, Mariners, or Red Sox get hot. Still, at a time of year when fans are often obsessively scoreboard watching, the lack of tension is disappointing.

This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance.

To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coinflip playoff odds (specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%). As the best and worst teams sort themselves out throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past several months, we have been working on adding customization features to our player pages for FanGraphs Members, focusing on information that’s pertinent for current major leaguers. If you are a Member and signed in, you can now configure and save three to six different custom dashboard cards for batters and pitchers.

You’ll find a gray bar at the top of the player pages underneath the player name header. If you click on the Player Dashboard link on the right that says “Open Settings,” it will open the dashboard controls:

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Last week, I modeled Shohei Ohtani’s chase for 50 home runs and 50 steals to predict when he might reach that historic dual milestone. That prediction isn’t static, though. Every time Ohtani plays a game, the likelihood of his getting to 50/50 changes. Good news, though: Updating the model is as easy as hitting a few keys and listening to my computer hum for a bit.

This isn’t going to be a long article. It is, however, an updated set of probabilities, which is the whole point of this exercise. Ohtani hit two homers in his weekend series against the Guardians, which leaves him only four home runs and four steals short of a half century in each statistic. His odds of reaching 50/50 are up to 61.3% in my simulations – they were 55.6% before this series.

As a quick refresher, I’m simulating the likelihood of his hitting 50 of each statistic with a Monte Carlo simulation that takes his talent, his opponents, and the stadiums where he plays into account. I also introduce a random fluctuation in his home run talent: Sometimes he’s hot, sometimes he’s not, and sometimes he’s in between. I then simulate the season a million times and note whether he hits 50/50, and if so, in which game he does it.

The two homers in the weekend series have slightly moved up the most likely date for when he’ll reach the 50/50 threshold. Before his series against Cleveland, my simulation suggested that the single game most likely to see Ohtani either steal the base or hit the homer that pushes him over the line was the Dodgers’ September 27 game in Colorado. That’s still the case – but it’s now dead even with the previous game, September 26 in Los Angeles against the Padres. Furthermore, the Padres series has overtaken the final Rockies series as the three-game set in which he is most likely to set the mark.

Here’s the complete set of game-by-game probabilities:

I think these projections do a good job of handling a tricky problem. But I do want to make one point about their limitations: Steals aren’t quite as easy to model as home runs. Pretty much every time that Ohtani comes to the plate, his ideal outcome is a home run. He swings to hit home runs, and pitchers do their best to prevent them. The past does a great job of predicting the future here, because intent doesn’t change from one plate appearance to the next. Steals don’t work quite like that. Sure, Ohtani’s speed is a consistent and important input; the same is true for his baserunning instincts, the opposing pitcher’s ability to hold him on, the catcher’s throwing arm, and so on. But how much he wants to steal is also crucially important. He’s attempting to steal more frequently in the second half of the season than he was in the first, and his desire to run presumably will only accelerate if he’s sitting on, say, 50 home runs and 49 steals. I’m modeling a steady-state true-talent world, but I think it would be reasonable to tilt the distribution slightly earlier if Ohtani hits the homer plateau before the stolen base one, which looks more likely today than it did last week.

In any case, some takeaways: The last six games of the season are the most likely time to see history. The series against the Padres is now the best bet despite San Diego’s excellent pitching staff. The last series of the season, at elevation against a bad pitching staff, is the next most likely. The likelihood of Ohtani’s getting to 50 during both series is higher now than it was on Thursday, and I might even be underestimating it given that he might decide to attempt more steals as he nears the border of history.

Last week, my colleague Jay Jaffe noted that Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor had just entered the list of top 20 shortstops in JAWS, his system for assessing players’ Hall of Fame worthiness, which factors in a mix of career value (WAR) and peak value (WAR over their seven best seasons). That’s not the only notable thing about Lindor’s season, of course, as after a slow start to 2024, he has forced his way into the NL MVP conversation. With a .270/.339/.492 line, 135 wRC+, and 7.2 WAR, he may be having his best season in a career that has him looking increasingly Cooperstown-bound.

It seems almost absurd, but Lindor’s OPS didn’t take even the tiniest of peeks over .700 until June 5 — he’s been so hot that you’d think he was produced in Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. With Shohei Ohtani fighting for the first ever 50-50 season, Lindor may now be the biggest obstacle to the former’s coronation. Given the relatively modest impact even the biggest baseball stars have in comparison to their peers in football or basketball, no individual can really carry a team, but Lindor is certainly trying his best: The Mets have the second-most wins in baseball since the start of June (54), with the offense going from 17th to sixth in seasonal wRC+ over the same timeframe:

In that stretch, Lindor has edged out the other NL hitters by nearly 2 WAR. One of the odder consequences of the shape of Lindor’s performance is that it may result in a Hall of Fame player having missed the All-Star Game in the best season of his career. In fact, despite ranking fifth in WAR among hitters since the start of 2020 (behind Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, Freddie Freeman, and José Ramírez), Lindor hasn’t made an All-Star squad since 2019. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for a player who plays in baseball’s largest market and has a $341 million contract to be underrated, but here we are!

Ranking 20th at your position in JAWS is already a mighty impressive feat, but it’s even more impressive when you’re only 30 years old, meaning there’s a lot of time left to add heft to your career WAR, which makes up half of JAWS. With Lindor’s (relatively) disappointing 2021 Mets debut even farther back in the rear-view mirror, it seems like a good time to provide an update on his rest-of-career projections:

Even projecting a typical decline through his 30s — there’s a reason the vast majority of Hall of Fame cases are largely built when players are in their 20s — Lindor’s mean ol’ ZiPS forecast offers ample opportunity for him to put up some seriously gaudy career totals. The median ZiPS projection has Lindor finishing with 400 career homers on the nose, enough to rank him as one of the best power-hitting shortstops in baseball history:

Whether you look at players who primarily played shortstop or only consider performance while playing the position, Lindor features prominently. His 30 home runs this season gives him 245 for his career, 10th all-time among shortstops, while finishing with 400 would be enough to put him fourth all-time. If we look only at home runs while playing short, Lindor is sixth and is just over 100 homers behind Cal Ripken Jr. for the top spot. Given that Lindor is an elite defensive player, it doesn’t seem like he’s ticketed for an easier position anytime soon, short of a serious injury that necessitates a move.

Before last season, I gave ZiPS the ability to project career JAWS. In an era that’s rich in star shortstops, Lindor is currently projected to finish at the top of this generation. Here’s a projected JAWS chart, once all the currently active major league players have headed off into the sunset:

Even just the median projection would make Lindor a shoo-in on his first Hall of Fame ballot and put him meaningfully ahead of the other shortstops who debuted in the 21st century — for now, at least. If Bobby Witt Jr. keeps his beast mode switched on, he’ll rocket up this list fairly quickly (Gunnar Henderson just missed the list, along with Trea Turner). Given his already impressive place in history, I think Lindor would still make the Hall pretty easily even if his career ended tomorrow, as the Sandy Koufax of shortstops. The Mets’ penchant for sudden, often hilarious implosions makes watching them sometimes feel like an especially cringe-inducing episode of The Office. But if you aren’t tuning into their games, you’re missing out on the peak of a possible future Hall of Famer. And as countless players from Mike Trout to Miguel Cabrera to Ken Griffey Jr. have demonstrated, the opportunity to see these players at their best is frequently far more fleeting than we hope.

Jaden Hamm was surprised when he was selected by the Detroit Tigers in last year’s draft. That it happened in the fifth round wasn’t unexpected — he’d been projected to go in the three-to-five range — but the organization he would soon ink a professional contract with certainly was. The right-hander out of Middle Tennessee State explained it this way when I talked to him prior to a game at West Michigan’s LMCU Ballpark last month:

“I get a call [from my agent] and he’s like, ‘The Tigers are you taking you in the fifth,’” Hamm recalled. “ I was like, ‘What?’ He was like, ‘The Tigers.’ I was like, ‘I know who you said, but I didn’t expect that.’”

Subterfuge played a role in the surprise. Hamm had talked to Detroit’s area scout only a handful of times during his junior season, and while he went to the draft combine and had meetings with teams. the Tigers weren’t one of them. His best guess was that he was going to be drafted by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Atlanta Braves, or Houston Astros. That none of them — nor any other team — pulled the trigger in time has turned out well for the Tabbies. Hamm has emerged as the second-best pitching prospect in Detroit’s system, behind only shooting star Jackson Jobe.

The numbers tell a big part of the story. In 99 innings with West Michigan, the 22-year-old (as of earlier this week) Hamm has overpowered High-A hitters to the tune of a 2.64 ERA, a 3.10 FIP, a 30.6% strikeout rate, and just 73 hits allowed.

Another part of the story are Hamm’s metrics, which include 20-21 inches of vertical ride on his low-to-mid 90s four-seamer. Learning how best to employ his heater is yet another part of how he’s gone from relatively unknown to a breakout prospect. Read the rest of this entry »