Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a player/league/umpire spat over on-screen strike-zone plots, whether “K-Zone” and its ilk have had a harmful effect on the game, where they stand on a hitter vs. pitcher dispute about the mid-game use of advanced pitching machines, the promotion of Nationals top prospect James Wood (and the future of Orioles top prospect Jackson Holliday), and Byron Buxton’s recent success. Then (59:08) they identify and discuss the teams, hitters, and pitchers that have most surpassed or fallen short of their preseason projections halfway through the regular season.

Audio intro: Dave Armstrong and Mike Murray, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Nate Emerson, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Drellich on zone plots
Link to Reddit thread on plots
Link to BP piece on plots
Link to ESPN on pitching machines
Link to Ben on pitching machines
Link to Ben on moving the mound
Link to Ben on roster limits
Link to MLBTR on Wood
Link to Nationals depth chart
Link to FG’s The Board
Link to MLB Pipeline top 100
Link to AAA wRC+ leaders
Link to Holliday’s game logs
Link to O’s prospect list
Link to Orioles depth chart
Link to Buxton’s sprint speeds
Link to sprint speed leaderboard
Link to team projections sheets
Link to hitter projections sheets
Link to pitcher projections sheets
Link to preseason team projections
Link to preseason hitter projections
Link to preseason pitcher projections
Link to MLBTR on Phils injuries
Link to Sam on Duran
Link to Laurila on Hauck
Link to Sox pitching piece 1
Link to Sox pitching piece 2
Link to Sox pitching piece 3
Link to Sox pitching piece 4
Link to team DRS leaderboard
Link to Paine on the Cubs
Link to McKenzie feature
Link to Peña interview clip
Link to Ben on in-game interviews
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Twitter Account
 EW Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

A friend of mine is a huge Cleveland Guardians fan, and the other night we were discussing the awards chances for some of their top players. He pitched Emmanuel Clase as a Cy Young candidate — which, side note: Have you seen his ERA and Cleveland’s record when leading after eight innings this year? — but I was more interested in where José Ramírez and Steven Kwan might finish in the MVP race. I pulled up our leaderboards to see where they stood and was greeted with a surprise that had nothing to do with the Guards:

Huh? Josh Smith? The same Josh Smith who batted below the Mendoza Line in each of his first two major league seasons? The one who didn’t get a single postseason plate appearance last year? The one who barely made the Opening Day roster this season? Somehow, yes.

Through the first half of the 2024 campaign, that Josh Smith has been the most productive hitter in a loaded Texas Rangers lineup. Of course, that doesn’t quite capture how great the 26-year-old has been this season — after all, that loaded lineup is hurt and underperforming — but you could shave 25 points off his wRC+ and he’d still be their best hitter. Fortunately, the Yankees included Smith in their 2021 trade for Joey Gallo, so no shaving is required.

More to the point, Smith isn’t just excellent relative to the Rangers’ band of bangless bangers. Rather, his status as a great hitter this season is indisputable. Here’s where Smith ranks among qualified American League batters:

So what’s behind Smith’s surge? The most obvious thing to point to is his stance. According to Shawn McFarland of the Dallas Morning News, Smith changed his setup and load over the offseason while working out at Texas’ Globe Life Field with Seth Conner, the team’s assistant hitting coach. Smith stands more narrow now than he did last year, and he has gone to a “stacked” load — meaning he keeps his head stacked over the center of his body through his swing to the point of contact. The purpose of these adjustments was to cut down on strikeouts and fly balls, hit more line drives, and get back to the contact-oriented approach that made him a Top 100 prospect a few years ago.

“I decided to change it because I was hitting like a buck fifty,” Smith told McFarland in April. “That was kind of annoying, so I decided to make some changes.”

His actual batting average last year (.185) wasn’t quite that bad, but regardless, if you want to hike up your average, striking out less and hitting more line drives is a good place to start.

Midway through this season, Smith’s changes have worked as intended. His strikeout rate has dropped from 23.7% last year to 19.2% this year, and his 34.9% fly ball rate is down from last year’s 40.4%. Meanwhile, he’s increased his line drive rate by 10.4 percentage points (25.3%, up from 14.9%). That’s the biggest jump among the 188 players who recorded at least 200 plate appearances in both 2023 and ’24:

Smith has said that in his first two seasons, he got caught up in the push for power. He was chasing fly balls because he thought that was the way to stick in the big leagues. In some ways, he achieved what he was going for last year: He dramatically increased his barrel rate (10.5%, up from 2.4% in 2022) and his average exit velocity (88.5 mph, up from 87.0). And last year was an improvement at the plate from his woeful rookie campaign, but that’s like saying the 1963 Mets were better than the ’62 Mets — they were better, but only because they couldn’t get any worse:

During the offseason, in the afterglow of winning the World Series, Smith concluded that he wasn’t going to cut it as a slugger. At 5-foot-10 and 172 pounds, he couldn’t generate enough power to make his 2023 approach worthwhile. So he started working out with Conner and the early returns were promising, as Smith had a good spring training (154 wRC+ in 49 plate appearances). He made the Opening Day roster mainly because of his positional versatility, but he was a backup and playing time wasn’t guaranteed.

That is, until third baseman Josh Jung broke his wrist in the fourth game of the season, requiring surgery. Smith replaced him as the strong side of a platoon but quickly hit his way into the everyday lineup. Beginning with his first start on April 2 through the end of that month, Smith hit .321/.415/.506 across 94 plate appearances, good for a 163 wRC+. He hasn’t looked back since, climbing up the batting order and settling into the no. 3 hole. Even with Jung nearing his return to the lineup, manager Bruce Bochy has said Smith has earned a starting role, though where he plays in the field will depend on the day.

Narrowing his stance and stacking his load have helped Smith get into a better position to hit, but being in a good position to hit and actually doing it are two different things. That brings us to the driving force behind Smith’s success: He’s making much better swing decisions.

Inspired by teammate Corey Seager, Smith has started hunting pitches over the heart of the plate. Sounds obvious, right? Swing at the most hittable pitches. Duh! But that’s easier said than done when you’re in the box and trying to gear up for 100-mph heaters while also worrying about nasty breaking pitches. In Seager, Smith saw the benefits of a selectively aggressive approach and realized he’d been overthinking things in the box.

Now he’s stripped hitting down to its most basic elements to such a degree that I’m cringing while typing this because it sounds like I went to the Crash Davis School of Baseball Clichés: Swing at good pitches, don’t try to do too much, hit line drives. But this really is what Smith is doing. Check this out:

Smith has been especially great at hunting first pitches in the Heart Zone:

This season, nestled in the lineup between Seager and Adolis García most games, Smith is seeing first pitches in the Heart Zone at a much higher rate, and when he does, he’s hacking at and ripping them.

There are some questions about the sustainability of Smith’s breakout. He is greatly outperforming his expected stats (.244 xBA, .350 xSLG, .314 xwOBA), and it seems unlikely that pitchers will keep grooving him this many pitches. But, even if a regression is coming, it’s hard to image that Smith will be as bad as he was in his first two seasons. With his new setup and approach, his foundation as a line drive hitter should help him limit his slumps and produce as a solid lineup contributor, if not the surprising offensive force he’s been this season.

One of the most frequent questions I receive about ZiPS is folks wondering how the long-term projections for X hitter or Y pitcher have changed compared to what they were preseason. Since we’re right at the midpoint of the season, this is a good time to review just how the first half of the 2024 season has shifted expectations for individual players. The methodology I’m using is simple: comparing the current 2025-2029 WAR projections versus the 2025-2029 WAR projections as predicted at the start of the season. I’ve only included good prospects and players who are currently relevant to the majors (or injured) so we don’t get a bunch of random Double-A hitters who are slightly more or less below replacement level than they used to be gumming things up. I’ll tackle position players today, with pitchers to follow next week. Read the rest of this entry »

There were a few good reasons for me to catch up with Tanner Houck this past week. One is that he has arguably been the best starting pitcher in baseball over the first half of the season. Along with a 2.18 ERA and a 2.20 FIP, the 27-year-old Boston Red Sox right-hander boasts the highest WAR (3.6) among big league hurlers. Another is that I’ve been due to ask him about the pitch he relies on most. Per Statcast, Houck has thrown 41.8% sliders, 30.8% sinkers, 24.8% splitters, and 2.6% cutters.

Back in 2019, when he was pitching in Double-A, Houck was featured here at FanGraphs in an interview that focused on his sinker. Two years later, a second interview explored a developing splitter that, as my colleague Kyle Kishimoto detailed just over a month ago, has become an especially effective weapon. Which brings us to the here and now. Interested in both how Houck’s slider has evolved and how it plays within his three-pitch arsenal, I approached him to get some answers.

———

David Laurila: How does the slider you’re currently throwing differ from the one you had last year?

Tanner Houck: “It’s a different grip, technically. Last year, I was running up the horseshoe a little too much and not getting as much side-to-side action. This year there is a focus of creating more east-to-west, side-to-side movement with the pitch, as well as on prioritizing throwing it more in bigger situations. It’s my best pitch by far, so I’m leveraging it whenever I can in those big moments.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Baltimore Orioles. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. The parenthetical part of the title is largely just a nod to Zach Lowe, whose ESPN basketball column inspired this one. He occasionally mentions flaws or foibles holding a particular team or player back, in lovingly GIF’ed up detail. I’m more of a rah-rah type, and plenty of weeks I don’t have a single Didn’t Like in the column at all. This week, though, I can’t help it; mental lapses, baserunning errors, and overall sloppiness are all over the column. That’s not to say I don’t love watching it, because part of what’s fun about baseball is when a theoretically staid game gets messy, but let’s be clear: A lot of these plays are not good plays. We’ve got superstars getting confused, on-field collisions, and absolute howlers. Let’s get started.

1. The Profligate Nationals
The Nats are one of the unheralded fun stories of the baseball season. They’re hanging around .500 and playing like better days are ahead. CJ Abrams and MacKenzie Gore look like franchise mainstays. James Wood, another part of the return from the Juan Soto trade, isn’t far off. Mitchell Parker and Jake Irvin might be mid-rotation starters. Jacob Young is an elite defender. They have plenty of interesting role players, and the whole team plays with reckless and joyful abandon.

That’s particularly true on the basepaths, where the Nats rank third in steals but only 11th in total baserunning value. They’re always angling for how to advance another base, whatever the costs. Sometimes that ends in tears. 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.

Winning streaks don’t typically change the course of a team’s season. For example, the Dodgers are probably going to finish first in the NL West no matter how many games they win over the next week or so. The same would be true for the White Sox, just in reverse; they could rip off 10 straight wins and their outlook still would be about as bleak as it gets. And yet, in winning seven games in a row, the Astros have completely altered their trajectory for the rest of the season.

Incidentally, the last Astros loss came against those same abysmal White Sox on June 18, when Chicago rookie Jonathan Cannon was one out away from completing an eventual 2-0 shutout. After that game, Houston’s playoff odds fell to 29.3%, its nadir for the season. Since then, the Astros have won seven straight to pull within 3.5 games of the final AL Wild Card, and their odds to make the postseason are back above 50% for the first time since May 26. Now, entering this weekend’s series against the also-surging Mets at Citi Field, the Astros are just 4.5 games out of first place in the AL West.

It wouldn’t have been the least bit unreasonable to suggest prior to the winning streak that the Astros ought to be sellers at the deadline. Kyle Tucker had just been placed on the IL with a shin contusion that is expected to keep him out of the lineup until July. Cristian Javier and José Urquidy had just undergone Tommy John surgery, ending their seasons and making them non-factors for at least the first half of 2025. Houston had also just released veteran first baseman José Abreu, electing to eat the remainder of his disastrous contract that runs through next season rather than roster him any longer. This was a team that simply looked dead in the water, ravaged by injuries and underperformance and unable to get things going. Oh, how a week changes things.

No Kyle Tucker? No problem. All but four of the 14 batters the Astros have sent to the plate during the streak have posted a wRC+ above 100, with the quartet of Jose Altuve, Yordan Alvarez, Alex Bregman, and Jeremy Peña finally clicking at the same time. Impressively, the offense has caught fire despite homering just six times in the seven-game stretch; instead, Houston’s 20 doubles have kept the line moving.

In addition to the aforementioned Javier and Urquidy, the Astros also have been without Justin Verlander during this stretch, after they placed him on the IL with neck discomfort the day before their winning streak began. Instead, they’ve been forced to lean on a group of mostly unheralded pitchers, and boy have those arms delivered. Hunter Brown has turned his season around by revamping his pitch mix (Robert Orr and Ben Zeidman have a great look at it over at Baseball Prospectus), and Spencer Arrighetti just had the best start of his young career; he allowed three hits and no walks while striking out 10 across seven scoreless innings in Wednesday night’s 7-1 win over the Rockies. Ronel Blanco — Houston’s only pitcher who’s survived the injury bug this year — just keeps rolling right along and looks to be in prime position to make the All-Star team in his first full season, at age 30!

Now that the Astros are firmly on the buy side ahead of the deadline, barring something catastrophic to negate their winning streak over the course of the next month, how will they approach things?

Even with Javier, Urquidy, and J.P. France all out for the year, the Astros have rotation help on the way. Verlander and Luis García are expected back soon, with Lance McCullers Jr. not far behind and rookie Jake Bloss able to help out once he too is off the injured list. Verlander, Valdez, Blanco, McCullers Jr., and García would make for a strong playoff rotation (especially because Arrighetti, Bloss, and Brown will be in reserve). But, understanding that they’ve got other positions of issue, namely first base, why not acquire two Birds with one trade? Yes, I’m saying they should trade with the Blue Jays.

Toronto is on the other side of the coin, with its playoff odds down to 5.1% entering Thursday’s drubbing of the Yankees. Perhaps no team this season has been as disappointing as the Jays, whose best course of action looks like selling and rebuilding for the future.

Ideally, the Astros would take advantage of Toronto’s unexpected woes by trading for first baseman Vladimir Guerrero Jr., who is under club control through the end of next season, while also adding a starting pitcher, though it’s unclear how willing the Blue Jays would be to deal Guerrero. Heck, his trade value alone feels extremely unclear: He’s having a very good year (133 wRC+) but still has infuriating batted ball tendencies, with a grounder rate above 50% and just 10 home runs. Teams will surely line up to acquire Guerrero if he were made available in the hopes that they can optimize his contact. The Astros especially would be drawn in by the thought of Vladito taking aim at the Crawford Boxes, thus giving them their best power threat at first base since Yuli Gurriel clubbed 31 homers in 2019 with the help of the juiced ball.

If we presuppose that the Blue Jays are, in fact, willing to trade Guerrero and retool for 2026 and beyond, knowing he could earn close to $30 million next season in his final year of arbitration, the biggest hangup would be agreeing on a price that the Astros would be comfortable paying, especially considering the state of their farm system. Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice described their farm as “below average on impact and an average one in terms of depth.” But when you consider the uncertainty surrounding Toronto’s top two prospects — Ricky Tiedemann, who hasn’t been able to stay on the field consistently, and Orelvis Martinez, who was just suspended 80 games for PED usage, halting his development — intriguing, higher-floor prospects just might be what the Jays are seeking. Among the players that Houston could offer are Bloss, Jacob Melton, and Joey Loperfido, who would be left without a spot if the Astros were to add Guerrero.

It’d be valid for the Astros to balk at that price, but what if they took on a steady-if-unspectacular starter like Kevin Gausman, Chris Bassitt, or José Berríos along with Guerrero to tamp down the prospect cost? All three pitchers are good, but also on the wrong side of 30. If the Jays are going the path of retooling anyway, it may behoove them to remove a highly paid starter from their payroll because he probably won’t be around to make an impact on the next good Toronto team anyway. Sure, adding one of these starters would likely push Houston’s payroll to unforeseen heights, but the Astros should be game to take on such a contract if it means getting another solid starter without giving up as much in prospect value.

The Astros are having a weird season and may have a weird future as they move away from the risk-averse front offices of Jeff Luhnow and James Click. So they might as well lean fully into it and take some risky shots that could reap them major rewards.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Nolan Schanuel’s aversion to day games, the Astros reaching .500 and coming for the Mariners, Houston’s weekend opponent (the Mets) making it back to .500 and nearing a playoff spot, the success (and good fortune) of Reynaldo López, the bad fortune of Adam Duvall, and how “expected” stats have changed perceptions of performance, Hunter Greene and vomiting on the mound, a Dodgers bat…man’s clutch catch, Shohei Ohtani’s RBI streak, Ohtani’s dog’s backpack, and pedantic questions (1:20:55) about leaving the bases loaded, when a game is “all” one team, and how umpires signal a full count.

Audio intro: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Washington quote
Link to Schanuel splits
Link to Sam on Schanuel power
Link to FG playoff odds
Link to ESPN SoS
Link to BaseRuns standings
Link to Winker video
Link to BP on Brown’s sinker
Link to Mets Grimace story
Link to McDonald’s wiki
Link to Grimace wiki
Link to pitcher wOBA-xWOBA
Link to hitter wOBA-xWOBA
Link to lowest ERAs
Link to xERA-ERA sheet
Link to xHR-HR
Link to Duvall on cans of poop
Link to CBS on Greene
Link to Reynolds video
Link to BP on Reynolds
Link to Greene water tweets
Link to Ben on sick starters
Link to Herrera’s play
Link to Dodgers batmen story
Link to Ohtani RBI story
Link to SABR on longest streaks
Link to longest streaks wiki
Link to Ohtani and dog pic
Link to pet Randoseru
Link to Randoseru video
Link to Randoseru article
Link to Randoseru Reddit thread
Link to listener emails database
Link to Montgomery PitchCom clip
Link to O’s fan interview
Link to ballpark meetup forms
Link to meetup organizer form

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Twitter Account
 EW Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Today is an important day on the baseball calendar, although you might not see or hear that mentioned anywhere else. At some point this evening, likely around 10:30 PM Eastern, the seventh game of the night will wrap up and the 2024 major league season will cross over into its second half, technically speaking. Half of the 2,430 games on the regular season schedule will have a winner and a loser, and the majority of the league’s 30 teams will have played at least 81 games. To me, it’s the perfect time to check in on the various postseason races around the league. Teams have had plenty of time to prove who they are, but there is just as much time remaining for those narratives to change completely. Let’s dive in.

To give you a quick sense of how things have changed since Opening Day, here is a side-by-side comparison of the potential playoff field as determined by our preseason projections, the most popular picks from our preseason staff predictions, and what the playoffs would look like if the season ended today:

The current projected standings look quite similar to that final column, with two exceptions: the Astros are projected to beat out the Red Sox for the final American League Wild Card spot, and the Padres and Cardinals are projected to swap places in the second and third National League Wild Card positions. Read the rest of this entry »

By June of 2013, Baltimore’s beat writers had established their favorite in-season stat to track: Manny Machado’s rapidly rising doubles count.

Machado was in the midst of his first full season in the majors and on pace to make a run for the single-season doubles record. He finished the season with 51 (a several-way tie for 51st all-time), but in the moment, he represented a rookie with sky high potential, standing in the shadow of a mountain representing his own potential peak.

As he dumped double after double into the outfield, Orioles broadcasters noted for fans that the 20-year-old Machado was still developing physically, so his power tool was poised to level up as his career progressed, and when it did, some portion of those 51 two-baggers would convert to round-trippers. The Doubles to Dingers developmental arc is a real phenomenon. After hitting a double once every 14 plate appearances and a home run once every 50 in 2013, Machado followed up that performance in ’14 by doubling just once every 25 PA while upping his homer rate to once every 30. More recently, the current Baltimore broadcast booth has applied the Doubles to Dingers arc to Gunnar Henderson, another promising second-year player on the left side of the Orioles’ infield. However, as Henderson has increased his home run rate in his second full season by over 50%, his doubles rate has held steady, suggesting he’s leveled up his hit tool alongside the power surge, which doesn’t quite fit this narrative arc.

So which players have best exemplified the Double to Dingers storyline, and how did their stories play out afterward? We don’t need to rely on broadcasters, who have a tendency to fuel fan optimism, because this is extremely quantifiable. To identify players on this path, I started the search in 1988 and looked only at players who at the time had three or fewer seasons of at least 100 PA in the majors. I compared their ratio of dingers to doubles during the season in question to their career ratio for all seasons prior. Only samples of at least 300 PA were considered when calculating the ratio. Players also needed to be hitting doubles in at least 4% of their PAs prior to unlocking the next level of power, and after leveling up, their new homer rate should settle in above 2% of PAs (thresholds chosen are round numbers at or just below league average because this really only matters for hitters producing at a baseline level of competency in both key categories). To further ensure that the change in their dingers-to-doubles ratio is caused by a somewhat proportional change to the frequency of both doubles and dingers, their homer rate needed to increase by at least half a percent; likewise, their doubles rate must have decreased by at least half a percent. Read the rest of this entry »