On Monday night, the Astros celebrated Memorial Day by no-hitting the Rangers. Throwing to catcher Christian Vázquez, pitchers Tatsuya Imai, Steven Okert, and Alimber Santa combined for the 18th no-hitter in a franchise history that dates back to 1962. According to the great Sarah Langs, not only is that the most no-hitters over that period, but the second-place Dodgers are a full five no-nos behind with 13. Imai was making just his sixth major league start. Santa was making his major league debut. There must be something in the water in Houston.

I didn’t catch any of the game live. I saw a supercut that shows all 27 outs the Astros got. This is it. You don’t have to watch it to enjoy this article, and it’s seven minutes long, but I at least wanted to give you the chance to experience the game the way I experienced it.

Several things jumped out at me at the beginning of the video. It starts with an establishing shot of Imai. He’s toeing the rubber before he throws his first pitch, and his stats are overlaid on the screen. They are yucky. He’s 1-2 with an 8.31 ERA, a 1.79 WHIP, a 3:2 walk-to-strikeout ratio, and a 4.64 xFIP. With the Seibu Lions in NPB, Imai ran an ERA below 2.50 in each of the last four seasons. He was unhittable. But his first five-start stretch stateside was abysmal. He hit the IL with arm fatigue after three outings, got lit up in his first Triple-A rehab start, then got lit up again in his first start back with the big club. In the start after that one, on May 18, Imai put up a game score of 41. Somehow, it was his second-best mark of the season. He previously threw a curveball, splitter, and regular changeup, but he seems to have abandoned them entirely. “Command,” wrote The Athletic’s Chandler Rome, “has been somewhere between spotty and nonexistent.” All of this is to say that, to this point in his short MLB career, Imai has not looked like a guy with no-hit stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re a third of the way through the regular season, which is when the standings start to matter and win-loss records start to become more predictive of summer results. That’s an exciting prospect for the league’s surprise contenders, if a frightening one for some of the playoff hopefuls that are struggling to make headway in the standings.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format 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 coin flip 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%.) The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out between now and October, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise remains reactive to hot streaks and cold snaps. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab.

First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula.

All power rankings stats, including team records, are updated through Sunday’s games. The rest of the information below is current as of Tuesday morning.

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The Braves lost consecutive games for just the third time this season this past weekend, dropping two straight to the Nationals in a surprisingly hard-fought series. Despite that small hiccup, Atlanta is completely in control of the NL East; the team has an 8 1/2 game lead over Washington and is showing no signs of slowing down.

The Rays wound up splitting their rain-shortened series against the Yankees over the weekend after Aaron Judge blasted a walk-off home run on Sunday. That loss snapped a five-game win streak, though Tampa Bay is still 3 1/2 games ahead of New York in the AL East. The team’s offense has been humming along, sitting in the top five in baseball in batting average and on-base percentage, though they’re just 28th in home runs and isolated power. The entire package has been solid — a 104 wRC+ puts them eighth in the majors — but there’s a pretty clear path to improving the lineup as the Rays start planning how to approach the trade deadline.

The Dodgers won four of six against the Padres and Brewers last week, successfully completing a gauntlet against some of the best teams in the National League. Shohei Ohtani had collected hits in eight straight games since his short reset at the plate a few weeks ago; he was held hitless on Sunday, but has compiled a 235 wRC+ over his last 10 games. Teoscar Hernández is also heating up; he’s collected 18 hits and three home runs over the last two weeks. Of course, one of the biggest reasons the Dodgers have enjoyed so much recent success is a bullpen that just had a 38-inning scoreless streak snapped Monday night.

In a series that flipped the NL Central standings, the Brewers swept the Cubs last week. Jacob Misiorowski and Kyle Harrison combined for 13 scoreless innings and 19 strikeouts in that series, as Milwaukee’s pitching staff held Chicago to just five total runs. Misiorowski has been particularly impressive in May; he allowed his first run of the month in his start on Monday and has collected 49 strikeouts in 31.1 innings. Even though they couldn’t overcome the Dodgers this past weekend, the Brew Crew took the first game of a huge series against the Cardinals on Monday.

The Guardians have gone streaking up the standings. They’ve won four straight series, compiling an excellent 11-3 record over the last two weeks; the Nationals scored 10 runs against Cleveland on Monday, just the second time the Guardians have allowed more than four runs in a single game during this stretch. With the Tigers and Royals in danger of falling out of the American League playoff picture entirely, it really does seem like the AL Central is Cleveland’s to lose.

The Yankees welcomed Gerrit Cole back last week and he looked great in his return; he held the Rays scoreless over six innings, allowing just two hits while striking out two. New York ended up splitting that series against Tampa Bay, which means the team hasn’t won a series since taking two of three from the Rangers in the first week of May. Aaron Judge has run a 92 wRC+ during this slide; his walk-off home run on Sunday was his first homer since May 10.

The Diamondbacks have very quickly turned their season around. Including their win on Monday, Arizona has gone 12-4 over their last 16 games and are suddenly in the thick of the NL Wild Card race. Ketel Marte has been on fire during this stretch. Seven of his last nine games have been multi-hit affairs, and he’s collected 24 hits and three home runs over the last two weeks, good for a 241 wRC+. Not to be out done, Corbin Carroll is in the midst of a 13-game hit streak, with 21 total hits, two homers, and a 261 wRC+.

The Cardinals went 2-3 against the Pirates and Reds last week, and will wrap up a tour of their NL Central foes with series against the Brewers and Cubs this week. For now, the Red Birds are in second place in the division and holding onto a Wild Card spot, but they lost the first game of their series in Milwaukee on Monday and need to turn things around against the division’s leaders.

It was a nightmare of a week for the Cubs. Including their loss on Monday, they’ve now lost nine straight and 13 of their last 15. The team has been shut out four times, and has scored three or more runs in just five games during this cold snap. With three more games in Pittsburgh and a weekend series in St. Louis coming up, Chicago is slumping at exactly the wrong time. The NL Central has been the most interesting division in baseball so far this season, and it seems like the standings could look a lot different by the end of this week.

The Phillies had some of their forward momentum derailed last week, losing consecutive series to the Reds and Guardians. Jacob Misiorowski’s run in May has been dazzling, but Cristopher Sánchez has been almost as good; he hasn’t allowed a single run this month and has struck out 36 batters in 32 innings. With Zack Wheeler back in the fold and Jesús Luzardo earning results more in line with his peripherals, the Phillies rotation finally looks like a strength after a rough first month of the season.

After a pretty rough finish to their April, the Twins have mostly stabilized in May. They’ve won four of their last five series, going 10-5 over their last 15 games. But even with the positive results, Minnesota’s roster has been in a state of flux. Ryan Jeffers fractured his hamate bone last week, and the team has demoted both Royce Lewis and Matt Wallner to Triple-A amidst their ongoing struggles. Thankfully, Byron Buxton is healthy and leading the offense; after a bit of a slow start, he’s posted a 188 wRC+ in May with eight home runs.

The Blue Jays starting rotation is being stretched to the breaking point. With Shane Bieber, Max Scherzer, José Berríos, and Cody Ponce all already sidelined, Dylan Cease joined them on the IL on Monday with a mild hamstring strain. It’s not as significant as losing Berríos to Tommy John surgery, but it does thin a rotation that was already struggling to cover innings. Thankfully, the team managed to avoid another major blow on Sunday. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. was pulled from the game after being hit on the elbow by a pitch, but he doesn’t seem to have suffered any lasting damage and should return to the lineup early this week.

The Reds are still trying to rebound from their eight-game losing streak to start the month of May. They’ve gone 8-6 since stopping that slide, but that hasn’t been good enough to keep pace in a competitive NL Central. Still, even if they’re not as good as their incredibly hot start made it seem, a bunch of the key pieces in their core have taken big steps forward this year. Elly De La Cruz is leading the offense with a 143 wRC+, and Chase Burns has been brilliant on the mound. It wouldn’t be surprising to see those two lead the Reds on an exciting playoff chase this summer — and remember, Hunter Greene is on the mend and expected to return around the All-Star break.

It looked like the Red Sox had a bit of momentum on their side after sweeping the Royals last week, but they were swept at home by the Twins this past weekend and fell back into the cellar of the AL East. It’s hard to keep pace with the powerhouses in the division when key players like Garrett Crochet and Roman Anthony have been sidelined with injuries. At least Willson Contreras is doing his best to carry the lineup; he collected 11 hits, two triples (!), and two home runs last week.

The Marlins couldn’t do much against the Braves last week, dropping three of four to the NL East leaders, but Miami bounced back by sweeping the Mets over the weekend. It’s been good to see Sandy Alcantara mostly back to his old self, but the most encouraging development on the pitching staff has been the breakout of Max Meyer. After dealing with injuries for the majority of the last few years, he’s posted a 2.52 ERA and a 2.98 FIP in 11 starts this season.

The collapse of the Tigers has been swift. They managed to snap an eight-game losing streak with a win in the second game of a double-header on Sunday, but it was just their third win in 19 games since placing Tarik Skubal on the IL on May 4. Things have gotten so bad in Detroit that Skubal trade rumors have started back up. He’s making an extremely quick recovery from his elbow surgery, and there’s reason to believe he’ll be back on the mound sometime in June. That would give the team about a month or so to really decide if they’re making a run for the playoffs or if they’d be better off trading Skubal and resetting the roster for next year.

Since the Rockies swept the Mets back on April 24–26, they’ve won just seven times in 26 games. That sweep had Colorado sniffing .500, but the team is now 15 games under. Mickey Moniak, the guy who had been leading the offense, was placed on the IL last week with a sprained ankle, and while that isn’t as serious as the elbow strain suffered by Chase Dollander a few weeks ago, the two brightest spots on the Rockies roster are now sidelined.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the FanGraphs Feature Focus, a new semiweekly series highlighting some of the overlooked site tools at your disposal as a FanGraphs user. With so many great tools, leaderboards and stats here at FanGraphs, it can be easy to lose track; my goal is to shed light on them. Since I spend about half of my time working on RosterResource and the rest helping to develop new features and improve old ones, I’ve gotten very familiar with everything the site has to offer. What’s more, because I am extremely online, I’m very attuned to how others use FanGraphs, which means I have a good sense of which features aren’t getting as much traction as their utility suggests they should.

These posts will take on different forms depending on the FanGraphs Feature being focused upon. Sometimes they’ll be quicker “Hey, this exists, have fun!” pieces; sometimes they’ll be in-depth tutorials explaining how our more complex tools work. If there’s an unfamiliar feature in our site menus that you’d like to know more about, drop it in the comments below. It might become a future Feature Focus! Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon! I hope you all enjoyed the three-day weekend.

12:02

Jay Jaffe: I flew solo while my wife and daughter drove upstate to visit my father-in-law (I had to stay behind to dog-sit). Did a lot of dad-puttering around the house, some repair projects, some yardwork, and a trek to Jersey City to see the 50th-anniversary celebration — and perhaps the final show ever — of The Feelies.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, back to baseball. Before we get started, I need to note that as with last week, we’re trying a new system with our chats, where you’re required to log in to FanGraphs to ask a question. You don’t need to be a Member, but you do need to have an account, just like you need an account to comment on any article. This is still something we’re evaluationg. If you have feedback, feel free to just leave it as a question, or you can send a note to support@fangraphs.com.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Eh, I’m not sure. Yes, it’s harder to come up with a great third baseman, and the Phillies have had their problems there since then (Alec Bohm has had one season above 2.0 WAR) but I think Harper was the better fit for the city and the culture, as Machado has been for the city and culture in San Diego

12:07

Jay Jaffe: the two are almost dead even in fWAR 27.9 to 27.7 for Harper, and that’s with an additional 107 games missed due to injuries

Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Martin appears to be coming into his own. Playing in what is shaping up to be his first full major league season, the 27-year-old Minnesota Twins outfielder is slashing .289/.396/.394 with a pair of home runs and a 130 wRC+ over 169 plate appearances. His track record coming into the campaign was somewhat spotty. Hampered by injuries — hamstring and oblique strains among them — he’d played in just 143 big league games, 93 as a rookie in 2024, and 50 last year. Moreover, while his .698 OPS and 101 wRC+ were credible, they fell short of what is expected from a player with his pedigree. Martin was drafted fifth overall in 2020 by the Toronto Blue Jays out of Vanderbilt University.

Uneven performances down on the farm are also part of his backstory. Trying to be something he’s not is one of the reasons why. Acquired by the Twins in the 2021 trade deadline deal that sent José Berríos to Toronto, Martin attempted to hit for more power than what his natural skillset suggests he should. Subsequently returning to his roots has helped fuel his long-awaited breakthrough.

“Being healthy is part of it, but more than anything, I reverted back to the player I was in college,” explained Martin, who was an OBP machine (.474) over his three seasons as a Commodore. “When I got to professional baseball, I started trying to play the numbers game instead of playing the game itself. I got too far away from myself in terms of trying to pull the ball in the air, doing more damage, getting higher [exit] velocities. That’s never been the type of player I am. I’m just a baseball player. I don’t do anything that will jump at you. I’m more of a consistency, play-the-game-the-right-way sort of guy.”

I asked the DeLand, Florida native if the attempts to up his pop were largely org-driven, or more something that he aspired to do on his own. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. This is the first installment of that series. The introduction can be found here.

April 13
It’s somewhere around 9:30 PM and Derek Jr. is asleep. I am, briefly, watching baseball for the first time since she was born two weeks ago. The Mets and Dodgers are in the eighth inning. The main thing I notice is Joey Gerber’s delivery. I’ve never heard of Gerber before, but my daughter is wearing a Gerber brand onesie, and I sincerely hope he’s the heir to that particular fortune. His leg kick is a joy to behold:

It would be a grave understatement to say that Gerber has a high-energy delivery. Brendan Gawlowski called him funky. Eric Longenhagen said he had an “odd, chicken wing arm action.” I’m inclined to go with Ricky Conti, who called the delivery “violent, with tons of effort and recoil.” When you think of a pitcher’s leg kick, you think of, say, Justin Verlander smoothly raising his knee up toward his chest, his lower leg pointed straight down toward the rubber. Even Juan Marichal’s legendary leg kick started roughly the same way. He raised his knee, and at first, his lower leg merely came along for the ride. What made the leg kick famous was that Marichal’s foot just kept on rising long past the point where other pitchers’ stopped. He reared way back, intimidating the batter with the bottom of his spikes, and catapulted down the mound, the ultimate tall-and-fall delivery. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. I have missed you. I have been on paternity leave for the past two months because — and I’m told this is the most common reason people go on paternity leave — my wife and I had a baby. Mostly, my wife had the baby while I said things like “You’re doing great,” and “I’m so proud of you,” and “Hey look, a baby,” but this is very much a team sport. Our free agent acquisition arrived loaded with tools like spiky hair, world-weary eyes, and a trapezoidal mouth with a cute little dimple just beneath it, but she’s a little short on big league experience. We’ll have to coach her up.

So now we have this baby girl. It’s unclear whether she’s a bouncing baby girl — we haven’t dropped her yet — but she certainly seems healthy enough. I’m looking at her right now. She’s sleeping in her crib all swaddled up like a salami. She is, as babies tend to be, adorable. She is also — and again I’m informed that this is standard — somewhat labor intensive.

While laboring over this novel life-form for the past two months, I have watched precious little baseball. I have done precious little anything other than care for my wife and child (or, as I am still getting used to calling it, my family). As a result, I am wildly underinformed about the latest developments in my field of expertise. The stray missives that reached my ears often left me with more questions than answers. Did somebody Monstars the NL East? Are we sure this is the same Ildemaro Vargas? When did all these bodies get so loose? Read the rest of this entry »

Erik Tolman has a remarkable backstory. Currently playing for the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings, the 26-year-old left-hander threw to one of baseball’s most prolific pitchers as a prep, and that is a comparatively insignificant part of his past. His level of perseverance is nothing short of remarkable. Tolman has overcome debilitating injuries on his journey to the doorstep of the big leagues.

His travails began in 2021, the year the Washington Nationals drafted him in the 14th round out of Arizona State University. He had the first of two Tommy John surgeries, costing him all but three games in his final collegiate campaign — and his bad fortune was only just beginning.

“I tore my UCL again at the end of my rehab,” Tolman explained. “Fourteen months after having surgery, in my last live ABs, I felt my elbow go again. It was a sad moment, honestly. But I talked to my family, and I believed in myself — I thought I could still be a big-leaguer — so I kept at it. Unfortunately, on my fifth start back, in August 2023, I dislocated my knee. That made for a whole new mountain that I’ve had to climb.

“The injuries have driven me to have a work ethic, and a mental fortitude, of just going balls to the wall,” he added. “I figured I could either struggle coming back from the injuries, playing baseball, or struggle out in the real world. At the end of the day, we’re the ones responsible for our lives and careers. If you get hurt, are you going to cave, or are you going to overcome?”

Tolman did far more than simply dislocate a knee after returning from the second TJ. What happened was not only catastrophic: it was hard to fathom. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard to know what to expect from a pitcher returning from a serious injury. In addition to velocity and spin rate, pitching is also about rhythm and feel, and that can take time to come back after a long layoff. But there was little rust for Gerrit Cole to shake off when he made his season debut Friday night at Yankee Stadium. In his first major league start since undergoing Tommy John surgery on March 11, 2025, Cole silenced the first-place Rays, allowing just two hits and three walks while striking out two across six scoreless innings. His only real trouble came in the first inning, when he gave up a leadoff single to Chandler Simpson and walked Junior Caminero to put two on with nobody out. After a Jonathan Aranda fly out, Cole picked the speedy Simpson off second base and then struck out Yandy Díaz looking at an inside fastball to end the inning. From there, he got in a groove. He averaged 96.1 mph with his four-seamer, and he threw 50 of his 72 pitches for strikes.

Cole left the game with the lead, but the Rays scored four runs in the top of the eighth inning to take the first game of the series, 4-2. They now lead the Yankees in the AL East by 5.5 games. Watching the Rays play Friday night, I couldn’t help but think about how annoying they would be to play against. They pitch well, put the ball in play, and are aggressive on the bases. One Yankee told me before the game that they remind him of last year’s Blue Jays because of their pesky bottom of the lineup and refusal to strike out. I’m still not sure how good the Rays are, but I get the feeling that they are always going to be better than I think.

In this week’s mailbag, we discuss another surprising team over the first two months of the season. We’ll also answer your questions about how many players in baseball have the ability to win MVP, how good Randy Johnson and other all-time-great starting pitchers would’ve been as closers, and why the 9-9-9 challenge beers are so small. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »