Will Aaron Judge win the Triple Crown? If you were hanging around on FanGraphs three years ago, this question might sound familiar. If you don’t want to click the link, back at the end of 2022, both Judge and Paul Goldschmidt were within earshot of a Triple Crown in the final weeks of the season. The projected probabilities were firmly against either of them winning it (about 4% for Judge and 3% for Goldschmidt), the bank won as it tends to do, and Miguel Cabrera remained the only Triple Crown winner of the last half-century. There’s a lot of 2025 left to go, but the man sometimes known as Arson Judge is once again setting fire to the league. And this time, some of the factors weighing against his potentially performing the feat are no longer present.

Triple Crown stats have lost their luster as tools for evaluating overall performance, especially batting average and runs batted in, but not everything has to be an optimized evaluative tool to be cool. Bo Jackson was not even close to the best baseball players of the late 1980s, but I dare someone to say he wasn’t one of the [insert superlative used by kids today that Dan totally doesn’t know because he’s old] players of his time. Triple Crowns are fun in a way that some sabermetric Triple Crown, perhaps wRC+/sprint speed/FRV, is not. Judge is, of course, also having an insanely good season by our more nerdy numbers, but today, we’re old school. And what could possibly be more old school and sepia toned than projection algorithms? Read the rest of this entry »

Home teams don’t win enough in extra innings. It’s one of the most persistent mysteries of the last five years of baseball. Before the 2020 season, MLB changed the extra innings rules to start each half of each extra frame with a runner on second base. (This only occurs during the regular season, which means the 18-inning ALDS tilt between the Mariners and the Astros in the picture above didn’t actually feature zombie runners, but the shot was too good to pass up.) They did so to lessen the wear and tear on pitchers, and keep games to a manageable length. Almost certainly, though, they weren’t planning on diminishing home field advantage while they were at it.

In recent years, Rob Mains of Baseball Prospectus has extensively documented the plight of the home team. Connelly Doan measured the incidence of bunts in extra innings and compared the observed rate to a theoretical optimum. Earlier this month, Jay Jaffe dove into the details and noted that strikeouts and walks are a key point of difference between regulation frames and bonus baseball. These all explain the differing dynamics present in extras. But there’s one question I haven’t seen answered: How exactly does this work in practice? Are home teams scoring too little? Are away teams scoring too much? Do home teams play the situations improperly? I set out to answer these questions empirically, using all the data we have on extra innings, to get a sense of where theory and practice diverge.

The theory of extra inning scoring is relatively simple. I laid it out in 2020, and the math still works. You can take a run expectancy chart, start with a runner on second and no one out, and figure out how many runs teams score in that situation in general. If you want to get fancy, you can even find a distribution: how often they score one run, two runs, no runs, and so on. For example, I can tell you that from 2020 to 2025, excluding the ninth inning and extra innings, teams that put a runner on second base with no one out went on to score 0.99 runs per inning. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan O’Hearn has been the best hitter on an underachieving Baltimore Orioles team so far this season. Moreover, he’s been one of the best hitters in the game. The 31-year-old first baseman/outfielder boasts a 185 wRC+, a mark currently topped by only Aaron Judge, and Freddie Freeman. Over 180 plate appearances, O’Hearn has left the yard nine times while slashing .340/.428/.558.

He began to bash after leaving Kansas City, where he posted a .683 OPS over parts of five nondescript seasons with the Royals. He was designated for assignment and subsequently dealt to the Orioles in exchange for cash consideration in January 2023. Baltimore then dodged a bullet. The O’s also DFA’d him, only to see him go unclaimed, allowing them to assign him to their Triple-A roster. Called up to the majors two weeks into the 2023 campaign, O’Hearn proceeded to do what he hadn’t done with his old team: square up baseballs on a consistent basis.

Since the start of the 2023 season, the left-handed-hitting O’Hearn has the highest batting average (.286) and on-base percentage (.346), and the second-highest wRC+ (130) among Orioles who have come to the plate at least 250 times. Playing primarily against opposite-handed hurlers, O’Hearn has logged 1,042 plate appearances over that span.

How did he go from the waiver wire to laying waste to big league pitching? Read the rest of this entry »

Way, way, way back in December 2023, the Rangers signed Tyler Mahle to a two-year contract. Absolutely nobody cared at the time, mostly because the news dropped the same day as Shohei Ohtani’s first press conference with the Dodgers. But also because Mahle, then recovering from Tommy John surgery, was expected to play a trivial part, at best, in the 2024 season.

Mahle had been a bit of a hipster favorite as an upper-mid-rotation starter in Cincinnati and then briefly in Minnesota — far from a household name, but from 2020 to 2022, he’d been quite good, and in high volume. Over those three seasons, he’d averaged 27 starts, 146 innings, and 3.0 WAR per 162 team games, with an ERA- of 90. For two years and $22 million, the Rangers were conceding that he’d rehab on their dime for most of 2024. But he would’ve been available for the 2024 playoffs if they’d made it that far, and if everything worked according to plan, they’d have a workhorse no. 3 starter under contract for 2025 at a fraction of what that kind of production usually goes for.

At least in 2025, everything has been working according to plan. Mahle has made 11 starts so far this season, with the past 10 lasting at least 80 pitches and five innings. Until his most recent outing, he hadn’t allowed more than two runs in any start. Even then, he allowed only three runs in his season-worst outlier. His 1.80 ERA is fifth best among all qualified starters. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the new hardest-hit ball of the Statcast era, exit speeds across eras, Oneil Cruz vs. Elly De La Cruz, whether Tarik Skubal has gotten too good, Aaron Judge not feeling great at the plate, whether Rockies fans should boycott the team, how the (first) Juan Soto trade is working out for the Nationals, a Clay Holmes rotation conversion progress report, Jake Burger’s minor league reset, a threat to Shea Langeliers’ A’s sprint speed lead, a dominant DH in Division III, and a new show trying to claim the podcast’s corner.

Audio intro: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Effectively Wild Theme (Horny)”
Audio outro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Cruz homer
Link to 120+ mph balls
Link to Clemens on Skubal
Link to Cooper stat
Link to Passan Skubal tweet
Link to ESPN on Skubal
Link to Skubal splits
Link to Misiorowski story
Link to Misiorowski clip
Link to Misiorowski video
Link to new Judge quotes
Link to 2024 Judge quote 1
Link to 2024 Judge quote 2
Link to Kyle Clark commentary
Link to year-over-year attendance
Link to Nats prospects
Link to Nats WAR leaders
Link to Rule of 17 explainer
Link to Burger game log
Link to MLB.com on Burger
Link to A’s speed leaders
Link to A’s prospects post
Link to A’s shakeup article
Link to CBS Mazzone post
Link to Mazzone player page
Link to Mazzone at TBC
Link to Mazzone article
Link to clip of the other EW
Link to Brault wiki
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Link to Simpsons clip

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This is not the company the Red Sox hoped they’d be keeping. When they face off against the Brewers tonight, they’ll be trying to avoid joining the Rockies, White Sox, Pirates, and Rays as the only teams in baseball with three separate losing streaks of at least four games this season. Boston currently sits fourth in the AL East and 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. According to our playoff odds, the Red Sox have seen their postseason probability fall by more than half since Opening Day, dropping from 56.2% to 25.3%. Only the Braves, Orioles, and Rangers have had a bigger decline.

Boston’s most recent win also provided its biggest loss of the season thus far. When Alex Bregman signed back in February, there was every reason to believe that the Green Monster would be his best friend. His game is designed around lifting the ball to the pull side, and he’s already bounced five doubles and a single off the wall on the fly, to go with three homers launched over it. But the Monster betrayed Bregman on Friday. In the first game of a would-be doubleheader against the Orioles (the second game was postponed, and Saturday became a doubleheader instead), Bregman scorched a single that short-hopped the wall, but as he chopped his steps to back off an aggressive turn, something looked off.

“I was rounding first base and digging to go to second and I kind of felt my quad grab, so I didn’t continue running to second base for the double,” Bregman said. “I just kind of stopped and came back to the bag so I wouldn’t make it any worse. After I felt it, I knew I needed to come out and see the trainer.” Bregman left the game with right quad tightness, telling reporters that he initially feared that the injury might be more severe, but that he felt more positive after the game and hoped he could avoid an IL trip. “Hopefully, I sleep good and it feels great,” he said. “We’ll just see how it presents and take the next step there, just kind of follow the training staff, their lead. But right now, it’s just quad tightness.”

Bregman didn’t sleep good. Pain from the quad kept him up during the night, and an MRI on Saturday morning revealed a “pretty severe” strain. Bregman compared it to the left quad strain he suffered in 2021. That strain kept him out 69 days, from June 17 to April 25. In case the Red Sox are looking for consolation, Bregman looked like himself upon his return that season, running 115 wRC+ before the injury and a 112 wRC+ (with better exit velocity numbers) after he came back. But that’s cold comfort. With a 160 wRC+ this season, Bregman has been the team’s best player, and he’ll be out for at least two months. Read the rest of this entry »

In Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers don’t lack for superstars with potent bats, but so far this season, Will Smith is swinging — and, notably, not swinging — just about as well as any of them. The two-time All-Star catcher is off to an exceptionally hot start, particularly with runners in scoring position, and the Dodgers recently shook up their roster with an eye towards helping him maintain a high level of production later into the season.

The 30-year-old Smith is hitting .333/.456/.511, good enough to lead the NL in on-base percentage and to rank third in wRC+ (175) behind only Freeman (191) and Ohtani (182). Often batting ahead of either Max Muncy or Michael Conforto — both of whom have struggled thus far this year — he’s been pitched around to some degree, and he’s shown exceptional plate discipline:

Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! I hope you all had great holiday weekends here. The weather in NYC was great, allowing for a lot of outdoor time — I avoided Friday night’s rain at Citi Field and caught Dodgers-Mets the next night. Wrote about Will Smith and Dalton Rushing in a piece that will be up soon.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: On Friday, I wrote about the Astros’ Christian Walker (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/christian-walker-hasnt-fixed-the-astros-fi…), who hit a walker-off home run yesterday. (sorry, not sorry)

12:05

Jay Jaffe: if you missed “Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe, and the Hall of Fame” — the SABR roundtable I did with Rose biographer Keith O’Brien, ESPN reporter Don Van Natta Jr., and Black Sox expert Jacob Pomrenke, it’s now up on YouTube here

12:05

Jay Jaffe: and with that, let’s chat…

12:07

Jay Jaffe: no sooner had I written about a set of twists and turns in the Red Sox infield — Trevor Story’s slump, Kristian Campbell’s work at first base, and Marcelo Mayer’s work at second (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/trevor-storys-slump-and-the-never-ending-s…) than Bregman got injured, leading the Sox to try Mayer out at third.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re almost through the first two months of the season, and playoff races in both leagues are shaping up to be pretty entertaining this summer. All but three teams in the AL are within three games of a postseason berth, which makes for a very crowded field. The NL is a little more stratified, but there are four Wild Card hopefuls hanging four or five games back in the standings.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings 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 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 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.

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. Read the rest of this entry »