Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the commissioner’s power to dictate conversations about baseball, realignment possibilities, whether league distinctions still matter, how much they have to banter about, Victor Robles’s bat throw and suspension, the latest Tommy Pham flare-up, a Ketel Marte controversy, the Brewers, the Blue Jays, and what teams’ styles of play represent, a two-pitch inning, the promotion of Samuel Basallo and the Orioles’ future at catcher, Zack Wheeler’s injury and the Phillies’ unaccustomed uncertainty with Wheeler and Aaron Nola, Bryan Woo’s six-inning streak, Kyle Tucker’s slump, Ceddanne Rafaela’s positional splits, three Seymours, and Cody Ponce’s KBO dominance.

Audio intro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Manfred’s comment
Link to Selig on realignment
Link to Nesbitt on realignment
Link to team travel mileage
Link to climate change article
Link to Robles suspension article
Link to Robles apology
Link to Pham article
Link to Piecoro on Ketel
Link to Nightengale on Ketel
Link to Perdomo on Ketel
Link to Ketel apology
Link to 1.0+ WAR Brewers
Link to Rosenthal on the Brewers
Link to Sam on the Brewers
Link to two-pitch-inning game
Link to MiLB two-pitch-inning
Link to Basallo promotion
Link to Basallo analysis
Link to rookie eligibility tweet
Link to rookie eligibility explainer
Link to Wheeler injury article
Link to team SP projections
Link to Woo article 1
Link to Woo article 2
Link to Tucker benching news
Link to Laurila on Rafaela
Link to Kruk comment
Link to knocker-up wiki
Link to three Seymours
Link to Bob promotion
Link to Bob Emergency
Link to Seymour Weiner news
Link to baby-name data

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The Boston Red Sox addressed their hole at first base over the weekend, coming to terms with free agent Nathaniel Lowe, formerly of the Washington Nationals. Lowe has struggled in 2025, hitting .216/.292/.373 for an 86 wRC+ and -0.8 WAR, his worst showing as a professional.

I don’t think that anyone — not even a member of Lowe’s family — would object too strongly to the declaration that Lowe has had an abysmal season. Lowe has never actually been a star, but with a .274/.359/.432 four-year run from 2021 to 2024, averaging 2.7 WAR per season, he had at least established himself in that Serviceable B+ First Baseman category. The end of Lowe’s time in Texas came quickly, and after a Silver Slugger in 2022, a Gold Glove and a World Series ring in 2023, and another solid offensive campaign in 2024, he found himself tradable for pitching help (lefty Robert Garcia) after the team acquired Jake Burger for reasons that still confound me. The Nats were making noise about being competitive in 2025, and there was a reasonable expectation that Lowe would improve the position without requiring a major long-term commitment. Read the rest of this entry »

At the All-Star break, Michael Harris II was heading for his worst season as a professional. His solid defensive skills couldn’t make up for his woeful 47 wRC+, a .210/.234/.317 batting line that had neither on-base skills nor power. Between a league-low walk rate and only six homers, Harris had “accumulated” -0.8 WAR, a shockingly low number for the Braves standout. Only two Rockies, Brenton Doyle and Michael Toglia, had worse numbers.

Since the All-Star break, Michael Harris II has been one of the best hitters in baseball. In a mere 30 games, he’s racked up 2.2 WAR thanks almost entirely to his offensive prowess. He’s hitting a bruising .398/.413/.732, good for a 217 wRC+. That power outage? Forgotten. Harris has more home runs since the break (nine) than before it. Only two players in baseball – Nick Kurtz and Shea Langeliers – have a better wRC+ over that time span, or more WAR.

It can be hard to hold two opposing ideas in your head, particularly when those two ideas are “Michael Harris can’t hit” and “Michael Harris is one of the best hitters in baseball.” One purposefully silly way of saying it: Harris has accumulated 158% of his 2025 WAR in the second half of the season. Another wild thing about this ridiculous tear: Between when I filed this piece on Monday afternoon and when it was published on Tuesday, Harris went 4-for-4 with a home run and gained 16 points of wRC+ and 0.3 WAR. For the rest of this article, the numbers I use are updated through the end of play on Sunday.

It’s unquestionably true that almost anything can happen for 100 plate appearances, but this is stretching the limits of “almost anything.” You don’t run a 200 wRC+ for a month on accident. You don’t run a 47 wRC+ for half a season on accident either. I had to investigate. Read the rest of this entry »

Beginning last Thursday and continuing through the weekend, several key rehabbers made appearances in the upper levels of the minor leagues. A few might have a meaningful impact on playoff races, while others are scuffling. I dish on eight pitchers below. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! It’s been a minute since our last chat, to say the least. Summer goings-on, especially a family vacation that ran Tuesday to Tuesday, did a number on my schedule here. Anyway, I’m back in Brooklyn and back on my b.s., so here we are.

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday, I wrote about the season-threatening shoulder issues faced by Zack Wheeler and Josh Hader https://blogs.fangraphs.com/injuries-put-the-seasons-of-zack-wheeler-a… since that went up, Wheeler had his blood clot removed by thrombolysis, but that doesn’t address the cause of the clot, and we’re waiting to hear from the Phillies as to whether he’ll pitch again in 2025.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: On Thursday and Friday of last week, I wrote about the Dodgers’ face-plant (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-dodgers-have-face-planted/) and the Padres’ surge (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-revamped-padres-have-surged-into-first…), then of course the Dodgers swept the Padres to retake the NL West lead.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Tomorrow I should have the first installment of this year’s Cooperstown progress report; my plan is to follow up with a second one next week.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, on with the show…

Read the rest of this entry »

Juan Soto is going to hit. This year, his first of many in Queens, his bat has come around nicely after a rough start; he’s slashing .251/.385/.495 for a 146 wRC+. That line is good for 10th in the majors, even if it’s a bit light by his standards. Offense is the main and most important part of Soto’s game, but it’s not the only thing. He has also played 120 games and 1,053 innings in right field for the Mets. On that end, he has struggled, and the most concerning part is related to his speed.

Soto has never been more than an average runner. Even in his early 20s, he peaked at only a 60th-percentile sprint speed, and from 2020-2024, he hovered around the mid-30s. Not the slowest in the league, but not speedy by any means. That’s not necessarily a problem; there are plenty of not great runners who are above average in the outfield. But when you’re near the bottom of the speed spectrum, you have very little room for error. Your reads, routes, and footwork have to be precise in pretty much every direction, and, well, Soto’s are not.

With -10 Outs Above Average and -10 Fielding Run Value, Soto has been the second-worst right fielder in baseball this season, behind only Nick Castellanos (-11). Overall, Soto falls into the first percentile by both OAA and FRV. He grades out a little better according to Defensive Runs Saved; with -3 runs, he is tied for 19th among the 25 players with at least 400 innings in right field. Read the rest of this entry »

Straight away, I wrote Jacob Lopez off. Even as he strung together three incredible starts in June — 32% strikeout rate, one run allowed over 19 innings — I couldn’t bring myself to think it actually meant anything. A 27-year-old lefty with hardly any prospect pedigree and so-so command throwing 90 mph dead zone fastballs? Small sample weirdness, nothing to see here.

It’s harder to dismiss Lopez these days. Once again, he’s on an infernal heater, this one even more scalding than the previous iteration. His last three starts: five innings, no runs, five strikeouts against the Diamondbacks; 7.2 innings, no runs, 10 strikeouts against the Nationals; seven innings, no runs, nine strikeouts against the Rays. That’s a 34.3% strikeout rate and a 0.98 FIP in a 19.2 inning sample.

Some of this is the quality of the opposition; the Rays and Nationals have been among the worst offenses in baseball over the last month or so. But the overall sample is getting uncomfortably significant. Over his 84.2 innings pitched this year, Lopez holds a 28.9% strikeout rate, eighth — eighth! — among all pitchers (minimum 80 innings pitched). He’s striking out more hitters than Paul Skenes, Jacob deGrom, and Spencer Strider. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me be the first to congratulate Logan Webb on his third-place NL Cy Young finish. It’s well deserved.

Right now, the award is Paul Skenes’ to lose, and it’s easy to see why. He’s big, he throws hard, he’s famous, and while he’s come back to Earth a little in the past three weeks, he genuinely hasn’t had a truly bad start since high school, if ever. Sometimes, playing for a last-place, small-market team is bad for one’s award chances, but if anything, the Pirates’ dog crap season has only perversely burnished Skenes’ reputation. He’d be a big fish in any pond, but my God, does he stand out here.

Believe it or not, there are two NL starters who came out of the weekend within half a win of Skenes on the WAR leaderboard: Webb and Philadelphia’s Cristopher Sánchez. The changeup is back, baby! Read the rest of this entry »

After a week hiatus, these power rankings are back… and nothing much has changed in the playoff picture. The National League is particularly stratified, even if the NL West is a bit closer than it was two weeks ago, and although there are a few more longshots in the American League, the 12-team field looks pretty settled right now.

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.

…

Well, the Brewers finally lost a game in the month of August. Their 14-game winning streak propelled their lead in the NL Central from one game ahead of the Cubs on July 31 to an eight-game gap, and they have the best record in the majors by six games. They’ve barely felt the impact of Jackson Chourio’s hamstring injury, which he suffered a few weeks ago, because nearly everyone else in their lineup is on fire. Seven of the eight Milwaukee players who have collected at least 50 plate appearances in August are running a 125 wRC+ or higher for the month. The Brew Crew will have an opportunity to truly bury the Cubs in the standings, as those two rivals have a five-game series on the schedule this week, beginning with a doubleheader on Monday at Wrigley Field.

The Blue Jays extended their lead in the AL East to five games by going 4-2 last week against the Cubs and Rangers. They might not be the most complete team in the AL, but as long as their superstars are producing, they look very hard to beat. To wit: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. blasted his sixth home run of the month on Sunday, Bo Bichette has returned to form after his terrible 2024 season, and George Springer was just activated off the IL on Saturday.

It took him a few weeks to acclimate to the big leagues, but beginning with a 3-for-6 showing on June 28, Roman Anthony has slashed .322/.433/.409 (a 158 wRC+) in 40 games. And he’ll be anchoring this lineup for a long time to come, as Boston signed him to a huge extension a few weeks ago. After treading water in the Wild Card race with a 3-3 record last week, the Red Sox have a huge four-game series against the Yankees looming this weekend in the Bronx.

The Dodgers and Padres entered last weekend’s series in Los Angeles on very different trajectories. After suffering a sweep at the hands of the Angels, the Dodgers dropped from first place in the NL West for the first time since late April. Meanwhile, San Diego had been surging, winners of five straight series with a 14-3 record over its previous 17 games. Then, naturally, Los Angeles won all three games to flip the momentum of both teams. The Dodgers once again lead the division, by two games entering this week, but this race is far from over, despite our playoff odds giving the Padres just a 16.1% shot at winning the West. We’ll see how those odds move after the two teams match up for three games in San Diego this weekend in their final meeting of the regular season.

The Phillies extended their lead in the NL East from half a game on August 4 to five games entering Monday, but they are now facing the prolonged absence of Zack Wheeler, who was placed on the IL on Sunday with a blood clot in his shoulder. The returns of both Aaron Nola and Alec Bohm from their respective injuries should soften the blow a bit, and Philadelphia should have the rotation depth to get by without Wheeler in the regular season. However, it’s quite possible the Phillies won’t have their best pitcher back for October. That’s a major concern in what should be a very competitive NL postseason field.

Even if the Cubs do well in their huge five-game set against the Brewers this week, it probably won’t be enough to disturb Milwaukee’s chances of winning the division. Instead, a good performance should allow Chicago to regain some of the momentum it has lost. When the Cubs took two out of three games from the Pirates over the weekend, it marked just the third time the North Siders have won a series in the four weeks since July 21, a span of eight series.

It looks like the Tigers have put their July swoon behind them. They couldn’t complete the four-game sweep of the Twins on Sunday, but they’ve now won three straight series and have gone 13-7 over their last 20 games. The Astros will visit Detroit this week in a showdown between two of the best teams in the AL.

The Mariners had an eight-game winning streak snapped on Wednesday, but their surge earned them a share of the AL West lead for a very brief moment. From there, though, Seattle faltered again, losing both of its series last week, against the Orioles and the Mets, and slipping to 1 1/2 games behind the Astros in the West. Even so, things are looking up for the Mariners: With Bryce Miller set to be activated off the IL on Tuesday, the M’s will have all five of their top starters active and healthy for the first time this season. Meanwhile, after a frigid three weeks coming out of the All-Star break, Cal Raleigh is on fire once again. Over his last nine games, Big Dumper is slashing .303/.395/.818 with five home runs and a 231 wRC+.

As for the Astros, you can chalk up another injury on their long ledger this season. This time it’s a shoulder injury to Josh Hader, which is expected to sideline him for the rest of the regular season, though the door is still slightly open for an October return if everything heals well. In better news, Yordan Alvarez is set to begin a minor league rehab assignment this week.

Since being activated from the IL on August 5, Aaron Judge has posted a very-mortal-though-still-solid .229/.426/.429 slash line (140 wRC+). No matter, the Yankees have gone 7-4 with Judge back in the lineup and have crawled back within a half game of the Red Sox and Mariners for the top Wild Card spot in the AL.

Things got pretty dicy for New York’s National League team, as the Mets slogged through a brutal 2-14 stretch and let the Reds close the gap considerably in the Wild Card standings. New York never let go of that final spot, and its back-to-back wins against the Mariners over the weekend provided a little bit of breathing room, but this is still a much tighter race than anyone in Queens would like. The good news for the Mets is that their two Franciscos in are heating up; Lindor tallied 14 hits and three home runs last week, and Alvarez has posted a .323/.408/.645 slash line (193 wRC+) since being recalled from Triple-A on July 21.

With the Mets stumbling, the Reds looked like they were poised to pull into a playoff position, especially after they won their series against the Phillies heading into last weekend. But Cincinnati ran into the Brewers at exactly the wrong time, losing the first two games before snapping Milwaukee’s 14-game winning streak in extra innings on Sunday. Unfortunately, as soon as the Reds activated Hunter Greene off the IL, Chase Burns switched places with him after suffering a flexor strain in his throwing elbow. For now, manager Terry Francona is hoping for the best-case scenario, that Burns can resume throwing soon and return before the end of August. However, Reds fans shouldn’t get too excited just yet, as the organization will surely be cautious with the 22-year-old’s rehab and almost certainly limit his workload the rest of the way.

The three teams in this tier are desperately trying to hang on in the AL Wild Card race. The Guardians fell to 3 1/2 games behind the Yankees for the final playoff spot after getting swept by the Braves at home over the weekend. It was Cleveland’s first series loss since late July. Even with those three losses, the Guards still have the AL’s best record since July 7 (23-12). Meanwhile, the Royals have been nearly as good over that same span (20-13). Following a three-game sweep of White Sox, Kansas City enters this week just a half-game behind Cleveland in the standings.

On the other side of the coin, the Rangers are in the middle of what could be season-crushing skid. On July 27, Texas reached a season-best six games over .500; since then, the team has gone 6-13 and slipped below .500 again. This week probably represents the last gasp of hope for the Rangers to return to the Wild Card race. They travel to Kansas City for four games before hosting the Guardians for a three-game set this weekend.

It was fun while it lasted, but you can probably stick a fork in any hope of a surprise Wild Card run from the Marlins. After sweeping the Yankees three weekends ago to reach .500, they’ve won just four of their last 14 and are now seven games behind the Mets for the final playoff spot. To make matters worse, Kyle Stowers, Miami’s best hitter this season, was just placed on the IL with an oblique strain. At least the Marlins can point to their competitive stretch in July and dream about returning to contention sooner rather than later.

It’s far too little, too late, but the Braves are finally on a roll. They swept the Guardians last weekend and are now 9-2 over their last 11 games. The key to this late-season surge has been the resurgence of Michael Harris II. After making some swing adjustments in early July, he’s slashing .386/.402/.719 (210 wRC+) since the All-Star break. If Atlanta doesn’t have to worry about Harris’ bat moving forward, it gives the organization one less thing to address in what has suddenly become a hugely important offseason.

Not to discount what Harris has done lately, but the two best hitters in baseball during the second half of the season both play for the Athletics. You probably know about the heater that Nick Kurtz is on, but Shea Langeliers has been almost as good over the last month. Both of those guys blasted home runs on Sunday — for Langeliers, it was his major league-leading 14th since the All-Star break. The A’s will need to figure out how to pitch in their temporary home in Sacramento, but their offense certainly looks like it’s for real.

The Twins’ expected post-deadline crash hasn’t exactly arrived. Sure, they went 2-5 against the Yankees and Tigers last week, but they are only a game below .500 since they sold nearly every spare part off their roster. The fantastic play of Luke Keaschall is a big reason why they’re still playing like a competitive team; he’s posted a 149 wRC+ since being activated off the IL on August 5. The biggest baseball news in Minnesota last week was the announcement that the Pohlad family will remain principal owners of the team after exploring a sale. The optics of this announcement stink. The Twins just traded away a huge chunk of the roster and dumped Carlos Correa off the payroll. To turn around and say this teardown was “part of the process” looks like an extension of the same penny pinching that led to these past two disappointing seasons. The hope established in 2023, when they won their first playoff series in two decades, feels like a long, long time ago.

With a pair of series wins over the Cardinals and Diamondbacks last week, the Rockies are now playing ahead of the historically bad pace of the 2024 White Sox. Colorado has to win just seven games before the end of the season to avoid tying Chicago’s record of futility. That certainly feels doable, even if the Rockies have one of the most difficult remaining schedules in baseball.

Read the rest of this entry »