As we approach August, now is a good time to take a fresh look at the farm systems of some of the clubs we expect to be buyers at the trade deadline. These teams are both contending for a playoff berth and in position to make a buyer’s style trade for a star big leaguer, the kind that will likely require parting with a top farmhand or two. We kicked things off with the Atlanta Braves, and we’ll continue today with the Los Angeles Dodgers.
In tandem with an evaluation of the team’s needs and deadline posture, I’ve updated Los Angeles’ prospect list to account for graduations, incorporate the team’s new draftees, and reflect developments on the farm. The Dodgers have a great farm system, heavy on outfield prospects and pitchers who throw hard but who might just be relievers.
The Situation
The Dodgers have a comfortable 12.5-game lead in the NL West. They’ve successfully weathered injuries to several key cogs on offense (Tommy Edman, Teoscar Hernández, and Will Smith) through a combination of their older stars remaining productive, and Andy Pages and Dalton Rushing improving. On the pitching side, their younger hurlers, especially Justin Wrobleski and several of the sophomore relievers, have stepped up after many of their other arms went down (including Edwin Díaz, Tyler Glasnow, and Blake Snell), and despite a full injury ward, Los Angeles has a top six pitching staff in most statistical categories. More reinforcements are on the way from within, as a few of the injured Dodgers (Díaz, Snell, and Enrique Hernández) are on rehab assignments as the trade deadline approaches, creating a bubble that will force some action on the margins of the big league roster. They may have to play musical chairs a bit as they decide how aggressively to pursue star-caliber improvements to their few weak spots. Read the rest of this entry »
For one day, the Marlins were probably going to make the playoffs. On July 8, after they’d shut out the Mariners, 2-0, our Playoff Odds gave the Fish a 51.5% chance of playing in October. It was the first time they’d crested 50% since 2023.
They had just swept the A’s in West Sacramento and were about to finish sweeping the Mariners at home. Crank, crank, crank, crank, crank went the roller coaster. With the final win against Seattle, the Marlins had won 16 out of 20, tied for the best 20-game span in franchise history. The six-game winning streak that closed that span put them 10 games above .500, at 52-42. Crank, crank, crank. They were tied with the Phillies for the second and third Wild Card spots. They were three full games ahead of the Cardinals in fourth place. Not only were the Marlins going to hold onto Sandy Alcantara at the deadline, wrote Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, but they were going to be buyers for the first time in Peter Bendix’s three years at the helm, “barring” — crank — “an utter” — crank — “collapse.” Then the Playoff Odds took a stomach-churning plunge. It was the opposite of the famous Sarah Langs Whee! It was an Eeew, and it was gross indeed.
The Marlins lost their next 12 games. Last night, after coming within an eyelash of unlucky 13, they finally broke the streak with a win. They blew a three-run lead to the Phillies in the sixth inning and went into the bottom of the ninth down two. But they came back to walk it off on a bases loaded single from Griffin Conine. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve written before about one of my favorite baseball traditions: The Rays make a run to the playoffs, and because they’re not the Yankees or Red Sox, and they turn over their entire 40-man roster every 24 months, they show up on TV with a bunch of guys the average sports fan has never heard of.
Come October, America is introduced to a weird reliever when he throws three perfect innings in the ALDS. “Who the frick is this guy?” America asks. “And how does anyone hit him?” Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! I’m back from my Induction Weekend trip to Cooperstown, with my final chat before the August 3 trade deadline.
12:03
Jay Jaffe: My writeup of Sunday’s induction ceremony and the weekend’s other festivities is in the editorial pipeline. Compared to last year, this was a subdued weekend. Jeff Kent (who gave the best of the three speeches), Carlos Beltrán, and Andruw Jones just don’t have the universal appeal of Ichiro Suzuki — who does? — at least not enough to compel as many people to travel to Cooperstown in high season. Last year an estimated 30,000 people were at induction day, compared to 12,000 — a number that looks very inflated to these eyes but it’s what was officially reported — this year.
12:04
Matt: How many times have you been to Cooperstown and what’s your favorite restaurant there? Partial to breakfast at the Doubleday Cafe myself
12:06
Jay Jaffe: I think this was my 14th trip to Cooperstown, and this is the first calendar year I’ve made it twice. I first went in 2000, via a spur-of-the-moment detour on an upstate trip suggested by my then-girlfriend (bless her wherever she is), then in 2003, and annually from ’16–25 plus twice this year. I was supposed to go twice in 2020, but after a February Hot Stove Weekend fundraiser for the Friends of Doubleday Field, the pandemic scrubbed that year’s induction ceremonies.
12:10
Jay Jaffe: I honestly don’t eat particularly well when I’m in C’town except at the home of my hosts, former Cooperstown mayor Jeff Katz and his wife Karen. I do like the burgers at Doubleday Cafe but they’re not as good as the ones at the tiny Cooperstown Diner across the street. Spurbeck’s Grocery has very good sandwiches but they’re not open on weekends, and Danny’s, which was once my weekend-sandwich-of-choice spot, is under new management and was dealing only pre-made Sandwiches of Sadness this weekend. I did have a couple of excellent meals at Mel’s at 22, which is a somewhat elevated menu and probably my top recommendation.
12:11
BuccoFan: Hi Jay – if you had to bet, who do you think gets the 3rd NLWC spot?
Last week, I helmed FanGraphs’ annual Trade Value Series, a list of the 50 most valuable players in baseball. As is customary, I built the list using my own insights as well as feedback from both the FanGraphs staff and a number of team personnel. But for the second straight year, mine wasn’t the only ranking in town. In addition to my rankings, our Crowdsourced Trade Value tool let any reader create their own list via a series of “which of these two players do you prefer” decisions.
Two weeks and 500,000 responses later, we turned those “this one or that one?” preferences into an aggregate list. You can see the crowd’s results here, as well as your own. If you’re interested in diving more deeply into the methodology we used to turn everyone’s individual votes into an aggregate ranking, last year’s version of this article has the specifics, but generally speaking, we take everyone’s individual player-versus-player results, combine them into one giant list, and sample them in a random order (a few times) to come up with a composite list of the preferences of all FanGraphs readers.
First, I wanted to highlight the crowd’s top 10, which looks a whole lot like my top 10:
Caleb Durbin had a brutal first few months of the 2026 season. One week into June, the Boston Red Sox third baseman had come to the plate 208 times to the tune of a .190/.254/.288 slash line and a 47 wRC+. Despite his pull-oriented right-handed stroke seemingly being a good fit for the Green Monster, he had also gone deep just once — in a road game, no less. Understandably, the Fenway faithful weren’t exactly enamored with the player who had come East in February as a part of the multi-player deal that sent high-performing southpaw Kyle Harrison to Milwaukee.
Then things turned around. Since June 9, Durbin has slashed a robust .298/.363/.532 with a 145 wRC+ over 158 plate appearances. Moreover, he has homered nine times, with four of the blasts clearing Fenway’s fabled left-field wall. The most recent of the bunch was an eighth-inning game-decider that lifted the Red Sox to the 14th of their franchise-record-tying 15 consecutive wins.
What exactly did Durbin do to rebound from his disappointing early-season results? I asked him that question in the days leading up to the All-Star break, but before doing so, a related inquiry was in order: How does the present-day Durbin compare to the then-23-year-old New York Yankees prospect I spoke to in May 2023? Read the rest of this entry »
Justine Willard, Wendell Cruz, Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images
If you’re a baseball fan, the end of July means one thing: Trades. That’s right, we’re less than a week away from this year’s deadline, which is set for Monday at 6 p.m. ET, and there’s plenty of action still to unfold. Even a real snoozer of a deadline tends to have at least a few big deals, and so far, the only real needle mover swap made was the fascinating challenge trade that sent Connelly Early from the Red Sox to the Nationals for Curtis Mead.
While we don’t know precisely what will actually happen, since there are no such things as oracles, we have an idea that something will occur, making the trade deadline the ideal time for wish-casting and imagineering. As I do every year, I whip up some trade scenarios that are plausible and productive. We usually get fun additional trade discussion in the comments, so make sure to check those out and maybe even add your own. I’d also suggest letting me know when I give up too much or too little in a trade. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s daughter’s first MLB game, and Ben briefly interviews the four-year-old Sloan about her spectator experience. Then they discuss the MVP races (with an emphasis on Pete Crow-Armstrong’s status as the NL frontrunner over Shohei Ohtani), the Nationals and Red Sox swapping Curtis Mead and Connelly Early, a Kerry Wood trick pitch, John Kruk’s Sunday Night Baseball attire, teams’ tendency to covet Tarik Skubal vs. their reluctance to trade top prospects for rental players, and the biggest pre-deadline positional strengths for non-contenders and positional weaknesses for contenders.
With the second half of the season well underway, the trade deadline is almost upon us. This week is a critical stretch for a number of teams sitting on the fence between buying and selling. A nice little winning streak could push them to act a little more aggressively on the trade market, while a bout of losing could be decisive enough to add another seller to the mix.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe
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