Let’s be honest: Headlines aside, trying to dub one pitch the “best” in baseball is a silly way of thinking about things. There are so many pitches a year that anointing exactly one the best doesn’t make much sense. Emmanuel Clase threw hundreds of unhittable cutters this year. Blake Snell’s curveball, when correctly weighted, might as well be made of smoke. Paul Skenes and Jhoan Duran both throw 100-mph offspeed pitches. How can you separate one of these from the rest?
One easy way? Ask one of our pitch models. PitchingBot gives every single pitch three grades. There’s a pure stuff grade, a pure command grade, and a holistic overall score. Those work basically how you’d expect. Stuff is just the raw characteristics of the pitch, ignoring location and count. Command accounts for count and location. The overall grade isn’t a straight combination of the two; it uses all the same inputs, but instead of separately considering pitch shape and location, it grades the combination.
If, for example, you wanted to see the nastiest pitch of the year, you’d look at each individual pitch’s stuff grade. You’d want something with a ton of movement, good velocity, and probably some kind of funky release point to make the other attributes play up. It almost certainly won’t be a fastball, because there’s no way you can match the pure bat-missing prowess of a breaking pitch that way. You’d be looking for something like this:
That Kevin Gausman splitter is just the ticket. It’s not his most consistent pitch – splitters are tough that way. The movement profile is all over the place depending on his exact grip, which leads to the occasional floating ball that hitters can obliterate. But that variance works in his favor sometimes, too, like on that pitch to Giancarlo Stanton. That splitter fell 37 inches, six more than his average one, because he killed the spin on it absolutely perfectly. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about their obliviousness to Juan Soto signing rumors, what should count as a team claiming to have tried to sign someone, a rash of recent real signings, the strength of the free agent market so far, the Dodgers’ accounting tactics and misperceptions about deferrals, the decline in therapeutic use exemptions to MLB’s joint drug policy, and (44:17) the pros and cons of the controversial “golden at-bat” idea that was recently mooted by Rob Manfred.
After 17 seasons as a professional baseball player – very nearly half his life – Kyle Higashioka has signed his first major league free agent contract. And the timing couldn’t have been better. Higashioka entered a thin catching market coming off the most productive offensive season of his career, and he cashed in to the tune of a slightly back-loaded two-year, $12.5 million deal with the Rangers. The deal also has a $7 million mutual option for 2027 with a $1 million buyout, which means Higashioka is guaranteed to make $13.5 million.
One very disappointing year removed from a World Series championship, the Rangers are hoping that the 34-year-old’s consistency can help them bounce back into contention. Higashioka has now strung together three consecutive seasons in which he’s played at least 83 games and put up at least 1.3 WAR. Texas would love to see him make it four. Read the rest of this entry »
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. It was initially written for The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books, and subsequently adapted for SI.com and then FanGraphs. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
It happened so quickly. Freshly anointed the game’s top prospect by Baseball America in the spring of 1996, the soon-to-be-19-year-old Andruw Jones was sent to play for the Durham Bulls, the Braves’ High-A affiliate. By mid-August, he blazed through the Carolina League, the Double-A Southern League, and the Triple-A International League, then debuted for the defending world champions. By October 20, with just 31 regular-season games under his belt, he was a household name, having become the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game, breaking Mickey Mantle’s record — and doing so twice at Yankee Stadium to boot.
Jones was no flash in the pan. The Braves didn’t win the 1996 World Series, and he didn’t win the ’97 NL Rookie of the Year award, but along with Chipper Jones (no relation) and the big three of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz, he became a pillar of a franchise that won a remarkable 14 division titles from 1991 to 2005 (all but the 1994 strike season, with ’91–93 in the NL West and ’95–05 in the revamped NL East). From 1998 to 2007, Jones won 10 straight Gold Gloves, more than any center fielder except Willie Mays. Read the rest of this entry »
As I occasionally mention, I worked in finance before I started writing about baseball. One of my early bosses told me something that pretty much everyone in the industry has heard at one time or another. I had just presented a fancy trade that took advantage of about seven different financial instruments to eke out a small profit with minimal risk. He took a long look at my page of notes, scrunched up his nose, and gave me a tip that has stuck with me ever since: “Hedges are for gardens.”
That’s not something you’ll learn in a book. Financial theory is all about reducing variance and then doing the resulting low-risk trade you’ve built over and over. They call them hedge funds for a reason, after all: hedging against loss is a lot of the point. But the secret those books won’t tell you is that this behavior has a logical limit. If I showed you a risk-free way to make a dollar, theory would tell you to replicate that exact trade a billion times. If I showed you a riskier way to make five dollars, theory would tell you to reject it in favor of the first trade and make up the foregone four dollars in volume.
But in the real world, that’s not how things work. As it turns out, you can’t replicate things infinitely. Plenty of the decisions I’d made that reduced variance also reduced expected return per unit of the trade. You can think of it in simplified terms: I’d taken something that would make me four dollars, plus or minus five dollars, and turned it into something that made me two dollars for sure. Two is less than four. If I could select the guaranteed two dollar option twice, that would be clearly better than the risky four dollar option, but my boss pointed out that just doing twice as much isn’t always easy, or even feasible. The better trade, he told me, was the one that didn’t sacrifice quite so much expected value in the name of hedging.
What does this have to do with baseball? More than you’d think. Accepting lower returns in exchange for lower risk is a time-honored tradition across all sports. Whether it’s the running game in football, mid-range jumpers in basketball, or setting up deep and playing defensively in soccer, old school tactics were heavy on risk mitigation. Baseball has tons of these: shortening up to put the ball in play, pitching to contact, sacrifice bunting, letting your starter go seven regardless of how he’s pitching that day. Those strategies are all about minimizing variance around your central outcomes rather than trying for the highest effective value. Read the rest of this entry »
The Chicago Cubs got their offseason into gear Monday morning, with the reported signing of veteran left-handed pitcher Matthew Boyd to a two-year contract worth $14.5 million per year, plus incentives. Hey, Boyd is a name people know, and he had that one really good year a while back, didn’t he? There’s got to be a reason the Cubs are handing out a multi-year deal for almost $30 million to a pitcher who made eight starts in 2024, hasn’t broken 80 innings in a season since 2019, and turns 34 before the start of spring training.
For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Miami Marlins.
Batters
Building a good offensive team on the cheap is something that can be done, but it’s definitely not anything the Marlins have ever been able to do consistently. In the franchise’s more than 30 years of existence, it has had a wRC+ of at least 100 exactly twice, in 2007 and 2017. The Marlins did come close during their two championship seasons (wRC+ of 99 in both 1997 and 2003), but putting together a great lineup from within just has not been in the organization’s DNA.
That’s not likely to change in 2025. In Miami’s defense, its projected lineup – with some optimism in the health department – isn’t truly dreadful anywhere. There’s a real lack of zero-point-somethings on the depth chart graphic below, which is a nice thing. But if there’s a real lack of zeroes, there’s also a critical shortage of twos and threes, let alone the fours and fives that drive teams to division titles and playoff spots. Read the rest of this entry »
Last offseason, the Mets got in early on the starting pitching market. They signed Luis Severino in late November, later pairing him with Sean Manaea atop their rotation. Both deals were modest and short term, essentially chances for the players to rebuild their résumés while pitching for a playoff contender. And that’s exactly what happened. So now, with Severino and Manaea in line for larger paydays, the circle of life restarts: The Mets have signed Frankie Montas to a two-year, $34 million deal with an opt out after the first year.
At surface level, Montas doesn’t seem like a blockbuster signing. He just posted a 4.84 ERA (and 4.71 FIP, this wasn’t some weird BABIP issue) in his first year back after missing most of 2023 due to a shoulder injury. He’s about to turn 32. His last excellent season was in 2021. The list of drawbacks is lengthy.
Ah, but “knowing which drawbacks to overlook” might be David Stearns’ superpower. Manaea was coming off of two straight abysmal seasons when he signed in New York, and Severino hadn’t been great since 2018. But both had the capability to excel – they already had in their careers, and not in a fluky way. The right surroundings, the right defense, a pinch of luck here and there: It wasn’t hard to see how those two deals could work out. Likewise, Montas might have been down in 2024, but I have no trouble talking myself into an improved 2025.
Montas has never been a pure bat-missing strikeout machine. When he was at his best in Oakland, he did everything just well enough for the total package to work. He struck out more batters than average, walked fewer than average, kept the ball in the ballpark, and went six or so innings a start. No one would mistake him for Cy Young, but doing a bunch of things well added up to an ERA in the mid-3s. That’s a clear playoff starter, exactly what the Mets need. Read the rest of this entry »
Technically, there wasn’t much at stake. Even though Mason Miller was looking to protect a one-run lead with two outs in the 10th inning of an early September clash, the A’s and Rangers were playing out the string, battling for wins in a lost season. For Wyatt Langford, however, it meant something more.
On the first pitch, Miller fired 101 mph down the middle. Langford was aggressive, fouling it straight back for strike one. He watched 102 mph sail high, then flicked his bat to foul off an up-and-in 101-mph heater to fall into a 1-2 hole. A slider sailed outside before he fouled off pitches at 102 mph and 103 mph to stay alive, and then he laid off two wicked sliders to secure the base on balls. Langford faced down some of the best stuff in baseball, and emerged the victor.
It was just a walk, but it sparked a resurgence. After a dismal five months, Langford exploded in September, posting a 180 wRC+ and leading the American League in WAR. In the series following his successful encounter with Miller, he blasted titanic tanks off Luke Weaver and Clay Holmes, catching up to heaters at the top of the zone and depositing hanging sweepers deep into the left field bleachers.
It led to a question: Was September reflective of Langford’s new level? The answer, in part, was conditional on prior expectations.
And the expectations were certainly high heading into the season. After landing in Texas with the fourth overall pick in the 2023 draft, Langford incinerated the high minors, posting a .360/.480/.677 line across four levels and 200 plate appearances. ZiPS pegged Langford’s 50th percentile outcome above three wins, reasonably confident that Langford would go from the SEC to an above-average regular in the span of a year. As Cactus League play began, the hype train picked up steam; Langford hit .365 with six homers, leaving no doubt as to whether he’d start the year on the big league roster.
It turns out hitting in the majors is hard. No longer was Langford tasked with fending off the pitching staff of Mississippi State or the El Paso Chihuahuas; instead, he had to deal with Chris Sale sliders, Hunter Greene fastballs, and Tarik Skubal changeups.
Fittingly, he looked like a rookie. The plate discipline was there early on; his walk and strikeout rates hovered around league average, suggesting that Langford was not completely overmatched like his rookie counterpart Jackson Chourio, who struck out over 32% of the time in March and April. But Langford’s batted ball quality was lacking. He slugged just .314 in April, lifting heaps of lazy fly balls into outfield gloves.
Whereas Chourio found his footing in the summer months, logging a 144 wRC+ in June and never looking back, Langford’s line remained stubbornly subpar — until the final month of the season. Finally, as the Rangers slogged through their September schedule, Langford went bananas. His .300/.386/.610 line and excellent baserunning led to 1.6 WAR in that month alone, trailing only the infernal Shohei Ohtani.
There are a few potential stories to tell about the Langford rookie campaign. One is that he ran into a few poorly located pitches across a small sample. Another is that Langford made his adjustments, just as Chourio clearly did, accumulating enough experience against major league stuff to leverage his immense tools.
ZiPS, as always, splits the difference. The projection system sees Langford as a 3.8 WAR, 128 OPS+ guy next year, baking in Langford’s transcendent minor league results with a slight skill bump as he heads into his age-23 season.
But splitting the difference is no fun. This approach, applied to players across the league, will lead to more accurate projections. There is no good empirical reason to weigh September results more heavily in the next season’s forecast. But there is a temptation, at least on my end, to believe that Langford is going to be the player we saw in September moving forward.
In this version of the narrative, the expectation for Langford’s sophomore campaign isn’t just an All-Star 4-WAR season, as ZiPS forecasts; it’s something more like 5 WAR as the 50th percentile expectation, mirroring the age-23 projections for recent breakouts Corbin Carroll and Julio Rodríguez.
To make that argument persuasively, it would require evidence that Langford identified and then fixed the flaws that held him back across his first 400 or so plate appearances. And there is at least some reason to believe he did.
There is no one culprit for a hitter’s poor performance. The reasons are layered and complex; it could be an issue with certain pitch types or certain locations, for example. In Langford’s case, it seemed like at least one of the issues was structural, tied to his hitting mechanics. Both he and Rangers offensive coordinator Donnie Ecker believed his swing was too vertical.
Even two weeks into the season, it was clear that Langford needed to adjust. There was one clear potential area of improvement: His distribution of weight on his swing. In a story written by Steve Kornacki (no, not that Steve Kornacki) at MLB.com, Ecker was quoted as saying that Langford’s mechanical tendencies needed a reboot.
“[Langford] came from college and regularly has not faced breaking balls that are breaking 18 to 20 inches,” Ecker told Kornacki. “So, some of the body position he was in in college is now starting to evolve. If you look where the pressure is at, maybe in college it was on his back side. All of the best hitters in the big leagues, their pressure, when they land [on swings], is in the middle of their body. So, he’s slowly evolving from a guy that’s back, to having to get over the center that’s in the middle of our body.”
Esteban Rivera, FanGraphs’ resident hitting mechanics expert, explained to me that loading up weight on the backside makes it easier for hitters to whip their barrel under the ball and therefore generate power. This approach works well in college, where hitters aren’t generally exposed to high velocity and see a lot of mistake pitches. It works less well when Brandon Pfaadt is spinning sweepers that teleport across the width of the plate. Esteban also pointed out that fastballs on the inner half or sliders off the plate could trouble a hitter with a swing oriented toward crushing middle-middle mistakes.
Langford, for his part, appeared well aware of the problem.
“We’re working on getting back to that center mass, and not staying back too much,” Langford said in April. “It’s caused me to swing a little more up than I wanted, and I’m leveling out my swing. That’s helping me see the ball better.”
The early results were not favorable. Langford’s average launch angle climbed each month, from 16 degrees in April all the way to 23 degrees in August. Perhaps as a result, he was flummoxed by sweepers and sliders thrown by same-handed pitchers; through August, his wOBA was .234 on these pitches. He was even worse on hard inside fastballs; his .205 wOBA on high-velocity sinkers and four-seamers thrown on the inner half ranked among the worst in the league.
But in September, the swing leveled out. Langford’s average launch angle in September — 11 degrees — was the lowest of any month in the 2024 season. And the results — perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not — followed.
On inside heat, Langford never really adjusted. But he started crushing fastballs left out over the plate as well as hanging breaking balls, staying back long enough to identify spin and punishing mistakes. A good portion of his damage came on swings like this double against Marcus Stroman, lasering sliders at the knees into the right-center field gap:
These improvements coincided with a change to his setup. In April, he was hunched at the moment of the pitcher’s foot strike, looking to my amateur eye more like a slap hitter:
But during his month of destruction, Langford stood much more upright, ready to attack balls at any depth or width.
Langford’s apparent mechanical adjustments, prospect pedigree, and chronologically convenient damage distribution leads to questions about the nature of projections. Prospect evaluators, including our own Eric Longenhangen, were unbothered by his slow start. In his Top 100 Prospects Update in May, as Langford sat sidelined with a hamstring injury, Eric wrote that he expected Langford would “be an offensive star upon his return, and probably pretty quickly,” noting that the “huge tools and plate coverage” remained intact. It was just a matter of adjusting.
In his final month of the season, Langford looked like the offensive star Eric expected. In most cases, a huge month should not be cause for altering a projection. Langford, though, could be an exception.
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