Davis Schneider is a throwback. Not because he’s 5-foot-9, and fought his way through the minor leagues after signing for $50,000 as a 28th-round pick. Or because he has featured at three positions in his brief major league career, or because he hides half his face behind a bushy mustache twice the size of Tom Selleck’s.

We’re not throwing things back that far. Schneider is a throwback to about eight years ago, when the swing plane revolution was in full, um, swing. Back when the baseballs were juicier and fastballs had more sink, undersized infielders with strength and hit tool to burn were taught to uppercut, in contravention of 100 years of baseball orthodoxy. And thus stars were made out of Daniel Murphy, Ozzie Albies, and Schneider’s new Toronto teammate Justin Turner, among others.

Schneider was drafted in 2017, took two full years to make it out of rookie ball, had his first double-digit homer season as a pro in 2022, and only broke out last year. Schneider hit 29 home runs in 122 combined games in Triple-A and the majors, and emerged as a fan favorite in Toronto. Which you would expect, given that the Berlin, NJ, native got off to one of the hottest starts in major league history. Read the rest of this entry »

At 21-16, the Texas Rangers are first in the AL West standings, but it hasn’t been an easy stroll so far. They have an entire rotation of quality starting pitchers on the injured list, and while their offense has remained relatively intact, it has not yet been at full strength. Third baseman Josh Jung had wrist surgery in early April, first baseman Nathaniel Lowe missed the first three weeks of the season with a sore oblique, and shortstop Corey Seager has started slow after a sports hernia surgery in January kept him out for most of spring training. And on Monday, rookie Wyatt Langford, a first-round pick last June who rocketed to the majors to start this season, landed on the IL with a right hamstring strain, retroactive to Sunday. He’s expected to miss three to four weeks, which should keep him out until the end of the month.

Rangers will place Wyatt Langford on IL with a hamstring strain, slightly more severe than Grade 1, Bruce Bochy says. It will be 3-4 week absence

— Evan Grant (@Evan_P_Grant) May 5, 2024

Langford started Saturday’s game, a 15-4 win over the Royals, in left field but was removed in the fifth inning with what was initially diagnosed as hamstring tightness; an MRI later revealed the strain. Texas called up infielder Jonathan Ornelas from Triple-A Round Rock to fill out the 26-man roster.

Mired in a 1-for-15 slump following his first major league homer, an inside-the-parker on April 28, Langford has a brutal 68 wRC+ over his first 31 big league games. Things were bad enough that it was fair to wonder if the Rangers would temporarily send him to the minors to work things out — as the Orioles did recently with Jackson Holliday — but despite Langford’s woes, Texas doesn’t exactly have a better option than him for its lineup.

The Rangers offense is so thin that when Lowe missed the start of the season, the best player they could replace him with at first base was Jared Walsh, last seen hitting .125/.216/.279 for the Angels in 39 games in 2023. Before Ornelas was called up, the Rangers had only three hitters in the organization who were on the 40-man roster and not in the majors; Ornelas, catcher Sam Huff, and outfielder Dustin Harris, who currently sports a 79 wRC+ with Round Rock. Realistically, Langford was the team’s only viable option at DH.

That said, he definitely deserved his place in the Opening Day lineup. Langford was an advanced college hitter when the Rangers drafted him, probably doing so with the expectation that it wouldn’t be long before he reached the majors. He spent just three games at Rookie Ball last year, climbed to Double-A a month later, and after another two weeks, he finished the season at Round Rock. His .349/.479/.657 line across four levels of the minors comes out to a spicy 199 wRC+, basically meaning that Langford did as much damage to minor league pitchers last year as Mookie Betts is inflicting upon major leaguers so far this season. Hitting .365/.423/.714 in spring training did nothing to dissuade the Rangers of the notion that he was ready to play in the majors less than a year out of college.

Nor were the Rangers alone — 16 of the 25 FanGraphs staffers and contributors who made preseason picks predicted that Langford would win the AL Rookie of the Year, myself included. Those of us of fleshy construct were joined by the computers; entering the season, ZiPS projected him to post a 118 wRC+ this year, and Steamer was more bullish, at 125. Even the biggest Langford skeptic around, THE BAT overestimated him with its 92 wRC+ forecast. The betting world was in on him as well, with most books giving Langford the third-best preseason odds to win the ROY, behind teammate Evan Carter and Holliday.

Despite all this doom and gloom, there are some positive nuggets buried within Langford’s rough start. His plate discipline has remained intact; he was still better than league average at not chasing, making contact, and getting to 1-0 counts. His hard-hit percentage (38.6%) is a close enough neighbor to league average (44th percentile) that it could be borrowing its lawn mower. And although his .388 xSLG, per Statcast, is a number that would thrill few players other than Nick Madrigal, it is a huge leap from Langford’s actual mark of .293.

Running the xStats equivalent in ZiPS (zStats), you get an estimated line of .237/.326/.378 with four homers from his Statcast, plate discipline, pull/spray, and speed data. That is hardly good, but it looks like merely mediocre rather than disastrous.

What effect does his sluggish start have on his long-term outlook? I fired up the full ZiPS model to get an idea about how his 2024 so far has impacted his projections for the next six seasons.

Those projections are a good bit lower than his preseason ones, which had his WAR from 2025 to 2027 at 3.5, 3.8, and 3.6, respectively. This is unsurprising; Langford’s professional stats history was far shorter than most players and ZiPS had to use the much less accurate college translations as part of his projections, so these were always going to be more sensitive to 2024 play than they would’ve been for other major leaguers. Even so, Langford still projects as a solidly above-average bat who ought to be a long-term fixture in the Rangers’ lineup.

Langford’s breakout has been delayed by his struggles and now his injury, but his day is still coming. That’s encouraging for him, and it certainly bodes well for a Rangers offense that sure could use him.

Saberseminar is a leading baseball and sports analytics conferences — and it’s all for a good cause! The conference will take place August 24-25 at Illinois Tech in Chicago. Saberseminar brings together academics, data scientists, and MLB front office employees for a two-day showcase of the latest developments in baseball analytics, and it’s a great chance for researchers to show off their work in front of an audience of teams and vendors that are looking to hire. It’s also a place to network and build community across the industry, whether it’s with fans, reporters covering the game, scientists studying it, or front office personnel. FanGraphs has been a supporter of Saberseminar for over 10 years, and several members of our staff will be in attendance. Proceeds from the conference support charitable causes such as the Alliance to Cure Cavernous Malformation and the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

We hope you’ll consider attending and potentially giving a talk. Tickets are on sale now, and abstract submissions are due May 15. Student tickets are heavily discounted and there are special presentation slots available for student talks, as well as two $2,000 scholarships for students from underrepresented backgrounds to attend. For more information, please visit the conference website. We hope to see you there!

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

I don’t love to evaluate teams just by watching them and feeling the vibes, but in deciding what to write about for this morning, I kept coming back to the feeling that the Giants have played a lot of ugly, soulless, lopsided losses. They’re not horrible overall, but they definitely haven’t been good, which puts them in a purgatory of sorts. Fortunately, we’ve got have a good encapsulation in statistical form to prove how disappointing they’ve been. Connor Grossman, a former Sports Illustrated baseball editor who writes “Giants Postcards” on Substack, noted something interesting in Tuesday’s newsletter: That the Giants are 1-20 in games when they give up four or more runs.

I hopped over to Stathead to get a look at how San Francisco compared to other teams in such games, and it’s certainly not a pretty picture. Entering play Tuesday, only seven teams have allowed at least four runs in a game more often than the Giants, and no other team has performed worse when they do. To be clear, these are hard games to win; only the Orioles are breaking even in such games, and the league as a whole is a ghastly 143-425, winning just over 25% of the time. But the Giants’ pitifulness in these situations is setting them further back than any other team; the lowly Marlins, Angels, White Sox, and Rockies are the only other teams with at least 20 losses when they allow more than three runs in a game, but they’ve won more than one of those games. The Giants, of course, had visions of contending this season. Instead, it looks like whatever they were seeing was a mirage.

Here’s the thing: It’s true that the San Francisco offense isn’t good, but it really isn’t bottom of the barrel, either. The problem isn’t so much that the Giants can’t score; it’s that they just can’t score enough runs when they need them. They are scoring 4.8 runs per game when their pitchers give up three or fewer runs, but they are averaging a putrid 2.9 runs in the games when they allow at least four.

San Francisco’s lineup, as it has been for the entirety of the Farhan Zaidi era, was constructed to have the whole be greater than the sum of its parts, even with the additions of everyday bats Matt Chapman, Jung Hoo Lee, and Jorge Soler. Sure, these aren’t Gabe Kapler’s Giants with platoons seemingly all over the diamond, but the team still uses tandems at first base (LaMonte Wade Jr. and Wilmer Flores) and right field (Mike Yastrzemski and Austin Slater). This strategy could have worked, except Flores and Slater aren’t pulling their weight against lefties and the three new guys have all been somewhere between underwhelming and bad. That puts a lot of pressure on the pitchers to be perfect, and this rotation sure isn’t that, even with Logan Webb.

As if to provide further support that they can score, but only when they get good pitching, the Giants beat the Rockies on Tuesday night, 5-0. They’re now 15-1 in games when their pitchers allow no more than three runs.

Rhys Lightning Is Sparking With the Brewers

After missing all of last year recovering from ACL surgery, Rhys Hoskins signed a two-year, $34 million contract with the Brewers that affords him the opportunity to opt out at the end of this season. It’s too early to tell if he’ll decide to test free agency again this offseason, but so far, he’s fared quite well in his new digs.

Over 33 games, Hoskins is batting .218/.324/.437 (118 wRC+), down from his Phillies norm of .242/.353/.492 (126 wRC+) but still solid. Considering he just came back from a serious knee injury, it’s not surprising that he isn’t running well, both by the eye test and the statistics (his sprint speed is down 0.4 feet per second), or that he’s required more maintenance (15 DH days to 18 games at first base), but at the plate he’s been about as good as Milwaukee could’ve hoped.

Hoskins is a far more selective hitter this season, with a swing rate under 40% for the first time since 2019, and his 20.8% chase rate is the lowest it’s been since 2018, his first full year in the big leagues, according to Statcast. More interesting, though, is what happens when he actually does pull the trigger: He’s running the lowest in-zone contact rate of his career, yet he’s connecting more often than ever on pitches out of the zone. His 68.3% contact rate on pitches outside the zone is over six points above his previous career high and a staggering 10 points higher than it was in 2022.

While “hit fewer pitches inside the zone and make more contact outside of it” doesn’t seem like a sound strategy, it hasn’t affected Hoskins’ underlying numbers and may counterintuitively be helping them. The righty thumper’s xSLG and xwOBA are both markedly improved from 2022 and much more in line with his stronger 2021, and he’s also hitting fewer groundballs than at any point in his career. That’s important because the Brewers signed him to slug, not to try and beat out infield singles, and so far, slug is what he’s done. In Tuesday’s 6-5 win over the Royals, Hoskins hit his seventh home run over the season, tied for the most on the team.

Quick Hits

• The Cubs’ streak of scoreless starts ended on Tuesday when Craig Counsell extended Shota Imanaga to the eighth inning, only to watch him give up a two-run homer to Jurickson Profar that gave the Padres the lead. The Cubs came back and won, 3-2, on a Michael Busch walk-off home run to maintain their virtual tie with Milwaukee atop the NL Central.

• The Yankees pounded Justin Verlander for seven runs in their 10-3 win over the Astros on Tuesday. The highlight came when Giancarlo Stanton led off the fifth inning with a 118.8 mph home run; that’s the hardest ball hit off Verlander since at least 2015, when Statcast started measuring exit velocity.

Steven Kwan has been instrumental in helping the Guardians climb to the top of the AL Central and compile the league’s second-best record (23-12) and largest division lead (2.5 games). Unfortunately, the 26-year-old left fielder won’t be around to help them for awhile due to a hamstring strain, though if there’s a silver lining, the injury has opened the door for the debut of one of their top prospects, 23-year-old Kyle Manzardo.

Kwan felt tightness in his left hamstring and departed after the third inning in Saturday’s game against the Angels. During the inning, he had run into foul territory to make a basket catch on a Mickey Moniak fly ball, and afterwards, showed some discomfort:

Read the rest of this entry »

There were a ton of fascinating matchups last week — Dodgers-Braves, Brewers-Cubs, and Orioles-Yankees — and the victors of those series set the tone for what could be very interesting playoff races over the next few months.

This season, we’ve revamped our power rankings. The old model wasn’t very reactive to the ups and downs of any given team’s performance throughout the season, and by September, it was giving far too much weight to a team’s full body of work without taking into account how the club had changed, improved, or declined since March. That’s why we’ve decided to build our power rankings model 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 coinflip 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%). 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 some of the clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — I’ve taken some 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 information included in the comments are current as of Tuesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I looked into the strange fact that starter usage hasn’t declined as precipitously as it first seemed over the past half decade. It’s downright strange that pitchers are throwing nearly as many pitches per start as they did in 2019, because it sure doesn’t feel that way. It’s even stranger that the average start length has declined by a mere half inning since 2008; I’m still scratching my head about that one even though I’m the one who collected the evidence.

One potential answer stood out to me: maybe I was just measuring the wrong thing. Meg Rowley formulated it a bit better when we discussed the article: Maybe by capturing all the pitchers in baseball, I was missing the change in workloads shouldered by top starters. In other words, no one remembers the pitcher who made the 200th-most starts (Xzavion Curry in 2023, Ryan Tucker in 2008), and the usage patterns of back-end starters don’t leave much of an impression in our minds. We care about the horses, the top guys who we see year after year.

Time for a new measurement, then. I took the same cutoff points from last week’s study, which serves to control for early-season workloads. But I further limited the data this time. I first took the 100 pitchers who had thrown the most innings in each year and called them “established starters” for the next year. Then I redid my look at pitch counts per start and innings pitched per start, but only for top pitchers in each year. Read the rest of this entry »

Juan Soto is a tricky player for me to write about, because the numbers speak for themselves — no literary flourish needed. Trying to get cute while writing about a guy performing miracles isn’t baseball blogging, it’s the Gospel of John.

Nevertheless, Soto is operating on such a level (he’s hitting .316/.421/.559 through the weekend — all stats are current through Sunday’s games) that it begs examination. Soto has the best batting eye of his generation; therefore, for him, every year is a walk year. But this season, specifically, is his final one before he hits the open market in search of a record long-term contract.

It’s been a complicated couple years for us Soto zealots. How can this player demand more money than the (deferral-adjusted) Shohei Ohtani deal? He’s never won an MVP and only finished in the top three once. He’s never recorded a 7-WAR season, never hit 40 home runs. He’s a bad defender, and in the past two seasons, he hit .242 and .275 respectively. If he’s such a uniquely valuable player, how come two teams gave up on him before he turned 25? Read the rest of this entry »

In the seventh inning of Sunday afternoon’s game in Houston, Bryce Miller left a sweeper over the inner third of the plate, and Jon Singleton didn’t miss it, hammering a towering two-run shot to right field that yielded a bat flip and gave the Astros a 4-3 lead. With that, the Mariners were stopped short of tying a major league record — a semi-obscure one, but an impressive one nonetheless: the most consecutive games with a starting pitcher allowing no more than two earned runs. The Mariners did rally to win 5-4, sending them to their sixth straight series victory and lifting their record to 19-15, enough to help them preserve their half-game lead over the Rangers (19-16) in the AL West.

The starters’ streak began back on April 10, when Logan Gilbert held the Blue Jays to one run in 7.2 innings, and extended to 21 games through Saturday. Most of the starts were exceptional, and for the stretch, the unit pitched to a 1.38 ERA and a 2.91 FIP, but two of those starts depended upon the earned/unearned run distinction to extend the streak, and two were short outings of four or fewer innings; one of those starts, Emerson Hancock’s clunker last Wednesday against the Braves, was both. Still, even including unearned runs, their 1.86 runs allowed per nine allowed during the streak is impressive. Read the rest of this entry »

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