Welcome to “Wait, What?!,” a series in which I’ll take a look at some of the players whose performance has most surprised me this season. These will all be guys I covered as part of this season’s list cycle. It’s important to reflect on previous work, and in cases where the numbers don’t match the scouting report, there’s often a lesson to be learned, or at least something to keep in mind going forward.

While it can be useful to let a report marinate for a couple years before looking back, sometimes a player’s production prompts a quicker postmortem. Such is the case with Blue Jays catcher Brandon Valenzuela, who has accumulated 1.6 WAR in his first 59 career games mere months after I projected him as a glove-first backup on Toronto’s farm system overview. Let’s take a deeper look at how we got from A to B, evaluate whether I should have seen this kind of production coming, and reflect on whether Valenzuela’s breakout warrants a re-evaluation. Perhaps we’ll even learn something, something to think about when it comes time to evaluate the next upper-level catcher who looks like a defense-first reserve. We’ll begin with a look at Valenzuela’s tool grades and scouting report from January, which I’ve reproduced below:

A glove-first catcher, San Diego traded Valenzuela to Toronto last summer in a deadline deal for Will Wagner. The 25-year-old has kicked around the mid-to-upper levels for a couple years now and heads into the 2026 season as the club’s third catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Earlier this season, Shohei Ohtani appeared to have a legitimate shot at adding a Cy Young Award to a trophy case that already includes four MVP honors plus the AL Rookie of the Year. Fully recovered from his late-2023 ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, he consistently pitched deep into games and carried an ERA below 1.00 into June. Yet, after being knocked around a bit last month, he was scratched from his final start before the All-Star break, and bypassed the All-Star Game itself in favor of receiving an injection of lubricant in his left knee. Prior to the opener of Sunday’s doubleheader at Yankee Stadium, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts revealed that Ohtani — who wasn’t scheduled to pitch during the three-game series in the Bronx — would be scratched from his upcoming start and would take an indefinite break from pitching.

“Where we’re at right now, how we’re proceeding, I would say that it’s going to be some time,” Roberts said. “I’d say that it’s not going to be a day-to-day thing.”

The break from pitching will not affect Ohtani’s availability as a designated hitter. His left knee is his landing leg for pitching, which he does right-handed, but it’s his back leg for hitting, which he does left-handed. “It’s the pitching and the torque on landing on that leg that kind of gets it upset,” the manager said. “The hitting doesn’t do that.” Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Howdy, folks! Apologies for the late notice on today’s chat. I was wrapping up a piece on Shohei Ohtani’s pause from pitching and had some away-from-keyboard responsibilities that prevented me from putting together the nuts and bolts for this chat.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: It’s been a few weeks since I was able to pull one of these off due to my annual trip to Cape Cod (which was lovely) and then being buried neck-deep in my annual Replacement-Level Killers series spotlighting the most glaring holes on contending teams. That series wrapped up yesterday with the entry on designated hitters (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-2026-replacement-level-killers-designa…). You can use the navbar atop the article to find the other five entries of the series.

12:07

Jay Jaffe: I had a lot of fun this past weekend at Yankee Stadium for the biennial Dodgers-Yankees regular season series. I went on Friday night as a fan and saw Roki Sasaki pitch well and Max Muncy ruin the nights of Gerrit Cole and Aaron Boone, then returned on Sunday for the doubleheader after rain washed away Saturday night’s game. It was a split-admission doubleheader; I was at the ballpark for just over 12 hours and watched most of the World Cup final between games while plugging away at those DHs.

12:07

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, the question queue is still filling up due to the late notice of this chat, but i’ll dive in.

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Oh, i missed this last night as it happened after I wrapped up work and baseball attention. https://www.mlb.com/news/nolan-arenado-reaches-2-000-career-hits

Read the rest of this entry »

With the August 3 trade deadline fast approaching, we’re bound to see minor leaguers aplenty floated in trade rumors. If you’re curious about the players who might find themselves in new orgs in a few weeks, The Board is a great resource, as are the new minor league leaderboards, the subject of today’s Feature Focus.

The Basics

• Our minor league statistics go back to 2006, with batted-ball data going back to 2007.
• You can combine multiple seasons, or separate the leaderboards into discrete player-seasons by checking the box next to Split Seasons.
• The Level, League, Minor League Team, and MLB Org drop-downs allow for multiple filters across drop-downs (e.g., selecting Triple-A and then the Pacific Coast League), but not for multiple filters within each drop-down. The leaderboards don’t currently allow for selecting multiple MLB organizations, for example.
• The Stat Filters can be stacked, however. Here’s the leaderboard filtered for a 150 wRC+ or higher and 15 or more steals, sorted by most steals:

You’ll notice that in the above screenshot, wRC+ isn’t actually shown in the resulting leaderboard because it’s not in the Standard tab. Unlike the player pages or our major league leaderboards, the minor league leaderboards don’t have a Dashboard tab, so the default statistics are different. This can be solved using the Custom Report button, which I used to add wRC+. I also restricted my view to qualified hitters only:

Members can add columns to their hearts’ content, while non-Members are limited to 10 total columns in their custom reports.

What’s New

The current minor league leaderboards didn’t get a drastic overhaul from the old version (which will remain live through the World Series), but there were two fantastic additions.

The first is custom date ranges, available only to Members. When a custom date range is selected, the player’s age will show a span of years, as illustrated in this leaderboard of the minor league leaders in strikeouts since July 1, 2023:

The filters section includes a MaxAge option, which works the same as the Age filter would for a single season, but filters on the oldest player-season shown in the range.

Non-Members are limited to the Quick Range options of the last seven, 14, or 30 days, along with the Season Start and Season End selectors.

We’ve also incorporated our new Heat Maps feature, which I went over in detail a couple of weeks ago.

As is the case with all new and updated features at FanGraphs, we don’t view the minor league leaderboards as a fully complete project just because we’ve made a couple of additions. At the top of the new leaderboards, you’ll see a link to submit any feedback you have.

Arsenals that include three variations of a fastball — four-seamer, two-seamer, cutter — are increasingly common in today’s game, and Drew Rasmussen is among the trend’s success stories. Relying heavily on a triad of heaters, the 30-year-old Tampa Bay Rays right-hander boasts a 2.96 ERA and a 3.65 FIP over 249 1/3 innings across the 2025-2026 campaigns. Moreover, he just represented the Rays on the American League All-Star team for a second year running.

How Rasmussen became three-heater reliant (just over 80% combined usage) isn’t itself atypical. The way he tells the story of how it happened is atypical… if not a bit curious. In explaining the advent of his most recent — and most impactful — fastball addition, he pinpointed a hitter against whom he’d struggled far less than his telling would suggest.

Rasmussen sat down to talk fastballs when the Rays visited Fenway Park over the weekend. As his responses were expansive — followup questions were few and far between — what he shared is being presented in monologue form.

———

Drew Rasmussen: “When I got traded here [in May 2021], I was four-seam and gyro slider — that’s basically what I was throwing in Milwaukee — and then I had a curveball that was very low usage, as well as a bad, bad changeup. Over here, when they transitioned me from the bullpen into the rotation, we learned that I can manipulate the gyro slider a little bit to create a little more lift and give it more of a true cutter profile. I can also manipulate it to get some depth and keep a true slider profile, which gives me the opportunity to pick and choose shapes depending on what I’m looking for. Situationally, what do I want to throw?

“They saw the movement profile of my changeup, so we scrapped that pretty quick. From there we started developing a sweeper — I have the ability to supinate through everything — and that worked pretty well for me in 2021. Then, in 2022, I kept running into Bo Bichette. I had nothing to get him out with. Nothing. I mean, he’s good at hitting balls the other way, and staying on everything. But if you missed in with a breaking ball, he could do pull-side damage. I would be out there frustrated, because the only thing I had to go in on him with was a four-seamer. And at the time, I was cutting it anyway.

“We started playing around with things. Because I had nothing that would work [inside] to him, we would take a shot with a four-seam up and away and he would hit a double into the gap. We would take a shot with a gyro slider down and away, and he would hit it through the four hole. We’d go sweeper and he’d shoot something down the line. I’d try to bounce a curveball and he would hit a line drive up the middle. Everything I threw worked right into his comfort zone, basically. Read the rest of this entry »

As is tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the lead-up to the trade deadline to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at the players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.

For those of you who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2027-2031, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money (exclusive of any signing bonus), if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2031 (assuming the player is under contract or team control for those seasons, or has a player or vesting option). Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2025 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his technical wizardry. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all of the players who have been ranked up to this point. Read the rest of this entry »

You know the joke. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” asks the interviewer. Mitch Hedberg has the perfect answer. “Celebrating the five-year anniversary of you asking me this question.” Mike Elias and the Orioles sure seem to have their own five-year plan, and they fleshed it out on Sunday, signing right-hander Kyle Bradish to a five-year, $90 million extension. The deal buys out the starter’s final two years of arbitration, along with three free agent years, keeping him in orange and black until his age-35 season in 2031. Bradish is making $3.55 million in arbitration this season, and he’ll make $10 million when the new deal kicks in next year. He’ll get a $3 million raise in 2028, then get $1 million added to his annual raise in each subsequent season. So he’ll make $10 million in 2027, then 13, then 17, then 22, then 28 in 2031. It’s a classic example of linear growth rather than exponential, and it should help Bradish stay a step ahead of inflation. According to The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka, it’s also the largest deal for a pitcher in franchise history.

Bradish has a 3.50 ERA and a 3.62 FIP for his career, but there’s still room for some uncertainty in his profile. He debuted in 2022 and put up ugly numbers across 23 starts, running a 4.90 ERA and a 4.46 FIP. He broke out in 2023, going 12-7 with a 2.83 ERA and a 3.27 FIP. The underlying numbers weren’t quite so spectacular, as a big component of his improvement was a drop in home run rate that looked unsustainably large. Although Bradish had made more sustainable improvements to his walk, strikeout, and groundball rates, it still would have been fair to expect some regression. Instead, he came out of the gate even better in 2024. His walk rate did indeed regress, but he suppressed homers even further and ratcheted his strikeout rate all the way up to 33%. It was a huge jump, but it lasted just eight starts before the god of ulnar collateral ligaments demanded its tribute.

Bradish returned from Tommy John surgery at the end of August 2025, and he picked up right where he’d left off before the injury. In fact, over his six starts, he struck out more than 37% of the batters he faced. If you combine the two seasons, Bradish threw 71 1/3 innings across 14 starts, posting a 2.65 ERA and a 2.48 FIP. He put up 2.5 WAR in what was essentially half a season. It was legitimate dominance. Read the rest of this entry »

At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contending clubs. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 10% when this series began), I’ve also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included it here because the team’s performance is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the fifth full season of the universal DH, 0.2 WAR represents the current median, with 11 teams below zero, 12 between zero and 1.0, and just seven with 1.0 or more, with only five reaching 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .244/.325/.422 for a 106 wRC+ this season, down four points from last year’s final mark, the highest since the adoption of the universal DH.

It does appear that an increasing number of teams are investing more playing time in a single DH. From 2022 (the first full-length season with the universal DH) to ’25, the number of players reaching 450 plate appearances in the DH role increased from three to four to seven to nine; this year, they’re on pace for nine, as well. That said, all but one of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

As is tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the lead-up to the trade deadline to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at the players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.

For those of you who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2027-2031, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money (exclusive of any signing bonus), if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2031 (assuming the player is under contract or team control for those seasons, or has a player or vesting option). Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2025 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his technical wizardry. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all of the players who have been ranked up to this point. Read the rest of this entry »