Baseball’s middle class is pretty large this year. Just 10 teams have records over .500 right now, while nine teams are within three games of a playoff berth — and that doesn’t include the four teams that are currently tied for the final National League Wild Card spot. Because the standings are so compressed, especially in the NL, one team going on a hot streak can up-end the status quo very quickly, as the Reds showed us last week.
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Bo Bichette is a ton of fun to watch at the plate, and that’s especially the case in two-strike counts. He takes on the old school approach of physically altering his swing to avoid striking out. There is something aesthetically pleasing about a player who refuses to strike out; it’s admirable, even. It can also be rewarding.
Bichette has used a no-stride two-strike approach his entire career, but back in 2022, he started standing a bit taller, with his weight pre-shifted into his rear hip to go along with his no-stride load. In 2021, his .212 wOBA with two strikes was well behind the league-wide mark of .236. As a hitter with an above-average hit tool and a knack for making good contact on pitches off the plate, that performance simply wasn’t good enough. Indeed, it’s the exact sort of thing that would force most hitters to try something else, which is what Bichette did. While his wOBA and xwOBA in two-strike counts showed no tangible improvement, 2022 was (and still is) his best full season by wRC+ (130). Whatever the results were, Bichette’s overall offensive game was thriving, so instead of reverting back to the more crouched setup, he built upon his new two-strike stance to improve it.
In 2023, Bichette’s .233 two-strike wOBA was in line with the league average (.232), while his .250 xwOBA was .018 points higher than league average. He decreased his whiff rate with two strikes by about four percentage points from 2022, and his strikeout rate dropped three percentage points as a result. That’s notable, of course, but remember: More contact isn’t always better for a chase-prone player like Bichette, as a batter’s quality of contact on pitches outside the zone is typically worse than on those over the plate. The key here is that Bichette’s reduction in whiffs came with better contact; last year he had the best xwOBACON with two strikes (.389) of his career. Read the rest of this entry »
Hurston Waldrep is one of my favorite pitchers in the minor leagues. Or rather, he was, because the Braves called him up this weekend and gave him his major league debut on Sunday. Waldrep was the no. 24 overall pick in the draft last year, and I was by no means alone in considering that selection a steal for Atlanta.
A year ago this weekend, Waldrep was pitching the University of Florida to the College World Series; on Sunday, his opponent, the Washington Nationals, was somewhat more challenging. Waldrep’s line in his debut ended up being extremely ugly: 3 2/3 innings, four hits, four walks, only one strikeout, and seven earned runs allowed. Atlanta lost the game 8-5, and Waldrep got charged with the decision, leaving him with a career record of 0-1 and an ERA of 17.18.
Waldrep’s first big league start ended in disaster, but up until the point where it all went wrong, the rookie showed incredible promise. So let’s look a little deeper, because amid the pile of runs, you can see why I’m still so high on Waldrep, and why he could end up being immensely important to the Braves later this year. Read the rest of this entry »
Our new player pages, which have been available to FanGraphs Members for the past week, are now available to everyone! Thank you to all our Members who helped test these out. The new player pages include a number of enhancements:
Vertical Menu
We have a new vertical menu with expandable options within each player page. Now you can access Pitch-Type Splits and Pitch Velocity Graphs without going through other menus.
The menu is now accessible via a floating action button in the bottom right corner on mobile devices. This allows you to access the menu from any point on the page without having to scroll to find it.
Modular Player Information
We’ve given the player information section an overhaul with organized modules. There are now additional RosterResource details, such as player role, acquisition method, and current contract information seamlessly integrated into the layout.
Data Table Enhancements
We’ve streamlined pitch-level data into fewer tables with selectors for the different data sources. Pitch Type and Velocity are also now in one table, and the Pitch Values/100 have been combined with the Pitch Values into a single table. For the Statcast and Pitch Info data, we’ve filtered out pitch types columns where we don’t have data for both pitchers and batters, though this will be less noticeable for batters.
Pitch Modeling
We’ve added pitch modeling tables for both Pitching Bot and Stuff+. The pitch modeling sections allow you to toggle between the different models.
I also wanted to recognize and thank the rest of the engineering team, David Appelman and Keaton Arneson, for their contributions to this project!
Have feedback or spotted a bug? Drop us a comment or send us an email at support@fangraphs.com. Your input helps us keep improving.
Last Sunday’s column led with Detroit Tigers infielder/outfielder Matt Vierling reflecting on his days as a two-way player in high school and at the University of Notre Dame. This week’s leads with a former two-way player whose career path took a different turn. A native of Saginaw, Michigan who played shortstop and served as a closer at the University of Nebraska, Spencer Schwellenbach is currently a member of the Atlanta Braves starting rotation.
His big-league debut came sooner than expected. The 24-year-old right-hander was drafted in 2021 — Atlanta selected him in the second round — but because of Tommy John surgery he didn’t take the mound until last year. At the time of his May 29 call-up, Schwellenbach had just 110 minor-league innings under his belt. Moreover, he hadn’t thrown a pitch above the Double-A level.
His two-step call-up is something he’ll never forget.
“They actually told me I was going to Triple-A,” said Schwellenbach. “I showed up in Gwinnett, threw a bullpen, and after I got done they asked if I was all packed up to go to Virginia. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got all my stuff here.’ They were like, ‘Well, unpack your stuff, you’re throwing in Atlanta on Wednesday.’ I was so taken off guard that I didn’t know what to say. It was like, ‘holy crap.’ I called my parents, my fiancee, my brothers, my sister. It was awesome.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s recent resurgence, then answer listener emails about what a dynastic team could do to avoid being widely hated, a mid-plate-appearance batting change, widening the foul lines to increase offense, whether reducing pitcher injuries would be worth bringing back pitcher hitting, the popularity of a perfect ump, the fairness of unintentional foul tips, and which Mario Kart power-up would be best in baseball, plus additional banter about the Angels’ surprisingly small post-Ohtani attendance drop and ((1:09:51) a Stat Blast (with Michael Mountain) about championship win probability MVPs, combining regular-season and postseason stats, and more.
Like many other nerds, I have devoted a lot of time to slicing and dicing Baseball Savant’s new bat tracking data over the last few weeks. And like many other nerds, I’m not entirely sure how we’ll end up using this wealth of new information. More time, more data, and more brain power is needed to wring out whatever sweeping new truths it may hold. I’m going to write about bat tracking data in a more focused way next week. There are a couple things I think are really interesting; not necessarily new information, but ways that bat tracking data can give us hard numbers for things that we’ve already learned. In this article, I’ll be a bit more scattershot. I’d just like to take you through how I’ve processed all the information that has come out over the last few weeks.
First off, bat tracking will give us new stats that stabilize more quickly than existing ones, as that’s how granular metrics that separate underlying skills from results tend to work. In smaller samples, exit velocity turned out to be a better predictor of overall batting performance than wRC+ or wOBA. Now we have swing speed, which in smaller samples turns out to be a better predictor of exit velocity. To wit, I pulled data from the first week of bat tracking, April 3 to April 9, and compared it to each player’s overall numbers this season. I eliminated any player with fewer than five plate appearances during the first week or fewer than 100 PA during the entire season, which left me with a sample of 295 players. It was no contest. Full-season exit velocity had a much stronger correlation to first-week swing speed (R = .60) than it did to first-week exit velocity (R = .40). It also predicted full-season hard-hit rate better than first-week hard-hit rate (R = .66 for swing speed, compared to R = .46 for hard-hit rate). If, after the first week, you want to know who’s going to hit the ball hard for the rest of the season, don’t look at exit velocity. Look at swing speed:
I’m not as stridently anti-tanking as some people — in my youth, I was a Sixers blogger during The Process, so I can say from experience that rooting for a historically bad team has its moments — but there is one thing that bugs me about the Orioles and Astros and so on from the 2010s. They’ve broken the curve for bad teams.
Back in my day, it took some doing to lose 100 games. Teams that bad were special. Now, we don’t blink at having multiple 100-loss teams in the same season, and 110-loss teams or worse are pretty common. It takes an increasingly rare brand of ineptitude to catch our attention nowadays.
Max Fried hadn’t yet established himself when I first talked to him for FanGraphs in April 2018. While highly regarded — the San Diego Padres had drafted the southpaw seventh overall in 2012 out of Los Angeles’ Harvard-Westlake High School — he had just a smattering of innings under his big league belt. Fast forward to today, and Fried — acquired by the Atlanta Braves in a December 2014 trade the Padres presumably wish they hadn’t made — is one of the best pitchers in baseball. Moreover, he has been since the start of the 2019 season. With the caveat that pitcher win-loss records need to be taken with a large grain of salt, the 30-year-old hurler has gone 66-23 over the last five-plus seasons; his .742 winning percentage ranks first among his contemporaries (min. 50 decisions). Fried’s ERA and FIP over that span are 3.00 and 3.20, respectively, and in the current campaign those numbers are 2.93 and 3.22.
His hitting also bears mention. In 2021, the last year before the National League adopted the DH, Fried had the highest batting average (.273), on-base percentage (.322), wRC+ (77), and wOBA (.289) among pitchers with 40 or more plate appearances. While not exactly Wes Ferrell, Fried could more than hold his own in the batter’s box.
How has the Atlanta ace evolved as a pitcher since we spoke six years ago, and does he miss stepping up to the plate with a piece of lumber in hand? I broached those topics with Fried on Wednesday afternoon at Fenway Park.
———
David Laurila: You were relatively new to the big leagues when we first spoke. Outside of being older and more experienced, what has changed since that time?
Max Fried: “Honestly, I would say it’s just experience, just constantly evolving and taking from what I’ve learned over the years. A lot of it has been commanding my pitches better, throwing them for strikes and keeping guys off balance.”
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
On Tuesday, I wrote about how the Brewers have been able to leverage largely unheralded depth into an excellent start to their season. In a conversation about the column with one of my friends the following day, I referred to the Brewers as “Rays North” for their ability to extract the most out of players and pile up wins. But really, the Brewers are paving their own trail and the Rays are at something of a crossroads.
Entering a huge four-game series against the Orioles on Friday, the Rays are 31-31, and 13 games back in the AL East. They’ve got 100 games left, so there’s no need to panic just yet, but they’re at risk of missing the playoffs for the first time since 2018, and for their first losing season since 2017.
The ever-present depth that has defined the Rays for much of Kevin Cash’s tenure just hasn’t been there, especially on the pitching side. The bullpen, which has been fodder for cheeky memes whenever the Rays pick a reliever up off waivers (I love tweeting “1.80 ERA coming” for every arm they snag off the scrap heap), has plunged to 29th in WAR, with the team simply not possessing the breadth of arms that it has in years past. The middle relievers have been especially troublesome; while Pete Fairbanks, Jason Adam, and Garrett Cleavinger have all been excellent once the ball has gotten to them in the late innings, the bridge to them is crumbling.
And their starters aren’t helping matters. Only Ryan Pepiot and Zack Littell have ERAs below 4.00, and Aaron Civale and Taj Bradley have been hit especially hard. Bradley has tantalizing potential and can carve through hitters with the best of them when he’s on — he struck out eight batters in his first three innings against the Red Sox two starts ago — but when he’s off for an inning or two he gets absolutely hammered. He’s allowed seven homers across five starts. That inconsistency has fueled a rotation that ranks 26th in WAR, and unlike in prior years, the Rays don’t have reinforcements on the way. Joe Rock is their only prospect pitching particularly well at Triple-A.
It’s a bit more encouraging — if not by much — that Tampa Bay sits 19th in the majors by position player WAR, and maybe that’s enough to conjure up some Rays magic. However, I’m just not sure this offense should even be this good. Isaac Paredes is almost singlehandedly carrying the bats, with last year’s core of Yandy Díaz (99 wRC+), Randy Arozarena (83 wRC+), and Josh Lowe (109 wRC+ in just 15 games thanks to a couple IL trips) failing to support him. I don’t think Díaz is suddenly an average bat; he won the batting title in 2023, continues to hit the ball hard, and still makes great swing decisions. Arozarena is a different story. His swing-and-miss issues and newfound inability to optimally hit the ball (his sweet-spot percentage is in the first percentile) don’t exactly give me hope that a turnaround is imminent.
So, where do the Rays go from here? Many other teams would be relieved if they still had a .500 record as plenty of their most important players underperformed; those clubs might bank on some positive regression and decide to upgrade their roster before the trade deadline. But that’s not how the Rays operate, especially in an extremely tough AL East.
Complicating matters is their payroll, which is currently at $97 million, by far the highest of the six years for which we have payroll data at RosterResource. While teams will never open the books and say exactly what a particular payroll means for financial losses and gains, owner Stuart Sternberg claimed before the season that the high payroll would lead to “real losses.” Sternberg added that he views those losses as worth it because he’d “like to keep [the successes] rolling,” and I have no real reason to doubt that he means that; the Rays have been good for years, and he’d surely like to have a talented team when the franchise’s new stadium ostensibly opens in 2028. What I’m not sure, though, is if augmenting this deeply flawed team to win this season is the best move. For the first time in a while, I could see the Rays going in the complete opposite direction.
The Rays are never ones to make huge additions at the deadline — it’s more complementary players like Nelson Cruz and Civale, and longer-term plays for untapped potential like Arozarena and Fairbanks — but that doesn’t mean they might not make huge subtractions. Tampa Bay is famous for never having untouchables, and despite his anemic performance, teams are apparently quite interested in Arozarena. He has the third-highest salary on the team, and I have no reason to believe the Rays also wouldn’t entertain offers for their two highest earners, Zach Eflin and Díaz, if the return is commensurate and the front office thinks that such a move would be the best path toward improving in 2025 and beyond. On a smaller scale, if the Rays are roughly .500 by the time the deadline rolls around, I’d be surprised to see Amed Rosario, Shawn Armstrong, Phil Maton, Chris Devenski, and Harold Ramírez still on the team.
As usual, what the Rays end up doing at the deadline might lead to some head-scratching; plenty of their moves during their stretch of success seemingly came out of nowhere, and some of those surprises hardly made sense at the time. But this is an organization that is always thinking about what’s next rather than pushing all its chips in for a single season. And there’s no reason to think that this won’t be a quick reset rather than a long rebuild. Next year, ace Shane McClanahan, Jeffrey Springs, and Drew Rasmussen are expected to return to the rotation after recovering from elbow injuries that will cost them most or all of this season. Also, the Rays should have über-prospect Junior Caminero, who is currently battling quad issues in Triple-A, healthy and ready to contribute in 2025. And don’t forget about Xavier Isaac, who’s tearing through the minors himself and could be an option for the big league club as soon as next year. Playing for next season is probably the smart move for the Rays at this point, and if that means trading away some talent from this year’s club, then so be it.
Sponsor Us on Patreon
Facebook Group
Twitter Account
EW Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
iTunes Feed
Get Our Merch!
