Jeremy Peña is off to an excellent start. He’s also been one of the least productive hitters in baseball. How’s that for a lede?

If I told you that without any additional context, perhaps you’d think Peña was struggling at the plate but making up for it in the field. Yet, the former Gold Glove winner currently has -2 OAA and -5 DRS on the season. So much for that theory. Much to the contrary, Peña is on fire at the plate. Over the first six weeks of the 2024 campaign, he is batting .313 with a 129 wRC+. And while his .351 BABIP is likely unsustainable, his .327 xBA ranks second among qualified American League batters. His .363 xwOBA ranks in the 80th percentile, a big step up from his .305 xwOBA (22nd percentile) in 2023. Most impressive, he has cut his strikeout rate down to just 14.0%, ninth lowest in the AL. His strikeout rate has improved from the 30th percentile in his 2022 rookie campaign to the 61st percentile last season, and now it sits in the 92nd percentile in year three.

However, if you glance up from those percentiles on Peña’s Baseball Savant page, you might be surprised by the most important number of them all: His batting run value is zero. The line on the value spectrum is the faintest shade of blue, sitting about a quarter of an inch closer to “poor” than “great.” That doesn’t seem right. Indeed, out of 485 batters to see a pitch this year, Peña is the only one with a wOBA and xwOBA above .350 and a negative batting run value, according to Savant. It’s not hard to understand why he’s an outlier. Typically, when a player is hitting anywhere close to as well as Peña, he provides at least some positive value to his club.

Metrics like wOBA and xwOBA are context neutral, while Baseball Savant calculates run value by considering the runners on base, the number of outs, and the ball and strike count for each discrete event. If you take that general methodology a step further and also consider the inning and the score, you get a statistic like Win Probability Added (WPA) – although Peña might ask that we please, please stop taking the methodology a step further. According to WPA, Peña has cost the Astros far more than he has given back in 2024. Houston ranks second to last in the AL with -3.82 offensive WPA this season. Peña (-1.03) is responsible for more than a quarter of that negative WPA. Only two players have contributed to the team’s misfortunes more than Peña: the now-optioned José Abreu and a deeply slumping Alex Bregman. Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Judge, Paul Goldschmidt, and José Abreu aren’t the only recent MVPs off to underwhelming starts in 2024. After putting together a season for the ages last year, Ronald Acuña Jr. has scuffled thus far, both in terms of making contact and hitting for power. His struggles have coincided with those of a couple of the team’s other heavy hitters, with the result that the team recently slipped out of first place in the NL East for the first time in more than a year.

Roughly two years removed from season-ending surgery to repair a torn ACL, Acuña became the first player ever to hit at least 40 homers and steal at least 70 bases in the same season. He clubbed 41 dingers and swiped a major league-leading 73 bags, aided by a couple of rule changes that increased per-game stolen base rates by 41% league-wide. Playing a career-high 159 games, he hit .337/.416/.596 while leading the NL in on-base percentage, steals, wRC+ (170), plate appearances (735), at-bats (643), total bases (383), hits (217), runs (149), and WAR (9.0). Despite a strong challenge from Mookie Betts, he was a unanimous pick for the NL MVP award.

Where has that electrifying slugger gone? With more than a month of play under his belt this season, Acuña has hit just .267/.373/.359 with 14 steals but just two homers. Thanks to his 12.4% walk rate and his high on-base percentage, that slash line is still good for a 116 wRC+, but the 54-point drop in wRC+ is steep, even if it’s “only” the 16th-largest in the majors among players with at least 400 PA last year and 100 this year. Read the rest of this entry »

In-zone rate is one of the most fascinating stats in baseball. It definitely means something, but you sometimes need to sort through a couple different factors in order to determine just what that something is. If pitchers think they can knock the bat out of your hands, they’ll come right after you inside, but if they’re scared you’ll do damage, then they’ll nibble around the edges. If you chase too much, they’ll look to tempt you outside the zone, but if you make good swing decisions, you can force them to throw it over the plate. Fastballs end up in the zone more often than breaking balls and offspeed pitches, so if you struggle to catch up to velocity, you’ll see more pitches in the zone. There’s always some randomness thrown in for good measure too, but generally speaking, that’s the matrix.

If you combine all those factors, you’ll see that most of the time, players who take big hacks see fewer pitches in the zone than those who just try to put the ball in play. Since 2021, Salvador Perez and Bryce Harper have seen the fewest pitches in the zone, while Myles Straw and Ha-Seong Kim have seen the most. But there are some elite players who combine the best of all worlds: They make good swing decisions and they combine power with contact ability. If you hang it, they’ll bang it, and if you bury it, they’ll spit on it. These players usually end up with a zone rate that’s somewhere in the middle, simply because there is no one good way to pitch to them. Think Joey Votto, Alex Bregman, and our subject for today: Mookie Betts.

If you’re a baker, you might be fond of the kitchen sink cookie: the cookie where you mix anything and everything that might be delicious into the dough. Pecans and peanut butter chips? Sure. Toffee bits and white chocolate? The more the merrier. Betts is baseball’s version of the kitchen sink cookie, studded with athleticism, coordination, savvy, skill, versatility, maybe even some shredded coconut. There’s no such thing as a right way to pitch him. He has weak spots, but he’s excellent at hitting the kinds of pitches that are usually located in those spots because he’s good against every kind of pitch. He’s never excelled against pitches at the top of the zone, but he destroys four-seam fastballs. If you want to beat him up there, you really have to hit the very edge, because if you miss high, he won’t swing, and if you miss low, he’ll clobber it. He’s also had trouble low and away, but again, he’s always been solid against the breaking pitches that most righties try and throw there.

This year, Betts is batting leadoff in front of reigning AL MVP and current Triple Crown candidate Shohei Ohtani and perennial MVP candidate Freddie Freeman. There’s nobody in baseball with better lineup protection, so you could be forgiven for assuming that he has been seeing a lot more strikes this season. He has not. In fact, his zone rate has fallen from 49.1% in 2023 to 45.4% this season. That drop of 3.7 percentage points is tied with MJ Melendez for the second largest among all qualified players, behind only Anthony Volpe, who went from 50% to 46.1%. That leaves Betts with a zone rate in the 13th percentile of all qualified players.

So far, 10.1% of the pitches Betts has seen have been in the waste zone, and 24.4% have been in the chase zone. Both of those numbers are the highest he’s ever recorded. Just 23% of the pitches Betts has seen this year have been in the heart zone. That’s the lowest rate he’s ever recorded, and it’s also eighth lowest among the 196 players who have seen at least 400 pitches this season. Pitchers are avoiding him like never before, and it’s not just that he’s seeing fewer strikes. They’re trying to execute a specific plan.

They’re trying to hit that outside corner. Betts is seeing fewer four-seamers, and more sinkers and offspeed pitches. Those offspeed pitches, as well as the breaking balls he’s seeing, are more concentrated on the outside edge of the plate.

Strictly speaking, this plan is not working. Betts is already sitting on a major league-best 3.0 WAR, and his 193 wRC+ is second only to the 217 mark of the player who is, in theory, protecting him in the lineup. It’s hard to argue that the league has finally figured out a player who’s currently on pace for 12.8 WAR.

However, this plan is absolutely changing the shape of the production Betts is putting up. First, the good news: He’s running a career-high 16.3% walk and a career-low 9.6% strikeout rate. His 1.71 walks per strikeout are miles ahead of Vinnie Pasquantino’s 1.36 in second place. Now the bad news: Betts’ hard-hit rate and 90th percentile exit velocity are down significantly. His pull rate is down to 32.6%, the lowest of his entire career and a drop-off of more than 13 percentage points from 2023. He hasn’t hit a homer since April 12 or an extra-base hit since April 28. Here’s what that looks like in heat map form. The map below shows Betts’ value according to Runs Above Average per 100 pitches.

If you’re a pitcher, that makes it pretty clear: outside good, inside bad. Even with Ohtani and Freeman looming, it might make sense to try to hit your spot on the outside corner and risk giving up a walk. Furthermore, this plan is not without precedent. If you go back and look at the heat maps of the pitches Betts has seen in recent years, one of them jumps out as similar to this season.

In 2021, pitchers tried a similar tack, aggressively going after the outside corner. Betts ended up with a 131 wRC+ — the worst mark he’s had since 2017. If you’re an opposing pitcher with no good options — which is to say any pitcher who finds themselves 60 feet, 6 inches away from Mookie Betts — why not try an approach that has, at least grading by the ridiculous curve of Betts’ stellar production, worked before? Look at how many of his hits (especially his extra-base hits) went to left field last year.

Right field is just a sea of gray outs with a few green singles sprinkled in. In 2023, Betts had a .602 wOBA when he pulled the ball, .396 when he hit it straightaway, and .189 when he hit it to the opposite field. Why not do everything you can to keep him from pulling the ball and encourage him to hit it the other way? Unfortunately for opposing pitchers, this tactic requires a high level of precision. Betts doesn’t seem to mind taking his walks, and on the rare occasions when he does get a pitch to hit on the inner half, he’s making the most of it.

However, there are a few signs that he’s had to adjust to combat this approach. He appears to be setting up closer to the plate this season. In the pictures below, I’ve copied and pasted a second home plate right next to the actual home plate to give a better sense of scale.

In theory, moving a few inches closer means that the inside pitches Betts usually mashes are now a little bit further inside, which should give him less time to turn on them. Furthermore, his chase rate is up a bit from last season, and it has been rising in recent weeks.

This could just be regression. Betts has an 83 wRC+ over his last nine games, but it’s not like he was going to run a 250 wRC+ and a 12% chase rate all season. However, he really is chasing more — not a lot, but more than he did in April and more than he did in 2023. We’ve seen him move closer to the plate, and it’s certainly possible that seeing so few pitches in the strike zone has made him a little bit sick of waiting for his pitch and more likely to swing at something he shouldn’t. We’re only a fifth of the way through the season, and all the numbers you’ve seen so far are likely to continue to regress to the mean. Betts will likely face more pitchers who are bold enough to challenge him inside (or at all). But for now, it looks like he’s still adjusting to this new approach.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Riley Greene’s latest pants-related wardrobe malfunction, the Padres-Marlins Luis Arraez trade, the continued scuffling of Vladimir Guerrero Jr., a C.B. Bucknor bit, and more. Then (52:30) they’re joined by Neil deMause, author of Field of Schemes, and J.C. Bradbury, author, stadium-funding researcher, and professor of economics, finance, and quantitative analysis at Kennesaw State University, to discuss the latest wave of attempts by teams to obtain public funding for ballpark projects and whether the public is belatedly pushing back, plus a follow-up postscript (1:28:29)

Audio intro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”
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Audio outro: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Effectively Wild Theme (Pedantic)”

Link to first Greene pants tear
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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 »