Back in the halcyon days of 2021, things were looking up for Robbie Ray. After a promising but inconsistent start to his career, he put everything together all at once and won a Cy Young award. He hit free agency on the back of that season and signed a deal that guaranteed him five times what he’d made in the majors so far. The future was bright – except that Ray turned around and put up a miserable 2022 campaign, meaningfully worse across the board despite pitching in Seattle, where trained squirrels can go six innings and give up two runs in the pitcher-friendliest ballpark in the big leagues. Then he got hurt. And later got traded as salary ballast. Life comes at you fast.

Ray would hardly be the first pitcher to spike some hardware in a weak year — only six AL pitchers reached 4 WAR in 2021; Ray wasn’t one of them — and then fade away. Rick Porcello says hi, by the way. If Ray’s last act was keeping replacement-level time on the Giants, at least he got his one big payday. Expectations weren’t high, and when he was shut down with an injury only a month after returning in the second half of last year, they fell further still.

Of course, I’m writing this article, so you know that hasn’t continued. Rather than teeter into irrelevance, Ray has come out strong to start 2025. He looks as good as he has since his award-winning season – and arguably even better. So let’s look at how he’s doing it now, because whether you’re a long-time Ray-head or just seeing the first Rays of light this year, he’s a strange enough – and fun enough – pitcher to be worth taking notice of. Read the rest of this entry »

At one point or another, most of us have done the thing where we go to the refrigerator in search of a snack, decide nothing looks appealing, close the door, then come back 15 minutes later to check again and somehow feel annoyed when the contents remain unchanged. It’s a near-universal experience despite the illogical nature of the whole thing. And when we relate this experience to others, it’s always the refrigerator, even though we could just as easily choose to re-check a cabinet or the pantry. But I think this is where we do get some credit for being slightly logical. The contents of a refrigerator are far more transient than the dry and canned goods stored elsewhere in the kitchen. The fridge is where we keep the perishables, the food that by definition isn’t meant to last long. Food in the refrigerator comes and goes, rots and gets tossed, all at a much faster rate than elsewhere in the kitchen.

Park factors work a little like a refrigerator. They present a single value that contains within it the influence of several different components that vary from park to park, much in the way my refrigerator is two-thirds beverages and cheese, while yours probably has fruits and veggies and maybe some leftover ham from Easter that you should definitely throw away. Some of the components captured by park factors are static and easily measured, like surface dimensions and wall height. They’re the condiments that remain consistently stocked in the fridge door.

But sometimes you throw open the door to a park’s refrigerator and get whacked in the face with a stench of unknown origin. And that stench becomes all the more potent as it mingles with a to-go box of leftover Thai and a carton of milk growing more questionable by the day. Likewise, wind speeds, the daily dew point, and the angle of the sun at different points relative to the solstice all fluctuate and interact in a way that a scientist with the right expertise could tease out and quantify, but that remain a bit fuzzy to the casual observer.

It was these squishier components of park factors, the ones that ebb and flow as weather cycles in and out and the seasons change, that sparked my curiosity about how park factors might vary over the course of such a long season. Traditionally, park factors are calculated over multiple full seasons of data (though sometimes single-season park factors are useful for capturing more recent trends), and that’s not just a sample size consideration. A full season of data is needed to ensure a balanced schedule where every opponent faced on the road is also faced at home and vice versa. This ensures that when comparing runs per game at home to runs per game on the road, the team quality is consistent in both subsets. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Elly De La Cruz’s unspectacular start to the season, the firing of Brandon Hyde and what it would take for them to blame a manager for a team’s disappointing season, the hubbub about Juan Soto’s hustle, MLB’s announcement about Rivalry Weekend’s success, Kyle Schwarber and the lineage of non-Hall-of-Fame hitters who’ve appeared to have a chance at “magic number” milestones, MLB’s attempt to define the swing, the overwhelming array of Statcast stats, the latest call for Shohei Ohtani to specialize, and more.

Audio intro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Jonathan Crymes 2, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to FG on the O’s
Link to FG playoff odds
Link to BaseRuns standings
Link to Girardi firing article
Link to ESPN on Valentine
Link to FG on the Twins
Link to Soto flight confusion
Link to Ben on Jeter vs. Cano
Link to Soto in-game interview info
Link to Ben on in-game interviews
Link to Soto plays
Link to Mendoza quote
Link to MLB press release
Link to Vedder Cup story
Link to Schwarber HR stat
Link to Stathead query
Link to most HR since 2022
Link to swings article 1
Link to swings article 2
Link to new Savant leaderboard
Link to article on new metrics
Link to FG on Royals pitching
Link to Ohtani strikeout
Link to Pereda ball
Link to Ohtani article
Link to Sam on Ohtani

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I spend a lot of time saying the word “April.” It’s a convenient excuse to wave away any notion of changing my mind drastically on a player after two or three weeks of the season. But April isn’t actually meaningless, and as we head toward June, we’re already nearly a third of the way through the season. A lot of the stuff we’ve seen isn’t just a rough patch or a freak BABIP, but career trajectories changing, and that has consequences for the players and their teams. One of the most common questions about players I get in chats is some variation of “What does ZiPS think now?” I can’t answer them all, mainly because “doughy middle-aged nerd talks to his magical baseball box for an hour” sounds like the worst episode of Black Mirror ever. That said, because I do full in-season runs of ZiPS in the middle of every month, now seems like a good time to get some projectionist changes of heart for the overachieving and underperforming players.

So whose changing fortunes are most likely to lead to changed destinies? Well, to get an idea of which trajectories have changed the most, I took the current 2026 projected numbers for each player and compared them to the 2026 ZiPS projections from before this season began. We’ll start with the good news, because I’m a Baltimore native and an Orioles fan, so I need something sunny first. These are park-neutral projections, and I eliminated anyone who is projected as below replacement level, since we’re focusing on major league-relevant players. Today, we’ll cover the position players before moving on to the pitchers tomorrow.

Here are the players whose 2026 ZiPS projections have improved the most since the beginning of this season, sorted by the greatest gains in projected WAR: Read the rest of this entry »

When we last checked in on the Twins, they had stumbled out of the gate, losing eight of their first 12 games — a start that looked particularly dismal given last September’s collapse, which cost them a playoff berth. But times have changed, with the offense heating up and the pitching staff emerging as one of the league’s stingiest. Thanks to a just-ended 13-game winning streak, the Twins now own the American League’s fourth-best record (26-21, .553), though injuries to players such as Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa threaten to stall their momentum.

On May 3, the Twins beat the Red Sox 4-3 in Boston, ending a four-game losing streak that had dropped them to 13-20 and had included two walk-off wins by the Guardians. They beat the Red Sox to close out a road trip, then went home and pulled off three-game sweeps of the Orioles and Giants, punctuated by a 10th-inning walk-off victory. Back on the road, they swept three from the hapless Orioles in Baltimore before taking the first two from the Brewers in Milwaukee, running their record to 26-20. On Sunday, they finally lost again, falling to the Brewers 5-2.

The final three wins of the Twins’ streak were all shutouts, starting with a 4-0 blanking of the Orioles by starter Chris Paddack and two relievers on Thursday, continuing with a 3-0 whitewashing of the Brewers behind Joe Ryan and three relievers on Friday, and concluding with a 7-0 drubbing of Milwaukee highlighted by the work of Pablo López and three relievers on Saturday. In all, the Twins shut out their opponents for 34 consecutive innings (the longest since the franchise moved to Minnesota in 1961), beginning with the fourth inning of Wednesday night’s game, after the Orioles had scored six runs; they extended that streak until the second inning on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! It’s a gorgeous day here in Brooklyn, and while that may not make a difference to you if you’re staring at a computer screen, it’s lightening my mood just a bit.

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about the Braves’ outfield situation with the return of Ronald Acuña Jr. finally on the horizon https://blogs.fangraphs.com/as-the-braves-recover-from-their-sluggish-…

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Today I’ve got a piece on the Twins’ just-completed 13-game winning streak. That’s in the pipeline and should go up shortly.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Tomorrow evening at 7 PM ET, I’ll be participating in a SABR roundtable on the subject of the recently reinstated Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson, along with Keith O’Brien (author of the recent Rose bio Charlie Hustle) and ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr., who has reported on the reinstatement efforts regarding both Rose and Jackson. Jacob Pomrenke, an expert on Jackson and the 1919 Black Sox scandal, will serve as moderator. https://sabr.org/latest/this-week-in-sabr-may-16-2025#shoelessjoe

12:05

Jay Jaffe: It was just after last week’s chat wrapped up that all hell broke loose with the Rose news. My coverage of it is here: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/say-it-aint-so-commissioner-manfred-posthu…

12:05

Jay Jaffe: And with that housekeeping out of the way, on with the show!

Read the rest of this entry »

“The reason the Royals are so far down this list is that they don’t have an obvious back of the rotation yet.” That’s what Ben Clemens wrote when the Royals turned up at no. 13 on our Positional Power Rankings back in March. Until Saturday, the lack of depth hadn’t held them back at all. Their five starters, Seth Lugo, Cole Ragans, Michael Wacha, Michael Lorenzen, and Kris Bubic, had started 45 of the team’s 46 games. As Michael Baumann wrote last week, Bubic, the biggest question mark of the bunch, has instead pitched like an exclamation point. After taking a no-hit bid into the seventh inning in San Francisco last night, he’s 5-2 with a 1.47 ERA and 2.72 FIP. Put it all together, and the Kansas City starters have a 2.93 ERA and 3.45 FIP, good for the third- and fourth-best marks in baseball, respectively. But that depth is finally going to be tested. On Saturday, the Royals announced that they’d sent both Lugo and Ragans to the injured list.

Lugo and Ragans, who respectively finished second and fourth in the AL Cy Young voting in 2024, have been on opposite sides of the process-results spectrum thus far this season. Lugo is rocking a 3.02 ERA with a 4.52 FIP, while Ragans has a 4.53 ERA and a 1.99 FIP. The good news is that neither injury sounds too serious (with the obvious caveat that because they’re pitchers, either player could spontaneously combust at any moment). Both had been dealing with nagging injuries in recent weeks and seemed to reach the point where it was time to back off rather than risk something more serious. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Riley was relatively raw when our 2017 Atlanta Braves Top Prospects list was published in February of that year. Six weeks short of his 20th birthday, he was coming off of a Low-A season in which he logged 20 home runs and a 124 wRC+, but also fanned 147 times. With lingering concerns about both his contact profile and conditioning, Eric Longenhagen conservatively ranked Riley no. 28 in a then-strong Atlanta system.

Riley has obviously gone on to have a highly successful career. Since debuting with the Braves in May 2019, Riley has put up a 124 wRC+ and 19.9 WAR across parts of seven seasons, slugged 30-plus homers in three different years, and made a pair of All-Star teams. A mainstay in the middle of Atlanta’s lineup, the 41st-overall pick in the 2015 draft out Southaven, Mississippi’s DeSoto Central High School has developed into one of the senior circuit’s top sluggers.

What did Riley’s 2017 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out I shared some of what our lead prospect analyst wrote and asked Riley to respond to it.

———

“Riley began the year struggling with any sort of velocity and then improved the timing of his footwork, quieted his hands and started hitting. Late in the year, he was turning on plus velocity.”

“Very accurate,” Riley said. “Coming out of high school, I hadn’t seen velo a lot, and I kind of had a lot going on with my swing. I needed to make some adjustments. Being a bigger guy, a power guy, it was kind of, ‘All I have to do is touch the ball, get a barrel to the ball.’ It was one of my first steps in learning how to shorten everything up and just get a barrel to it. From there, good things happen.”

“He has plus raw power (at least) and has improved his body composition since high school (when he was a heavy 230). But at just 19, with some general stiffness to his actions, Riley is pretty likely to kick over to first base as he matures.” Read the rest of this entry »

As we get further and further into the month of May, signs of summer are popping up all around us. Allergies are flaring, you can start to trust the major league stat leaderboards, and colleges across the country are wrapping up their spring semesters.

That last point is important, because summer is the season of study abroad. Every year around this time, thousands of American undergraduates get on planes, learn to navigate a foreign country, meet new people, and discover that their Spanish gets way better after three or four beers. It’s a marvelous experience, and I want to bring it to you, the FanGraphs readers.

Welcome to the 2025 FanGraphs Fan Exchange Program.

For one week, I want you to put your favorite team on the shelf and follow a different one. Do whatever you do in the normal course of being a fan, but do it for another ballclub. Read the rest of this entry »