When Steven Kwan left the Guardians’ May 4 victory after straining his left hamstring, the Guardians owned the American League’s second-best record (21-12) as well as a 1.5-game lead in the AL Central. While Kwan was their most productive hitter at the time, they’ve thrived in his absence, going 15-6 thanks in part to a nine-game winning streak that ended at the hands of the Rockies on Monday. All of that has netted them the league’s second-best record (36-18)… and a 2.5-game lead in the Central. Baseball is a funny game sometimes.
The Guardians haven’t gained as much ground as you might expect given that the Royals ran off an eight-game winning streak that began on the same day as Cleveland’s streak and have gone 14-7 in Kwan’s absence; meanwhile, the Yankees have gone 15-5 to supplant the Orioles (12-7) as the team with the league’s best record. Still, the streak did create some daylight between the Guardians and the Twins, who were tied for second in the division with the Royals but have since gone 10-11 to fall to 6.5 games back.
A soft schedule probably didn’t hurt the Guardians, either. After winning the rubber game of their three-game series with the Angels sans Kwan, they took two of three from the Tigers, lost three of four to the White Sox (oops), then took two of three from the Rangers before sweeping consecutive three-game series from the Twins, Mets, and Angels. Collectively those teams have a weighted winning percentage of .418, with the Twins (.547 via a 29-24 record) the only ones at or above .500.
Kwan’s injury is a convenient inflection point for analysis. If it’s still somewhat arbitrary, it does offer a window into the Guardians’ overall performance, as well as how they’ve maintained a .714 winning percentage without him. Read the rest of this entry »
Hi! It has been made to clear to me that my use of f = m * a as a narrative device herein was quite distracting, chiefly because in this context it’s incorrect. I apologize in advance to renowned baseball physicist Prof. Alan Nathan, should he ever read this; to all other physics enthusiasts who have remarked on the mistake; and to me, for embarrassing me. Ideally you will see past it and appreciate the meat and potatoes of the post for what they are: that there is possibly declining marginal utility to bat acceleration in a way we don’t seem to witness for bat speed. Thanks, and sorry again!
I can’t possibly begin to cover all the excellent work concerning Statcast’s new bat tracking data. Now as much as ever, it’s important to support your local Baseball Prospectuses, PitcherLists, Baseball Americas, FanGraphses and freelance Substack writers. We move quickly in these parts. There’s so much analysis to consume, all of it superb.
When confronted with this new data, one of my first instincts was to see which metrics from other areas of sabermetric analysis could be replicated within the bat tracking framework. Enter 90th-percentile exit velocity (90EV); it’s a powerful shorthand metric that distills a lot of information about the top end of a hitter’s exit velocity distribution into a single number. It’s not perfect, and other metrics outperform it, but it’s easy to see how it has become popular in contemporary analysis, especially in prospecting and scouting circles. Read the rest of this entry »
We knew the best hitter in baseball this year would be a multi-positional talent. We knew he would play for one of the top teams in the league. We knew the value of his contract would begin with the words “seven hundred” and the first syllable of his last name would be a source of complex carbohydrates. What we didn’t know is that it would be Guardians catcher/outfielder/first baseman/third baseman/DH David Fry, who is making $741,100 this season and currently leads the majors (min. 50 PA) in OBP (.488), OPS (1.079), wOBA (.459), and wRC+ (204).
The Brewers took Fry in the seventh round of the 2018 draft, eventually sending him to the Guardians during the 2021-22 offseason as the player to be named later in a trade for right-hander J.C. Mejía. Fry had first appeared on the Brewers’ top prospect list ahead of the 2020 season, when Eric Longenhagen ranked him 24th in a weak system, noting the positional flexibility that made him “an interesting potential bench piece.” That assessment largely stuck as Fry rose through the minor leagues (and switched organizations), although he was downgraded from a 40 FV to a 35+ FV in 2021 and eventually fell out of the Guardians’ top 50 ahead of the 2023 season. Eric tweaked his evaluation that year, subtly downgrading Fry from “interesting potential bench piece” to “interesting 26th man candidate.” It was a fair assessment at the time; Fry was roughly a league-average hitter in his first full season at Triple-A (105 wRC+). Entering his age-27 campaign, there wasn’t much reason to bet on his upside.
Yet, Fry was hard to ignore during his first full spring in big league camp in 2023. He bookended that spring training with home runs in his first and last at-bats and hit well in between, too, finishing with a 154 wRC+ in 19 games. Although he didn’t make the Guardians’ Opening Day roster, he surely made a good impression; after a solid month back at Triple-A, he earned his call to the show. Playing catcher, first base, corner outfield, and a little bit of third (with a couple of pitching appearances to boot), Fry showed off his versatility while hitting well enough (106 wRC+) to collect major league paychecks for the rest of the year. Entering 2023, ZiPS projected a .291 wOBA from Fry, and he boosted that projection to a .306 wOBA before the start of this season. Nobody would call his performance last year a breakout, but he put himself on the inside track to play a role for Cleveland once again in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »
Several preseason favorites are sliding down these rankings as we barrel toward the third month of the season, while other clubs — most notably the Guardians — are continuing their surprisingly strong starts.
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 a handful of 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 »
Brice Turang grew up swinging a bat, and the fruits of those labors are coming to fruition in his second MLB season. Following up on a rookie campaign in which he logged an abysmal .585 OPS, the 24-year-old Milwaukee Brewers second baseman is flourishing to the tune of a .301/.366/.428 slash line and a 128 wRC+ over 188 plate appearances. Showing that he can be more than a threat on the bases — he swiped 26 bags a year ago and is 19-for-20 so far this season — Turang also has 15 extra-base hits this season, as many as he had in all of 2023.
The son of former big league outfielder Brian Turang, Brice Turang was drafted 21st overall by the Brewers in 2018 out of Santiago High School in Corona, California. He was ranked no. 65 on our Top 100 Prospects list entering last year. At the time, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin wrote that Turang was “almost certain to have a significant and lengthy big league career,” albeit someone who “has never been a sure bet to do enough offensively to be an impact everyday player.” Two months into his sophomore season, one in which the Brewers are surprisingly atop the NL Central standings, Turang is looking like a hitter — small sample size acknowledged — who you just might not want to bet against.
In the latest installment of my Talks Hitting series, Turang discusses his gap-to-gap approach to his craft, which is driven more by competing than data.
———
David Laurila: How have you developed as a hitter over the years?
Brice Turang: “A lot of it is that I hit basically every day. My dad owned a facility and I would go with him from three o’clock to nine o’clock every night. I loved it. I loved going to work with him. I’d be in the cage all the time, hitting, [developing] hand-eye coordination. Then, as you get into pro ball, the work you do is more of a quality-over-quantity type of thing.”
Laurila: There wasn’t nearly as much hitting data available when your father played. How does the way you learned from him relate to the present day?
Turang: “I don’t look at the data. I’m up there to compete and hit the ball hard. I mean, the data is what it is. You can put a number on anything, so I don’t really even think about it. I just compete and try to hit the ball hard up the middle, hit a line drive up the middle.” Read the rest of this entry »
Statcast’s new public repository of bat tracking data has been out for a few weeks now. Like every number manipulator with a sense of curiosity and middling technical skills, I’ve been messing around with the data in my spare time, and also in my working time, because messing around with data is both my job and hobby.
Mostly, I’ve been reaching some conclusions that mirror what others have already shown, only with less technical sophistication on my part. This article by Sky Kalkman does a great job summing up the biggest conclusion: Pitch location and spray angle (pull/oppo) influence swing length so much that you probably shouldn’t quote raw swing length. But I thought I’d look for something slightly different, and I think I found something.
Here’s the high level conclusion of my search: When pitchers throw harder fastballs, hitters slow down their swings to compensate. It sounds counterintuitive. Shouldn’t hitters speed up their bats to try to get to the faster pitch? But I had a hunch that this wasn’t the case. If you listen to hitters describe their approach against flamethrowers, they focus on shortening up and putting the ball in play. “Shortening up” might sound like it describes swing length, but it also surely describes swing speed. A hitter who is just punching at the ball likely won’t swing as hard as one trying to launch one. If you’re prioritizing having your bat on plane with the ball as long as possible, you probably aren’t focusing as much on raw speed. Read the rest of this entry »
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.
The emotional toll of losing Ronald Acuña Jr. to another ACL tear is obvious. The entirety of the baseball world came together to express shock and disappointment at Sunday evening’s news that Acuña would need season-ending surgery for the second time in four years. At his best, Acuña is arguably the most electric player in the game, as we saw last year during his otherworldly MVP-winning campaign, when he became the first player ever to hit 40 home runs and steal 70 bases in the same season. Baseball is simply not as exciting without him on the field.
Beyond that, though, the injury is a devastating loss for the Braves, whose probability to win the NL East — which was already diminished, as Dan Szymborski noted in his column on Friday — sunk by 10 percentage points within a day after Acuña went down. Sure, he was struggling over the first third of the season — he hit just four home runs in 49 games, and his OPS was nearly 300 points lower than last year’s mark — but his importance to the Atlanta lineup is undeniable.
Monday’s game, an 8-4 loss to the Nationals, provided a look at what the Braves’ offense will look like without the reigning MVP. The good news was that third baseman Austin Riley returned after missing 13 games with an intercostal strain, but it was clear that this was not the same unit that last year drew comparisons to the 1927 Yankees. Second baseman Ozzie Albies replaced Acuña in the leadoff spot, with Riley sliding to the two-hole and DH Marcell Ozuna, who’s been the team’s most productive hitter this year, moving from fifth to third in the order, ahead of slugging first baseman Matt Olson. After that, things drop off considerably, though it helps that catcher Sean Murphy is back from the oblique strain that kept him out since Opening Day. Read the rest of this entry »
The Portland Sea Dogs roster includes three Top 100 prospects, but neither Roman Anthony (15), Marcelo Mayer (42), nor Kyle Teel (83) has been the Double-A affiliate’s best player so far this season. That distinction belongs to a 23-year-old, shortstop-turned-left-fielder whom the Boston Red Sox drafted 69th overall in 2019 out of the Carlos Beltran Baseball Academy. Along with playing stellar defense at a new position, Matthew Lugo is slashing .306/.404/.653 with 10 home runs and an Eastern League-best 191 wRC+.
Markedly-improved plate discipline has played a big role in his breakout. Last year, Lugo logged a 5.9% walk rate and a 27.6% strikeout rate. This year those numbers are 13.4% and 22.5%.
The key to his newfound ability to dominate the strike zone?
“Timing,” explained Lugo, who takes his cuts from the right side. “Last year, I had a lot of movement with my hands, which made me inconsistent being on time with the pitcher. My hands were very low, and then when I got to the launch position they were very high; there was a lot of distance for my hands to go through. This year, I’m closer to my launch position before I swing. I also had a [bat] wiggle and this year I just get to my spot with no wiggle. I’m getting into my spot early and have more time to see the pitch, so I’m making better swing decisions.”
The decision to move Lugo off of his natural position and into an outfield corner wasn’t based on defensive shortcomings, but rather on the arrival of Mayer. The high-ceiling shortstop was promoted to Portland last year on Memorial Day weekend, and given his first-round pedigree, he wasn’t going to be the one moving. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about which slow-starting 2023 pennant winner (Diamondbacks or Rangers) is more likely to get back on track to return to October, explain (9:37) the saga of Dick Windbigler, the rare pitcher who actually hurt himself by pausing mid-delivery (featuring an appearance by Dick’s widow, Melba Windbigler), then (30:04) answer listener emails about the requirements for claiming to have seen a game played in every MLB ballpark, the funniest MVP chant alternatives, changing the penalty for shift violations, and clustering hits and outs, meet major leaguers (1:01:44) Ryan Loutos and Jacob Hurtubise, and Stat Blast (1:14:50) about the least productive hitting streaks and more (plus a postscript).
Before the start of the season, the Atlanta Braves were the consensus pick to win the NL East. While it wasn’t unanimous – try getting a few dozen writers to fully agree on something – 22 of 25 FanGraphs writers predicted the Braves to win the division for the seventh straight season. Sportsbooks offered odds on Atlanta that had an implied probability of 75-80% for winning the division. ZiPS projected the Braves to win the most games in the majors and gave them a 63% chance to take the NL East crown. But as we approach the end of the first third of the season, it’s the Philadelphia Phillies who are on top of the division with the best record in baseball. The team’s six-game lead over Atlanta isn’t an insurmountable barrier, but it’s still a comfortable cushion for this point of the season. So, how concerned should the Braves be? And how long do they have to overcome their rivals and keep their division streak alive?
Frequently, when I discuss surprise first-place teams at this point of the season, I compare the situation to a hypothetical foot race between Usain Bolt and me. It goes without saying that Bolt is a much faster runner than I am, to the degree that he’d probably beat me in a race hopping on one foot. But what if he gave me a head start so I could get a sufficient lead? How far ahead would I have to be to have a chance to hold off the world’s fastest man? Uhhh, 10 steps from the finish line by the time he starts running might get it done. Obviously, this isn’t the perfect analogy, because even if Bolt is the Braves of running, I certainly am not the Phillies. But you get the idea: At some point in the season, a division race becomes a question of time, not talent.
First things first, let’s take a look at the current simulated ZiPS projected standings, through Thursday night’s games.
ZiPS Projected Standings – NL East (Morning of 5/24)
Team
W
L
GB
Pct
Div%
WC%
Playoff%
WS Win%
80th
20th
Philadelphia Phillies
98
64
—
.605
62.2%
34.4%
96.6%
10.8%
103.8
91.4
Atlanta Braves
94
68
4
.580
36.4%
53.7%
90.1%
11.1%
100.7
87.5
New York Mets
79
83
19
.488
1.4%
23.2%
24.6%
1.2%
85.8
73.0
Washington Nationals
69
93
29
.426
0.0%
2.1%
2.2%
0.0%
75.8
63.1
Miami Marlins
67
95
31
.414
0.0%
0.8%
0.8%
0.0%
73.4
61.0
Well, at least if you go by the ZiPS projections, Atlanta fans aren’t getting the happiest version of this tale. ZiPS still thinks the Braves are the better team, but the margin has narrowed considerably. What was a 10-win gap in March has thinned to just a hair over a three-win separation per 162 games (20 points of winning percentage, to be exact). In fact, the Phillies are now projected to have an almost identical probability of winning the division as the Braves did at the start of the season, despite Atlanta’s aforementioned 10-game edge; as I remind people, the future is almost always far more uncertain than you think.
This is actually an impressively durable change, which further complicates matters for the Braves. Projections for teams don’t usually move quickly because, well, baseball history says they shouldn’t. ZiPS has been doing team projections since 2005. If all you had to go on to project the last two-thirds of a season was a team’s preseason projection in ZiPS and the team’s actual record for the first-third of the season, the best mix based on two decades of projections is about two-thirds ZiPS and one-third actual record.
The offenses tell much of the story, so let’s start with Philadelphia’s offense. Here are the differences between ZiPS preseason WAR and the current projected final WAR. The latter consists of the WAR already on the books and the rest-of-season projections. Remember, this already includes all those grumpy old regressions toward the mean.
Phillies Offense – ZiPS Preseason vs. Final 2024 WAR
That’s eight players projected to finish with at least a half-win more than at the start of the season. Castellanos is the only Phillies player whose projected WAR is now a half-win worse, but the projection systems didn’t expect much from him going into the season anyway. None of the hitters who are smashing the ball right now are expected to turn into midnight pumpkins. Even Bohm, the infielder ZiPS was most suspicious of, is now in the top 10 for most projected WAR added for 2025. And it’s not shocking that Harper, Realmuto, Turner (who is currently on the IL), and Stott are projected to maintain their strong starts.
As for the Braves, their vaunted offense has come out rather impotent. They rank seventh in the NL in runs scored, which isn’t disaster territory, but Ronald Acuña Jr., Matt Olson, and Austin Riley have all been just barely above league-average hitters this year. Sean Murphy has been out with an oblique injury that he suffered on Opening Day, but that’s been less of an impact because Travis d’Arnaud has been solid as the everyday backstop. Things might be a lot worse right now if not for the performances of d’Arnaud and Marcell Ozuna.
Atlanta’s current place in the standings is the fault of its underperforming stars, not its complementary talent. And that’s what makes it tough for the Braves to turn things around with a few trades, as they did in 2021 before surging to win the World Series. It’d be one thing if the problem were someone like Orlando Arcia, because the Braves wouldn’t think twice about benching or trading him to acquire a better shortstop. But when it comes to Acuña, Olson, and Riley, all Atlanta can do is wait for them to catch fire. What adds to this general feeling of helplessness is that the team’s biggest problem on the pitching side is Spencer Strider’s season-ending UCL injury. Even if the Braves were to try and swing a trade, their farm system is one of the weakest in baseball right now and only a few teams are currently out of contention. Major reinforcements aren’t on the way anytime soon.
The good news for Atlanta is that its stars are capable of breaking out of their funks at any moment, but the longer it takes them to turn things around, the more time the Phillies have to pull away. To get an idea of how much time the Braves have left, I took the current projected standings and had ZiPS simulate the rest of the season with both teams posting the same record going forward (for the sake of the example, I’m going with a 94-win pace) to see how quickly the divisional probabilities would change. Without picking up ground but also not losing any, Atlanta would slip to two-to-one divisional underdogs by June 10, and hit the three-to-one spot on the last day of the month. If this continues to the morning of the trade deadline, the Braves would find themselves with only an 18% projected chance to win the NL East, while the Phillies’ divisional odds would climb to 81%. (The Mets would still retain a few tenths of a percentage point.)
Let’s be clear: Despite the relatively gloomy outlook for Atlanta, a six-game deficit heading into Memorial Day Weekend is not insurmountable. In fact, the Phillies have the same divisional odds now as the Braves did two months ago. That said, for the first time since 2011, the NL East is the Philadelphia’s division to lose.
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