Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

May 18
The summer after my wife and I moved in together, we had a mouse in our apartment. We set traps everywhere we could think to put them, but no matter what kind of traps or bait I used, the mouse wanted nothing to do with them. After a couple days, I got desperate. I wanted to figure out exactly where the mouse was getting in so that I could close up the gap to keep it out. Failing that, I wanted to figure out where it was going so that I could set traps in the right places. So I propped up an iPad against the arm of the couch with its camera pointed at the kitchen, called it on FaceTime from my laptop, and brought the laptop into the bedroom and closed the door. Then I sat quietly, stared at my kitchen from the other room, and waited for the mouse to show up. Even as I was setting everything up, I recognized it as an act of madness. But it worked.

I didn’t glean much that first day. If I recall correctly, the mouse did eventually show up, but it turned out that the iPad didn’t have a good angle on its movements. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from or where it was going, only that it crossed the kitchen a time or two. Convinced that the concept was sound and the execution could be improved upon, I tried it again the next day. My wife was off work, so I explained that I needed her to hole up in the bedroom with me. She recognized it as an act of madness too, but she found it hilarious. She dubbed it Mouse TV, and she understandably shrieked when the mouse finally showed up. We watched and stifled our laughter as it nosed around the kitchen. It took a couple more days of Mouse TV to figure out where the mouse was coming from, plug the hole, and make sure that the mouse wasn’t coming back. My wife was tickled the whole time. Whereas I felt embarrassed and vaguely unclean about having a rodent in my home, she’d tell the story of Mouse TV to anyone who could listen. It has, somehow, become a fond memory. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Because You Asked, a series in which I’ll dive deeper on some of the players who readers inquire about in my weekly chats. These tend to be guys who were absent or only briefly mentioned on our last list cycle, or players with production that’s out of step with their reputation or scouting reports. Also, Jonah Tong. Hopefully this exercise allows me to just tap a sign every week instead of writing the same sentence or two; we’ll see how it goes. First up: Manuel Pena.

Pena is a 22-year-old utility prospect in the Diamondbacks system. We’ve written about him before — Eric and I ranked him 15th in Arizona’s system in 2022 as a projectable power hitter — but he quickly fell out of the main section of lists and was absent entirely during our last three cycles. This year, Pena has started games at first, third, and second base, as well as in left field, and while he has a little shortstop experience on his CV, he’s primarily a four-corner guy at this point. Nobody’s asking about the glove, though. Pena has drawn attention for one reason: Out of nowhere, he’s among the minor league leaders in home runs with 29. This comes after he’d hit 31 in the previous five seasons combined, so fans and readers understandably want an update here. Read the rest of this entry »

Something significant happens to Chase Burns around this time every year. In 2024, the Reds made him the no. 2 overall pick in the draft. A little less than 12 months later, the former Wake Forest flamethrower made his big league debut. This summer, Burns was named to his first All-Star team, paving the way for a seven-year, $105 million contract extension.

Burns’ new contract kicks in next year and runs through the 2033 season; and in a rare occasion for a pre-arbitration extension like this, there are no opt-outs, options, or escalators. Thank God — you need a degree in discrete mathematics to know how long Julio Rodríguez is under team control, so a simple contract structure is a refreshing change. Read the rest of this entry »

The All-Star break affords a good opportunity to run a full update of the ZiPS projections, since the lack of action allows me, the system’s flesh-and-blood creator, the time to refresh every speck of data that ZiPS uses before new games push over my tower of dominoes.

The ZiPS projected standings are the product of a million seasonal simulations; there’s a lot of PC power and a unfortunate amount of linear algebra involved. In order to get a better estimate of the upside and downside of a team, ZiPS takes the important additional step of simulating the roster itself before it ever considers a single game on the schedule. To illustrate, in most of the million simulations, Yordan Alvarez continues to treat opposing pitchers in a rather rude fashion, and sometimes, he even wins the Triple Crown. But in some simulations, he’s merely OK, while in others, he misses time due to injury. In a small percentage of those runs, the injury proves significant and prematurely ends his season. When a player is injured in a ZiPS simulation, the computer fills in the depth charts based on who is left standing. While this isn’t a perfect approach, the overall effect is to give us a range of expectations for the Astros, allowing us to peek as far as as we can into the future until the future actually arrives. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, please visit our Patreon.

With Ben Lindbergh serving jury duty, Meg Rowley is joined by Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Craig Goldstein. The pair discuss the perils of hotel pillows and showers, then turn their attention to the 2026 All-Star Game, how the in-person experience compares to the TV one, and the challenges of making it a fun event relative to the Home Run Derby. Then Craig offers his thoughts on the CBA negotiations and Rob Manfred’s approach to communicating (38:58), before he and Meg discuss a few of the things they are looking forward to (and one thing they’re dreading) about the season’s second half, including the White Sox, good teams playing well, a potentially weird deadline, and Pete Crow-Armstrong.

Audio intro: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Josh Busman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to the Five and Dive episode where Craig discusses the Rays
Link to Craig on the weird deadline ahead
Link to Steven Goldman on the All-Star Game
Link to Jake Mintz on the All-Star Game Sandlot tribute
Link to Jayson Stark on the AL’s All-Star pitching dominance
Link to Andy McCullough on the All-Star Game
Link to Michael Baumann on Philly as the haters’ All-Star Game
Link to Katie Woo on Jordan Walker
Link to Ben Clemens on Dillion Dingler
Link to Davy Andrews on Pete Crow-Armstrong
Link to Ryan Blake on Lance McCullers Jr. Trade
Link to Dan Szymborski on an AL team with a losing record making the postseason

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Having gone around the horn during the first three entries of this series, it’s time to turn to the outfield. In a break from tradition, instead of looking at the teams with trouble at either corner in one fell swoop, this time I’m addressing the ones receiving less-than-acceptable production from their left and center fielders. Right fielders will get a standalone list in order to keep the length of these articles manageable. There’s still some crossover between today’s positions and their respective lists, with two contenders double-dipping.

While still focusing on clubs that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far (which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season), 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 them here because the team’s performance is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly within the context of the rest of a team’s roster. The capsules are listed in order of their left field rankings first, while noting those crossover teams with an asterisk. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the August 3 trade deadline, but these are ones to keep an eye on. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Fully appreciating what Phillies DH Kyle Schwarber is and does as a baseball player is harder than you’d think given that he really only does one thing.

Namely, this:

Obviously, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. It’s more accurate to say that Schwarber is a distinct brand of a three-true-outcomes hitter. For his career, 49.4% of his plate appearances have ended in a strikeout, a walk, or a home run. But even among three-true-outcomes players, Schwarber is very homer-forward. Round-trippers make up a high ratio of his production, particularly among his peers who also own a batting average that hovers right around the leaguewide mark. Looking at qualified player-seasons where at least 49% of plate appearances ended in one of the three true outcomes and the player batted .255 or lower, Schwarber has three that rank in the top 10 in terms of the percentage of three true outcomes that were homers. Among that same subset of player-seasons, Schwarber has two that rank in the top six in terms of home runs per plate appearance (2025 and 2026) and four in the top 25 by home runs per hit (2022, 2023, 2025, and 2026). Read the rest of this entry »

The first deal of the 2026 trade deadline was interesting more than it was important.

On Wednesday, the Astros sent Lance McCullers Jr., Colton Gordon, and cash considerations to the Brewers in exchange for Jadyn Fielder, the son of Prince Fielder. The Athletic’s Chandler Rome described the deal as a “salary dump” for Houston, noting that owner Jim Crane convinced McCullers to waive his no-trade clause to help the team manage its budget and roster. The Brewers were happy to oblige, adding depth and taking on a new pitcher project, parting with the son of a franchise legend to do so.

The deal marks the end of an era in Houston. The Astros drafted McCullers 41st overall in 2012, the same year they took Carlos Correa first overall. He developed right alongside the Astros as they progressed from tankers to titans, often serving as an exemplar for their forward-thinking pitching strategy. Nobody threw a higher rate of curveballs (44%) from 2015 through 2018 than McCullers, even going so far as to throw 24 straight curveballs to close out a four-inning save in Game 7 of the 2017 ALCS. Read the rest of this entry »

As the second half of the season gets under way this weekend, it’s the perfect time to take stock of where each team finds itself with less than three weeks to go until the trade deadline. Yesterday, I covered the teams ranked 18th to 30th according to our power rankings. Today, I’ll finish with the teams most likely to be vying for playoff spots this fall.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format 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 coin flip 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%). The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out between now and October, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise remains reactive to hot streaks and cold snaps. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab.

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 — there are times where I take 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. Read the rest of this entry »