The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

From being called out publicly by his general manager, manager, and third base coach during an historically wretched season one year, to being robbed of an MVP award after falling just short of a 40-homer, 40-steal campaign the next, Matt Kemp was an enigma. Because he focused more on basketball than baseball growing up, his instincts for the sport sometimes lagged behind his physical abilities, but at his best, he was a superstar, and a sight to behold thanks to his speed and power — a combination of traits that earned him the nickname “The Bison.” He made three All-Star teams and won two Gold Gloves (despite subpar metrics), but unfortunately, a series of injuries to his shoulders and legs compromised those abilities. The $160 million contract he signed after that near-MVP 2011 season became a millstone that sent him from team to team during its eight-year run. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I looked into the curious case of Benjamin Button. Er, no, that’s not right. I looked into the fact that the average age of big league hitters keeps declining, like Button, while pitchers haven’t followed suit. There are any number of possible explanations for that pattern, and if the mystery appeals to you, I highly suggest reading the comments of that article, where our excellent readers have advanced a number of solid theories. I think there’s plenty of meat left on the bone in figuring out what’s causing this trend, but I won’t be delving into that (much) today. Instead, I made like Woodward and Bernstein and followed the money.

Age is a decent proxy for service time; older players have generally, though not alway, been in the league longer than younger players. Similarly, service time is a decent proxy for salary; players who have been in the league longer generally make more money than newcomers, for a variety of reasons. So is our data really just saying pitcher salaries are going up? Well, kind of.

I took salaries for all major league players starting in 2019, discarding the abbreviated 2020 season. I split them up by type – pitchers in one bucket, hitters in another, and Shohei Ohtani in both. Total pitcher and hitter salaries have both gone up – passage of time, inflation, and so on. But after a huge increase heading into 2022, when seven different hitters signed nine-figure contracts, the total outlay to hitters has leveled off. Meanwhile, pitching salaries are catching up:

As an aside, I only pulled data through 2019 because it’s outrageously difficult to get complete salary data. If you’re looking for Opening Day annualized salaries, sure, those are reported. If you’re looking for free agency contracts, again, pretty easy to find. There are no disputes about what Freddie Freeman’s salary was in 2025; it’s public record. But what about Freeman’s former teammate Justin Dean, who racked up 52 days of service time in his debut season? What about split contracts? Late debuts? Up-and-down types? I worked out a method for what I consider a very good approximation of those salaries, but I don’t feel confident going back before the start of RosterResource’s database, which begins in 2019. Even then, this is approximate, though as I mentioned, I’m confident that it’s a good approximation. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the San Diego Padres.

Batters

The season ended in disappointing fashion, as the Padres lost the NL Wild Card Series in three games against the Cubs. But overall, 2025 has to be considered a success for San Diego. For the first time in franchise history, the Padres passed the 90-win mark in consecutive seasons, and they did so against the backdrop of their owner’s death and their TV provider going bankrupt. They also lost Joe Musgrove for the year, and possibly Yu Darvish permanently. The Friars patched just enough pitching and hitting together to threaten the Dodgers’ supremacy in the division, and now they’ll try to do it again, without Dylan Cease and with a nearly maxed out payroll.

The good news is San Diego seems to have mitigated two of the problems on offense that ZiPS saw coming into last year. Ramón Laureano, whose career looked to be on life support a year ago, has largely returned to form, and though ZiPS is not projecting another .855 OPS from him, it does think he’s a legitimate, non-problematic starter in left field. ZiPS was quite down on catcher Elias Díaz, and while midseason acquisition Freddy Fermin didn’t hit all that well last year, he has a better offensive track record, and he’s still not far past 30. ZiPS still doesn’t like the team’s situation at first base, where Jake Cronenworth is set to play now that Luis Arraez is a free agent.

Jackson Merrill and Fernando Tatis Jr. remain terrific, and while Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts are likely on the downslope of their careers, that’s more of a long-term worry than a problem for this year. I’d feel better about the Padres if they had a better starter at either first or designated hitter, but this is a solidly above-average lineup.

Pitchers

What San Diego gets from the rotation might truly determine the team’s ceiling and floor. ZiPS isn’t pegging Nick Pivetta to repeat his 2025, but he’s solid, and fairly durable, and that’s quite valuable. Bringing back Michael King was necessary, as this rotation just isn’t good enough to absorb the loss of both King and Cease, even if King chooses to opt out after the 2026 season. But the questions begin after the two of them. I’ve always liked Musgrove, and ZiPS thinks he’ll be fine, but there’s a great deal of risk for any pitcher coming off Tommy John surgery, especially immediately.

After Musgrove, the questions grow darker still. Randy Vásquez had a 3.84 ERA in 2025, with peripherals that didn’t remotely support that performance, and let’s just say that baseball has a long history of pitchers who are declared to have invalidated FIP theory, right before it becomes clear that no such thing happened. JP Sears is pure innings-eater, and while he remains the last Sears location open for business, that’s not saying much at this point. ZiPS likes Kyle Hart more as a reliever than a starter, and cordially hates all the other starting options currently in the organization, with the possible exception of any surprise reliever–>starter conversions.

ZiPS isn’t as excited as Steamer is about the bullpen, but it does see it as a solid B/B+ squad. Mason Miller is, of course, absolutely stunning, and ZiPS likes the Adrian Morejon/Jeremiah Estrada/Jason Adam part of the supporting cast. But it’s lukewarm on guys like Wandy Peralta and David Morgan, and doesn’t really care for the back of the pen. There’s only one “no name special” here, in that ZiPS is highly interested in Garrett Hawkins, with a 3.70 ERA projected as a reliever, and would very much like to see him in the big league bullpen soon. Well, if ZiPS actually had human feelings, of course.

The Padres look a lot like the 2025 team, with a win projection in the high 80s and 90 being well within the probable range. But it’s a fragile 90 wins. A few nasty surprises in the rotation could unravel things very quickly, as the team doesn’t have a deep farm system at the moment to acquire good starting pitching.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2026 due to injury, and players who were released in 2025. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Ambient Math-Rock Trip-Hop Yacht Metal band that only performs in abandoned malls, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.16.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on Bluesky. This last is, however, not an actual requirement.

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Cleveland Guardians. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody’s having more fun this offseason than the Toronto Blue Jays, who celebrated their first pennant in 32 years (and near-miss at winning the World Series) by rearming and getting back into the fight. Midseason acquisition Shane Bieber re-committed for pennies on the dollar, and Toronto supplemented its rotation by landing the top free agent pitcher on the market, Dylan Cease, as well as KBO breakout star Cody Ponce.

The Jays then kicked January off by reaching back into the international market to purchase third baseman Kazuma Okamoto from the Yomiuri Giants of NPB. The Jays are already up to third in projected 2026 payroll, at least for now; the Phillies and Yankees are fourth and fifth, and both of those clubs have some rounding out of the roster to do before spring training.

Except apparently the Jays might not be done either. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about how the on-ramp for learning about sports analytics has changed since they were students, follow up on players who unretired after becoming coaches, break down the Edward Cabrera trade (and the Michael Lorenzen signing), and then discuss the remaining top-10 free agents (Kyle Tucker, Alex Bregman, Framber Valdez, Cody Bellinger, Bo Bichette, and Ranger Suárez) from three perspectives: where they’d have the biggest impact, where would be most fun for them to sign, and where they will sign.

Audio intro: Garrett Krohn, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Rice job listing
Link to Andres class article 1
Link to Andres class article 2
Link to Sabermetrics 101 MOOC
Link to Mota article
Link to Quirk bio
Link to Chambliss bio
Link to “Conformity Gate”
Link to Ben on Mass Effect 3
Link to Baumann on Cabrera
Link to Cabrera pitch values
Link to worst fastballs
Link to Andrews on Lorenzen
Link to FG top 50 FA
Link to Petriello on Tucker
Link to Gelb on Bichette
Link to IF fielding value
Link to team payrolls
Link to team SP depth charts
Link to team positional projections

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“It’s not being quantified like it should.” That’s what Tommy Pham told Will Sammon and Eno Sarris of The Athletic. Pham isn’t your stereotypical ballplayer who hates advanced stats. He’s a visionary who wants them to be even more advanced, to factor in even more context, to do an even better job of turning every tiny thing that transpires on the field into cold, hard numbers that can be credited to or debited from a ballplayer’s account. On Monday, Sammon and Sarris published an article that described Pham’s dream of a brighter sabermetric future. “I want to create a system that is going to change all that,” he said. Tommy Pham, the old school grit-and-grinder with 12 years in the majors under his belt, wants us nerds to get even nerdier, and he’s here to help. He even has a name in mind: PhamGraphs. “It’s pretty self-explanatory,” he said.

First and foremost, we here at FanGraphs want to let Tommy Pham know that we are going to sue your ass back to the stone age for trademark infringement so incredibly flattered by this charming homage. Moreover, we are here to help. We are up for the challenge. We want in. Welcome to PhamGraphs.

I can relate to Pham’s plight personally, because once upon a time, I, too, created my own FanGraphs knockoff. Specifically, I experienced a burgeoning enthusiasm for apples in the summer of 2016, so I started a spreadsheet where I’d list all the apples I ate, rate them on a scale of one to five, and write a review. The spreadsheet was titled AppleGraphs, and I figured it that if I really liked tracking my apples, I’d eventually turn it into a blog. Instead, I kept it up for a couple months and then forgot about it. I never showed it to anybody. Here’s an excerpt.

I wrote a total of 13 entries before it petered out (though if some venture capitalist is reading this and wants to throw a million dollars my way, I will gladly resurrect AppleGraphs as a blog or a newsletter or a zine or whatever unwieldy medium you and you blood money would prefer). You can read the whole thing here, but only if you really, really don’t have anything better to do, because, once again, it was just a spreadsheet where I described apples as a way of killing time at my desk until FanGraphs published a new article for me to read.

My extraordinarily roundabout point here is that, as someone with experience ripping off David Appelman (with apples, no less), I am determined to take Pham very seriously and answer his points as best I can, one by one. However, I want to note first that Pham’s comments revealed two overarching concerns. First, he wants the numbers to feature more context, to get into deserved performance rather than actual performance. Weighted Runs Created Plus, our flagship hitting metric, is park-adjusted and league-adjusted. The numbers are measured against the league average, which is always 100, and they’re adjusted based on the hitting environment of the park a hitter plays in. But they’re not designed to show deserved performance. They’re designed to show how well you performed relative to the league average. They don’t factor in strength of opponent or batted ball luck or a host of other factors. However, those numbers are available to Pham if he wants them. DRC+, or Deserved Runs Created Plus, is the flagship offensive metric of Baseball Prospectus. Deserved performance is what they do at BP. That may just be the site for Pham, and he may want to rethink his branding.

Actually, now that I mention it, I should probably note that Baseball Reference WAR also takes the strength of your opponent into account. The point is, Pham can keep his options open. The sabermetric community is a big tent. We’re all Pham.

That said, you have to stop somewhere. It’s impossible to factor everything in. There’s no shortage of examples. If you’re Randy Johnson and you detonate a mourning dove that divebombs into the path of your fastball, and the umpire calls the pitch a ball (which would have been the right call), should that ball really count against you? If you’re Rafael Ortega and a double falls in over your head because a territorial goose has colonized deep center field and forced you to play too shallow, should you really have your defensive metrics docked? If you’re Cody Bellinger and some room service chicken wings give you such horrendous food poisoning that you have to miss a game and bat .143 with a 24 wRC+ over the next two weeks, is that really all your fault? Shouldn’t some of the -0.2 WAR you put up over that timeframe be doled out to the chef at the hotel, to Perdue AgriBusiness, and to the chickens themselves? I could keep going all day. I’m not even done with the bird examples yet. You could keep going forever because everything’s connected. At some point, you just have to draw the line and look at what happened on the field.

Pham’s second overarching concern was, obviously, to burnish his numbers. He’s a 37-year-old free agent who is looking for a deal. He has played for nine different teams over the last five seasons and put up a combined 0.1 WAR across the last two, and he’s been on something of a media campaign recently (and not so recently). In November, Pham revealed that he’s been playing through plantar fasciitis since the second half of 2023, but, conveniently, he’s all better now. These new comments no doubt express his true beliefs, but they also seem designed to put a positive spin on his performance in order to get himself a good deal – or as Zach Crizer put it over at The Bandwagon, “Tommy Pham has some ideas about stats that would make Tommy Pham look better.”

Now let’s get to Pham’s issues. He made two particular points. The first was that playing for a losing team, especially one that loses a lot of close games like the Pirates, means that you tend to face better pitching, because all the opponents who end up beating you have to use their high-leverage arms in order to close out their victories. The close-game qualification is an important one, and it takes some of the sting out of Pham’s argument, because bad teams end up in just as many blowouts as good teams, and the leverage is low for both teams at that point. If the Phillies are blowing your doors off, they’re not going to waste Jhoan Duran in a non-save situation. Now, the back of a good team’s bullpen is sure to be better than the back of a bad team’s, but the difference isn’t going to be quite as big.

Still, Pham is right that he’s been facing tougher arms than usual. In addition to noting all the close games the Pirates played last year, he mentioned that he switched teams twice during the 2024 season, and that those moves came at inopportune times. A series of scheduling quirks caused him to catch three straight prolonged stretches where his current team was facing off against particularly stiff competition. As a result, he believed that he faced much better pitching than most batters. (He also mentioned that he discussed this with his agent, who confirmed his hunch, and I have to admit that I’m a sucker for this line of reasoning. Anyone who has ever had an argument with a significant other has heard some version of the line, “I asked my friends, and they all think I’m right and you’re wrong.” No matter how bad the fight, it’s always at least a little bit amusing.)

We checked this out, and when I say we, I mean David Appelman. David calculated the average ERA and FIP of the pitchers that every batter faced in both 2024 and 2025. In 2024, the pitchers Pham faced had a combined ERA of 4.02, the 19th-lowest among all batters with at least 400 plate appearances. That put him in the 90th percentile. In 2025, his opponents had a 4.17 ERA, which put him in the 75th percentile. He really has faced tough pitching over the last two years. It’s not unprecedented – somebody’s got to be in the 99th percentile every year (sorry Royce Lewis) – but it is real.

Unfortunately, Pham’s argument falls a little bit flat at this point. If you try to give him credit by regressing his performance to account for this greater degree of difficulty, you learn that the effect is much smaller than you’d expect. In 2025, Pham faced pitchers whose combined ERA was 0.08 points lower than the league average, so let’s give him credit for those extra points. There are several ways to run the numbers, but Ben Clemens showed me a quick and dirty way to do it using constants from The Book. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t like math. One point of wOBA works out to roughly half a run per 600 plate appearances, and 600 plate appearances works out to roughly 141 innings. Half a run over 141 innings works out to 0.032 points of ERA. Now we have a conversion rate: one point of wOBA equals 0.032 points of ERA.

That means if we give Pham 0.08 extra points of ERA to bring him up to the league average, it only adds 2.5 points to his wOBA. That’s it. He goes from .308 to .311. Among the 215 players with at least 400 plate appearances in 2025, that takes him from the 150th-highest wOBA to the 145th.

If we use FIP rather than ERA, which Pham would presumably prefer because it’s a better indication of a pitcher’s true talent level, we’d add only 1.3 points of wOBA. (We can go even further: If we use the pitchers’ projected ERA or FIP at the time of each plate appearance according to Steamer – effectively showing how good everybody thought the pitchers were at the time – then Pham actually faced an easier slate of pitchers than the average batter!) As I mentioned earlier, DRC+ takes the strength of opponent into account, and that’s likely why it graded Pham higher than wRC+ over the last two seasons, but that bonus was just three points in 2024 (a 92 wRC+ and 95 DRC+) and four points in 2025 (a 94 wRC+ and 98 DRC+). None of this turns him into even a league-average bat. So yes, Pham faced tough pitching, but no, it doesn’t make all that much difference.

That said, I don’t want to let all these numbers get in the way of a good story. While we’re talking about all the high-leverage arms Pham has faced, we need to note that he was great in high-leverage situations. In 2025, he ran a 168 wRC+ across 40 high-leverage plate appearances, batting .355. Over the past two seasons, his 136 wRC+ in high-leverage situations puts him in the 80th percentile of all hitters (minimum 80 high-leverage plate appearances). If I were Tommy Pham, I’d be making sure that high-leverage situations were part of the conversation, too.

Pham’s second point was about how wind can play havoc with outfield defense, and here I’ll rely on an excerpt:

Pham remembers a particular play from last season that frustrated him as it related to how defensive metrics are used to value players. In a game against the Milwaukee Brewers, he was playing left field. A ball hit approximately 360 feet with a 90-mph exit velocity short-hopped the outfield wall. The wind carried it. Pham was playing in, so he couldn’t get to the ball. The play reflected poorly in his defensive numbers.

“I got docked on the ball because Statcast doesn’t factor the wind part,” Pham said. “When I learned that, I’m like, OK, if the wind’s blowing out, I need to play a little bit deeper.

“It’s a really flawed system. But it’s getting factored into our value.”

Before we get into the play in question, let’s start with the part where Pham says that he didn’t learn until age 37 that he should probably play a bit deeper when the wind is blowing out really hard. That seems – how do I put this respectfully? – unlikely to be true. Surely, this sabermetric visionary had, you know, thought about what the wind does before the year 2025. Pham makes a valid point about how defensive metrics have so far been unable to account for wind, but the example he uses to illustrate it is, by his own account, just a story about how he was positioned poorly.

Some of the details are off, but I was able to find the play in question. I understand why Pham has it stuck in his mind. It cost the Pirates a game. It was a line drive double from Caleb Durbin on May 25. It left the bat at 97.1 mph, traveled 371 feet, got over Pham’s head, and short-hopped the wall. The Pirates were leading 5-3 in the top of the eighth, and because the tying run was on second base, Pham was playing a bit shallower than usual. In 2025, the average left fielder at PNC Park played 301 feet deep, and Pham averaged 295. On this play, he was at 293 feet. He was making sure that he’d be able to hold the runner at third if Durbin singled. For that reason, I’m not so sure that he would’ve been playing deeper even if he had factored in the wind. The double scored two runs, tying the game at five, and Durbin scored the game’s deciding run when the next batter also doubled to Pham in left field.

Pham was right that the wind aided the ball a bit. Over the course of the 2025 season, 12 balls were pulled at the same launch angle and exit velocity off the same pitch type, and they traveled an average of 353 feet. This ball went an extra 17 feet. Still, his argument has several problems. The first is that Statcast only gave this ball a catch probability of 30% to begin with, thanks to the wall penalty. It graded out as a four-star play, which means that it was so difficult that it barely hurt Pham’s numbers. Second, at this stage of his career, Pham doesn’t make four-star catches anyway. His numbers going back on the ball have been bad for years now. He’s 37 and not that guy anymore (unless his plantar fasciitis really is gone forever). In fact, less than a week earlier, Elly De La Cruz hit a nearly identical ball to Pham in left field. Durbin’s ball required Pham to travel 79 feet over 4.7 seconds. De La Cruz hit his harder, but it required Pham to travel 78 feet over 4.7 seconds, and it landed in pretty much the exact same spot. On both balls, Pham had a chance to make the catch but decided to slow down — especially on De La Cruz’s — rather than risk injury by crashing into the wall.

Third, it’s also important to note that the Statcast numbers here, at least to some extent, factored in the wind already. Those catch probability numbers aren’t perfect, but this is exactly the kind of batted ball where they work well. Pham isn’t getting graded based on the launch angle and exit velocity; he’s getting graded on the hang time and the distance he had to travel. Statcast is accounting for those extra 17 feet in its grading system, and then it is knocking off some of the difficulty because the ball landed near the wall. It’s not taking off a couple extra percentage points because the wind made the ball move unexpectedly, and Pham is right that in a perfect world he would get credit for that. However, this is pretty tame in terms of wind effects. The ball didn’t change direction because of a sudden gust, and it didn’t move unpredictably due to swirling conditions. It just had a tailwind that allowed it to get on top of him. Maybe we’ll get there one day, but right now, it’s hard to imagine any system detailed enough that it could put a specific number of catch probability percentage points on just how much harder the tailwind made this play, let alone do so accurately enough to be worthwhile.

To return to the most important point, why wasn’t Pham taking the wind into account already? He got docked because he didn’t catch the ball, but he did not get docked (at least not by Statcast) for his positioning. In fact, because he started out so far from where the ball landed, Statcast gave him more leeway, reducing the catch probability, and thus the hit to his OAA. Other systems like DRP and DRS factor in positioning, and they may well have docked him for playing too shallow here. Or, maybe the opposite is true; maybe they would’ve recognized that he was playing shallow in order to hold the runner at third on a base hit, and would’ve considered his positioning to be correct even though it didn’t work out. If that were the case, perhaps they wouldn’t have held it against him either. There’s always more context to take into account, even when there are no birds in sight.

I should also note that Pham once again came close to touching on something that would have made him look great. Did you know that our splits tools allow you to check how a player performs based on the wind conditions? We can’t split out outfield defense, but it turns out that Pham is actually a great hitter when it’s windy. Over the course of his career, we have him credited with making 164 plate appearances when the wind is blowing at least 18 mph. In those plate appearances, he’s batted .354 with a 197 wRC+. Our database shows 513 players who have at least 60 plate appearances in those conditions. Pham’s 197 wRC+ ranks eighth, just a couple of spots behind Aaron Judge and Juan Soto. Yet again, Pham is doing the right thing by bringing wind into the conversation.

Before I leave you, I want to mention that, although I’ve made plenty of jokes and taken a critical eye to the issues he raised, I think Pham has the exact right attitude here. Like every player, he’s run into some bad luck at times. And, like every player, he’s also faced some good luck. Here’s a popup that turned into a double only because Pham had the good fortune to hit it to Teoscar Hernández:

Pham doesn’t sitting around thinking about all the times he got lucky, and for good reason. He plays the game at the highest level, where failure lurks around every corner. Nine years ago, right around the time I started the now-legendary AppleGraphs, I was playing in a pickup baseball league in Queens and saved this quote from Grégor Blanco. Coincidentally, it too appeared in an article by Eno Sarris:

“These things are going to happen. You go up and you go down. When you go down, you need to realize that it happens. Don’t let frustration get you. Try to simplify the game. Take some pitches, start seeing the ball again. Build that confidence again. You need to start seeing it inside yourself. ‘I got a walk! That’s good. I hit the ball hard.’ Sometimes in a streak, you hit the ball hard right at someone, and you think, ‘What do I have to do?’ Instead, say, ‘Yeah, that’s what I want. I hit the ball hard.’”

I saved it because, even in this silly adult league, I found it useful to trick myself into staying positive. When I hit a bloop single or reached on an error, I’d tell myself, ‘Great job, you got on base.’ When I lined out, I’d tell myself, ‘Great job, you hit the ball hard.’ In other words, I found a way to take something positive out of nearly every at-bat.

Pham has a tattoo that reads “Believe in Yourself” on his left arm, just below the spot where his sleeve ends. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that it was a huge missed opportunity for him not to spell it ‘Yourselph,’ but I’m sure the location was no accident. I’m sure the tattoo is right there so that Pham can look down to remind himself of that whenever he feels the slightest bit of doubt creep in. If he wants to create his own statistics in order to help him follow the instructions on his arm, then we here at FanGraphs and PhamGraphs are happy to do our part.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Greeting friends, enemies, and the possibly neutral who accidentally found their way here with a misclick somehow

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I think he’ll be quite awesome for the first few years. I expect the end won’t be great, but it ought to be a better situation than Chris Davis, and I imagine the front office is realistic about what the abck end could like like

12:05

Dan Szymborski: I mean, the drug seems to be working, but I should probably read things!

Read the rest of this entry »