We’re less than three days away from the trade deadline, and aside from a challenge trade here and some minor swaps there, the only action we’re getting is inaction. Both Casey Mize of the Tigers and Freddy Peralta of the Mets were scratched from their scheduled starts Friday night, presumably as a precautionary measure to ensure that neither hurler would get hurt ahead of a likely trade.
Of course, we’ve known for a while that the Mets were going to be sellers this deadline season, giving their last-place standing for most of the year. They fired manager Carlos Mendoza at the end of June, and more recently, they’ve been giving every fan a $10 concessions voucher with their ticket, as both an apology for the poor performance on the field and an incentive to keep fans coming to the park to watch that poor performance — which in a few days could get even worse. In addition to Peralta, the Mets are also likely to at least some of their other pending free agents, such as Luis Robert Jr., Tyrone Taylor, Clay Holmes, and Brooks Raley 레일리, as well as high-leverage reliever Luke Weaver, who’s under contract through the end of next season. Detroit’s decision not to start Mize may have something to do with a groin issue that he’s been dealing with recently, as The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Cody Stavenhagen noted. The team let Tarik Skubal, the top pending free agent on the block, start on Thursday even as it is supposedly shopping him. That’s because the Tigers still have about a 1-in-4 shot to make the playoffs, as of the start of play Friday, according to our Playoff Odds. They reportedly haven’t made a final decision on whether they will trade Skubal and their other players on expiring contracts, among them Mize and second baseman Gleyber Torres. If Detroit ends up selling, closer Kenley Jansen, who has a club option for next season, could also be on the move.
In addition to answering your questions about the trade deadline in this week’s Mailbag, we’ll also cover Jordan Hicks’ resurgence with the White Sox, home runs hit slower than the pitch that was thrown, and odd Hall of Fame cap decisions. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, please visit our Patreon.
Ben Lindbergh brings on baseball-loving comic-book experts David Harper (of SKTCHD and Off Panel: A Comics Interview Podcast) and Tiffany Babb (of The Comics Courier, The Comics Staple, The Fan Files, and Interesting Jobs the Podcast) to assemble superpowered baseball teams. First they banter about Harrison Bader’s scooter troubles and David’s and Tiffany’s baseball/comic-book backgrounds, trade-deadline desires, and favorite baseball/comics crossovers. Then (37:20) they take turns filling out rosters from the ranks of Marvel/DC superheroes.
Spencer Strider made a big splash entering the majors, finishing second in the NL Rookie of the Year voting in 2022 to his teammate Michael Harris II. In just 131 2/3 innings that season, Strider struck out 202 batters against only seven homers allowed, for a sterling 2.67 ERA, an even better 1.83 FIP, and 4.9 WAR. He showed it wasn’t a fluke the following season, making the NL All-Star team and doing enough to pop up on more than two-thirds of the Cy Young ballots.
But two starts into his 2024 campaign, his velocity was down and he reported elbow pain, and that was that for his year, prematurely ended by an internal brace procedure. Since then, he hasn’t been the same pitcher. Now out again with an elbow ailment, MLB.com’s Mark Bowman gives credence to the talk that Strider won’t return in 2026, at least as a starting pitcher. I’ve heard the same insider buzz myself, but Mark has way better Braves sources than I do.
So what happens for Strider now? What does his projection look like after an injury-shortened 2026, and how would his numbers look if he were converted to the bullpen full time? Read the rest of this entry »
We have some movement in the race between immovable objects.
The Rangers on Monday capped a four-game, wraparound series win over the Mariners to take what feels like a commanding 2 1/2-game lead over them and a two-game lead over the Astros in the AL West. Texas followed that up by dropping a series to the AL-best Rays, while Seattle dropped a series from the NL-best Dodgers and Houston swept the Angels. Entering Friday’s action, the Rangers lead the Astros by a half game and the Mariners by 2 1/2 games. That’s how it’s gone for the league’s most languid division in 2026.
Monday’s win gave the Rangers a 7-3 record against the Mariners on the year, securing Texas the tiebreaker should that become relevant in late September. Meanwhile, the Rangers head to Houston this weekend for a three-game set with the Astros currently holding the tiebreaker, 6-4. A Texas sweep in the road series would give it the head-to-head advantage against both of its AL West rivals. If not, things could get even more interesting come the final week of the season.
Even so, our Playoff Odds aren’t expecting the Texas-Houston tiebreaker to matter too much. That’s because, for the first time in 2026, the 55-54 Rangers look like the favorites to win the division.
Eric A Longenhagen: Hi hello how are you, it’s another 115+ degree day here in Tempe, time to chat.
12:17
Big Fan: Philosophically, do you feel like contenders value their prospects too much? Not enough? The right amount? I’m sure the answer varies by team, but it’d be interesting to hear which teams typically fall in which bucket.
12:19
Eric A Longenhagen: It varies by executive even more than team. The small market teams covet the surplus value, and the way GM trees have grown the last 20 years has made it so the folks who helm those teams have migrated to the bigger markets, and those philosophies are then employed by the Dodgers, Mets, etc. One’s need to hug prospect is inversely related with their ability to draft and make more. WHen you’re a well-oiled machine like the Rays, you should be more aggressive and push the chips in now and then.
12:20
aglossman: I have no interesting or original questions to ask. Do you think the Sox will trade Arias? I hope not
12:20
Eric A Longenhagen: Nah, if they do it’d have to be for someone so good you might feel otherwise after it’s done.
12:20
Big Fan: The Braves have recently promoted a handful of prospects. Do you think the timing was to juice their value in models without giving a player long enough to be exposed at a new level?
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 25
After nearly five hours of sleep, Derek Jr. wakes up a bit past one in the morning. She’s clearly struggling with some gas issues. I try to soothe her without taking her out of the crib, bicycling her little legs to help her through it, but it doesn’t help at all. She displays every sign of ravenous hunger, so I change her and start her on a bottle, but the milk just won’t go down. Something is going on. She’s clamoring for the bottle, she’s pulling milk into her mouth, and she’s riotously upset every time I take the bottle away, but she keeps letting all the milk run right down her chin. She doesn’t need to burp. It’s not her diaper. I’m not sure what else could be wrong, so after awhile, I give up on the bottle and get her into what has become my standard soothing-a-gassy-baby position. It’s basically a human swaddle.
I settle Derek Jr.’s shoulder in the crook of my right arm, my hand reaching down to grab hold of her right thigh and pull her knee up toward her belly. With my left hand, I give her a pacifier and press her right arm across her chest, then I turn my right arm to press her into my body so that her face is buried in my chest, which holds the pacifier in place. When it works, this position soothes her instantly, though she still pulls frantically at the pacifier. It takes a good 20 minutes for her to work through the gas, and then, suddenly, she relaxes. Not only is she hungry, but she wolfs down the entire the bottle and falls promptly to sleep. I settle her on my shoulder to burp her gently, and I pull out my phone to check what happened in baseball today.
Tomorrow — well, today I guess — is my first official day back at work. I spent the morning preparing this journal’s introduction and first installment for editing, then going through my wife’s camera roll looking for images I could use. I found pictures of myself from the day Derek Jr. was born. Parents are strongly encouraged to give the baby as much skin-to-skin contact as soon as possible. It’s good for bonding and it promotes the release of oxytocin, so there I am in the hospital room wearing my FanGraphs hoodie with no shirt underneath, feeling supremely silly, the zipper cold against my chest. It never really worked out, though. Derek Jr. just wasn’t comfortable being against my chest that way, and I felt like I’d failed. I’d forgotten about that until I saw the pictures this morning.
Tonight, my wife and I only had an hour or so of free time between getting Derek Jr. down to sleep and going to bed ourselves. My going back to work will be enough of an adjustment, so I didn’t want to force her to spend her one hour of relaxation time watching baseball. We put something else on the TV while I perused the leaderboards looking for something to write about tomorrow. As a result, I still have no idea what happened during tonight’s games. What I missed was Houston’s Tatsuya Imai, Steven Okert, and Alimber Santa combining to no-hit the Rangers. With Derek Jr. still asleep on my shoulder, I pull up the highlights. They are hilarious.
It’s got to be one of the sillier no-hitters in history. The highlight package starts in the first inning, with no outs and two Rangers already on base, because apparently Imai walked the first two batters of the game. He only strikes out two, and aside from a couple popups, every ball in play seems to fall into one of two categories. Either center fielder Jake Meyers is running down what looks off the bat like a surefire double in the gap, or a middle infielder is standing on his head to corral a hard-hit grounder that appears destined either to fracture Imai’s tibia or end up in center field.
Imai started the season (and his MLB career) in disastrous fashion. He went on the IL with arm fatigue, got shelled in one of his two rehab appearances, then got shellacked in his first start back in Houston. He came into the game with an 8.31 ERA and -0.2 WAR. Tonight, he walked twice as many as he struck out and had a 50% hard-hit rate. The Rangers walked fewer batters and allowed only one more hard-hit ball than Imai did, and they got lit up for nine runs. The Astros didn’t throw a single offspeed pitch or curveball all night. Aside from four sinkers from Imai, every pitch was either a four-seamer or a slider. Somehow, that didn’t help the Rangers much. Maybe this is what I should write about tomorrow.
A minute or so into the highlights, Derek Jr., still asleep, does sort of a reverse bear crawl from my shoulder down to my chest. She settles with her knees on my lap and her torso pressed against mine, her head resting sideways just below my chin. It’s a position both the teachers of a parenting class and the nurses at the hospital encouraged us to use, as it allows for maximal skin-to-skin contact. They made it sound special, and I was excited for it. I’d seen other people hold their babies that way. It’s why we have those dumb pictures of me holding Derek Jr. with no shirt under my hoodie. But I couldn’t make her comfortable that way, and I gave up. All of a sudden, two months later, it’s where she wants to be. After a rough afternoon and night, she’s finally comfortable and happy, her warm little body pressed against me. She gets so tense when she’s upset; sometimes we lift her up from the crib and her whole body is stiff as a board. But she’s relaxed now. The highlight package is long, and as I watch the Rangers smash the ball every which way except into some grass, I’m overwhelmed by gratitude for the chance to have this moment with Derek Jr. melted against me. Maybe it’s the oxytocin.
I shouldn’t be up writing this. I’ve mortgaged two hours of sleep to document this moment, and I have to be up in three-and-a-half more to write about how James Wood can’t seem to figure out which pitches to challenge. If Derek Jr. wakes up right now — which could absolutely happen — I’ll be doing so on very, very little sleep. That’s been the tradeoff of this whole project, though. I can make sure we never forget all of these special moments, but only if I’m willing to lose some sleep in the night and be a bit more of a zombie during the day. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it going now that I’m going to be spending my days writing. It’s certainly felt worth it so far, and I’ve been so lucky to have had this time, to have such an amazing job that lets me write this journal at all.
Here’s one thing that I haven’t been able to document, that I don’t think I’ll be able to document fully. I’ve written a lot about what it feels like to have Derek Jr. asleep in my arms in the rocking chair in the middle of the night. It’s the most special thing I have. It’s my time to be close to her, to share my warmth, and to know that I’m taking care of her as well as I possibly can. I sing to her. I tell her how loved and beautiful she is. I crane my head down to look at her perfect face, and then I tilt my head back until I’m looking at the ceiling (my God, does that hurt, by the way) and try to burn the image into my memory. But I can’t do it. My brain just doesn’t work that way. I can’t hold onto it, and there’s no way to take a picture of it. I know I’m going to forget this image. It is the most precious thing to me, and I’m going to lose it. In some sense, I’ve lost it several times already; too slowly for me to notice, it must have changed so much as Derek Jr. has grown and grown over the past two months. No matter how tightly I hold her, so much slips away. So I stay up late. I put it into words as best I can. I get through the day.
As August 3 draws closer, we’re continuing to update the farm systems of some of the clubs we expect to be buyers at the trade deadline. These teams are both contending for a playoff berth and in clear need of a significant upgrade, the kind that will likely require parting with a top farmhand or two. Today, we’re evaluating the Milwaukee Brewers.
In tandem with an evaluation of team needs and posture, we’ve also updated Milwaukee’s Top Prospect list. The new list accounts for the graduations of Brandon Sproat, Logan Henderson, and Craig Yoho, and offers a fresh valuation on several notable farmhands. The big news is that Alexander Frias, Brady Ebel, and Tyson Hardin have moved onto our Top 100, while Jett Williams has fallen off. We’ll cover them, and a couple of the other big changes, in more detail below.
The Situation
The Brew Crew is at it again. Milwaukee has the second-best run differential in baseball and a 5.5-game lead in the NL Central. As of Thursday afternoon, our Playoff Odds give them an 83.4% chance to win the division and all but guarantee a spot in the tournament. Enviable pitching depth has helped them weather absences from Quinn Priester, Brandon Woodruff, and Kyle Harrison without missing a beat. The club’s big divisional lead has even afforded them the luxury of letting Sproat work through some kinks in the big league rotation. Offensively, they’ve mostly been healthy this year, and are again working miracles with a modern version of small ball. Last in baseball in homers, the Brewers are nonetheless fifth in runs and sixth in wRC+. They take their walks, don’t strike out much, steal efficiently, and otherwise run the bases well. Potential upgrades to this unique club make most sense viewed through the prism of who can help them win a series against the Dodgers rather than who can help them clinch a playoff spot. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the end of Ben’s jury duty and Meg’s first colonoscopy, then discuss an investigation into Dodgers owner Mark Walter’s finances, Roki Sasaki’s big glove, Munetaka Murakami’s performance against good velocity, a squirrel sighting (and top prospect Max Clark’s arrival) in Detroit, baseball’s animal kingdom, who gets to claim Jimothy, the frustrating Mariners, Curtis Mead’s im-mead-iate injury, and pre-deadline unrest in Philly. Then (1:05:16) FanGraphs contributor Kiri Oler joins to preview the Women’s Pro Baseball League’s inaugural season and consider its prospects for long-term success.
On Wednesday afternoon, Tarik Skubal threw what looked for all the world to be his last pitch as a member of the Detroit Tigers.
Skubal fanned six Orioles — including his 1,000th career strikeout — and held the Orioles scoreless into the seventh inning. Tigers manager A.J. Hinch, wanting his ace to finish on a valedictory note, let Skubal pitch himself into some trouble in the seventh, but lifted him once Leody Taveras singled in Baltimore’s first run. Read the rest of this entry »
As August 3 nears, we are taking a fresh look at the farm systems of some of the clubs we expect to be buyers at the trade deadline. These teams are both contending for a playoff berth and in position to make a buyer’s-style trade for a star big leaguer, the kind that will likely require parting with a top farmhand or two. Today, I’m covering the Philadelphia Phillies.
In tandem with an evaluation of the team’s needs and deadline posture, I’ve updated Philly’s prospect list to account for graduations, incorporate the team’s new draftees, and reflect developments on the farm. The Phillies have a top-heavy system with a few key, arrow-up pitching prospects. Read the rest of this entry »
Sponsor Us on Patreon
Give a Gift Subscription
Effectively Wild Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
Apple Podcasts Feed
Spotify Feed
YouTube Playlist
Facebook Group
Bluesky Account
Twitter Account
Get Our Merch!
