The Nationals aren’t the biggest story of the 2026 season – not yet, anyway. Their record sits at 43-43, which leaves them 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. That’s a pleasant surprise for a team we projected to finish 26 games below .500, but it has not changed the opinion of the Playoff Odds. Our odds project the Nationals to run the second-worst record in the National League the rest of the way, and give them just a 4% chance of snagging that spot. Until yesterday’s loss to the Red Sox, the computers had begrudgingly had to bump Washington’s probability of winning the World Series from 0.0% on Opening Day all the way up to 0.1%. After the loss, the Nats are back down to double zeroes. Regardless of how much regression comes their way in the second half, the Nationals have been one of the most interesting teams in baseball so far.

You’ve almost certainly heard someone say in the last several weeks that the Nationals have the best offense in baseball and the worst pitching. In fact, our dear friend Leo Morgenstern wrote an article for MLB Trade Rumors titled “A Closer Look At The Best Offense In Baseball.” That was six weeks ago now, and although the Nationals have cooled off some, you can still make the argument that they have the best offense. At the time, Leo pointed out that the Nationals were averaging 5.46 runs per game, the highest mark in baseball this year, and ahead of the franchise record of 5.39 set by the 2019 World Series champions. Since that article came out, the Nationals are tied for the sixth-most runs in baseball, dropping their season mark to 5.26 per game. They still had the best mark in baseball until yesterday, when the Dodgers hung nine runs on the A’s. Both teams have now scored 452 runs, but the Dodgers have played 85 games to the Nationals’ 86, bumping them up to 5.32 runs per game. I wrote this article before yesterday’s games, when the Nationals were still first, so please don’t yell at me too much for the anachronisms in the ensuing paragraphs. Read the rest of this entry »

The team payroll pages at RosterResource have gotten improvements over the last few months, from incentives data to more detailed contract info, that aid in making our payroll numbers simultaneously more accurate and easier to parse where the money’s coming from. Team totals also feed into the Payroll Breakdown page, the subject of today’s Feature Focus.

The page is accessible in two spots: the Payroll tab of RosterResource…

…and also the Breakdowns tab:

The default view of the breakdown table sorts the 30 teams by their 2026 cash payroll, or the amount committed to players for the 2026 season, regardless of when the money is actually paid out. For example, Shohei Ohtani counts as the full $70 million by this calculation, not the $2 million he’s actually earning this year because the rest is deferred, nor the approximately $46 million he counts for against the luxury tax calculation. Clicking on a team’s abbreviation will redirect you to their detailed payroll page for more information.

The table is fully sortable, but upon resorting, the Rank Payroll column doesn’t change; it’s always pegged to that default view. That allows for comparing to the baseline and makes it easy to see that luxury tax (CBT) payroll aligns strongly, but not perfectly, with cash payroll:

The middle three columns illuminate how exactly payrolls are constructed by the stages of a player’s career, again using the cash payroll as the denominator. There are fun quirks to be found there, like the fact that the White Sox have zero arbitration-year salaries on the books:

Or that the ragtag Marlins and Cardinals are spending a third of their payroll on pre-arbitration players, even as those are the lowest salaries possible, at or just a bit above the league-minimum $780,000:

The last set of columns totals the cash payroll commitments for each of the next three seasons. This only includes guaranteed money and does not take into account arbitration-year players, pre-arbitration players, or yet-to-be-earned incentives. So yes, the Dodgers have $422 million in player salaries committed to next year (the proration of Kyle Tucker’s signing bonus means he counts for $87 million!) before accounting for the arbitration-year salaries for Brock Stewart, Alex Call, Alek Thomas, Jake Cousins, Emmet Sheehan, Gavin Stone, and most notably, Andy Pages.

FanGraphs Members can export the entire Payroll Breakdown table to Excel for further analysis.

In the summer of 2024, numerous European soccer teams came to the United States for preseason training and exhibition games, and while they were here, they sampled the local culture, including baseball. You might remember I got a blog post out of it.

Well, the soccer people are back, and in greater numbers than ever, thanks to the World Cup. And they’re trying out our non-foot-based games again. Let’s see how they’re doing.

I know I probably come off as angry and cynical about the state of the world in general, but for all its faults (and they are innumerable), the World Cup is one of my favorite events in all of global popular culture. I’m not just saying that as a big soccer fan; I have an earnest, bordering-on-naïve belief in the power of sports to inspire friendship across national, ethnic, religious, and class lines. Read the rest of this entry »

With July just days away, we’re entering one of the most exciting stretches of the major league season, with the contours of the playoff race coming into full view, All-Star Week festivities looming, and the trade deadline fast approaching. Unfortunately, that doesn’t exempt us from having to contemplate the drier world of player compensation schema, and for what is unlikely to be the last time as MLB and the MLBPA negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement. Last week, MLB released a new proposal that would massively overhaul how major league players are paid. By my count, this is the league’s third proposal this month, following its more detailed outline of a potential salary cap and a separate framework that would make the largest changes to amateur talent acquisition since the draft was first instituted in 1965.

Any discussion of baseball’s finances tends to be emotionally charged among fans, so I will freely note my personal biases as a prelude to analyzing the league’s proposal. When I pay money to attend a baseball game (something I admittedly do less than I used to before I covered the sport professionally), I’m paying that money to watch the players play baseball, more so than to watch an owner own a team. Even cynical ol’ me had a Panini sticker book back in the day. Now, teams certainly bear many of the costs to get those players onto the field, but the largest expense — namely, the massive stadiums they play in — is one largely borne by taxpayers. If MLB has a revenue problem, that strikes me as something ownership ought to address. If Bob Castellini and Bob Nutting are suffering because Steve Cohen and Guggenheim Baseball Management have access to more potential revenue than they do (ignoring that the Mets’ and Dodgers’ owners paid a lot more for their respective teams because of those revenue streams) and someone needs to write Castellini and Nutting a check, I’m not sure why it should be Shohei Ohtani and Francisco Lindor (or at least, their comparable future versions) rather than the other owners.

That being said, let’s move on to the meat of the deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

As if the Wild Card chases weren’t exciting enough, a bunch of the division races were also upended last week. The Rays and Rangers claimed first place in their respective divisions, the Phillies cut their deficit to three games in the NL East, and the Guardians and White Sox stayed tied atop the AL Central.

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 »

Across two decades that have produced just three pennant winners and one champion between New York’s two teams, the city’s sports media industrial complex has spent a fair bit of time calling for one manager’s head or another, or at least stoking that sentiment among fans. Still, it rated as a bit of a surprise on Friday when the Mets announced they had fired manager Carlos Mendoza — er, announced “the departure of” Mendoza, as if he were a flight leaving LaGuardia Airport — and named former Padres manager Andy Green, who’d been the Mets’ senior vice president of player development, to serve as interim manager for the remainder of the season. It was the first time that either the Mets or Yankees had changed skippers during a season since 2008, when the Mets canned Willie Randolph during a California road trip. While the team’s play this season, and indeed for over a year, made the case for a switch, Mendoza didn’t assemble this expensive band of underperformers. But like so many managers before him, he took the fall for someone else’s flawed blueprint.

The Mets were 34-47 when Mendoza was axed, exactly halfway through this season, and halfway through the five-year contract of president of baseball operations David Stearns, who hired Mendoza in November 2023, five weeks after leaving the Brewers to join the organization himself. At the time of the firing, the Mets were last in the NL East and had the league’s third-worst record, with just a two-game margin separating them from the major league-worst Rockies. They had lost six games in a row — their third losing streak of at least five games this season — while being outscored 54-22. In the nightcap of a doubleheader against the Cubs on Wednesday, the Mets’ infield combined to make six errors, with a player at each position making at least one in the same game for the first time since 1962. Amid that debacle, fans chanted the name of bygone slugger Pete Alonso, whose departure via free agency last December has come to symbolize a roster overhaul that went too far.

“Embarrassing,” Mendoza said after the six-error game and the doubleheader sweep. “Overall, the whole day. Two losses, but the way we played overall. That last game was unacceptable. Everybody’s pissed. Everybody’s frustrated.” Read the rest of this entry »

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 12
Today was the first time I left my wife to put Derek Jr. down to sleep on her own. My friend Michael Clair had an event for his book about the Czech national baseball team, and after watching him pour everything into this book for years, there was no way I could miss it. It was a great time. Jay Jaffe hosted, so I got to chat with him, Mike and his family, and a couple other cool baseball people I’d never met before. But it was also a disorienting experience.

It started with a tactical error on my part. On my way from the subway station to the bookstore, I passed an old Polish bakery and couldn’t help ordering one of the poppy seed buns in the window. When the clerk reached for the display, I realized that the buns were way, way bigger than they looked from the outside. I was now a block and a half away from the event, holding a bun the size of my face inside a crisp paper bag. Because I am a fool for baked goods, and because I didn’t want to distract everyone by crinkling the bag for the entire event, I did what had to be done. I stuffed the entire face-sized bun into my face during the three-minute walk to the bookstore.

I sat up front next to Mike’s wife, and as the event got going, I felt my baseline exhaustion combine with a massive carbohydrate crash. It was not ideal. It also felt so strange to just sit there without having anything else to do. Nobody needed me. There were no chores to do, no way I could help out. It was probably the first time in a month I’d worn jeans rather than basketball shorts. My wife had encouraged me to go out and have fun without worrying about her and Derek Jr. I suppose it should have been a relaxing feeling, but I just wasn’t ready for it. Once the Q&A ended and I’d gotten in a few minutes of small talk, I fairly ran out of the bookstore and back to the subway. Read the rest of this entry »

The guys in caps and white pants have been chucking the ball around for a few months now, but Major League Baseball’s most important undertaking — collective bargaining — is just getting started.

The league and the MLBPA have traded preliminary economic proposals over the past month, and some of the items on the table are quite spicy. The league wants a salary cap and a five-year limit on contracts for free agents who change teams. The MLBPA wants extensive reforms to the revenue sharing system and a quicker path to free agency for players in their 30s — and to nearly triple the minimum salary by the end of the CBA.

But the spiciest nugget in the carton might be MLB’s proposal for a 12-round draft that’s limited to players who are 20 years old and at least two years out of high school. Read the rest of this entry »

Woo-Suk Go was one of Korea’s top closers from 2019-2023. Over that five-season span, the 27-year-old right-hander logged 137 saves and a 2.39 ERA across 275-and-a-third innings with the LG Twins. Moreover, his 29.3% strikeout rate was the highest among KBO hurlers who threw at least 200 frames.

He hasn’t had nearly as much success since coming stateside. Signed as an international free agent by the San Diego Padres in January 2024, Woo-Suk was subsequently swapped to the Miami Marlins four months later in the Luis Arraez deal, only to be released in June 2025 and picked up by the Detroit Tigers. His inability to gain a foothold is reflected in the numbers. He entered the current campaign having recorded just six saves and a 5.61 ERA over 75 appearances down on the farm.

This season has been an another story. Looking more like the pitcher who dominated KBO hitters, Woo-Suk boasts a 2.06 ERA, a 2.26 FIP, and a 35.1% strikeout rate over 39-and-a-third innings across 25 appearances, eight with Double-A Erie and 17 with Triple-A Toledo. Working most often in a setup role, he is 3-1 with three saves.

Results aside, how does he differ from the young pitcher who excelled in his homeland? Read the rest of this entry »