Brandon Mann’s playing career was coming to a close when he was featured here at FanGraphs in June 2020. A southpaw whose professional experience spanned 17 seasons — including part of 2018 with the Texas Rangers — he was soon to turn from hurler to tutor. Mann served as a pitching coordinator for the KBO’s Lotte Giants in 2021, then spent the next two years as a trainer and pitching coordinator at Driveline. His last two season have been in Miami. Mann joined the Marlins as a pitching strategist in 2024, and this year he is their bullpen coach.

Given his background and expertise, as well as my being intrigued by some of the talented arms on the Miami pitching staff, I made it a point to catch up with Mann when the Marlins visited Fenway Park in mid-August. I wasn’t sure exactly what we’d talk about, but I knew that it would be a good pitching conversation. We ended up focusing on changeups and splitters.

———

David Laurila: You just told me that Edward Cabrera has a unique changeup. What makes it stand out?

Brandon Mann: “The most unique part is how hard it is [94.2 mph, per Baseball Savant]. The movement profile is similar to a sinker, although it has a little bit more depth than sinkers in general. It’s really more of the spin. Say he throws a changeup and a sinker and both are 96 [mph]. The movement profiles would be almost identical, but the changeup is going to fall off more because it’s got as much as 600 fewer rpm. That’s super unique.

“I don’t know if the movement gives it justice when you actually see… say it’s three [inches] of induced vertical break and 16 [inches] horizontal — and then he throws a sinker at six and 18. They’re the same velo, and the sinker stays up, but the changeup falls off, and somebody swings and misses at it. A lot of that is the spin component. Again, it’s similar velo, but anywhere from 500 to 600 rpm less spin. Read the rest of this entry »

As you surely know, Michael Baumann has been writing about MeatWaste for two weeks now. Specifically, he’s been writing about who is great at hitting pitches in the Meatball and Waste portions of the strike zone, according to Statcast’s Attack Zones diagram. Those are hitter’s pitches. The meatball zone right down the middle (zone five in the diagram below) is where batters crush the baseball, and the waste zone far away from the strike zone is where they have no trouble laying off pitches that are certain to be called balls. Baumann wrote about how the Brewers are great as a team at capitalizing on those pitches last week, and then today he ran down the individual MeatWaste leaderboard, a phrase I didn’t know I needed in my life until Tuesday.

This is useful information with a delightfully repulsive name, and it made me wonder about the opposite leaderboard. MeatWaste tells you who’s crushing hitter’s pitches, but let’s find out who’s excelling against pitcher’s pitches. Technically, that isn’t the opposite of MeatWaste. MeatWaste makes up just nine of Statcast’s 33 attack zones. The true opposite would include the other 24 that make up the Chase, Shadow, and Heart zones (except for zone five, the spot right over the very middle). It would also look very, very similar to the list of the best hitters in the game.

This list isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know because we’re looking at too much of the zone. If we want the opposite of MeatWaste, we need to look at the edges of the strike zone, where swing decisions are difficult and loud contact is hard to come by. Statcast calls this the shadow zone, and it includes any pitch within one baseball’s width (or 2.9 inches) of the edge of the strike zone.

What do we call the opposite of MeatWaste? Is it meat that’s the opposite of waste, like filet mignon? If we acknowledge vegetables as the opposite of meat (though you could make a strong argument for pudding), does that mean it’s veggie waste, like edamame shells? Or does that mean it’s the opposite of both meat and waste, like an artichoke heart? In the end, I decided to keep it simple and just follow Statcast’s taxonomic principles. These aren’t Meatballs, they’re Shadowballs, and if you know anyone who goes by that nickname, I urge you to explain in the comments how they came by it. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I dug into the data a little to see if there was any empirical basis to the suspicion that the Brewers lineup might not be cut out for October. The result was a new metric, if you want to call it that, called MeatWaste%. This number — the percentage of pitches that end up either in the dead center of the strike zone or out in Baseball Savant’s Waste region — I used as a proxy for pitcher quality. MeatWaste pitches are gifts to the batter, the kind of offering that produces an instant swing decision and either an easy take or a full-force swing.

I found two things: First, that the Brewers are better, relative to the league, on these two pitch locations than they are on the whole. And second, that these easy opportunities come around often in the regular season, but disappear in close playoff games. Simple enough, though there are limits to what this finding allows us to infer about the Brewers’ future. It’s why they play the games, after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the state of the wild cards and whether the pennant races have been more exciting than forecasted despite the lack of actual changes in the playoff field, Cal Raleigh’s latest exploits, Geraldo Perdomo’s quiet excellence, the Orioles’ 2026 outlook, the Dodgers’ rotation and bullpen, Shohei Ohtani’s playoff role(s), the bouncebacks of Mookie Betts and George Springer, Yordan Alvarez’s ankle, James Wood and Spencer Jones slumps, season-ending schedules, and whether teams playing spoiler is satisfying for fans.

Audio intro: Jimmy Kramer, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to FG playoff odds
Link to Clemens on the playoff odds
Link to Paine on the Mets
Link to Clemens on Raleigh
Link to FG WAR leaderboard
Link to Orioles report
Link to Dodgers rotation ranking
Link to Dodgers reliever ranking
Link to team SP projections
Link to Dodgers rotation story
Link to Ohtani starting story
Link to Ohtani outfield story
Link to Perdomo/Betts leaderboard
Link to Craig on the Dodgers
Link to Rob on the zombie runner
Link to Petriello on Jones
Link to Apple TV+ baseball doc
Link to Astudillo news

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Cal Raleigh is hot. Thumping three homers in a span of two days has put Big Dumper at 56 on the season with 11 games left to play. That binge gives him a realistic shot at hitting a nice round 60 on the season, a threshold that only an elite few sluggers have ever reached. He’s doing it as a catcher, which is absurd. He left the old single-season home run record for catchers in the dust a long time ago.

As I learned all the way back in first grade, 62 is only two more than 60. Given Raleigh’s predilection for blasting bombs in bunches – he hit six in six games earlier this year, and nine in a separate 11-game stretch – Aaron Judge’s single-season AL home run record (and for some people, though not me, the “true” home run record) is definitely in play.

As is tradition at FanGraphs, when someone goes for a home run milestone, we forecast when it might happen. Whether it’s Judge’s quest for 62, Albert Pujols’ push for 700, or Shohei Ohtani’s bid for 50/50, it’s fun and useful to predict when the actual milestone game will occur. I’ll start with the methodology, but if you’re not into that, there are some tables down below that will give you an idea of when and where Raleigh might hit either his 60th, 62nd, or 63rd homer.

I started with our Depth Charts projection for Raleigh’s home run rate the rest of the way. That’s based on neutral opposition, so I also accounted for park factors and opposition. Since Raleigh is a switch-hitter, I used the specific pitchers the Mariners are expected to face to determine whether he starts each game batting lefty or righty, and also used those pitchers’ home run rate projections to determine opponent strength. I used a blend of projected starter, home run rate, and observed bullpen home run rate to come up with a strength of opposition estimate. That let me create a unique home run environment for each game. I also told the computer to randomly select how many plate appearances Raleigh receives each game, with an average of five most likely but some chance of four or six. Read the rest of this entry »

BOSTON — The Cleveland Guardians drafted Parker Messick 54th overall in 2022, and the decision to do so is looking increasingly shrewd. Since making his major league debut on August 20, the 24-year-old southpaw out of Florida State University has taken the mound five times and fashioned a 1.84 ERA and a 2.50 FIP over 29 1/3 innings. And while his 18.3% strikeout rate in the majors isn’t impressive, Messick fanned 29.1% of batters prior to his call-up, suggesting the strikeout stuff is still to come. When Eric Longenhagen wrote about Messick in late May, he pointed out that the lefty “leads the minors in strikeouts since 2023.”

What makes Messick effective is a combination of factors that belie his pedestrian velocity and lack of an elite breaking ball. As our lead prospect analyst explained when ranking the 50-FV prospect fourth in the Guardians system, “Messick’s 92-mph fastball doesn’t have a ton of carry to it, but it does run uphill and can garner whiffs via its angle.” Eric went on to write that his “changeup is at least plus.”

Messick considers his changeup to be his best pitch.

“I would say that it is,” Messick told me when Cleveland played in Boston earlier this month. “As far as swing-and-miss goes, yeah. When it’s paired right with my other stuff — when I’m tunneling it off of my other pitches — is when it is at its best. It does have some sharp movement down at the end, I guess. It also has just enough speed differential to get that swing-and-miss at the bottom when they’re out in front of it.” Read the rest of this entry »

With just 12 days left to go in the regular season, two teams — the Brewers and Phillies — have clinched playoff berths, and on Monday the latter became the first to win its division. From among the four other division races, only in the AL West and NL West are the second-place teams closer than five games out, putting the chances of a lead change in the range of low-fat milk. With the exception of those two races, the lion’s share of the remaining drama centers around the Wild Card races.

Once upon a time, this space would be filled with my reintroduction of the concept of Team Entropy, but through the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement, Major League Baseball and the players’ union traded the potential excitement and scheduling mayhem created by on-field tiebreakers and sudden-death Wild Card games in exchange for a larger inventory of playoff games. The 12-team, two-bye format was designed to reward the top two teams in each league by allowing them to bypass the possibility of being eliminated in best-of-three series. Often, however, things haven’t worked out that way, because outcomes in a best-of-five series are only slightly more predictable than those of a best-of-three.

Aside from the Dodgers beating the Padres in last year’s Division Series, every National League team that has earned a first-round bye under the newish system had been bounced at the first opportunity, with the Dodgers themselves falling in rather shocking fashion in both 2022 and ’23. The AL has had only one such upset in that span: the 2023 Rangers, who beat the Orioles and went on to win the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — Let’s get one thing clear off the top: A splitter is not a fastball. Any confusion about this topic is understandable, seeing as the full government name of the pitch is “split-finger fastball.” Don’t be a captive to the inflexibility of language. The splitter is lying to you about its very nature.

The origin story of the splitter begins in 1973, when a Cubs minor leaguer named Bruce Sutter was recovering from offseason elbow surgery and struggling to regain his fastball velocity. A pitching instructor named Fred Martin approached the sore-armed 20-year-old with a new pitch. This would be a variation on the familiar forkball, held with index and middle finger spread as far apart as possible in order to impart downward movement.

But while the forkball came out of the hand with an identifiable knuckleball action, Martin had Sutter grip the baseball ever so slightly forward, getting similar action with fastball-like spin. Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball’s injured list is the sport’s unofficial 31st team, one that never makes the playoffs but always plays spoiler. In the last week, 22 players were placed on the IL. The biggest name was Will Smith, who late last week landed on the IL with a bone bruise on his hand, courtesy of a rather rude foul tip off the bat of Nick Gonzales.

The Dodgers aren’t known for having a great deal of injury luck, but as injuries go, Smith’s appears to be far less consequential than it could have been. Smith’s tests revealed no fracture, minimizing the amount of time he’s expected to miss. The 30-year-old catcher is having the best offensive season of his career, with a .296/.404/.497 slash line and a 153 wRC+, all except slugging percentage representing career bests. He has played in fewer games than usual, but that’s largely due to the team’s roster construction; he started 39 games at designated hitter in 2022-2023, but Shohei Ohtani’s presence now makes it far more difficult to sneak him into the lineup here when he has a day off of catching. The injury would be a big deal… if it were a big deal, but Smith could return as early as this upcoming weekend. It could have been even sooner, but Smith’s start last Tuesday after missing five games meant that the retroactive IL date was later than September 3, when the Gonzales foul tip occurred.

Smith and the Dodgers seem to have gotten lucky, but the Astros and Yordan Alvarez may not see the same fortune. Less than a month after returning from a broken hand that had cost him more than half of the 2025 season, Alvarez turned his ankle while touching home plate in an awkward fashion that is only appropriate on your Stretch Armstrong doll. He has not yet been placed on the IL, and the exact consequences are still to be determined, but it’s all but official that he is going to miss some time. We’ll know more after his MRI on Tuesday. A serious injury to Alvarez could imperil the Astros in their tight playoff race and beyond if they make it to October.

Alvarez has already spent 115 days on the IL this season, and the Astros have certainly felt his absence, but how do their losses this season compare to those of other teams this season? More broadly, which team has lost the most production to the injured list? If you ask the fans of an underperforming team, the near-unanimous answer will be “us,” but I think we can do better than that! Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks!

12:02

Jay Jaffe: For the fifth straight Tuesday, we’re doing this — which I think might be a season high. A lack of travel will do that.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, on Friday I wrote about Mookie Betts’ turnaround (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/mookie-betts-may-salvage-his-season-yet/), and yesterday he was named the NL Player of the Week and had a big night against the Phillies in a losing cause, with a solo homer and a pair of sac flies.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about the Mets’ slide; remarkably, they’ve gone 32-49 since Senga was injured on June 12. Their problems basically stem from running out of arms. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/amid-the-collapse-of-their-pitching-the-me…

12:05

Jay Jaffe: I’m working on a piece about the remaining playoff races. it’s not Team Entropy but it’s what we have, and it’s helpful to understand the tiebreakers and remaining scenarios

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Pouring one out for Robert Redford, whom I particularly loved in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting (both with Paul Newman). If you’re young enough that those movies aren’t familiar to you, by all means waste no time in seeing them. As for The Natural and the baseball connection, eh, i don’t hate the movie like i do Field of Dreams, but it’s got problems.

Read the rest of this entry »