Which Hitters Have Seen Their 2026 Projections Change the Most?

Vincent Carchietta and Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

I spend a lot of time saying the word “April.” It’s a convenient excuse to wave away any notion of changing my mind drastically on a player after two or three weeks of the season. But April isn’t actually meaningless, and as we head toward June, we’re already nearly a third of the way through the season. A lot of the stuff we’ve seen isn’t just a rough patch or a freak BABIP, but career trajectories changing, and that has consequences for the players and their teams. One of the most common questions about players I get in chats is some variation of “What does ZiPS think now?” I can’t answer them all, mainly because “doughy middle-aged nerd talks to his magical baseball box for an hour” sounds like the worst episode of Black Mirror ever. That said, because I do full in-season runs of ZiPS in the middle of every month, now seems like a good time to get some projectionist changes of heart for the overachieving and underperforming players.

So whose changing fortunes are most likely to lead to changed destinies? Well, to get an idea of which trajectories have changed the most, I took the current 2026 projected numbers for each player and compared them to the 2026 ZiPS projections from before this season began. We’ll start with the good news, because I’m a Baltimore native and an Orioles fan, so I need something sunny first. These are park-neutral projections, and I eliminated anyone who is projected as below replacement level, since we’re focusing on major league-relevant players. Today, we’ll cover the position players before moving on to the pitchers tomorrow.

Here are the players whose 2026 ZiPS projections have improved the most since the beginning of this season, sorted by the greatest gains in projected WAR: Read the rest of this entry »


The Twins Have Turned Things Around

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When we last checked in on the Twins, they had stumbled out of the gate, losing eight of their first 12 games — a start that looked particularly dismal given last September’s collapse, which cost them a playoff berth. But times have changed, with the offense heating up and the pitching staff emerging as one of the league’s stingiest. Thanks to a just-ended 13-game winning streak, the Twins now own the American League’s fourth-best record (26-21, .553), though injuries to players such as Byron Buxton and Carlos Correa threaten to stall their momentum.

On May 3, the Twins beat the Red Sox 4-3 in Boston, ending a four-game losing streak that had dropped them to 13-20 and had included two walk-off wins by the Guardians. They beat the Red Sox to close out a road trip, then went home and pulled off three-game sweeps of the Orioles and Giants, punctuated by a 10th-inning walk-off victory. Back on the road, they swept three from the hapless Orioles in Baltimore before taking the first two from the Brewers in Milwaukee, running their record to 26-20. On Sunday, they finally lost again, falling to the Brewers 5-2.

The final three wins of the Twins’ streak were all shutouts, starting with a 4-0 blanking of the Orioles by starter Chris Paddack and two relievers on Thursday, continuing with a 3-0 whitewashing of the Brewers behind Joe Ryan and three relievers on Friday, and concluding with a 7-0 drubbing of Milwaukee highlighted by the work of Pablo López and three relievers on Saturday. In all, the Twins shut out their opponents for 34 consecutive innings (the longest since the franchise moved to Minnesota in 1961), beginning with the fourth inning of Wednesday night’s game, after the Orioles had scored six runs; they extended that streak until the second inning on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »


Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 5/20/25

12:01
Avatar Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! It’s a gorgeous day here in Brooklyn, and while that may not make a difference to you if you’re staring at a computer screen, it’s lightening my mood just a bit.

12:01
Avatar Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about the Braves’ outfield situation with the return of Ronald Acuña Jr. finally on the horizon https://blogs.fangraphs.com/as-the-braves-recover-from-their-sluggish-…

12:01
Avatar Jay Jaffe: Today I’ve got a piece on the Twins’ just-completed 13-game winning streak. That’s in the pipeline and should go up shortly.

12:04
Avatar Jay Jaffe: Tomorrow evening at 7 PM ET, I’ll be participating in a SABR roundtable on the subject of the recently reinstated Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson, along with Keith O’Brien (author of the recent Rose bio Charlie Hustle) and ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr., who has reported on the reinstatement efforts regarding both Rose and Jackson. Jacob Pomrenke, an expert on Jackson and the 1919 Black Sox scandal, will serve as moderator. https://sabr.org/latest/this-week-in-sabr-may-16-2025#shoelessjoe

12:05
Avatar Jay Jaffe: It was just after last week’s chat wrapped up that all hell broke loose with the Rose news. My coverage of it is here: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/say-it-aint-so-commissioner-manfred-posthu…

12:05
Avatar Jay Jaffe: And with that housekeeping out of the way, on with the show!

Read the rest of this entry »


Injuries Are Really Starting To Crank on the Royals Rotation

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“The reason the Royals are so far down this list is that they don’t have an obvious back of the rotation yet.” That’s what Ben Clemens wrote when the Royals turned up at no. 13 on our Positional Power Rankings back in March. Until Saturday, the lack of depth hadn’t held them back at all. Their five starters, Seth Lugo, Cole Ragans, Michael Wacha, Michael Lorenzen, and Kris Bubic, had started 45 of the team’s 46 games. As Michael Baumann wrote last week, Bubic, the biggest question mark of the bunch, has instead pitched like an exclamation point. After taking a no-hit bid into the seventh inning in San Francisco last night, he’s 5-2 with a 1.47 ERA and 2.72 FIP. Put it all together, and the Kansas City starters have a 2.93 ERA and 3.45 FIP, good for the third- and fourth-best marks in baseball, respectively. But that depth is finally going to be tested. On Saturday, the Royals announced that they’d sent both Lugo and Ragans to the injured list.

Lugo and Ragans, who respectively finished second and fourth in the AL Cy Young voting in 2024, have been on opposite sides of the process-results spectrum thus far this season. Lugo is rocking a 3.02 ERA with a 4.52 FIP, while Ragans has a 4.53 ERA and a 1.99 FIP. The good news is that neither injury sounds too serious (with the obvious caveat that because they’re pitchers, either player could spontaneously combust at any moment). Both had been dealing with nagging injuries in recent weeks and seemed to reach the point where it was time to back off rather than risk something more serious. Read the rest of this entry »


Austin Riley Addresses His 2017 FanGraphs Scouting Report

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Austin Riley was relatively raw when our 2017 Atlanta Braves Top Prospects list was published in February of that year. Six weeks short of his 20th birthday, he was coming off of a Low-A season in which he logged 20 home runs and a 124 wRC+, but also fanned 147 times. With lingering concerns about both his contact profile and conditioning, Eric Longenhagen conservatively ranked Riley no. 28 in a then-strong Atlanta system.

Riley has obviously gone on to have a highly successful career. Since debuting with the Braves in May 2019, Riley has put up a 124 wRC+ and 19.9 WAR across parts of seven seasons, slugged 30-plus homers in three different years, and made a pair of All-Star teams. A mainstay in the middle of Atlanta’s lineup, the 41st-overall pick in the 2015 draft out Southaven, Mississippi’s DeSoto Central High School has developed into one of the senior circuit’s top sluggers.

What did Riley’s 2017 FanGraphs scouting report look like? Moreover, what does he think about it all these years later? Wanting to find out I shared some of what our lead prospect analyst wrote and asked Riley to respond to it.

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“Riley began the year struggling with any sort of velocity and then improved the timing of his footwork, quieted his hands and started hitting. Late in the year, he was turning on plus velocity.”

“Very accurate,” Riley said. “Coming out of high school, I hadn’t seen velo a lot, and I kind of had a lot going on with my swing. I needed to make some adjustments. Being a bigger guy, a power guy, it was kind of, ‘All I have to do is touch the ball, get a barrel to the ball.’ It was one of my first steps in learning how to shorten everything up and just get a barrel to it. From there, good things happen.”

“He has plus raw power (at least) and has improved his body composition since high school (when he was a heavy 230). But at just 19, with some general stiffness to his actions, Riley is pretty likely to kick over to first base as he matures.” Read the rest of this entry »


The 2025 FanGraphs Fan Exchange Program: Introduction and Entrance Survey

Tim Heitman-USA TODAY Sports

As we get further and further into the month of May, signs of summer are popping up all around us. Allergies are flaring, you can start to trust the major league stat leaderboards, and colleges across the country are wrapping up their spring semesters.

That last point is important, because summer is the season of study abroad. Every year around this time, thousands of American undergraduates get on planes, learn to navigate a foreign country, meet new people, and discover that their Spanish gets way better after three or four beers. It’s a marvelous experience, and I want to bring it to you, the FanGraphs readers.

Welcome to the 2025 FanGraphs Fan Exchange Program.

For one week, I want you to put your favorite team on the shelf and follow a different one. Do whatever you do in the normal course of being a fan, but do it for another ballclub. Read the rest of this entry »


How Cal Raleigh Learned To Stop Swinging But Keep Hitting Bombs

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Cal Raleigh has a lot of power. That’s always been his calling card, at least on offense. In each of his three full major league seasons, he’s posted a below-average OBP and an above-average offensive line. In cavernous T-Mobile Park, the hardest place to hit in baseball, his 34 home runs and .436 slugging percentage in 2024 were downright titanic. This year, though, he’s tapped into something new.

Or, well, his results are absolutely something new. One very interesting thing about Raleigh’s spectacular 2025: It hasn’t come from more raw power. Maximum exit velocity? Nothing new for Raleigh. Neither is his average exit velocity, nor his hard-hit rate, both of which are broadly in line with 2024. His bat speed is the same. When he’s trying to hit a home run, he’s doing it the way he always has.

But while his ability to hit baseballs hard might be the same as it’s always been, he’s demonstrating that ability more often than ever before. He’s both putting the ball in the air and pulling his elevated contact more frequently, and more of his batted balls are barrels, too. He’s striking out less frequently, with a career-high contact rate and career-low swinging strike rate.

Nothing is ever so simple that it’s driven by one thing, but I think there’s one important change driving Raleigh’s surge. It’s something he’s been working toward for a few years, in fact. When Raleigh is ahead in the count and pitchers throw him meatballs over the heart of the plate, he’s swinging less than ever before:

Cal Raleigh’s Heart Swing%, Ahead In Count
Year Swing%
2021 83.7%
2022 85.0%
2023 76.1%
2024 77.9%
2025 73.4%

Read the rest of this entry »


FanGraphs Power Rankings: May 12–18

Thanks to a big upset during MLB’s inaugural Rivalry Weekend, the Dodgers are out of the top spot in these rankings. In their place? The Gritty Tigs.

Last year, we revamped our power rankings using a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings or FiveThirtyEight’s defunct sports section, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant solution 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 throughout the season, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise will remain reactive to hot streaks or cold snaps.

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 »


Catchers Are Finally Joining in on the Fun at the Plate

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I sometimes worry about overusing the words “for a catcher” in my writing. I don’t like overusing words. Case in point, I hate that I have already overused the word “overusing” (and the word “words”) in the first two sentences of this piece. Yet the “for a catcher” qualifier is often necessary. Catchers aren’t as fast as other position players. He runs well… for a catcher. They aren’t as agile as other position players. He’s athletic… for a catcher. They need more time off than other position players. He plays a lot… for a catcher. Above all else, they tend not to hit as well as other position players. Say it with me now: He hits well… for a catcher.

Catcher is the most demanding defensive position, and as a result, offensive standards for backstops are lower. The average wRC+ at catcher is typically about 10% worse than the big league average. That means that a team whose catchers produce a 100 wRC+ will usually rank among the majors’ top third, even though you wouldn’t want to see those catchers batting higher than the bottom third of the order. This is so often the case that most of us take it for granted. For instance, if I were chatting in a sports bar instead of writing for FanGraphs, I might say that Austin Wells (101 wRC+), Bo Naylor (99 wRC+), or J.T. Realmuto (102 wRC+) has hit “pretty well for a catcher” this year, without even bothering to check how well the average catcher has actually performed. Unfortunately for those guys, I’m far more comfortable sitting behind a computer than sitting in a bar, so I did look into how well catchers have hit in 2025. What I discovered is that, at least for now, I’m at no risk of overusing the phrase “for a catcher” after all. Just past the quarter mark of the 2025 season, catchers have a 101 wRC+.

With a .246/.318/.396 slash line, catchers are slightly outperforming the league average in all three triple slash categories. If they can keep this up, the 2025 season will be the first since at least 2002 (as far back as our positional splits go) in which catchers outperformed the league average in any one of the triple slash statistics, let alone all three. Read the rest of this entry »


As the Braves Recover From Their Sluggish Start, the Return of Ronald Acuña Jr. Looms

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The Braves have limped through the first seven weeks of the season at far less than full strength, particularly within their outfield, where they lost Jurickson Profar to an 80-game PED suspension and have taken a very slow and deliberate approach to Ronald Acuña Jr.’s rehabilitation from his second anterior cruciate ligament repair surgery in three years. That outfield has ranked among the majors’ least productive, offset only by the emergence of Eli White. But at least help is on the horizon. Acuña’s rehab stint is finally underway, and he could return to the Atlanta lineup as soon as this weekend.

Acuña tore his left ACL on May 26, 2024 and underwent surgery to repair it on June 4. When he returned from his 2021 tear of his right ACL nine months and one week after surgery, he did not play up to his usual standard in ’22. The Braves resolved to take his rehab more slowly this time around, resisting the urge to accelerate his timeline even with Acuña reportedly hitting 450-foot bombs in batting practice early in spring training, and even with the team stumbling out of the gate by losing its first seven games and 13 of its first 18. The 27-year-old slugger finally returned to action last Tuesday with the Braves’ Florida Complex League affiliate, homering off Kevin Velasco, a 19-year-old righty on the Orioles’ FCL squad:

Acuña then moved up to Triple-A Gwinnett, where he went 3-for-6 with a homer and six walks in three games against the Charlotte Knights, affiliate of the White Sox, from Thursday through Saturday. The homer, a 102-mph, 420-footer to dead center, was hit off 25-year-old lefty Tyler Schweitzer. Read the rest of this entry »