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Through their ups and downs this season — a pair of 10-game winning streaks here, a 10-game losing streak there — the one constant for the Cubs has been injuries to their starting pitchers. On that front, this week brought a flurry of bad news. Not only did both Edward Cabrera and Ben Brown land on the injured list on Wednesday, bringing their current total of sidelined starters to six, but president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer announced that Justin Steele, who suffered a setback in late April while rehabbing from his second Tommy John surgery, isn’t likely to rejoin the rotation this season. In need of warm bodies to provide some innings, the team swung a trade with the Mets to acquire lefty David Peterson, a 2025 All-Star who has been getting lit up this year, but if the Cubs aspire to maintain their hold on a playoff spot, they’ll need significantly more help ahead of the August 3 trade deadline.

At this writing, seven of the 11 pitchers who have made at least one start for the team this season — including openers — have landed on the IL at least once, and that count doesn’t even include Steele. With Wednesday’s moves, five of the six pitchers forecast to throw the most innings for the team in our preseason Positional Power Rankings were out hurt, though Thursday’s scheduled activation of Opening Day starter Matthew Boyd from his second IL stint reduces that count. The Cubs rotation ranked 20th in projected WAR in our PPR, with a projected 4.03 ERA and a 4.15 FIP, but even that level of performance has been unattainable. Currently, Chicago is 26th in starting pitcher WAR (2.9), with a combined 4.64 ERA and a 4.79 FIP, and while the team’s use of the occasional opener fuzzes up those stats a bit, the bullpen (including bulk pitchers) has netted -0.3 WAR, with a 3.82 ERA and a 4.62 FIP. Don’t even ask about ready help from the minors, as the organization’s top upper-level pitching prospects — Jaxon Wiggins, Brody McCullough, Brandon Birdsell, Connor Noland — either are currently hurt or have been ineffective. It’s a bleak situation everywhere you look, at least at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Oh thank goodness, there are questions in the queue

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I think so, but it may be closer than they’re comfortable with, especially if they have a quiet deadline

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I’m not *highly confident* the Phillies are five games better than the Braves, but I think that it’s not unlikely

12:05

Dan Szymborski: If that makes sense

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One of the things I try to emphasize when I talk about projections is that they’re not numbers written in stone, but an array of estimates that’s always moving. Each individual plate appearance or inning pitched, while not a needle-mover on its own, adds to our knowledge of a player and very gently changes his career trajectory. Forecasting a player isn’t all that different from forecasting a hurricane, but thankfully, players cause a lot less mayhem. Except maybe Len Koenecke.

It’s been three months since the start of the season, and we have a lot of new information about players. Since we’re approaching the halfway point of the season, and the fact that I’m getting a few dozen chat questions a week about which players have seen their projections change the most, I thought this would be an appropriate time to do an in-season ZiPS run with the full-fat model that is too compute-intensive to run every day. To keep the list relevant to 2026 MLB goings-on, I narrowed it to players who either have played in the majors this year or are one of the 1,232 prospects on The Board. So my apologies to players such as Peyton Alford, who has seen his 2027 ERA+ projection jump from 88 to 110.

I’ve also separated starters from relievers, with pitchers projected to start in at least a third of their appearances landing with the starters. Since relievers tend to be more volatile than starting pitchers, I wanted to make sure the latter were represented. After all, a bump of 10 points of ERA+ in 180 innings is more impactful for a team than 15 points of ERA+ in 60 relief innings! Read the rest of this entry »

With the 2026 college baseball season having just concluded (a hearty congratulations to both the University of Oklahoma and the College World Series’ Most Outstanding Player, Jaxon Willits), the MLB Draft Combine still in progress, and the Draft itself rapidly approaching, now seems like as good time as any to remind everyone that we added Division I college baseball statistics to the site last year. In addition to college leaderboards, Division I players have their own player pages, while the college stats of drafted pro players can be found on their pro player pages (undrafted free agents currently have separate college and pro player pages, though we’re working to merge them).

The leaderboards can be accessed within the Leaders tab on the main FanGraphs navigation bar:

Before I dive in, here are the basics:

• Stats go back to 2021 and, as they are for professional leagues on the site, they’re updated daily during the season.
• wRC+ is conference-adjusted, not park-adjusted as it is for the minors and majors.
• Unlike most other FanGraphs leaderboards, there are no Dashboard or customization options for Members; what you see under the Standard and Advanced options is the full suite of college stats available.

Using the various drop-downs at the top of the page, you can build your own leaderboard. For example, you might be interested in the best seasons for Miami University (go RedHawks!) hitters since 2021, by wRC+:

Or the best SEC seasons by strikeout rate:

I used “Qualified” as my plate appearance/innings pitched minimum for both of these leaderboards. The qualified playing time rules are same as they are for affiliated ball: 2.1 plate appearances or one inning pitched per team game.

Our college player pages look much the same as the pro player pages, just with fewer statistics. There are even the customizable player cards you’ll find on all player pages, though of course the RosterResource information and Spark Graphs will have to wait:

College stats on the player pages is hidden by default for players who have more than one year of minor league data. College stats can be toggled back on using the College button at the top of each data table:

Turning college stats on for any table within a player’s page will turn it on for all tables, so long as you remain on that player’s page. Turning college stats on doesn’t make the other stats go away, of course, so you can view a player’s entire journey from college up through the minor leagues and into the majors. Here are Nick Kurtz’s ridiculous hitting lines since college:

One last thing to highlight: If the team abbreviations you see prove inscrutable, don’t worry – we have a fix for that! You don’t have to Google where the country’s second-leading hitter by batting average attended school. You can simply hover over the abbreviation in question to view the school’s full name:

As is always the case at FanGraphs, exporting college data to Excel is limited to Members.

To repurpose an old quote about the weather, if you don’t like the identity of the best catcher in baseball, just wait a year and you’ll have a new best catcher in baseball. It’s almost uncanny. Every year, there are two contenders for best catcher in baseball. And every year, one of them falls to the wayside, to be replaced by someone new. It’s like clockwork:

Last year was an exception to the rule in that Cal Raleigh was a lot better than Alejandro Kirk, but for the most part, the top two catchers in the game have put up similar WAR. It’s hard to stand out all the way at catcher, and it’s also hard to stay near the top for long. Truthfully, that isn’t all that surprising. Catching is phenomenally difficult on the body, and WAR is a counting stat. The best catchers play a lot, and they wear down. Before long, they’re either playing less often or playing less effectively.

With that backdrop, you might expect one of Kirk or Raleigh to be clinging to the top spot while a new contender appears. But that hasn’t happened. They’ve both been hurt – Raleigh missed a month on the IL, and Kirk missed more than two. And they’ve both played poorly when healthy – both are off to the worst offensive starts of their careers, though Kirk’s is in a tiny sample. There’s still more than half a season to play, and it’s reasonable to think that the two of them might end up posting solid numbers the rest of the way, but they’ve racked up a combined 0.5 WAR so far this year. It’s safe to say that there will be some new faces at the top. Read the rest of this entry »

I ended up here by accident. I was writing about Steven Kwan yesterday, and I found myself on a leaderboard that contained all 3,658 qualified seasons for batters since 2002. That’s the first year Sports Info Solutions started tracking its reams and reams of granular data, so I spend a lot of time with the leaderboards set to that particular date range. If somebody is at the top or bottom of a column on that leaderboard, then they have earned a superlative. For example, in 2003, SIS credited Tony Batista with a 63.4% pull rate — the highest pull rate ever recorded! I have to believe it’s the highest of all time, too. How is it even possible to pull the ball 63% of the time? It certainly sounds impossible, but I believe the number to be true both because the second and eighth spots also belong to Batista, and because, well, do you remember Tony Batista’s batting stance?

Yeah, that’s what you’d expect a guy with a 63% pull rate to look like. Batista’s offensive approach made him look like a guy who had time traveled from an age long before right field was even discovered.

Today, we’re talking about a different former Oriole who, at least as of right now, can lay claim to one of the most extreme seasons of all time. Here’s the top of the fly ball rate leaderboard. Once again, we’re looking only at qualified seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Tucker’s tenure with the Dodgers hasn’t gone as well as anyone hoped so far, and on Monday night at Target Field, things took a turn for the worse. After walking during his first plate appearance, he yielded to a pinch-runner upon reaching second base due to back spasms. While he hasn’t yet landed on the injured list, the Dodgers have set a timetable that allows for “a mental reset” — to use manager Dave Roberts’ term — as Tucker tries to end a prolonged slump.

Tucker apparently began experiencing back spasms when the Dodgers took the field in the bottom of the first inning, though he didn’t have any balls hit in his direction. When he batted with one out in the top of the second, he fouled off Zebby Matthews’ first pitch — a four-seamer just off the plate — then looked at four straight balls, three of them in similar locations to that initial offering. Tommy Edman followed with a single, at which point Roberts replaced Tucker with pinch-runner Alex Call, who took over in right field.

“Back just like lit up and [I] went out there just tried to hope that it would calm down or go away or something, I’d just keep flying through it,” said Tucker afterwards, adding that “finishing the swing hurt.”

Roberts first noticed Tucker’s discomfort when he was batting. “I saw him take his at-bat — a little bit of wincing and kind of when he was jogging to first base,” the manager said. “And then once he got to second base, I think it was just more not seeing him move the right way, and I didn’t want to put him in any more jeopardy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things I try to emphasize when I talk about projections is that they’re not numbers written in stone, but an array of estimates that’s always moving. Each individual plate appearance or inning pitched, while not a needle-mover on its own, adds to our knowledge of a player and very gently changes his career trajectory. Forecasting a player isn’t all that different from forecasting a hurricane, but thankfully, players cause a lot less mayhem. Except maybe Len Koenecke.

It’s been three months since the start of the season, and we have a lot of new information about players. Since we’re approaching the halfway point of the season, and the fact that I’m getting a few dozen chat questions a week about which players have seen their projections change the most, I thought this would be an appropriate time to do an in-season ZiPS run with the full-fat model that is too compute-intensive to run every day. To keep the list relevant to 2026 MLB goings-on, I narrowed it to players who either have played in the majors this year or are one of the 1,232 prospects on The Board. So my apologies to players such as Tre Richardson III, whose projected 2027 OPS+ has improved from 54 to 74. I’ve ranked the players by the largest changes in projected 2027 OPS+ compared to what it was in the preseason. Read the rest of this entry »