Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the firing of Perry Minasian and the Angels’ outlook under John Mozeliak, Molly Jolly, and Arte Moreno, how MLB is using official channels to publicly promote its position in labor bargaining, whether the Mets’ disappointing season will influence other teams’ approaches to roster construction, the popularity (or lack thereof) of Josh Naylor, Jacob Misiorowski and the imprecise nature of pitch-speed records, and the delightful debut of the Diamondbacks’ Mitch Bratt, plus a postscript about MLB’s ball-drag statement.

Audio intro: Alex Ferrin, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Blum on Minasian
Link to Blum on Minasian 2
Link to Dubuque on Minasian
Link to Rosenthal on Mozeliak
Link to Nightengale’s Angels report
Link to Jolly article
Link to MLB labor videos
Link to MLB Instagram labor post
Link to Ozempic ad 1
Link to Ozempic ad 2
Link to MLB.com column 1
Link to MLB.com column 2
Link to Baumann on draft prospect opinions
Link to bully pulpit wiki
Link to 2026 Mets clubhouse story
Link to 2025 Mets clubhouse story
Link to 2023 Mets clubhouse story
Link to Stearns clip
Link to Meisel on Naylor
Link to Hedges clip
Link to Garrett comment
Link to Naylor on Pawol
Link to Miz 105.5 mph story
Link to Miz postgame comment
Link to Miz postgame clip
Link to 105+ MPH pitches
Link to 107+ perceived MPH pitches
Link to Pitch Info website
Link to Chapman max MPH at BB
Link to Hicks max MPH at BB
Link to Joyce max MPH at BB
Link to Miz max MPH at BB
Link to PITCHf/x calibration article 1
Link to PITCHf/x calibration article 2
Link to PITCHf/x calibration article 3
Link to PITCHf/x calibration article 4
Link to PITCHf/x calibration article 5
Link to Bratt delivery 1
Link to Bratt delivery 2
Link to Bratt last year
Link to Walden/Capps story
Link to Seinfeld clip
Link to Bratt extension rank
Link to “fall on my ass” tweet
Link to Savant drag dashboard
Link to MLB statement to Ben
Link to Acuña comparing balls
Link to MLB trademark application

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While he’s never been a true liability on the infield, Max Muncy has generally been a player whose defensive contributions took a back seat to his offense. The Dodgers have long counted on Muncy’s combination of power and plate discipline to outweigh his shortcomings in the field while bouncing him from first base to second to third depending on their roster’s current needs. That handling has paid off handsomely, as he’s been a vital contributor to four pennant winners and three World Series champions since being plucked off the scrap heap in April 2017. This year, however, Muncy has really flashed the leather at third base, showing the best range of his career. He leads all third basemen in Statcast’s Fielding Run Value, while tying for second in Defensive Runs Saved.

According to Statcast, Muncy was 11 runs below average at third base in 3,817 innings from 2018–25, roughly the equivalent of four runs below average per full season of play; he was four below average by that measure in just 801.1 innings last year. This year, he’s already six runs above average in 621 innings. According to Statcast’s Outs Above Average, he’s gone from being the majors’ worst qualifier on plays coming in (-9) to tying for second-best (4). DRS has generally been more charitable in its assessment of his defense; he was 16 runs above average at third from 2018–25, and is eight above average this season.

Muncy is just one of several Dodgers whose defensive play has helped his team top the rankings in my annual midseason defensive breakdown, with shortstop Mookie Betts, center fielder Andy Pages, second baseman Alex Freeland, and catcher Will Smith also making major contributions to that placement. I’ll explain the methodology below, but first, a bit more about the 35-year-old slugger, who on Monday night hit a towering solo homer in the first Dodgers-Athletics matchup to feature both Max Muncys, who share the same birthday (August 25) and drafting team (Oakland). Read the rest of this entry »

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 »