If you’re looking for a team to make a surprise run to the playoffs, the final month of the season likely won’t be that exciting; there are just three teams on the fringe of the postseason picture, and none of them have playoff odds higher than 20%. But with 12 teams jockeying for their playoff position and a handful of division races left to be decided, there’s still potential for a good bit of intrigue between now and October.

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 »

The Baltimore Orioles came into this year with a few goals. Foremost among them: reach the playoffs, find reliable pitching, and sign some of their young core to contract extensions. Goal one is out of the question. Goal two is up in the air. But goal three? Goal three is going strong after the Orioles and Samuel Basallo agreed to an eight-year, $67 million contract extension, with a team option and escalators that could push the total value to $88.5 million. Andy Kostka of The Baltimore Banner first reported the deal.

Basallo, currently the third overall prospect in baseball, debuted in the majors last week after a whirlwind tour of the minor leagues. He overpowered A-ball at 18 in 2023, mastered Double-A in 2024, and was hitting .270/.377/.589, good for a 150 wRC+, in Triple-A before the O’s called him up. He’s been far younger than his opposition at every level, and it just hasn’t mattered; his colossal raw power has papered over any weaknesses or growing pains again and again.

Throughout his ascension through the prospect ranks, the biggest question about Basallo has been whether he’ll stick behind home plate or have to move to a less demanding defensive position, likely first base. While Basallo’s offensive performance has been consistently excellent, his defense hasn’t been quite so exciting. A stress fracture in his elbow has slowed him, costing him valuable reps at catcher. He played DH about as frequently as he caught in Triple-A this year, and the same was true in 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, you don’t really have to squeeze your glove when you catch the ball. At least, you don’t have to think about squeezing it. It’s an instinctual thing, and while it’s different if you’re a catcher, the whole point of the glove is to corral the baseball. It was designed just for that. The ball tends to stick in there.

That’s most of the time. Sometimes you really do have to think about squeezing the ball, though. Sometimes there’s geometry involved. I love the geometry.

I love thinking about the angles. How do I position myself so I can catch this throw and apply the tag in one motion? Should I wait on this ball, or should I circle around it so I can charge it and field it on a short hop? At what point do I give up on picking this throw and step back to catch it on the long hop? Read the rest of this entry »

Tarik Skubal and Hunter Brown matched up at Comerica Park earlier this week, and the aces didn’t disappoint. In a game Detroit won 1-0 in 10 innings, the Tigers southpaw fanned 10 batters through seven stellar innings, while the Houston Astros right-hander tossed six scoreless frames with half a dozen strikeouts. In terms of modern-day pitchers’ duels, this was nearly as good as it gets.

On pace to win his second straight AL Cy Young Award, Skubal is currently 11-3 with a 2.32 ERA and a 33.1% strikeout rate. Brown, who is fast establishing himself as one of baseball’s best pitchers, is 10-5 with a 2.36 ERA and a 29.3% strikeout rate. Both cook with gas. Skubal’s fastball ranks in the 91st percentile for velocity, while Brown’s ranks in the 83rd percentile.

A few hours before they went head-to-head, I asked Detroit manager A.J. Hinch how — left and right aside — the two hurlers compare.

“I know my guy, and don’t know Hunter as well — how he goes about it or how he prepares — but if you’re looking at who has the best fastballs in the league, you’re going to look at both of those guys,” replied Hinch. “If you look at who has elite secondary pitches, both do. Tarik will use his changeup more than Hunter will. I just think there’s an it factor that comes with a guy where, when we come to a ballpark and Tarik is pitching, we expect to win. I’m sure when Hunter is pitching, the Astros expect to win. That’s the definition of top of the rotation.”

Which brings us to the baker’s dozen innings they combined to throw on Tuesday night. Once upon a time, it would have been several more. For much of baseball history, pitchers who were dealing were generally allowed to keep dealing. The legendary July 2, 1963 matchup between San Francisco’s Juan Marichal and Milwaukee’s Warren Spahn is a case in point. That afternoon, Marichal threw 16 scoreless innings, while Spahn (at age 42, no less) tossed 15-and-a-third of his own — only to then be taken deep by Willie Mays for the game’s only run. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the funniest things to come out of this mailbag column so far occurred two weeks ago, when I wrote about the most replacement-level players of all time. I began that week’s mailbag by talking about questions that require both quantitative data and subjective analysis to answer, and I used the question “Who is the greatest baseball player of all time?” as an example. I made it quite clear that I wasn’t going to give my opinion on the subject; instead, I explained how people might consider the question and formulate their arguments, and in doing so, I mentioned a few of the best players ever. Nothing to it.

Except, of course, I should’ve known that you wonderful baseball sickos couldn’t resist hashing out that debate in the comments. A good number of you latched on to the part about how someone might give Barry Bonds the edge over Babe Ruth because “Bonds wouldn’t have been allowed to play during Ruth’s career.” Readers also made points about expansion and cited U.S. census numbers to compare the population sizes of major league baseball and the country. I truly did not expect any of that.

So maybe I should be prepared for anything with the question I answered to begin this week’s mailbag, which also deals with all-time great players and lineups. It’s quantitative for sure, but context is also necessary to understand why things turned out the way they did. It’s a fun one, so let’s get to it. Before we do, though, I’ll remind you all that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, my colleague Jay Jaffe touched a bit on Jacob deGrom and his Hall of Fame case. Since the world can always use more sentences describing how awesome deGrom is, and because I’m fascinated by how his Hall of Fame case will look to voters sometime in the mid-2030s, I decided to dig a little more into his future candidacy and reasonable expectations for what the end of his career can add to his record. I also wanted to explore what deGrom’s case means for 2010s/2020s Hall of Fame starting pitcher representation more broadly.

This has been a concern of mine for a while, and I talked a bit about it last year in the context of Chris Sale’s marvelous comeback season. This piece has stuck with me as it was one of those rare articles in which the act of writing it changed my opinion somewhat. At the start, my thought process was “with a less than 50% chance of finishing with 200 wins, Sale probably won’t be in the Hall of Fame, and may be too borderline for even me.” But then I projected the rest of the league, and for the first time ever in ZiPS, not a single pitcher who hadn’t already passed 200 wins was projected to have a 50% chance of reaching that milestone. So, perhaps Sale should get to Cooperstown even if he falls short of that threshold, because if the writers don’t vote for him on the grounds that he didn’t get to 200 wins, how could we justifiably elect any future starting pitcher?

When I wrote last year’s piece, there were only 11 pitchers between 100 and 200 wins, a shockingly tiny number. And of those 11, only one is in a better position to win 200 games now than he was then: Sonny Gray, who has added 12 wins and is having a fairly typical season by his standards. As far as the other 10 are concerned… Gerrit Cole is out until well into 2026 due to elbow surgery, and Sale has missed a bunch of time this year from injuries. Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson have both since retired, Johnny Cueto has all but officially done the same, and Carlos Carrasco and Dallas Keuchel are in the minors and, for the purposes of this exercise, might as well be retired. Wade Miley has one win this season and is currently out with forearm pain in his comeback from Tommy John surgery. Yu Darvish, who didn’t make his season debut until July, has moved only two wins closer to 200 in his age-38 season. As a Baltimore native, I’m not psychologically prepared to talk about Charlie Morton’s progress.

The good news is eight new pitchers have joined the 100-win club this season, but none of them look to be on a path to 200 wins right now.

Of these eight, only Nola projects with a 50% chance to get to even 150 wins. While it’s theoretically possible for most of the eight to get to 200 wins, it would require an unusually robust late-career surge. During the Wild Card era, only 10 pitchers have amassed 90 wins after their age-34 season, and almost all of them were in the early part of the era; pitcher workloads have continued to drop, and starting pitchers get fewer decisions than ever.

ZiPS projects only four other pitchers to have a 50% shot at reaching 150 wins: Tarik Skubal, Garrett Crochet, George Kirby, and Paul Skenes.

Rewind ZiPS a decade, and it gave 17 active pitchers a 50% chance to win 200 games. Nine eventually did hit that milestone, and Cueto, the only member of the other eight who is still technically active, isn’t going to do it.

So, let’s run the ZiPS projections for the remainder of deGrom’s contract with the Rangers, beginning in 2026 and running through 2028 — assuming Texas picks up his club option for that season. ZiPS was really worried about his health entering the season, for very obvious reasons, and while he just missed his most recent scheduled start due to shoulder fatigue, the injury is not believed to be a long-term issue. His projected workloads in future seasons have increased now that he’s stayed mostly healthy in 2025.

Give deGrom the 21 projected wins for 2026-28 and a couple September wins this year, and that gets him to 123 for his career. In his piece, Jay brought up Sandy Koufax while discussing deGrom, and I think it’s an apt comparison.

Koufax’s peak was more concentrated and more impactful in individual seasons than deGrom’s, but as I said about Johan Santana when he was on the Hall of Fame ballot, if your best years are being mentioned in conversation with those of Koufax, you must have been a dynamite pitcher. To me, from a pure dominance perspective, Peak deGrom isn’t that far behind Peak Koufax; certainly, the gap isn’t wide enough to keep deGrom out of Cooperstown considering pretty much everyone views Koufax as a no-doubt, inner-circle Hall of Famer.

Of course, it’s an inauspicious sign for deGrom that I’m using Santana as the other not-quite-Koufax comp, given that Santana went one-and-done on the ballot. But I’m hopeful that time is on deGrom’s side here. Santana was knocked off the ballot in the 2018 election, and the demographics of BBWAA members who stick around long enough to earn a Hall of Fame vote have changed a lot over the last decade. In fact, the BBWAA didn’t open up membership to internet-based writers — a group that tends to be more versed in analytics — until after the 2007 season, and many of these stathead members couldn’t vote when Santana was eligible. That will be different by the time deGrom hits the ballot in roughly eight or so years.

By then, it’ll be nearly 20 years of writers seeing starter workloads change, and maybe voters will have figured out how to account for the fact that the role of a starting pitcher is very different in the 2020s than it was in the 1990s, let alone in the days of Old Hoss Radbourn. The trio of former Cy Young winners in their 40s — Justin Verlander, Max Scherzer, and Zack Greinke — will likely be in Cooperstown by the time deGrom hits the ballot. Clayton Kershaw is only three months older than deGrom, but considering the Dodgers icon debuted six years earlier, it feels all but guaranteed that he will be the first of the two to retire, meaning he will also enter the Hall before deGrom becomes eligible. If that happens, Kershaw will be the last of his kind to be voted in by the writers, setting the stage for a new standard for starters to make it to Cooperstown. That is, unless Kershaw is to be the last-to-debut Hall of Fame starting pitcher.

I can’t imagine that will be the case, but it is true that over the next decade, the BBWAA has some interesting philosophical questions to answer about the nature of starting pitcher greatness. I’m not sure what those answers will be, but I do know that deGrom will be instrumental in determining them.

There’s no getting around the fact that the Pirates are a bad baseball team. At 54-74, they’re well on their way to their seventh consecutive losing season and ninth out of the past 10. Even so, they’ve only got the majors’ fourth-lowest winning percentage (.422) — it’s not like they’re the Rockies (.289) or the White Sox (.354). Yet it turns out the Pirates are chasing history, albeit in an under-the-radar and unflattering way. They’re in danger of becoming the first AL or NL team since the start of the 20th century to finish the season without a single hitter producing at a league-average level or better.

I don’t mean “without a single regular,” though depending upon how we define that term, that’s on the table as well. I mean anybody who’s stepped up to the plate while wearing the Pirates’ black and gold this season. The top Pirates hitters by wRC+ are infielders Nick Gonzales and Liover Peguero, both of whom are sporting a wRC+ of 98. The 26-year-old Gonzales, Pittsburgh’s regular second baseman, is hitting .278/.322/.392 through 264 plate appearances. He’s been limited to 62 games due to a fractured left ankle, caused by his fouling a ball off himself during spring training, though he played on Opening Day and even homered off the Marlins’ Lake Bachar. After hobbling around the bases, he landed on the injured list and didn’t return to the lineup until June 3. Peguero, a 24-year-old infielder, has bounced between Triple-A Indianapolis and the majors, where he’s been playing with some regularity since late July; in 58 PA, he’s hit .208/.276/.453.

Six other Pirates have a wRC+ in the 90s:

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

We spend a lot of time here at FanGraphs writing about breakouts. A player who’s suddenly figured it out represents both an exciting piece of news and a chance to dive into the nuances of pitching or hitting. Reading and writing about that subject so often makes you pick up on certain patterns. Today, our subject is Mets infielder Brett Baty, who hasn’t played enough to qualify and who hasn’t broken out in a big way, yet who is fascinating because his breakout doesn’t quite match the patterns we’re used to seeing.

A former 55 FV prospect who ranked 19th on our 2023 Top 100 list, Baty came into the season with a 71 wRC+ over three seasons and 602 total plate appearances. He’s 25, and he’s had an up-and-down career, mashing his way up the Mets system and then struggling upon his promotion to Flushing. He’s got an .889 OPS in the minors and .654 in the majors. If you were to ask a Mets fan what Baty needed to do in order to succeed this season, they probably would have said he needed to put the ball in the air more and he needed to stop striking out so much.

Over 326 plate appearances this season entering play Thursday, Baty has 15 home runs, matching his career total from the start of the year, and a 107 wRC+. These are huge improvements. But he’s done that despite continuing to strike out too much and running a career-low launch angle. That’s not the only mystery. Baty is hitting the ball harder, going from an average exit velocity of 88.8 mph from 2022-24 to 90.8 mph in 2025. Adding two ticks of EV is huge. His hard-hit rate has also jumped from 40% to nearly 47%. But once again, his increased contact quality doesn’t fit the patterns we’re used to seeing. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. August is a month I like to use for rest and recovery. After the chaos of July, there’s a natural lull in the season before the drama of September. Both deadline buyers and sellers are figuring out their new rosters and allocating playing time to new arrivals and minor league call-ups. No race is down to the wire, and yet many races are already decided. That’s a great time to relax – and what I like to do to relax is watch baseball. This week’s set of five things doesn’t have a lot of pivotal plays or playoff squads on the brink. It doesn’t have walk-offs or game-ending defensive plays. It’s just guys doing cool things, and sometimes that’s the best part of baseball. So with a quick programming note – Five Things is off next week while I go to the US Open – and a nod to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, let’s get started.

1. Ultimate Reversals
In an 0-2 count in his first start off the IL, Hunter Greene lost control of a fastball:

Hey, it happens. It was an 0-2 count, so no big deal, get ‘em next pitch. Only, wait, something was going on:

Hit… by pitch? I’m not sure anyone at the plate was sure what happened. J.T. Realmuto said something to umpire Carlos Torres. Torres thought about it and then eventually awarded Realmuto first base. Tyler Stephenson went full John Travolta behind home plate, looking around in vain for someone to make this make sense to him.

How did Reds manager Terry Francona feel about this? The same way I did, and the same way you do right now, presumably:

When the first slow-motion replay came in, everything started to make a little more sense:

Realmuto wasn’t hit by the pitch; his bat was. It’s an easy overturn. Why didn’t anyone notice? Well, Stephenson had his eyes closed and his glove blocked Torres’ view of the butt of Realmuto’s bat. No one noticed the deflection right away either; after all, Stephenson stuck up his glove trying to catch it and the ball landed in the mitt.

The replay review was short and conclusive. The call on the field was overturned; instead of a hit-by-pitch, it was a foul ball. Only, that’s not quite right – there were two strikes. The ball landed in Stephenson’s mitt after making contact with the bat. That’s a textbook foul tip strikeout. Instead of strolling to first base, Realmuto trudged back to the dugout.

There have only been five other HBP-to-strikeout overturns in the replay review era. I watched video of all of them. The one this week was the strangest. Here’s AJ Pollock getting “hit” by Tyler Chatwood in the first one I found:

See the umpire’s quick and decisive reaction? That’s normal. Call a dead ball, determine what happened, point to first to signal a hit-by-pitch – it’s standard operating procedure. Torres didn’t even call a dead ball, because he didn’t realize he needed to.

In fact, I think Realmuto might have inadvertently done this to himself. It’s feasible that if he didn’t say anything to Torres, that would have just been a ball. No one saw the ball deflect off the bat in real time, and it was such a glancing blow that no one seemed to hear it. You can tell because of their reactions; Torres doesn’t call the ball dead right away and Stephenson definitely has no idea what’s going on. Also? Change this rule! That has to be one of the hardest-luck strikeouts of all time.

2. Coordination
Jung Hoo Lee’s second year in San Francisco has gone much better than his first. He’s healthy, for one thing: After an injury limited him to just 158 plate appearances in 2024, he’s been active for the entire season and has already crested 500 plate appearances this year. He’s improved across the board offensively, flashing gap-to-gap power and consistently working counts and avoiding strikeouts. It’s been more of a struggle defensively, where he’s been somewhere between blah (per OAA) and quite poor (per DRS and Baseball Prospectus’ DRP). It’s tough having your fielding compared to the ridiculous monsters who roam center these days. But how many of them can do this?

What’s that, you say? That was a standard play, catch probability 99%? The wind looked a little swirly, which made it slightly more difficult, but you’re not wrong. Lee took a meandering route to the ball and still had time to flatten his route and more or less come to a complete stop to judge the wind; he probably could have caught it standing up if he’d gotten a better read initially. That’s all true! But wait for the reveal:

It’s like a magic trick, pulling a coin out from behind a kindergartener’s ear only in baseball form. Oh, you’d expect the ball to be in my glove? No, of course it’s somewhere else. See, the ball actually kicked out of Lee’s glove, but he made a spectacular instinctual adjustment:

Lee’s right leg made that entire play. He lunged and missed with his hand, the normal thing you’d use to catch a baseball. For most players, that would be the end of the play. But Lee somehow flipped his hips to get in position, drove his right knee past the ball without bumping it away, and then pincered it into the hollow between his knees to protect it from falling to the ground.

Don’t try this at home. I say that out of personal experience – my dog looked at me funny for about five minutes while I tried to replicate it on my living room floor. There’s no practicing or teaching this. No one works on it in spring training. For nearly every outfielder in baseball, the play would have been over after it kicked out of their glove. Lee might be a below-average outfielder when you take the sum of his defensive contributions into consideration. His coordination and ability to make last-minute adjustments, though? It’s certifiably excellent.

3. Necessity
Ryan O’Hearn doesn’t face lefties. In his entire Orioles career – 1,223 plate appearances – he faced only 137 lefties. It’s no secret why: He posted an 89 wRC+ against them, as compared to a 126 wRC+ against righties. That’s a huge platoon split, more than double the major league average for lefties. The O’s had a surfeit of righty platoon options, and even this year, when O’Hearn put up his best season yet, they generally didn’t let him face lefties, and he hit poorly against them when he did get the chance.

In theory, the Padres are similarly capable of sheltering O’Hearn. They’ve only given him six plate appearances against lefties, and they’ve pretty much all been out of necessity rather than desire. Your bench isn’t always as full as you’d like, the other team can sneak in lefty relievers at almost any time late in the game, and no hitter avoids facing lefties altogether. In fact, the Padres have given him those opportunities at about the same rate as the O’s. But let’s just say he’s not hitting southpaws quite so poorly with San Diego:

That’s 4-5 with a walk, and all four hits have gone for extra bases. It’s far too small of a sample to make substantive conclusions, of course, but O’Hearn has already socked as many homers against lefties in a Padres uniform as he did in Baltimore, where he played for 20 times as long.

The last one, a two-run blast against All-Star Robbie Ray, came after Mike Shildt pinch-hit with O’Hearn against a lefty. It wasn’t exactly a normal decision – Jake Cronenworth was hit in the hand in his previous plate appearance, and while he played the field afterwards, he didn’t appear to be capable of swinging a bat. Since the Padres had already juiced their lineup with righties against Ray, the only bench hitter with a platoon advantage was Elias Díaz, and your light-hitting backup catcher isn’t a real pinch-hitting option. O’Hearn was the logical play even if “pinch-hit with the guy we never let face lefties against a dominant lefty” isn’t normally a good decision.

So, is O’Hearn suddenly a lefty killer? I don’t think so, but I definitely hope so. The Padres are going to run into many more chances to either let O’Hearn hit against a lefty or replace him with an inferior hitter (Jose Iglesias? Bryce Johnson?) who stands on the other side of the plate. Previously, the decision has rarely been interesting – get the righty in there. In the last 20 days, though, O’Hearn is making it hard to pull him from the game. Yes, it’s six plate appearances. Sure, that’s not how sample sizes work. But since coming to the Padres, he’s slashing .800/.833/2.400 against lefties. Can you really turn that down in favor of Candelita? It’s gonna be a great subplot to watch down the stretch.

4. Thievery
Alejandro Kirk doesn’t steal bases. In his entire minor league career, he swiped five bags, all in 2018 and 2019. He’s never so much as attempted one at the major league level. He’s listed at 5-foot-8 and 245 pounds, kind of the reverse of a prototypical base stealing frame. His 24.2 ft/sec sprint speed is in the second percentile league-wide. Could you, personally, beat Alejandro Kirk in a footrace? Probably not, but it’s at least closer than it would be for pretty much every other major leaguer.

Anyway, here’s Alejandro Kirk stealing a base:

This play was a perfect storm of pro-stealing factors. With only one out and a runner on third in a one-run game, the Rangers infield was all the way in. That meant Jake Burger couldn’t hold Kirk on first base because he was off the line and on the grass. It wasn’t a big deal, though. Is there a runner less important to hold on than the guy with 2,000 plate appearances and zero stolen base attempts? Meanwhile, with Daulton Varsho on third base, Kyle Higashioka had no interest in throwing down to second and letting Varsho maraud home. The Rangers knew there was no throw coming to second. Look at their positioning with the ball already in Higashioka’s glove:

In other words, they were more or less daring Kirk to go. Why wouldn’t they? Kirk batted 1,946 times before attempting his first steal. Second place in the majors for most plate appearances without attempting one? Spencer Horwitz with 723. The post-integration record for career plate appearances without a stolen base attempt is 2,224, by Johnny Estrada from 2001-2008. Very few batters reach 1,000 plate appearances without trying to steal at least once. Kirk was a true standout in his field of standing around.

Now he’s got a swipe in his back pocket. Estrada’s record is safe; the odds of Horwitz getting to that milestone are negligible. He’s not even a catcher! But more importantly, Kirk is on the board. He tried to act casual after stealing the base, but the crowd wouldn’t let it go (the Jays posted that it was his first career stolen base on the scoreboard). You know you’ve done something fun when you get Max Scherzer to react like this:

5. Pratfalls With Happy Endings
If your only understanding of outfield defense came from this column, you might think that falling over was a key part of the job:

Sorry for the camera angle; it’s all both broadcasts had. But in any case, what a disaster. You can’t fall down there. That’s Alek Freaking Thomas on the basepaths. He’s maniacally aggressive and has the speed to make it work; he’s 10 runs above average on the basepaths in his career even without taking stolen bases (he’s not a great base stealer) into account. He was on his horse right away and had eyes on home plate. Watch Thomas clock what’s going on in center, pick up third base coach Shaun Larkin waving him on, and book it home:

Wait, what? He got thrown out?!? Yeah, and by a lot, as it turns out. See, Angel Martínez fell, but it was fairly graceful as falls go. He didn’t lose the ball, didn’t panic, and was back on his feet quickly to toss in the relay. It took him about a second-and-a-half to recover, which isn’t great, but it’s a lot better than staying down or losing his grip:

That was a decent relay throw, perfectly on line but without a ton of vigor. Martínez has a cannon arm, but he didn’t show it off there; he was just thinking of getting the ball to the infield. When Gabriel Arias received the throw, though, he had maximum effort on his mind. Arias has an incredibly strong throwing arm, too. He knew there was going to be a play at the plate. He received the relay throw while already stepping into a throw home:

Don’t overlook Bo Naylor’s role in that play. The throw beat Thomas by plenty, but it reached Naylor on a short hop. Without perfect concentration, that ball would probably skip away. It hit so close to Naylor that he had to make a first-base-style scoop:

Meanwhile, though, even with an outfielder falling down and then feathering in a relay throw instead of ripping one, Thomas was out by quite a bit. I think I can show you what went wrong. Here’s Thomas with Martínez sprawled out in the outfield:

He’s nowhere near third base. Forget how hard Arias threw the ball on his relay; there aren’t many players who are making it home safely from this position:

The play wasn’t in front of Thomas; he noticed that Martínez fell, but he had to turn his head to run at maximum speed after that. But the timing just wasn’t right for even a fast runner to score. Martínez was throwing the ball in before Thomas reached third base. Arias was releasing it from shortstop before he was halfway home. Major league fielders are great. This just wasn’t a safe time to score, even after Martínez’s stumble.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Shaun Larkin isn’t coaching third base for the Diamondbacks anymore. Manager Torey Lovullo removed him after this very game, in fact. It was a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back situation, but I think it’s emblematic of how hard it is to wrap your head around just how athletic major leaguers are. Angel Martínez was on his back in the outfield, and then he made a natural-looking, low-effort move and just wasn’t. He didn’t have to make a hero throw. He didn’t have to try to whip it home on the fly to make up for his stumble. He just kept his head about him and let his natural coordination plus his team’s competence make up for the trip. Martínez has been quite bad in the outfield this year. He’s a shortstop by trade and hasn’t adapted to the broad expanses of grass all that cleanly. But making an athletic, tumbling play, and having the rest of the Guardians turn it into an out? He looks pretty good doing that.