Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about baseball’s time to shine after the NBA/NHL seasons and a structural difference between basketball and baseball, Jacob Misiorowski achieving escape velocity and entering the deGrom Zone (and a change he’s made that may matter more than his increased speed), the impending posting of red-hot Teruaki Sato, the losers and losers of the Rafael Devers deal one year later, what the trade deadline will look like in this topsy-turvy season, and (42:55) what MLB should do to avoid a repeat of the Giants’ Pride Night debacle, plus (1:25:45) closing banter about games starting/ending too early for night owls.

Audio intro: The Gagnés, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Daniel Leckie, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to 82-0
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We’re coming up on the halfway point of the season, and the playoff picture in both leagues is still as muddy as ever. That should make for an interesting trade deadline, with a bunch of teams seemingly on the cusp of making a run and only a few true sellers.

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 »

Read the rest of this entry »

After building a 4 1/2-game lead just a few weeks ago, the Guardians (39-33) are now in a virtual tie with the upstart White Sox (38-32) atop the AL Central. As the two teams continue to battle for the division lead, however, the Guardians will have to do without their biggest star for the next several weeks. During Saturday’s 3-1 victory over the Tigers, José Ramírez fractured the hamate in his left hand, an injury that will require surgery and sideline him until some time after the All-Star break.

Ramírez suffered the injury during a fifth-inning plate appearance against Tarik Skubal, who was making his return from surgery to remove loose bodies in his elbow. According to manager Stephen Vogt, the slugger first felt the injury while swinging at a slider that he popped foul. He grounded out on the next pitch, and while he hoped to remain in the game because outfielders Angel Martínez and Chase DeLauter had already exited due to injuries, he was replaced by Daniel Schneemann — who had initially replaced DeLauter as a pinch-runner — at the start of the sixth inning.

“He tried to go back out,” said Vogt of Ramírez. “He knew the position we were in, grabbed his glove. He said, ‘Maybe I can at least play defense,’ and couldn’t squeeze his glove. [He] wanted to get back out there to help us win that game and just couldn’t.” Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Readers:

I write to you from a place of hiding. The Phillies’ outfield situation has taken a turn for the worse, and the team has sent out a multitude of agents in response. The Phanatic and his lieutenants — green and fuzzy, mounted on quad bikes, armed with hot dog launchers — are now scouring the countryside in search of able-bodied right-handed adults. From Lancaster to Lakewood, from New Brunswick to New Castle, they maraud over hill and dale. If you own a baseball glove and can bat, you’re liable to be pulled from your bed in the dead of night and dragooned, press-ganged, and otherwise cajoled into service as the Phillies’ right fielder. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the illustrious Ben Clemens wrote about the state of the bunt, because the state of the bunt, as it turns out, is strong. Hitters are bunting more often, picking their spots better, and finding greater success. It’s a bunting renaissance. He didn’t appear in Ben’s article, but Milwaukee’s David Hamilton is at the forefront, leading the league with 10 bunt hits and 23 total bunts. It’s just the 12th time this decade a player has reached 23 bunts in a season, and we’re only halfway through June! Ben noted that 74.1% of bunts have been successful – meaning the bunt resulted in either a hit, an error on the defense, or a sacrifice – the highest mark in the universal DH era. With so much bunt in the air (and on the ground), I got to wondering how pitchers can fight back.

The first line of defense is to alter your positioning. You bring your third baseman in, play the corners in, put on the wheel play. But I wanted to come at it from another angle. If you’re a pitcher, and you want to make sure the batter at the plate doesn’t get a successful bunt down, what can you do? The two biggest things you can control are your pitch type and location. I dug into the Statcast data on bunts and attempted bunts over the past 18 years. This is not earthshaking research, and some of what I found is fairly intuitive, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it laid out, and I definitely haven’t seen any numbers behind it. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many of us, Jake Burger is tuning in to as many World Cup matches as his schedule allows. The Texas Rangers first baseman is a big fan of “the beautiful game,” and has been for well over a decade. Moreover, it isn’t just the US national team that captures his attention. Burger is an ardent supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, one of the more prominent sides in the English Premier League.

How and when did the 30-year-old St. Louis native come to embrace a team based in North London?

“I became a Spurs fan probably around 2011-2012,” Burger told me. “Gareth Bale and Luka Modrić were my two favorite players. It kind of started with me playing [the FIFA video game] and knowing a lot of those names. Modrić was a wizard out there. Bale, too. Then, obviously, Harry Kane came over to Spurs and I became a big fan of his. They kind of went on a run when Mauricio Pochettino came in [as manager], so following them just became more a part of my life.

“In 2019, I got to go over there to the new stadium and watch a game,” Burger added. “They played Bournemouth and won 3-2. I went over with Ryan Burr and Jimmy Lambert, who were in the White Sox organization with me, and we saw a few other matches, as well. Lambert is a Liverpool fan, and Burr a Man City fan, so along with the Tottenham game we went to a Manchester Derby and a Merseyside Derby; we saw Liverpool play Everton.”

Being a Tottenham fan this past season was anything but easy. Had they lost their final match, they would have been relegated from England’s top league for the first time in nearly 50 years. Much to the relief of Spurs supporters everywhere, they defeated Everton 1-0 to remain safe. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, I sent Michael Baumann a Slack message asking him the first question in today’s mailbag: How many teams have never had a 30/30 season? “Phew,” he said. “That’s a good one.” I told him I’d be answering it, but I thought it was a fun bit of trivia and wanted to know what his guess would be. I was on my way back from my softball game, and I told him I’d look it up as soon as I got home. But Baumann was impatient. He proceeded to run the search himself and answer the question for me.

“Thanks for doing the mailbag for me lol,” I said. He replied, “I had that thought. I just couldn’t help myself.” That’s the type of impulsive, obsessive behavior that drives us to answer your mailbag questions every week. Like you, we love all that is trivial, whimsical, historical, hypothetical, strategic, pedantic, gigantic, nitty, gritty, and silly about baseball. Your passion is our passion. Anyway, because Baumann couldn’t resist, part of the answer to the first question comes from his initial Stathead search. He told me to run my own search, just in case he missed something in his fervor.

We’ll get to the answer to that 30/30 question in a moment. We’ll also answer your questions on the teams with the greatest difference between cumulative player WAR generated and actual team wins, bases-loaded walks, and how to get your baseball fix when you’re short on time. But first, I’d like to remind you that 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 »

Tarik Skubal is the latest athlete to return to play faster than anticipated thanks to a new surgical technique or technology. But there’s something even better than coming back more quickly from an injury: avoiding an injury in the first place. Can injury prevention be improved as much as injury treatment? In this themed episode, Ben Lindbergh talks to four guests about three potential ways to keep players healthy. First (5:14), Mariners biomechanist Cedric Attias joins to discuss how pitching mechanics affect elbow stress, whether injuries stem more from nature or nurture, and whether MLB teams are prioritizing injury research. Second (49:23), Daryl and Adam Moreau, the father-and-son inventors of FlexProGrip, explain how forearm weakness endangers the UCL, how they designed and validated their training tool, and how the device has been adopted in the game. Third (1:41:18), Steve Rowson, director of the Helmet Lab at Virginia Tech, shares how helmets have improved across sports, why dangerous impacts are different in football and baseball, and why catcher’s masks may need an overhaul to minimize concussions.

Audio intro: Ian Phillips, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to NanoNeedle AP piece
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Link to pitcher cap inserts info 3
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Bryce Elder was thriving when he was featured here at FanGraphs in July 2023. Then in his first full season with the Atlanta Braves, the now 27-year-old right-hander was 8-2 with a 3.18 ERA, and he’d recently been named an NL All-Star. Killing worms was his M.O. Relying heavily on a sinker, Elder boasted a 53.6% groundball rate, which ranked fifth best among qualified pitchers.

Then things slowly started going south. From August 2023 through last season, Elder was on the winning end of just 14 decisions while putting up a 5.53 ERA over 48 starts comprising 259 innings. The University of Texas product had gone from a burgeoning frontline starter to profiling as more of a back-of-the-rotation arm.

Adversity has a way of begetting change, and much for that reason, Elder is no longer the same pitcher who struggled to record outs. The transformation has taken a bit of time — Rome wasn’t built in a day — but his current-season results are certainly pleasing to the eye. Over 14 starts, Elder has a record of 5-3 to go with a 2.66 ERA and a 3.46 FIP over 84 2/3 innings. Notably, his 45.0% groundball rate is the lowest of his career.

Elder discussed his evolution — one that has essentially brought him full circle in terms of success — when the Braves visited Fenway Park late last month.

———

David Laurila: It’s been three years since we first spoke. What has changed?

Bryce Elder: “A lot has changed. When we talked in 2023, I’d been on a roll; I’d had a good first half. But then the second half was pretty rough. It wasn’t all rough, but the numbers weren’t all that great. I was kind of like, ‘I’m tired of sucking, tired of not being very good, so I’m going to try to make some changes. I’d never worked on mechanics too much, and I’d never been a big, like, stuff chaser, but I got tired of dying on the hill of complete execution.

“I never thought I’d be saying that, even a year ago. But what I figured out is that if I could make my stuff a little better, that would only help. And then, if I was moving a little better on the mound, my execution was going to be just as good as it’s ever been, if not better. So, I think I’ve had a little tick up in stuff, as well as in my execution.”

Laurila: How did you go about accomplishing that? Read the rest of this entry »