FanGraphs Baseball

Ben Jacobs is emerging as a prospect to watch in the Detroit Tigers system. A third-round pick last year out of Arizona State University, the 22-year-old southpaw is currently on a five-game run at High-A West Michigan in which he has fanned 33 batters while allowing just 10 hits and two runs across 26 frames. Moreover, he has gone 15 scoreless over his last three starts.

His overall numbers are solid. On the season, the erstwhile Sun Devil has logged a 34.4% strikeout rate, a 3.50 ERA, and a 3.80 FIP over 87 1/3 innings, all but 16 2/3 of them with his current club. Jacobs made his professional debut with Low-A Lakeland in April, but earned a promotion by the end of the month.

He entered the year with a relatively low profile. When our 2026 Tigers Top Prospects list came out in late February, Jacobs ranked just 24th with a 40 FV. Fast forward six months and it’s hello helium. Recently asked for a scouting update, Eric Longenhagen called the Huntington Beach native an “arrow up guy,” adding that he now merits a 40+ FV.

How has Jacobs changed since signing with the Tabbies last summer? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s easy to forget that the trade deadline isn’t actually the last chance for teams to reload before the postseason. Players can join a team through waivers as late as August 31 — Monday, for those of you who, like me, have trouble keeping track of the calendar — and still be eligible for the playoffs.

It’s common practice for teams to put expensive vets on the wire to see if anyone will bite and take the contract off their hands. The Angels famously flooded the waiver wire in 2023, as their last-ditch effort to load up for a playoff run with Shohei Ohtani left backfired in a matter of days. This year, the biggest name on the move was Luis Robert Jr., who’s bound for Baltimore. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to give you a little cheat sheet for writing about deadline moves. If you’re talking about a seller who traded a player for a minimal return and you’re looking for silver linings, you can mention “opportunity.” It has two big advantages. First, it’s nebulous and hard to disprove. If you make a claim about a specific player, it might be wrong. If you say that a roster spot is an opportunity, how will someone counter that? But more importantly, roster spots really are opportunities, so your analysis will have the advantage of being correct. Case in point: Nate Lavender.

If you’re wondering who that is, that’s exactly what I’m getting at. Lavender debuted on August 4, the day after the Mets sent half the team out of town at the trade deadline. He was one of five Mets pitchers called up that day, a hockey-style line shift in the bullpen. Not all of them panned out. Xzavion Curry and Chayce McDermott are back in the minors. Jefry Yan has a fun strikeout celebration and a 5.18 FIP. But Lavender has been good enough that he’s worked his way from his big league debut into a setup role in three weeks. Opportunity, indeed.

A quick recap of Lavender’s minor league career: He was the Mets’ 14th-round draft pick in 2021, climbed the minor league ladder despite below-average velocity and stuff, and then blew out his elbow early in the 2024 season. He had an internal brace surgery that summer, and then the Rays plucked him away in the Rule 5 draft that December. They parked him on the 60-day injured list for the entirety of the 2025 season, as a bone spur in his elbow delayed his rehab. When the year ended and the 60-day IL disappeared, the Rays returned him to the Mets rather than place him on their 40-man roster. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the research Meg saw on her trip to Saber Seminar, a vintage Max Scherzer start, Tarik Skubal’s espresso-machine maneuver, a Kevin McGonigle double and rule 9.06(f), an international signing scandal (or in truth, two), MLB’s proposals for reworking offseason signings and roster rules, legal wrangling regarding prediction markets, WPBL difficulties, a Chris Sale gem, a costly FARTBAT, outfield additions, whether Shohei Ohtani will pitch again, the first team eliminated from division-title contention, and more.

Audio intro: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Saber Seminar site
Link to Scherzer start
Link to espresso article 1
Link to espresso article 2
Link to article on player frugality
Link to McGonigle hit article
Link to @ScoringChanges explanation
Link to Posnanski post
Link to old EW on automatic singles
Link to ESPN report on signing scandal
Link to MLB proposal article 1
Link to MLB proposal article 2
Link to Baumann on MLB proposals
Link to NHL holiday roster freeze
Link to MLB prediction-market deals
Link to latest legal decision
Link to prediction-markets piece 1
Link to prediction-markets piece 2
Link to WPBL standings
Link to WPBL article 1
Link to WPBL article 2
Link to Sale article 1
Link to Sale article 2
Link to Sale game page
Link to Baldwin game precedents
Link to FARTBAT article
Link to FARTBAT wiki
Link to MLBTR on Pham
Link to Pham vs. Myers spat
Link to MLBTR on Cave
Link to MLBTR on Robert Jr.
Link to Ohtani update
Link to Reddit Rockies post
Link to Curt’s Bluesky post
Link to Cowser catch clip
Link to Cowser catch article
Link to The Sun Never Sets

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On Thursday, I woke up to a text warning me that first pitch of the Diamondbacks-Giants Bridge League game had moved up to 10 AM local time – presumably due to the heat, our morning low on Thursday was 95 degrees and cranked up to 113 – and that a rehabbing Ketel Marte was in the lineup. The change in schedule meant I could spend an hour watching Ketel and Co., then slip over to the Rockies’ side of the Salt River Fields Complex to catch a second game. Rehabbers typically hit every inning, so I hoped to squeeze in three Marte at-bats before changing locations. Read the rest of this entry »

As the regular season enters its final month, the playoff picture in both leagues has been clarified somewhat. There are just two or three teams vying for the final NL Wild Card spot, while the AL Wild Card field has been whittled down to four or five. For the teams on the fringe of the playoff chase, it’s quickly becoming crunch time.

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 »

Tristan Peters was hardly on anyone’s radar entering the season. A lefty-swinging 26-year-old center fielder playing for his fourth organization since being drafted in 2021, he didn’t land on any preseason top prospects list or even project to see much time in the majors, where in his brief career he’d gone 0-for-12. Yet Peters — whose résumé includes a stint with the Savannah Bananas in 2021, when they were a competitive collegiate summer league team instead of a barnstorming sensation — has become one of the season’s biggest and most pleasant surprises. While helping the AL Central-leading White Sox pull off an already-unprecedented turnaround, he landed on the All-Star team and ranks high on the rookie WAR leaderboard. Last week, he even earned a spot in the record books by homering in five consecutive games.

Peters began his binge — which took place entirely at Guaranteed Rate Field against the Mets and Rangers — on August 22 with a solo home run off New York’s Christian Scott, then followed it up the next day with a wall-scraping walk-off solo shot off Kodai Senga, breaking a 1-1 tie. Peters hit both blasts while using a yellow bat — a nod to his time with the Bananas. The streak continued with a two-run tater off Texas right-hander Kumar Rocker on August 24 (Chicago’s only runs in an 11-2 drubbing), then a solo homer off Peyton Gray the next night, and finally a two-run dinger off Robby Ahlstrom on August 26.

That 406-foot homer off Senga was Peters’ only one during this stretch with an estimated distance of at least 400 feet, and just his second to travel at least that far this season; he had a 410-footer off A’s righty Justin Sterner on July 10, the day he hit for the cycle. On that note, Peters finished a triple shy of the cycle on both August 25 and 26; the first of those efforts included a two-run double off Jacob deGrom. All told, he went 10-for-18 with three walks, three strikeouts, nine RBI, and a 1.500 slugging percentage during that five-game run, not too shabby for a guy whose last prospect report, under the Rays’ 2025 unranked “Depth Starters and Outfielders” section, referred to him as one of the team’s “smaller, contact-oriented corner outfielders at the upper levels without meaningful power.” Read the rest of this entry »

With Byron Buxton out with a hip impingement and no timetable for his return, the Twins were short one outfielder. Luckily for Minnesota, it just so happens that the team’s best prospect, Walker Jenkins, is a center fielder, and is looking a lot like a hitter who didn’t have much more to learn from facing Triple-A pitchers. The fifth pick in the 2023 draft, Jenkins was hitting .308/.407/.532 for a 142 wRC+ in 69 games for the St. Paul Saints when he got the call on Thursday. He started in center for all three games of the team’s weekend series against the White Sox.

Still just 21, Jenkins might have reached the majors even quicker than he actually did if not for sharing Buxton’s proclivity for landing on the injured list. Hamstring and quad injuries in 2024 held him to 82 games, while an ankle injury cost him two months of the 2025 season. An injured shoulder, earned by a collision with the Summit Beer advertisement on the right-center field wall, put him on the shelf for most of May. Since returning to the Saints in late June, Jenkins has been on a tear, hitting .335/.414/.603, topped off with an August line of .405/.484/.772 with eight of his 12 homers on the year.

While one could argue that the Twins should have called up Jenkins a month earlier — Minnesota right fielders have combined for 0.0 WAR — this is one case where I think the conservatism was warranted. With a long injury history, it made sense for Jenkins to get more time in the high minors, and his readiness only became glaringly obvious in recent weeks. His .252/.332/.394 translation through mid-July (by ZiPS) was certainly good enough to be playable, but his hot run has improved his Triple-A translation to a legitimately exciting .287/.364/.450 line on the season. Just to demonstrate what I mean by exciting, ZiPS was still on the fence with Jenkins when I published this season’s top 100 prospects list back in February; ZiPS ranked him outside the top 100, at 131st overall. But if ZiPS had known his 2026 numbers, it would have shot Jenkins all the way up to fourth on the list. Read the rest of this entry »

Tristan Peters was a 22-year-old San Francisco Giants outfield prospect when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in August 2022. Drafted in the seventh round the previous year out of Southern Illinois University, he had recently been acquired from the Milwaukee Brewers at the trade deadline in exchange for Trevor Rosenthal. His profile was modest. While he possessed potential, Peters was nonetheless unranked, with plenty of raw edges to be smoothed out if he hoped to one day reach The Show.

It took time, but his once-raw tools are now are shining brightly on Chicago’s South Side. Now with his fourth organization — the White Sox purchased his contract from the Tampa Bay Rays over the offseason — Peters is thriving to the tune of a .279/.344/.468 slash line, a dozen home runs, and a 128 wRC+ over 408 plate appearances. Moreover, he went deep for the fifth straight game on Thursday, tying a franchise record held by seven other players. Munetaka Murakami is among them, having turned the trick back in April.

The developmental strides Peters has made since we spoke four years ago this month? Peters told me that there have been “tons,” with defense standing out as an especially meaningful area of improvement. On the offensive end, he has made adjustments to his lower half, putting him “in a better position to swing,” thus allowing him to be “more powerful.”

His future was in doubt as recently as December. Nine days before Christmas, the 26-year-old native of Winkler, Manitoba was designated for assignment. Not surprisingly, he found himself not only wondering where his baseball journey would take him next, but also if a big-league uniform was part of that equation. Read the rest of this entry »

Three months ago, when MLB and the MLB Players Association made their first proposals for baseball’s next collective bargaining agreement, I wrote about how these offers were designed to be rejected, and that they would continue to be until January at the earliest. For that reason, I haven’t devoted much space in these mailbags to the various rounds of bargaining that have taken place this summer. We have real baseball games to cover.

That said, I couldn’t help but laugh when I saw the most drastic change in MLB’s latest proposal: In the offer sent to the union on Thursday, the league proposed instituting two free agent signing periods during the offseason, the first stretching from the first day of the Winter Meetings until December 21, and the second beginning the first week of February. The first period of no free agent signings would allow teams to trade players and re-sign their own free agents, while the second would be a complete blackout of big league transactions. So why is that funny? Well, because the league made clear that the players wouldn’t be able to get these free agent signing periods unless they agreed to a salary cap, as if the transaction limitations would be enough of a sweetener to get the players to give in. The union doesn’t want free agent signing periods because they would give ownership greater leverage during negotiations, potentially resulting in unfavorable contracts. Bruce Meyer, the interim executive director of the MLBPA, called the proposal “unserious.” We’ve got a long way to go.

If you want to read more about the latest proposal, you should check out Michael Baumann’s writeup from Friday. Otherwise, let’s get on to this week’s mailbag. We’ll be answering your questions about Julio Rodríguez’s hitting, the greatest World Series ever, and what would happen if home runs became automatic triples. 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 »