FanGraphs Baseball

As an inveterately unhappy middle-aged man, I don’t like pointing out when things get better. So when I say that the 2023 MLB rule changes massively improved baseball as a spectator experience, you can rest assured that I’m not making that assertion lightly.

You know what I’m talking about: The shift ban, the pitch clock, and the pizza box bases. Back in the olden days, a sufficiently daring and athletic ballplayer could rack up 50, 60, or even 100 steals in a season. But the response to that era has been a gradual tightening up of baserunning tactics.

First, the roided-up giants of the 1990s got too stiff and meaty to run and slide. Even those athletes who maintained their springiness didn’t want to run into an out when the guy at the plate could use his 25-inch forearms to drive them in from anywhere. In the 2000s, an army of Theo Epstein wannabes took over baseball operations en masse. These men, with their locust-like commitment to efficiency, discouraged risky baserunning behavior even further. While their Harvard MBA classmates were killing the American housing market, they killed the stolen base. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Brewers’ record-tying shutout/blowout of the Mariners (warning: profanity), Bryce Rainer and the continued absence of a post-Ohtani two-way wave, the latest manifestation of Paul Skenes’s protracted struggles, the tater turnaround of Fernando Tatis Jr., the reason(s) for the diminishing viewership of “MLB at Field of Dreams,” and which baseball figure (or feature) could extend the Vin Scully/Connie Mack fun fact.

Audio intro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Mariners vs. Brewers box score
Link to biggest blowouts
Link to Julio mistake
Link to Mount Rainier wiki
Link to Laurila on Rainer
Link to article on Rainer’s signing
Link to The Board at FG
Link to Sam on Ohtani’s two-way balance
Link to best past two-way prospects
Link to Olerud pitching retrospective
Link to article on Jobe vs. Skenes game
Link to Tigers vs. Pirates game data
Link to Tigers vs. Pirates box score
Link to Stumpf on Skenes
Link to Sawchik on Skenes
Link to Oler on Skenes
Link to Verducci on Skenes 1
Link to Verducci on Skenes 2
Link to Skenes photos
Link to Skenes gamelog
Link to Ashcraft gamelog
Link to P/IP leaders
Link to Tatis before
Link to Tatis after
Link to BP on Tatis
Link to MLB at Field of Dreams wiki
Link to article on Hall of Famers
Link to article on audience size
Link to EW Field of Dreams episode
Link to MLB Speedway Classic wiki
Link to Sam’s Scully/Mack piece
Link to Ben’s comment

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Week Three has concluded in the WPBL, and as such, let’s get to recapping. As a reminder, these weekly roundups are designed to cover each week’s action by highlighting the most notable players, moments, and anything else I deem worthy of further commentary. For each edition of the recap, I re-license the naming rights to this list of highlights to whichever team I feel has won the week. And how does a team win the week? Well, unlike actual wins and losses in baseball, this type of win is purely subjective and will operate under the time-honored tradition of making it up as we go along.

Along with the list of highlights, the Unforced Errors list discusses the more confounding aspects of the prior week because good faith criticism is a necessary component of continuing progress. Rounding things out are the Historic Firsts of Lesser Renown. The league’s momentous firsts will obviously get their shine, but there’s something to be said for the more strange and mundane firsts, the smaller day-to-day occurrences that make a new league feel familiar and complete. Think of these firsts as the knickknacks on a shelf that make a new house feel like a home. Baseball fans won’t really feel settled into their new league until the first time a player on their favorite team commits a TOOTBLAN.

If you need a refresher on the league’s structure and mechanics, check out the Week One recap.

Without any further ado, your Week Three winner is the San Francisco Firebells. The Firebells went 3-0 on the week with two decisive wins over the second-place team in the standings (the Los Angeles Queens), and team captain Kelsie Whitmore issued a temporary moratorium on the Denae Benites MVP chatter. Read the rest of this entry »

After taking a few months off from releasing new experimental data visualization options in the FanGraphs Lab, I’m happy to announce that we’re back at it. Meet the Count Progression tool:

With the advent of the ABS challenge system, this year’s league-wide walk rate has been in the news. The first month of the season featured a huge number of walks, and while subsequent months haven’t been quite as extreme, we’re still tracking for the highest full-season walk rate of the 21st century (2020 was weird, naturally). When I was tracking down where those extra walks were coming from back in May, I came up with the idea of looking at each count in isolation to hunt for changing behavior. This tool is an offshoot of that line of research. Read the rest of this entry »

I say this with nothing but charity in my heart: It’s generally not a good sign when your team has a load-bearing Derek Hill. When the Phillies traded for Hill in June, he was arguably less valuable than the international bonus money they picked up in the same deal.

Hill is a career fifth outfielder with a strikeout rate (31.5% in 806 career plate appearances) that would make almost any hitter unplayable, especially a hitter with a career .281 on-base percentage and a career .132 ISO. But he can run, he can play center field, and he can hit lefties a bit. Best of all — and again, I’m not trying to be unkind here — Hill could not have dreamed up a scenario in which the bar for success was lower. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the deepening monetary morass surrounding Mark Walter and whether it will eventually ensnare the Dodgers, the struggles of Edwin Díaz and Kyle Tucker, L.A.’s incentive to try for a bye, the Dodgers’ and Mets’ offseason oopsies, Pete Crow-Armstrong’s heroics, the hot hitting of Denae Benites and the WPBL’s offensive environment, Joshua Báez and MLB’s debutant ball, Colt Emerson’s hidden hurt, the AL’s wild card mid-off, a four-team whirlwind for Jake Rogers, the longest team trade droughts, and more.

Audio intro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Walter Mitty wiki
Link to Ben on Walter
Link to Bloomberg on Walter
Link to WSJ on Walter
Link to Baker on Walter
Link to Reuters on Walter
Link to The Athletic on Walter
Link to Chelsea shares story
Link to Ohtani clause story
Link to Walter tweet
Link to more on Walter
Link to Tucker/PCA tweet
Link to one-day WAR
Link to Opta/PCA fun fact
Link to 1957 Power game
Link to FG WAR leaderboard
Link to Tucker miss 1
Link to Tucker miss 2
Link to Tucker home offense
Link to Tucker road offense
Link to Karros comment
Link to BP on Tucker
Link to Tucker in the dugout
Link to Tucker and Ohtani
Link to Tucker summary
Link to Díaz IL story
Link to Dodgers bye incentive
Link to Sheehan on Stearns
Link to Sam on Stearns
Link to Ben on the Mets
Link to WPBL leaderboard
Link to WPBL RA9
Link to MLB RA9
Link to BP on WPBL offense
Link to Benites wiki
Link to BP on Benites
Link to Benites MLB comps
Link to Cade Skywalker
Link to Simmons Mariners tweets
Link to Emerson story 1
Link to Emerson story 2
Link to Nightengale on Wilson
Link to Murphy’s hidden injury
Link to Watchmen quote
Link to Watchmen meme template
Link to Ben on debutant batters
Link to debutants spreadsheet
Link to MLB Báez video
Link to ESPN Báez video
Link to Callahan triple video
Link to Callahan triple story
Link to Cobb/Irwin article
Link to Paine on post-deadline confusion
Link to FG playoff odds
Link to post-deadline odds changes
Link to wild card standings
Link to Crizer on the AL standings
Link to Rogers fun fact
Link to Rogers feature
Link to Rogers wedding story
Link to trade droughts article
Link to Atlanta-Philly trades
Link to Cleveland-KC trades
Link to Dodgers-Tigers trades
Link to Red Sox-Yankees trades
Link to fourth out wiki
Link to Jaffe on John
Link to Episode 1580 Stat Blast
Link to Cubs-Cardinals game
Link to Cubs-Nationals game
Link to Hembekides clip
Link to Hembekides graph
Link to Wilson overturn
Link to Yan tweet 1
Link to Yan tweet 2
Link to Burgos gamelogs
Link to Burgos post

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Want to build a projection system? There are a lot of things you want to prepare for ahead of time, like fans thinking that you have a secret vendetta against their favorite team. The most practically important thing to know is that you are going to be wrong. Not just occasionally, but all the time. And assuring people afterwards that yes, 10% of players are supposed to fail to even meet their 10th-percentile projection isn’t going to get you off the hook, no matter how technically correct you are. Being wrong, however, is your opportunity to improve your model. Indeed, models learn a lot more from being wrong than being right.

When it comes to projecting the number of wins for a team, it mostly comes down to two big factors: how good the players are and who actually plays. Predicting the future is an incredibly difficult activity, and that is reflected in the variance in the probability “buckets.” ZiPS entered the season highly confident that Paul Skenes was a darn good pitcher, but even with that belief, ZiPS was only 50% sure that his 2026 ERA would fall between 2.37 and 3.20, and only 80% sure that it would land between 1.80 and 3.65. But as hard as it is to project how effective a player will be, that’s still easy compared to predicting who will play. Models can get a general idea of the likelihood of injuries from some specifics, like whether a player has missed a lot of time recently or just had Tommy John surgery. But what they don’t know, and certainly never will, is who will tweak their hamstring next Thursday and be out for the rest of the season, who will suddenly lose their velocity in their Labor Day start and need a UCL repaired, or who will be abducted by giant mutant ants and forced to toil in underground sugar caves.

So, which teams have suffered the most due to injury in 2026? If you ask fans, especially those of underperforming clubs, they’ll tell you that their favorite team has been uniquely put upon by injuries this season. But we’re numbers people here. We can do a bit better than that and see which team’s fans can justify their sad laments about the trials and tribulations of the hometown 26. Read the rest of this entry »

Tommy John spent 26 seasons pitching in the majors from 1963–74 and then 1976–89, more than any player besides Nolan Ryan, but his level of fame – and indeed, his contribution to the game — stems as much from the year that cleaves that span as it does from his work on the mound. As the first recipient of the most famous sports medicine procedure of all time, the elbow ligament replacement surgery performed by Dr. Frank Jobe in late 1974 that now bears his name, John endured an arduous year-long rehab process before returning to pitch as well as ever. His recovery gave hope to generations of injured pitchers whose careers might otherwise have ended.

By the count of analyst Jon Roegele, keeper of the Tommy John Surgery List, over 2,700 professional players have undergone some variant of Jobe’s pioneering surgery on John during either their amateur or professional careers. That list ranges from Brent Strom — who did not make it back to the majors after becoming the second recipient of Jobe’s ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction technique but went on to become a successful pitching coach — to Hunter Greene, who just underwent his second Tommy John last week. So far, only three are in the Hall of Fame, namely Paul Molitor (the first position player to undergo the surgery), John Smoltz, and Billy Wagner, but Justin Verlander, Chris Sale, and Shohei Ohtani will almost certainly follow in their wake, with more to come. By Roegele’s accounting, over 39% of all major league pitchers in 2025 had undergone Tommy John surgery.

On the mound, John was the epitome of the “crafty lefty,” so good at his vocation that he arrived on the major league scene at age 20 and made his final appearance three days after his 46th birthday. His 700 starts and 288 wins are both more than any other 20th- or 21st-century pitcher outside the Hall of Fame except Roger Clemens, but John’s longevity, his more dominant cohorts — including six 300-game winners — and the surgery that bears his name have overshadowed the rest of his on-field accomplishments. Between going 0-for-15 on BBWAA ballots (where he topped out at 31.7%) and 0-for-5 on Era Committee ballots (where he peaked at 43.8% on the 2025 Classic Baseball ballot), he never came particularly close to election, though in 2013, he got a share of the spotlight when the Hall honored Jobe. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my Tuesday chat. I’m just back from a trip to Salt Lake City to celebrate my father’s 85th birthday and the upcoming birthdays of my daughter and niece. While in transit, I learned that Tommy John had passed away. My tribute to him just went live moments ago: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/tommy-john-1943-2026-crafty-lefty-and-firs…

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Not sure about 90%, but maybe 75%. I’d put in more Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball players and strip out some of the 1930s guys who rode the Frisch/Terry Express. More starting pitchers from the 1980s to 2000s. More figures whose influence went beyond the numbers, including John Donaldson, Lefty O’Doul, Fernando Valenzuela, and yes, Tommy John (and Dr. Frank Jobe).

12:08

Jay Jaffe: I think some of it comes down to a perception and public relations. “Let’s get rid of these expensive acquisitions that were mistakes to acquire (Devers, Adames) and keep the homegrown guys we’ve nurtured (Webb) and that the fan base has grown to love.”

12:09

Jay Jaffe: But you’re right in that Webb has more trade value than a contract that is underwater or bordering on it

Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Detroit Tigers pulled off a truly delightful 1-5-4 double play. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and a video even more, so I’ll save everyone a lot of work and show it to you.

If you’re reading this, and you’re old enough to have lived through the war between small ball and sabermetrics in the early part of this century, you’re probably delighted to see a sacrifice bunt go awry like this. I lived through college baseball in the early-to-mid-2010s — if there was a war over sabermetrics, college ball at this time was its Stalingrad — so that was definitely my first reaction as well. Read the rest of this entry »