Randy Vásquez has struck out 19 batters in his first three starts of 2026. He didn’t record his 19th strikeout in 2025 until May 14, in the third inning of his ninth start.

Vásquez has simply dominated in the earliest days of the new season. He opened the year with six shutout innings against the Tigers, striking out eight. He picked up a mere three strikeouts in his second start against the Red Sox, but his stuff was just as good, generating whiffs on 32.6% of swings. And then he picked up eight more strikeouts on Thursday against the Rockies. He now has a 1.02 ERA, a 2.57 FIP, a 27.5% strikeout rate and a 5.8% walk rate, pitching like a top 20 starter in the majors to begin 2026.

Weird, right?

It’s not that Vásquez was terrible before this year. He posted a 3.70 ERA and 4.96 FIP across 26 starts in 2025, and his performance was similar in the two seasons prior. That’s a pitcher who can stick in the backend of most rotations and serve as useful depth. But it wasn’t clear what Vásquez did well, or how he might take the next step to becoming a true mainstay in the majors. He walked more batters than average. He didn’t really limit hard contact. And his 14.8% strikeout rate was the lowest among any starting pitcher with at least 200 innings from 2023 through 2025. He was just kind of there. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers can do all sorts of things to change their lot in life — launch plyo balls, rig up a Trackman, add a kick change — but motor preferences tend to be a fixed fact. Most pitchers fall into one of two buckets: pronator or supinator. Pitchers with high spin efficiency (say, 95% and up) on their four-seam fastball belong to the pronator class, while those below 90% can be considered supinators. (As a reminder, spin efficiency is the measure of how much spin is “useful;” a fastball thrown with perfect backspin would have 100% spin efficiency.) These mechanical biases tend to remain constant throughout a career. I took 185 pitchers who threw at least 25 fastballs in both 2023 and 2026; over that three-year span, the r-squared between their spin efficiency was 0.65.

On that plot above, you’ll see, as there always are, a few outliers. One is Joe Boyle. The tale of Boyle is relatively well known at this point, at least in certain social media pitching circles. Over the last three years, Boyle went from throwing from an over-the-top arm angle (53 degrees) to a distinct side-arm slot (26 degrees.) The arsenal, in turn, transformed alongside it. This dramatic slot change coincided with his fastball spin efficiency declining from 86% in 2023 to 67% in 2026, one of the largest drops in that span.

Boyle belongs to that collection of dots on the left of the plot that went from low spin efficiency to even lower spin efficiency. And then there’s one little dot all alone on the right side of the plot. That’s Emerson Hancock.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Texas Rangers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob Misiorowski has a fastball that consistently reaches triple digits, and he augments it with an effective curveball-slider combination. Usage-wise, the 24-year-old Milwaukee Brewers right-hander is throwing his high-octane heater at a 62.3% clip, while his breaking-ball percentages are 16.6 and 17.3 respectively. Given the lethality of those pitches — his xBA is a paltry .168, and his K-rate an MLB-best 41.8% — he has little need for a changeup…

… but there is one in his arsenal. From time to time, he will even show it to a batter. Of the 289 pitches Misiorowski has delivered so far this season, 11 (3.8%) have been changeups. The story behind his only-sporadically-used weapon?

“I’ve had a changeup my whole career,” Misiorowski told me prior to throwing three of them in a 101-pitch start at Fenway Park on Tuesday. “That was one of the first pitches I truly learned. But then as I started throwing harder, I began going away from it, and it obviously got worse and worse the less I threw it. By the time I got drafted [63rd overall in 2022], I basically didn’t have a changeup any more. I had to relearn it, re-figure it out. So, yeah, it’s always been there, but it hasn’t always been there.”

Misiorowski went on to tell me the grip was originally a more conventional four-seam circle, but that he now has his pointer and middle fingers together, and his thumb underneath. He also said that he likes the amount of horizontal he gets on it, which is generally around 18 inches and has been up to 20. When I told him that the movement profile sounds a little like a two-seam sinker, he agreed that it does.

A few more things Misiorowski told me about the pitch are unfortunately lost, due to glitches I’ve recently encountered on my iPhone’s recording app (I mentioned this teeth-gnashing, hopefully-resolved-soon, issue in Monday’s piece on Padres’ broadcaster Mark Grant.) Fortunately, I was able to grab a few minutes with Brewers pitching coach Chris Hook, who made up for the missing words with his own perspective.

How would he describe Misiorowski’s changeup? Read the rest of this entry »

I went to the Nationals-Cardinals game on Wednesday afternoon at Nats Park to check in on the two rebuilding clubs early in the season. Washington has been in a perpetual rebuild for pretty much the entirety of the 2020s, while St. Louis just tore its roster down to the studs this past offseason. And yet, with Chaim Bloom installed as the new president of baseball operations, a deep farm system, and several young position players starting to come into their own, the Cardinals seem to be closer to their next winning season than the Nationals.

That’s certainly how things played out on Wednesday, when the Cards beat the Nats, 6-1, to take two out of three in the series. St. Louis first baseman Alec Burleson, the team’s second-longest tenured position player, went 3-for-4 and knocked in three runs, and second baseman JJ Wetherholt made several slick plays in the field. Wetherholt, who entered this year as the 12th-ranked prospect in baseball, has reached base in all 11 of his starts this year, and he has at least one hit in 10 of them. (He went 0-for-4 with a walk and a run on Wednesday.) The big story, though, was Jordan Walker, who hammered his fifth home run of the season in the fifth inning. It was the 17th time in franchise history that a player has homered five times within his first 12 games to start the season. After two below-replacement-level seasons, it seemed less likely that Walker would ever make good on his former top prospect pedigree, but now he looks like a completely different player. He seems way more confident and is making much better swing decisions; he’s lifting the ball, while walking more and striking out less. Yes, it’s only been 12 games, but the early returns are promising. He enters Friday night’s game against the Red Sox slashing .295/.367/.682 with a 192 wRC+.

I’ll talk more about the Nationals in my answer to the first question below. We’ll also answer your questions about the World Series teams whose players accumulated the most and least WAR by the end of their careers, the potential injuries that would stop the Dodgers from being World Series favorites, and the most successful three-true-outcomes pitchers of all 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 »

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the bad omen of a broken bat on an Ichiro Suzuki statue, whether Mason Miller is, at this moment, the best pitcher ever on a batter-per-batter basis, and how to label atypical pitches, then Stat Blast (30:00) about team promotional giveaways, age and debut gaps among MLB brothers, and switch-hitters who hit higher in the lineup from one side. Then (47:58) Ben talks to 88-year-old All-American Girls Professional Baseball League pitcher Dolly “Lippy” Vanderlip about growing up as the lone girl in games against boys, joining the AAGPBL at age 15, playing for manager Jimmie Foxx, life on and off the field, the end of the league, how A League of Their Own revitalized interest in the AAGPBL, the impending launch of the Women’s Pro Baseball League, and more.

Audio intro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to broken statue video
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Braden Nett’s path to prospect prominence was anything but ordinary. Not only was he working at a Home Depot when he signed with the Padres in 2022 as a non-drafted free agent, but he also had barely played in college. What he lacked in conventional experience, he made up for with a promising arm. San Diego saw him pitching in the MLB Draft League, gave him a chance, and what’s transpired since is bordering on storybook. Initially from Troy, Missouri — with a short stop as a St. Charles Community College Cougar — the 23-year-old right-hander has progressed to the point where he is now ranked seventh on our newly released Athletics Top Prospects list, with a 45 FV.

His change of address came at last summer’s trade deadline. Intrigued by his promising-but-unpolished toolbox, the Athletics acquired Nett as part of the six-player deal centered around Mason Miller and Leo De Vries. On the season, Nett notched 116 strikeouts while logging a 3.75 ERA and a 3.77 FIP over 105 2/3 innings between a pair of Double-A outposts.

Currently sidelined with a rotator cuff issue — he’s on roster of the Triple-A Las Vegas Aviators, but has yet to appear in a game — Nett has a mid-to-upper-90s fastball when healthy. As I learned talking to him during spring training, he also has a wide-ranging arsenal. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to a new season of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. After a slow, veteran-who-signed-late-this-spring style warmup to the year, it’s time for another dive into the little details that catch my eye each week. It’s the perfect time of year for it. Beautiful weather, early-season optimism, overheard conversations about who should bat third and who’s a bum – it all fuses together to make this one of my favorite parts of the baseball calendar. And even though the WBC whetted my appetite for the spectacular somewhat, there’s really no replacing major league games for the sheer variety of entertainment. I’m sure that Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose old NBA column format I’ve borrowed, would say the same thing about the basketball regular season. Let’s talk baseball.

1. Ricochets
If you share my baseball consumption habits, it might seem like every weekday offers a Royals game, a Guardians game, or a Royals-Guardians game. And I love it! I’ll take any excuse to watch Maikel Garcia continue his ascent from contact hitter to do-it-all superstar, a kind of modern-day José Ramírez. And I get to watch the actual José Ramírez too? And Bobby Witt Jr.? And Steven Kwan, Vinnie Pasquantino, Bo Naylor, and old favorite Michael Wacha? Both of these teams are sneaky fun, and their series this week didn’t disappoint. Witt might be having a slow start on offense, but he’s still a defensive genius:

Lots of shortstops – pretty much every other shortstop, even – would get only one out, somewhere, on that play. But two?! Ludicrous. When Garcia’s lunging attempt caromed toward Witt, he turned from interested observer to protagonist so smoothly that it looked like he was planning on doing it the whole time. It started with his feet. Instead of charging the ricochet, Witt timed his steps to hop to a stop and get his body in as good a throwing position as he could:

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Athletics. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »