Read the rest of this entry »

As we approach the midpoint of the season, the playoff races in both leagues are as muddy as ever. With July just around the corner and the trade deadline looming, the teams on the fringes of the postseason picture need to figure out if they’re truly contenders or if they need to start looking toward the future.

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 »

Last Wednesday against the Mets, Chris Sale nearly went the distance for the first time in over six years. Now he’s been sidelined — an all-too-familiar occurrence in recent years — thanks to a freak injury, a fractured rib cage suffered while making an acrobatic defensive play. His loss interrupts a strong follow-up to his first Cy Young-winning season and a stretch in which the Braves have tried to dig themselves out of their early-season hole.

At Truist Park, Sale shut out the Mets on four hits through the first eight innings, needing just 102 pitches. With a 5-0 lead, manager Brian Snitker sent his ace back out for the ninth, giving him a shot at his first shutout since June 5, 2019, when he spun a three-hitter for the Red Sox against the Royals. Facing Juan Soto to lead off the inning, Sale ran the count full, then induced the slugger to hit a soft chopper to the right side of the infield. The 36-year-old lefty dove for the ball halfway between the mound and first base, landed on his left side while stopping it, and recovered to throw to first from his knees. It was an impressive play, if not an entirely necessary one given the score and the possibility that second baseman Ozzie Albies could have thrown out the none-too-fleet-footed Soto. “Do you think he wants this complete game?” marveled play-by-play broadcaster Brandon Gaudin.

With the adrenaline pumping, Sale didn’t show any sign of injury. He followed up his diving play by striking out Pete Alonso, blowing a 96-mph four-seamer by him for his sixth punchout of the night. He was one strike away from finishing when Brandon Nimmo blooped a single into left field on his 116th pitch of the night. Not wanting to push the matter any further — Sale hadn’t gone past 116 pitches since August 19, 2017, and no pitcher this season has gone past 117 — Snitker brought in closer Raisel Iglesias, who needed just two pitches to close out the game by retiring Luis Torrens on a grounder. Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Englert throws an array of pitches. The 25-year-old right-hander’s repertoire comprises a four-seam fastball, a sinker, a changeup, a cutter/slider, a sweeper, a “big curveball,” and a “shorter version of the curveball.” He considers his changeup — utilized at a 31.6% clip over his 13 relief appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays — to be his best pitch. More on that in a moment.

Englert, whom the Rays acquired from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for Drew Sommers back in February, will also break out the occasional… lets’s call it a baby curveball.

“I threw a few that were around 60 mph when I was in Durham,” explained Englert, whose campaign includes nine outings and a 1.84 ERA for Tampa’s Triple-A affiliate. “One of them was to the best man in my wedding. It was the first time I’d faced him in a real at-bat, and I just wanted to make him laugh.”

The prelude to Englert’s throwing a baby curveball to his close friend came a handful of weeks earlier. Back and forth between the Bulls and the bigs this season, he was at the time throwing in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium.

”I was totally messing around and wanted to see what kind of reaction I could get from Snydes (Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder),” recalled Englert, whose major-league ledger this year includes a 4.84 ERA and a much-better 2.93 FIP. “I lobbed it in there, kind of like the [Zack] Greinke-style curveball, and landed it. I thought he would laugh it off, but instead Snydes goes, ‘Huh. You could maybe use that early in counts to some lefties.’ That was him having an openness to, ‘Hey, make the ball move different ways, do different things, use them all.’” Read the rest of this entry »

By most measures, the Rafael Devers trade happened suddenly. It came without advance notice of his availability, and the Red Sox reportedly weren’t shopping him around. Immediately, it drew comparisons to the Luka Dončić-Anthony Davis trade in the NBA, because hardly ever in our scoops-driven media landscape, where even the tiniest rumor is treated as currency, does a transaction involving a superstar catch us by surprise.

And yet, now that the shock has worn off, trading Devers feels like a logical outcome to the saga that began in March, when the Red Sox signed Alex Bregman to play third base without giving the incumbent a heads up. The details of the ensuing rift have been covered at great length, at FanGraphs and elsewhere, so I won’t go into them here. A lot of the reporting since the trade has described the situation in Boston as untenable, and the damage done to the relationship between Devers and the team as irreparable. But based on how badly the Red Sox botched their initial response to the conflict, and then kept bungling their subsequent attempts at reconciliation, from my perspective, it seems like they didn’t make repairing it much of a priority.

We’ll tackle your questions about the Devers trade and so much more in this week’s FanGraphs mailbag. But first, I’d like to remind all of you 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 next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Tommy Kahnle’s postgame shaving ritual, Hunter Bigge’s close call and danger from foul balls, Padres vs. Dodgers as baseball’s best rivalry, and a lost opportunity for a Tarik Skubal vs. Paul Skenes matchup, then (58:23) answer listener emails about the most influential owner of the century, the definition of an inside pitch, full-count pickoff attempts with two outs, a possible sliding-mitt drawback, and real baseball with fantasy scoring.

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Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I won’t try to slow-play it; there was nothing I didn’t like this week. Baseball is freaking great right now. There are huge blockbuster trades that ignite passionate fanbases, for better or worse. The playoff chase is starting to heat up as we approach the All Star break. Crowds are picking up now that school is out. The weather is beautiful in seemingly every stadium. We’ve entered San Francisco Summer, which means it’s a lovely 57 and foggy most days here, ideal baseball weather for me (and you, too, if you live here long enough to acclimate). So I have no bones to pick this week, nothing that irked or piqued me. It’s just pure appreciation for this beautiful game – and, as always, for Zach Lowe of The Ringer, whose column idea I adapted from basketball to baseball.

1. The Streaking… Rockies?!
The hottest team in baseball right now? That’d be the Red Sox or Dodgers, probably – maybe the Rays or Astros depending on what time horizon you’re looking at. But if you adjust for difficulty level, it has to be the Rockies, who were one James Wood superhuman effort (two two-run homers in a 4-3 victory) away from a four-game sweep of the Nationals. Add that to their Sunday victory over the Braves, and they’re 4-1 in their last five. That could have been a five-game winning streak!

Sure, baseball is a game of randomness. Every team gets hot for little micro-patches of the season. But, well, this feels like the biggest test of the “anyone can do anything for 10 games” theory in quite some time. These Rockies are terrible. Their everyday lineup features six players with a combined -1.4 WAR this year. Those the starters – the bench is worse than that. Their rotation has an aggregate 6.23 ERA. They’ve been outscored by 196 runs this year; the next-closest team is the Athletics at -128. Read the rest of this entry »

I watch a lot of baseball, to the point that you might think it would all seem routine to me. After all, how many times can one person see a monster home run before the achievement loses its luster? Yet, at least for me, that could not be further from the truth. More often than not, the players on the field still find ways to captivate and surprise me. In a league with Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Paul Skenes, the unimaginable seems to happen on a regular basis. But early last week, I experienced one of the more jaw-dropping baseball moments of my life, courtesy of Athletics rookie center fielder Denzel Clarke in a game against the Angels.

I wasn’t the only one either. The whole baseball was excited about Clarke’s catch. Martín Gallegos of MLB.com talked with Clarke and his peers about it. In the Wall Street Journal, Jared Diamond used the catch as the hook to tell a more in-depth story about Clarke. Sam Miller covered Clarke’s two-and-a-half week progression of dealing with the wall over on his Substack, Pebble Hunting. And, of course, last week Ben Clemens led his Five Things column with Clarke and the catch. If you’re like me and can’t get enough of the catch, you should check out all four of these pieces.

So, about that catch… Clarke channeled his inner Spider-Man by scaling the Angel Stadium wall, catching the ball, and gracefully protecting his body on the way down, finishing with a perfectly symmetrical two-foot landing. The athletic ability is no surprise, given he was doing this last fall in Arizona. The little things, though, are great to see from an early development perspective. The entire play is a perfect demonstration of everything that Clarke excels at defensively — burst, route, deceleration, wall awareness — in addition to the acrobatics. I’m going to break it all down here today. But first, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page about how good Clarke has been on defense to start his young career. Let’s start with the outfield OAA leaders this season:

Clarke has played in 24 games and has 9 OAA, which is tied for third best among outfielders. The two players ahead of him — Pete Crow-Armstrong and Ceddanne Rafaela – have both played over 400 more defensive innings than him. Basically, almost every time Clarke has attempted a play that most other outfielders wouldn’t have made, he’s caught the ball.

Having 95th percentile speed is certainly a major part of that, but as we know, speed alone doesn’t make an elite defensive outfielder. To understand the other pieces of Clarke’s defensive game, we have to watch some video. Where better to start than with the Spider-Man catch.

With Grant Holman on the bump and Nolan Schanuel at the plate with no runners on, Clarke has a standard alignment. On a 1-0 pitch, Schanuel gets a splitter over the heart of the plate and puts as great swing on it, launching the ball 29 degrees at 102 mph to left-center field. Let’s watch it again:

Man, there are so many things to unpack with this play. Clarke is already at full speed by the time the camera cuts to him. He has the third-best burst in the majors, meaning that once he gets going in his route, he is absolutely cooking to get to the ball. Clarke’s reaction metric is actually only around average compared to other outfielders. What he does is a common strategy many fielders employ when tracking down fly balls: He waits a split second to find the ball to make sure he’ll take a more efficient route. From there, he accelerates to the spot where the ball is going.

After the jump, outfielders need to determine where they are relative to the ball and the wall, and then adjust their speed accordingly. Here, Clarke steals two quick looks after sprinting for several steps. First, he flicks his head around to look for the warning track; then, after a few more steps, he flicks his head around again, this time to find the wall. These glances force him to slow down and be more under control as he attempts to make the catch, which is especially important on this particular play, when he not only has to track the fly ball but also scale the wall.

His elite burst, efficient route, and poised deceleration give him a chance to make the play. Pure athleticism does the rest.

With a few choppy steps on the warning track, he gets in the perfect position to propel his body up and over the wall. He then grabs the top of the wall with his throwing hand to steady himself. Simultaneously, he extends his left arm, snags the ball, and rotates his upper body to protect is shoulder and halt his momentum so he and the ball don’t end up on the other side of the fence. He continues his clock-wise turn and rolls off the wall to land smoothly with two feet on the ground, then pops up to celebrate his absurd accomplishment.

Clarke dazzles on defense even when he’s not robbing home runs. I am most impressed with his proficiency on low line drives. These may seem fairly straightforward, but they are among the more difficult plays for outfielders. On an episode of his Bleacher Report podcast, On Base, from last week, Mookie Betts spoke with guest Jackson Merrill about a number of baseball topics, including Clarke’s catch. During the conversation, Merrill, a converted shortstop in his second year as a center fielder, said line drives are the most difficult batted balls for him to field. This is a common sentiment among outfielders. You have less time to read the flight of the ball and determine its trajectory; hesitation can lead to extra bases. So outfielders have to make a decision quickly and stick to it — and they need to be correct. Here are some examples of liners that Clarke has tracked down so far this season:

That first one, hit by Nick Castellanos, looks destined for the gap, but with a quick read and a straight route to the ball, Clarke catches it with ease. He recognizes the ball is looping a little, meaning he has a bit more time to cut it off in the air. If it’s hit slightly harder or with less arc, maybe he wouldn’t attempt to catch it, instead opting to head for the wall and play the carom.

Or maybe, considering how Clarke approaches the scorchers off the bats of Taylor Ward (second liner) and Bo Bichette (fourth), he’d run faster and make the play anyway. He looks just as comfortable snatching those two would-be extra-base hits, each rocketed over 105 mph.

He can afford to do this because of how quickly he can slow down. See how he overruns Ward’s line drive? That would be disastrous for most outfielders, but not for Clarke. He’s sprinting to his right, then suddenly decelerates with a slide and reaches back to his left. And he can do this in all directions.

The best outfielders are often the ones who aren’t afraid to sacrifice their bodies. Clarke is no exception, but he also isn’t reckless; he knows how to dive in a way that limits his injury risk. Watch the third play in the video above, when he dives forward as he comes in on the ball. Notice how he catches the ball in the center of his body. This allows him to make the catch with his hands facing upward so his wrists and shoulders are less exposed, thereby preventing awkward landings that could lead to jammed joints, torn ligaments, and broken bones.

Clarke’s defensive skills are so advanced that the A’s are willing to run him out there even as he struggles mightily at the plate. The good news, as Ben noted in last week’s Five Things, is Clarke was a productive hitter in the minors, and maybe he just needs time to develop at the big league level. I really hope that’s the case, because it’s such a treat to watch him play center field.

I will break all this down. You will get your thousand words. But sometimes a graph does most of the work for you, so let’s just get to it. Here’s the WAR put up by the catchers of every team so far this season:

Wait, sorry. Wrong graph. That one only has 29 teams. My mistake. Let me throw the Nationals on there real quick:

So yeah. That changes things a bit. What the hell is happening in Washington DC? I’m not sure any of the million ways you could answer that question would provide good news, but this catcher situation is its own kind of ugly.

Nationals backstops have put up -1.7 WAR this season, a full 1.5 worse than the Angels in 29th place. These are not replacement-level killers. These are killers who live far beneath the earth’s surface, digging tunnels, crushing people with rocks, blowing them up — wait, I guess I’m just describing Dig Dug, but you get the point. Washington’s catchers rank 29th in wRC+ and 30th in baserunning and overall offense. They rank 28th in catcher ERA. According to Statcast, they rank 30th in blocking, 30th in framing, and – hey, look at that! – 13th in caught stealing above average. So it’s not all bad.

We have team positional splits going back to 2002, and over that period, the 2009 Pirates and 2019 Rangers are the worst teams on record, with -3.1 WAR each. The Nationals catchers are on pace for -3.8 WAR. They’re on pace to break the record before Labor Day! Over our 24-season sample, the Nationals’ -1.7 catcher WAR has already sunk to them to the 14th-worst total ever recorded. They needed just 75 games to put up more negative value than the other 707 teams on the list. They dropped three spots just last night! This is truly execrable stuff. So let’s ask again, what the hell is happening behind the plate in DC? Here’s the bottom of the catcher leaderboard. Note that unlike the numbers you’ve seen so far, the table below shows total WAR accrued by catchers, not just WAR accrued while playing catcher:

Well, that’s one way to end up at the bottom of the list. Only two players have caught a game for the Nationals this season, and they rank second- and third-to-last in WAR. Keibert Ruiz has not been the worst offensive catcher in baseball, but because he ranks sixth in plate appearances, he has accrued the most negative offensive value. His defense grades out as the worst among all catchers according to Statcast’s fielding run value, and fourth worst according to DRS. Riley Adams is right behind him, thanks to a -19 wRC+ and his own defensive struggles. So far this season, 28 different individual catchers have hit more home runs than the Nationals have as a team at the catcher position.

As for the other players on the list, Jacob Stallings was so bad that he was released by the Rockies. Endy Rodríguez and Ben Rortvedt have also lost their respective jobs. Maverick Handley was just filling in and is back in Norfolk now that Gary Sánchez has returned from a wrist injury. You see where I’m going here. Almost everyone on this list has been bad over a tiny sample. Some of them were only pressed into service because of an injury in the first place. The only players on this list who are still receiving regular playing time are Ruiz and the WAR-defying Martín Maldonado, whom we should probably be calling The Big Intangible. Playing this badly will cost you your spot – even over a small sample, even in Colorado – but not in Washington.

The Nationals came into the season ranked 27th at catcher in our Positional Power Rankings, with a projected 1.5 WAR. They’ve already raced past that total in the opposite direction, but it’s not like this scenario was unforeseeable, or even unprecedented. Here’s what Leo Morgenstern wrote about Ruiz at the time: “Here’s the good news: Our projections think Ruiz can hit like he did in 2023 and catch like he did in 2024. It isn’t a sexy profile, but it’s enough to merit a starting job at the big league level.”

Instead, Ruiz is hitting like he did in 2024, and his defense metrics have regressed to right between the numbers he put up in 2023 and 2024. That’s a bummer, but it’s certainly not a shock. Adams is experiencing some bad batted ball luck – he’s probably not going to keep running a .103 BABIP – but he came into the season with a career 89 wRC+, and his defense has graded out roughly the same as it did in previous seasons. In other words, Ruiz and Adams are so far behind their projections because the projections assumed they’d regress to the mean, but they’ve instead gotten even worse. Ruiz is currently on pace to put up -2.0 WAR. According to our database, that would be the 13th-worst catcher season in major league history. And somehow, even though he’s only gotten into 20 games, Adams is on pace for the 28th-worst of all-time.

Unfortunately, for as far below replacement level as Washington’s catchers have been, there aren’t any obvious replacements available. When Eric Longenhagen ranked the Nationals top 32 prospects last May, Drew Millas was the only catcher who made the list. He ranked seventh with a Future Value of 45, but he’s currently running a 75 wRC+ in Triple-A Rochester. His 28.6% hard-hit rate puts him in just the eighth percentile (among Triple-A players with at least 150 PAs). As a whole, Washington’s catchers throughout the minors are running a 101 wRC+, which ranks 25th. They only have one catcher above Single-A with a wRC+ above 75. Millas will probably be up at some point. He’s had cups of coffee in each of the last two seasons, and even after his lousy start, the projection systems see him as better than both Ruiz and Adams right now.

The bigger problem is that there isn’t all that much reason for the Nationals to change course. Ruiz is in the third year of an eight-year deal (with club options for two more years beyond that). The team is tied to him, and publicly at least, still considers him part of the exciting young core that is now starting to coalesce. James Wood, MacKenzie Gore, and CJ Abrams are thriving. Luis García Jr. just put up a three-win season and is running good underlying numbers despite iffy results. Dylan Crews is still waiting for his own topline numbers to catch up to his impressive peripherals. Brady House just arrived in Washington. But the Nationals are still nowhere near being a competitive team. The supporting pieces aren’t there. The pitching staff isn’t there. Regardless of Dave Martinez’s recent comments in support of his coaching staff, the team also ranks at or near the bottom in both defense and baserunning.

The Nationals started the season with a 3% chance of making the playoffs, and they’re now down to 0.1%. They’re still acting like they don’t expect to compete, largely limiting their acquisitions to one-year deals for veterans they can flip at the deadline. Maybe general manager Mike Rizzo will decide it’s time to sign some players and make a run at it after the season ends, but this year is already lost. The best the team can hope for at the catcher position right now is snagging an underperforming veteran on the waiver wire to take Adams’ place and Millas performing solidly in a call-up. And if Ruiz’s performance doesn’t turn around, they’re almost certain to set a particularly ignominious record.