Last year, though he missed the first two and a half months of this season due to bilateral epicondylitis, Giancarlo Stanton bashed 24 homers in 77 games while hitting for a 158 wRC+ and 1.8 bWAR. Despite its half-season nature, the campaign was his strongest since 2021, and it appeared as though he had enough momentum to reach 500 home runs and, quite likely, secure a spot in the Hall of Fame. Unfortunately, Stanton has once again been unable to stay on the field. After straining his right calf in late April and then reinjuring it while rehabbing in mid-June, he suffered a moderate-grade left calf strain last week, one that may very well prevent him from playing again this season.

Manager Aaron Boone said on Saturday that Stanton strained his left calf while running the bases earlier in the week. He didn’t offer a timetable for the slugger’s return, but conceded, “We’re at a point in the calendar where it gets challenging… You all know how bad he wants to be on that field and contributing to a championship… Hopefully we just continue working to get him right and healthy.”

The 36-year-old Stanton has played in just 24 games this season, batting .256/.302/.422 (103 wRC+) with just three homers in 96 plate appearances. Those three homers boosted his career total to 456, the most of any active player, but they’ve run critical time off of his clock, so to speak. By colleague Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS-driven estimate, Stanton had a 71% chance of reaching 500 homers coming into the season, but per Dan’s hot-off-the-presses estimate, those odds are down to 51%, and to these eyes that still feels high. Stanton’s MVP award, two home run titles, five All-Star appearances, postseason performance (.254/.322/.605 with 18 homers) and otherworldly Statcast numbers might be enough to overcome a slight shortage in JAWS, but with just 47.0 career WAR (the Baseball Reference version, which is true for all of the figures cited here unless otherwise indicated), 35.4 peak WAR, and 41.2 JAWS, he’s just 37th among right fielders, 14.8 points below the standard. I don’t think that’s going to cut it. Read the rest of this entry »

The hottest pitching prospect in baseball joined the coldest pitching staff in baseball over the weekend.

Mariners left-hander Kade Anderson was solid in his major league debut on Saturday. The Cubs weren’t the softest landing, entering the day as the best lineup in the majors with a 111 wRC+. But the top prospect kept the Chicago batters off balance for five innings, striking out five with minimal resistance. Manager Dan Wilson left Anderson in to face the top of the order for a third time to begin the sixth — a controversial decision, but perhaps a necessary one given Seattle’s pitching implosion over the last two months — and he was quickly slugged out of the game. It was a sour note to end an otherwise strong debut, although dogpiling with his new teammates following a walk-off home run by Randy Arozarena certainly improved the mood.

The Mariners took Anderson third overall out of LSU last year. He got his first taste of pro ball this spring and blew through the competition in Double-A, posting a 1.06 ERA, a 1.78 FIP, a 40.5% strikeout rate, and a 3.9% walk rate over 93 1/3 innings. He made it as high as third overall on our Top 100 Prospects list, definitively the best pitching prospect in baseball at the time of his debut. He might have been called up sooner, but, well, I’ll get to Seattle’s pitching mess soon enough. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob deGrom tallied his 2,000th strikeout last week, providing another late-career achievement that might be engraved on a Cooperstown plaque sometime in the 2030s. That deGrom would reach 2,000 strikeouts seemed almost certain back at the end of the 2020 season, when he was 641 away. At that time, he’d struck out at least 200 batters in four of his six non-pandemic seasons. The first of those two other seasons was his 2014 NL Rookie of the Year campaign, when he didn’t debut until May 15, and in 2016, injuries limited him to just 24 starts. But since 2020, deGrom has been an example of Zeno’s paradox, seeming perpetually stuck in medias res. Achilles did eventually catch the tortoise, and deGrom and calculus won the day.

deGrom’s journey to 2,000 is a good reminder of why I like to occasionally harass ZiPS for milestone probabilities rather than simply dividing a player’s remaining distance by his most recent seasonal number and calling it a day. Whether or not there are infinite universes where every possibility happens, in this one, tendons tear and players age. A player can be on pace to finish with 500 home runs for a decade and never come particularly close, while another can sneak in the back door to a milestone that nobody saw coming, as Nick Markakis threatened to do late in his career.

The uncertainty is what makes baseball (and life) interesting. I can tell you that Aaron Judge needs 115 homers to make it to number 500; I have a calculator for that, and even if I didn’t, I was once a third-grader. But the road is hard to map, and the aging curve, performance models, and injury models in ZiPS give us a better idea as to the probability that Judge will hit 500 or 600 in this particular universe. It’s no fun to have such a tool and not deploy it, so it’s a good time to do an update on baseball’s search for pretty, round numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonah Cox had never set foot in Wrigley Field prior to June 5th of this season. It turned out to be a day he won’t soon forget. Six games into his MLB career, the 25-year-old San Francisco Giants outfielder went 3-for-3 and left the yard for the first time at baseball’s highest level. In front of an announced crowd of 39,060, the visitors ran roughshod over the Chicago Cubs by a count of 18-3.

His initial impression of the Friendly Confines?

“It’s one of those stadiums you see in movies, like Rookie of the Year, so when you walk out there it’s like ‘Oh my gosh,’” the Colorado native told me earlier this week. “Knowing the history and the fanbase, it’s just a really cool place to play.”

“Oh man, the ball was flying,” Cox went on to say of the contest, which featured eight home runs, seven of them by the Giants, “It was a ton of fun watching guys swing and have so much success. Then I got the call to come in and face Hoby Milner, the lefty [in the sixth inning with the Giants leading 9-0]. I was excited to get in there, and one thing led to another.”

Did it ever. The rookie recorded his second hit of the game — and just his third in the majors — in that same inning, which ended with the Giants on top 16-0. Then came the top of the ninth. With Cubs catcher Carson Kelly toeing the rubber, Cox cleared the ivy. Read the rest of this entry »

As you all probably know, at the start of every season, the FanGraphs staff puts together our bold predictions for the coming year. Each is, to varying degrees, plausible but unlikely, which is what makes it such a fun exercise. Anyway, entering the 2025 season, my bold prediction was: Corbin Carroll will become the fifth-ever 20/20/20/20 player — 20 doubles, 20 triples, 20 home runs, and 20 stolen bases in a single season — joining Frank Schulte in 1911, Willie Mays in 1957, and Curtis Granderson and Jimmy Rollins, who both did it in 2007. Carroll ultimately fell just three triples short of the threshold, while tallying 32 doubles, 31 homers, and 32 steals.

I decided not to run it back this year, figuring that wouldn’t be as fun, though I am very much still rooting for it to happen. The 20/20/20/20 Club is one of the most exclusive baseball has to offer. Pulling it off requires a precise combination of power, speed and instincts, and it has to happen at the exact right moment in a player’s career. As I wrote in my bold prediction: “A player needs to have enough pop to hit 20 homers, but not so much that the majority of his extra-base hits land in the seats. He also needs the speed to steal bases and stretch singles into doubles and doubles into triples. His instincts must be sharp, so he can know when to attempt the extra base without running into outs.”

Last Saturday, when I saw that Carroll had doubled and tripled in a 10-3 Diamondbacks win over the Braves, I pulled up his player page to check on his progress. He was up to 26 doubles, 15 triples, 18 homers, and 16 steals. He stole a base the next day, and after going without an extra-base hit in Arizona’s three-game series against the Red Sox, Carroll entered play Friday at 26 doubles, 15 triples, 18 homers, and 17 steals with 34 games left to play. This prompted my own question for this week’s mailbag, which I will get to momentarily. We’ll also answer your questions on the worst player to ever hit three home runs in a game, the biggest drop-off for a player in the season after finishing second in the MVP voting, and teams missing the playoffs despite leading the league in run differential. 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 »

For the New York Mets, the 2026 season has been an almost unmitigated disaster. Widely expected to compete for the NL East crown, the Mets got off to a brief hot start. And by brief, I mean brief, as the season’s high point was knocking out Paul Skenes in the first inning on Opening Day against the Pirates. From there, the season unraveled like the finances of Mike Campbell from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Gradually and then suddenly.

The Mets ambled around the .500 mark for another week or so, until a 12-game losing streak knocked them firmly into the league basement, where they have mostly stayed. By the time the calendar flipped to August, they had long come to terms with the idea that they would be sellers at the deadline. Recently, though, the Mets have gone on a tear, winning 11 of their 15 games since their deadline fire sale, giving some fans an excuse to dream on a miracle wild card run. That almost recently won’t happen, but their abysmal season doesn’t have to signify the start of a long rebuild. In fact, New York teams with massive payrolls aren’t generally extended much rope, with the hope being that the club will find its way back to contention quickly. Can the Mets do that in 2027? Read the rest of this entry »

If the 2026 regular season finished today, not only would a sub-.500 team qualify for the playoffs, but Shohei Ohtani’s run of three straight Most Valuable Player awards — the last two in the National League, since signing with the Dodgers — would probably end. Pete Crow-Armstrong has been absolutely on fire since late May, as substantial adjustments to his mechanics and approach have helped his offense catch up to his already-elite defense. The 24-year-old center fielder has overtaken Ohtani on the WAR leaderboard at a time when the two-way superstar has been shut down from pitching, and this week, he put himself in the history books in a few different ways.

On Monday night at Wrigley Field, Crow-Armstrong put on a particularly entertaining show against the White Sox, going 4-for-5 with a pair of home runs, a stolen base, two runs scored, and three runs batted in. Batting leadoff for the Cubs, he began the home half of the first inning by homering on Luis Castillo’s first pitch of the evening, a four-seamer on the inner edge of the plate. He singled off Castillo in the second, and after taking strike three looking on a sinker in the fourth, he drew a walk against reliever Tyler Schweitzer in the sixth, doubled off Trevor Richards in the eighth, then capped his night with a walk-off two-run homer off a hanging slider from Hagen Smith in the 10th. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Mathemadage, a new series where I investigate time-honored baseball adages using whatever data I can get my hands on and explore whether there’s any validity to them. I’ll apply my normal Ben Clemens mixture of a bit of math, a bit of intuition, and plenty of healthy doubt in declaring strong solutions to complicated problems. I hope to demonstrate that some of these true and others false, but I’m sure that many will end up in a suggestive but unprovable middle ground. And true to the premise of the series, we’re starting off with a fun adage that resists easy conclusions.

If you watch a baseball game from start to finish, you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a hitter get tied up on an inside fastball. “Got jammed,” the announcer might say, or maybe, “He just couldn’t get around on that one.” It’s a visual reminder of one of the pitching truisms that I learned as a kid and haven’t forgotten since: hard in, soft away.

I intuitively look for this pitching pattern when I’m watching a game. Hitters look incredibly uncomfortable when they’re trying to get their bat around a fastball in on their hands. Now that we have a few years of bat tracking data, though, I can do better than just vaguely searching for this effect. So this week, when I saw someone get jammed, I winced in sympathy and then started furiously downloading spreadsheets. Read the rest of this entry »