FanGraphs Baseball

Welcome to the second installment of “Wait, What?!,” a series in which I dive deep on some of the prospects whose performance has most surprised me this season.

He had me at “Italian.”

At the outset of the pandemic, my wife encouraged me to join along as she learned Italian. After months of resistance, I finally caved. The first word I learned was ragazzo, which means “boy.” The plural form (ragazzi) came not long after, at which point I was able to translate the name of the pizza joint I’d often stumbled into at 3 AM back in college. All of 90 seconds into studying, I was hooked. I quickly exhausted a couple of online courses and soon, in a sort of modern day, language-themed pen pal arrangement, I connected with a few Italians online, which improved my language skills dramatically. This will be my last article here before I take a two week trip to Italy to see those friends. As far as I know, I don’t have a hint of Italian heritage, but that hasn’t prevented me from becoming a proud Italophile.

So, when an Angels source sidled up next to me on the backfields a few months ago and started talking excitedly about a Milanese lefty they’d signed out of indy ball, I stopped paying attention before he got to the part about the upper-90s fastball and wipeout slider. Read the rest of this entry »

I might have a thing for guys who throw a lot of different fastballs. Earlier this week, I looked into Drew Rasmussen’s novel approach to pitching: just make the entire arsenal out of fastballs. Rasmussen used to mix four-seamers and cutters, but then he added a sinker and kicked things up a notch. The multi-fastball approach has swept baseball in recent years, in fact, to the point where pitchers with only one option in their toolkit now stand out to me. But I think I’ve seen a new variation. Ben Joyce throws two fastballs, and one of them is an offspeed pitch.

You probably think of Joyce as one of the hardest throwers in baseball, if you think of him at all. He was a standout at Tennessee, showing big league velocity while closing games for the Vols. He threw a pitch 105.5 mph in 2024, still one of the five fastest pitches recorded in the Statcast era. He’s always been a little wild. He reaches back for everything he possibly has. It’s the kind of profile that makes you wonder what he’s going to pair with that absurd fastball.

In 2024, Joyce started experimenting with a splinker, a splitter/sinker hybrid. He turned to that pitch partway through the year after discussing sinker grips with some of the other Angels pitchers, and he spent a lot of that season playing with the different ways he could throw it. It was very much still a work in progress – he changed the shape and velocity of it quite a lot as he learned the grip – but adding something that sat between his fastball and slider was a great success, so much so that Michael Baumann blogged about his two fastballs way back in January 2025. Then Joyce got hurt five games into the year, had shoulder surgery, and missed the rest of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the latest apparent change in the baseball’s behavior (this time it seems to be deader) and, in a tribute to Tommy John (11:35), retrace the timeline of his trailblazing surgery and his return to a major league mound 50 years ago through contemporaneous accounts and quotes. Then (55:58) they bring on top-tier Patreon supporter Jamie Verbrugge to discuss his podcast and baseball backgrounds before answering listener emails (1:05:02) about the upper bounds of a cup of coffee, a really entertaining but trophy-less season vs. a really boring championship season, an undercover baseball robot, whether Jefry Yan would celebrate a strikeout on an overturned ball call, whether fans are suggestible enough to be fooled by fake home run distances, an ultimate frisbee-style integrity rule for baseball, the value of Ron Washington, and the advisability of bringing the infield in, followed by Stat Blasts (2:01:49) about Pete Crow-Armstrong leading his league in offense and defense, every team in a divison having the same recent record, team games with high matching run, hit, and walk totals, pitchers who got a win, a loss, and a save in a single three-game series, team games with streaks of the same start to each offensive inning, bullpens where one pitcher out-WARed all the others combined, and strikeout-free shutouts.

Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Sean .P, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Sheehan on the ball
Link to Savant drag dashboard
Link to earlier ball analysis 1
Link to earlier ball analysis 2
Link to John’s statement
Link to MLB.com on John’s statement
Link to Reuters on John’s illness
Link to Tommy John wiki
Link to Frank Jobe wiki
Link to Jaffe on John
Link to career IP leaders
Link to Grant on Posey/Avila
Link to NanoNeedle article
Link to Maness repair article
Link to TJ timeline links
Link to TJS database
Link to Strom surgery article
Link to Bordley surgery article 1
Link to Bordley surgery article 2
Link to Ben’s baseball/America course
Link to Ben C. on Skubal and Detroit
Link to Dickson on “cup of coffee”
Link to Asimov’s Robot series
Link to Super Baseball 2020
Link to Baseball Highlights 2045
Link to Data smell Reddit thread
Link to Skenes photos
Link to Yan game video
Link to Yan box score
Link to Yan Savant search
Link to ultimate’s integrity rule
Link to Arraez/Washington article
Link to article on Wash in 2027
Link to SIS infield-in study
Link to Ben on shifting vs. RHB
Link to Stirnweiss SABR bio
Link to PCA/Snuffy Blast spreadsheet
Link to AL Central streaks image
Link to 13-13-13 Stathead query
Link to win/loss/save spreadsheet
Link to leadoff streaks info
Link to 2026 Guardians relievers
Link to bullpen WAR gaps spreadsheet
Link to Tigers-Guardians gamer
Link to zero-K, zero-run games
Link to listener emails database
Link to MLB All-Century Team
Link to BNS Jays play podcast

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The Detroit Tigers are one of the hottest teams in baseball. Since the calendar flipped to August, they’ve gone 7-3, scoring more than six runs per game in the process. In a muddled American League, that puts them right in the thick of the AL Central and Wild Card races. That, in turn, means they’re back in the hunt for a World Series ring. This burst of activity has them about as likely to make the playoffs (and win a ring) as they’ve been in the last few months, in fact; they’re back above 30% to reach October after dropping as low as 18% the day they traded Tarik Skubal.

That feels weird! Less than two weeks ago, the Tigers traded their best player, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball, for three prospects. They followed that up by trading Casey Mize, who had briefly inherited the title of top Tigers pitcher. It was a classic deadline sale – not a thread-the-needle plan with some additions and some subtractions, but a declaration that the plan was to get ‘em next year, and the years after that.

Does this mean the Tigers shouldn’t have traded Skubal and Mize? I’m not here to opine on that (OK, fine I’ll opine at the end of the article, but you have to read it first). But they did make those trades, and they did go on that hot streak, so here we are. The Tigers can’t un-trade those guys. MLB doesn’t have a takebacks rule. But I can’t help but wonder how the Tigers would look if they hadn’t made any moves at the deadline, and so I decided to write about it.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve visited our splits leaderboards or the player page splits or splits tool in the last few days, you’ve probably noticed a change. And you’d be right to have noticed! Our development team just deployed our upgraded splits, and I’ve been tasked with running through the changes. Here’s a top-level summary before I dive deeper:

Splits Page on the Player Pages

• We’ve added nine new stat groups to the splits page, including Statcast, Bat Tracking, plate discipline, and pitch-level metrics.
• We’ve changed the UI to include a stat group selector at the top of the splits page to accommodate the addition of more stats. If you want to see stats that appear in Advanced, Batted Ball, or our new stat groups, you’ll simply click on those options instead of scrolling down.

Splits Leaderboards and Player Page Splits Tool

• We’ve added the same new stat groups we added to the player page splits, including Statcast, Bat Tracking, plate discipline, and pitch-level metrics.
• We’ve refreshed the UI using our modern interface, making it responsive to user interaction.
• We’ve integrated the page with our updated Custom Teams feature. Please note, this integration is only available on the splits leaderboards.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Weathers allowed a lot of home runs in the early months of the season. Going into the final week of June, the 26-year-old New York Yankees southpaw had been taken deep 16 times over 14 starts comprising 80 2/3 innings. Frustratingly gopher-prone, he had a 4.13 ERA and a 4.31 FIP.

He has since been keeping balls in the yard. Over his last nine outings, the son of longtime big-league hurler David Weathers has surrendered just a pair of home runs over 46 innings while logging a 2.93 ERA and a 2.71 FIP. The reasons behind his turnaround? I haven’t spoken to Weathers since June 27 — one start into his resurgence — but based on that conversation and his pitch-usage numbers, an answer isn’t hard to deduce.

Weathers has thrown his four-seamer just 16.3% of the time since he stopped surrendering home runs at a 2004 Jamie Moyer pace, whereas he had previously been throwing it at a 27.8% clip. Meanwhile, his slider and changeup percentages have jumped as he has held his two-seamer usage fairly static. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to your Week Two recap of all things WPBL. 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.

But enough preamble, let’s get to the Week Two winner: The New York Heights. The Heights went 2-1 in the second week of WPBL action, including a victory in the league’s first extra-inning game on Sunday. Though the Los Angeles Queens own the league’s best record and run differential through two weeks of play, they did suffer a 12-3 loss to the Firebells, while the Heights have yet to lose a game by more than three runs. Add in what Denae Benites and Natsuki Yonetani have been getting up to (more on them below), and giving the dub to New York feels pretty obvious. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to understand the history of the Milwaukee Brewers over the past 15 years, you could do worse than the following graph.

In January 2018, the Brewers traded four talented prospects to the Marlins for Christian Yelich. Three of those players were athletic up-the-middle guys with power potential but serious questions about their hit tools. None of them panned out. Yelich, who had been a supporting player on some indifferent Marlins teams, took to the Juiced Ball era like a duck to water. In the first two seasons after the trade he won two batting titles, hit a total of 80 home runs, and finished first and second in the MVP voting. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB franchise appreciation, Stat Blast about what the resurgence of three-inning saves and the expanding distribution of saves say about pitcher usage, and learn about a new baseball injury. Then (43:28) they bring on Lindsay Imber of Close Call Sports and the official scorer behind the MLB Scoring Changes account to explain the “fourth-out” rule that confused fans and players this week and to pick nits with the MLB rulebook. Finally (1:30:50), Ben brings back former major leaguer John Poff to read from his new book, reflect on his use of “greenies” and players’ political differences, and share a new fundraising initiative for the Standing Rock Reservation, followed (2:13:45) by a few updates.

Audio intro: The Spaghettis, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: The Shirey Brothers, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ted O., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Yankees “capital infusion”
Link to story about Yankees valuation
Link to story about Lakers sale
Link to impending Padres sale
Link to FIFA takeover attempt
Link to Infantino wiki
Link to Littleton save
Link to save rule
Link to pope hat giveaway
Link to Latz stats
Link to Atlanta’s three-out savers
Link to data on three-out saves
Link to data on save-getters by season
Link to multi-inning RP outings data
Link to Herfindahl–Hirschman index wiki
Link to annual HHI data
Link to HHI graph
Link to Inverse Participation Ratio
Link to THT on three-inning saves
Link to SB Nation on three-inning saves
Link to Medium post on three-inning saves
Link to WSJ closers story
Link to Ben on saves slipping in 2017
Link to Betteridge’s law wiki
Link to parakeet bounceback news
Link to Goodhart’s law wiki
Link to league SP splits
Link to league RP splits
Link to FG post on Goodhart’s law
Link to other FG post on Goodhart’s law
Link to Arrigheti report
Link to more on Arrigheti
Link to Morton’s neuroma wiki
Link to Morton’s neuroma causes
Link to Mayo Clinic on Morton’s neuroma
Link to more on Morton’s neuroma
Link to even more on Morton’s neuroma
Link to Ben on the 2015 ALDS game
Link to Ben on confused counts
Link to @ScoringChanges
Link to @ScoringChanges fourth-out tweet
Link to @CloseCallSports
Link to Close Call Sports website
Link to Close Call Sports YouTube channel
Link to Lindsay wiki
Link to Lindsay’s fourth-out video
Link to Lindsay’s Sale video
Link to Lindsay’s Wheeler video
Link to fourth out wiki
Link to fourth-out story 1
Link to fourth-out story 2
Link to SABR on fourth outs
Link to The Athletic fourth-out explainer
Link to Bois on balks
Link to Sam on balks
Link to xkcd comic
Link to Schneider quote
Link to 2016 Schneider game
Link to Strike Four
Link to Poff Stat Blast
Link to first Poff appearance
Link to second Poff appearance
Link to Halls of Fame discussion
Link to Poff’s first Hall of Fame
Link to Poff’s second Hall of Fame
Link to Poff’s book
Link to Carlin routine
Link to baseball exceptionalism wiki
Link to greenies info
Link to Ben on PEDs and the ball
Link to “Buffalo Bill ‘s” poem
Link to Standing Rock wiki
Link to Gilbert Kills Pretty Enemy art
Link to John’s fundraiser
Link to Scherzer’s piano-playing
Link to Kendrick cameo story
Link to Skenes velo graph
Link to Skenes game story
Link to Liquid I.V. powder
Link to Rocker pickle-juice game
Link to Stanton yoga report
Link to Foulke wife tweet
Link to Foulke firing report

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