The Mets had the day off on Monday, and thank God. In any other line of work, they’d have called in sick with one of those mysterious 24-hour stomach bugs after the week they had. Close the blinds, get some sleep, hope everyone at the office has forgotten you existed by the time you clock in on Tuesday.
See, the Mets have spent the past two months in a real doozy of a race for the NL East title. On June 16, the Phillies beat the Marlins 5-2 while the Mets were idle, cutting New York’s lead in the division to two games. From that day until Tuesday, August 5, the division lead swung back and forth, but neither team could forge an advantage of more that two games. Read the rest of this entry »
Pitching analyst Lance Brozdowski has been on Brandon Woodruff since the Brewers right-hander returned from a 2023 shoulder surgery on July 6. Brozdowski has written about Woodruff twice, first breaking down the ways that he looks like a different pitcher this season. His second piece was titled “How Is Brandon Woodruff Doing This?” I’d like to really dig in and answer that question, both because when Brozdowski asks a question it’s usually a good one and because Woodruff’s numbers really are confusing. As Michael Baumann noted a few weeks ago, Woodruff’s return coincided almost exactly with Milwaukee’s recent unbeatable stretch. “If Woodruff is well and truly back,” Baumann wrote, “for my money he’s a bigger add than any starter who’s likely to get moved at the deadline.” Woodruff has gone 4-0 with a 2.29 ERA, a 3.73 FIP, and a 34.9% strikeout rate over his six starts, and he’ll likely be a huge part of the team’s playoff rotation, but whether he’s back is still very much an open question.
Before we get into everything, we should talk about Woodruff’s arsenal, which at least for a little while looked pretty different this season. A month ago at Brewer Fanatic, Matthew Trueblood analyzed Woodruff’s repertoire during his minor league rehab assignment, and wrote that in order to be successful, “Woodruff will need to reinvent himself.” The pitcher seemed to agree, at least at first. This season in the majors, he has thrown a four-seamer, sinker, changeup, cutter, curve, and sweeper. The cutter is new, with the sweeper replacing his traditional slider. However, he hasn’t thrown the sweeper since his second start (likely because it was the second game in a row the other team homered on the pitch), and he’s also drastically reduced his cutter usage over his last two starts. He’s also nearly evened out his fastball usage. In recent years, Woodruff led with his four-seamer, but now he’s throwing it 34% of the time and his sinker 31%, leading with the sinker against righties and the four-seamer against lefties. His curveball is down to 5% and his changeup has held steady at 17%. In other words, Woodruff is throwing a fastball 65% of the time, and that number jumps to 77% of the time if you count the cutter:
Let’s start with the reasons for suspicion, and please note that this section makes up five full paragraphs. Luck is a big component here. Woodruff is currently running a .143 BABIP and a 100% strand rate. Eight of the nine earned runs he’s allowed have come on home runs. Those are massively unsustainable numbers. The league averages a .289 BABIP and 72.5% strand rate. Even though he’s spent his entire career pitching in front of an excellent Milwaukee defense, Woodruff has never run a BABIP below .269 or a strand rate above 82% (except in 2023, when he only made 11 starts). No matter what else happens, we should expect his BABIP to add at least 100 points and his strand rate to drop by at least 20% going forward. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I took a peek at which offenses have exceeded (or missed) expectations this year. I did that by taking every player’s preseason projection and actual playing time to create a projected wOBA for the entire offense. I compared that to what has actually happened. The difference? That’s what we’re looking for, how much a team has surprised to the good or bad in 2025.
I couldn’t leave it at just one phase of the game, though. Pitching can be measured the same way (ish, see methodological notes below if you’re interested in the nitty gritty). I didn’t want to compare ERA (too noisy) or FIP (too regressed, aka not noisy enough). I settled on wOBA as a good representation of how well a pitching staff is doing overall. It’s a middle point between the two other options, so we are neither ignoring what happens on balls in play, nor caring too much about sequencing. Here, for example, are the Texas Rangers, the biggest overachievers of the season:
Right away, you can see why they’ve beaten expectations by so much. Four-fifths of their starting rotation, four of the five pitchers who have faced the most batters, have performed meaningfully better than their preseason projections. The fifth is Jacob deGrom, who had one of the best projections in baseball coming into the season and has hit it on the nose. Even their most-used bullpen arms have been pleasant surprises. That’s how you allow the fewest runs in baseball by a mile, apparently. Read the rest of this entry »
There’s no such thing as a perfect pitcher. There are guys with an incredible ability to spin the ball, but nothing to throw for whiffs at the top of the zone. (Mitch Keller and Matt Brash come to mind.) Some pitchers pump backspin four-seamers, but never settle on a reliable secondary. (Ryne Nelson, I’m looking at you.) Excelling at one thing often means being deficient at another.
Still, even if there are no perfect pitchers, there are some who come closer than others. Prime Gerrit Cole featured a carry heater and a firm slider with meaningful horizontal break. Jacob deGrom? Same deal. Some guys break our general understanding of the tradeoffs between certain pitch types. Most of those guys are aces. One of them is Ryan Bergert — at least potentially.
If that name rings a bell, it’s likely because Bergert featured in a deadline deal that brought him to Kansas City (along with Stephen Kolek, a rock-solid fifth starter type) in exchange for backup catcher Freddy Fermin. In these early days following the trade, Fermin is acquitting himself well, lining a bunch of base hits and striking out just once so far.
Fermin is valuable — especially to the catcher-deprived Padres — though not particularly exciting. He’s under team control for the rest of the decade, but he’s firmly locked into the “light-hitting backstop with excellent defensive skills” archetype. Bergert, on the other hand, strikes me as a guy with serious upside. Read the rest of this entry »
Jack Dreyer has been one of the top performers on a Los Angeles Dodgers pitching staff that includes no shortage of better-known hurlers. Amid relative obscurity, the 26-year-old rookie left-hander has logged a a 2.98 ERA and a 2.95 FIP over 46 appearances comprising 57-and-a-third innings. Moreover, only Yoshinobu Yamamoto has been worth more WAR (3.5) than has the 2021 non-drafted free agent out of the University of Iowa (1.3).
Our lead prospect analyst was early to the bandwagon. When our 2025 Dodgers Top Prospects list was published in late April, Eric Longenhagen described Dreyer as “incredibly deceptive,” adding that his whippy arm action delivers a fastball that has “20 inches of due north vertical break as it explodes toward the plate.”
The southpaw’s signature pitch wasn’t seen as plus during his injury-marred Iowa Hawkeyes days.
“In college, I was always told that I have average spin rate, so I can’t really throw my fastball at the top of the zone,” recalled Dreyer, who missed much of the 2019 season with a shoulder injury, then all of 2021 after undergoing Tommy John surgery. “I was told that I had a very average fastball. I kind of believed that, but then I got to the Dodgers and they were like, ‘No, actually, your stuff is really, really good. You can live at the top of the zone because of how your pitch moves.’ So, that’s kind of how I’ve adapted my pitching, using heaters at the top, which opens up my other pitches.”
Dreyer’s secondaries comprise a curveball that he’s thrown at a 10.8% clip this season, and a “bad slider” that he’s thrown far more frequently at 45.2%. More on the latter in a moment. Read the rest of this entry »
My favorite baseball questions are the ones that require both quantitative data and subjective analysis to answer. Who is the greatest baseball player of all time? Well, I could pull up the career WAR leaderboards, say Babe Ruth, and call it a day, but that wouldn’t a satisfying way to reach a conclusion. All of us know that the essence of Ruth — his vast accomplishments and legend — cannot be encapsulated by how many Wins Above Replacement he was worth.
What about Barry Bonds? He ranks second with 164.4 WAR, less than three wins behind Ruth (167.0), while playing against better competition; after all, Bonds wouldn’t have been allowed to play during Ruth’s career. Good point, but there’s the whole steroids thing clouding his legacy. For a while, Mike Trout looked like a worthy answer because of how much better he was than everybody else at a time when sabermetrics were becoming more mainstream. We would use the data to quantify his excellence and then, whenever the numbers alone weren’t convincing, we would say something about the superior talent level in the game today. Now, of course, the overwhelming majority of us would probably answer Shohei Ohtani because of his two-way exploits. We could cite his statistics, but we’d have to include so many qualifications, most of which would relate to the fact that he’s pitching and hitting.
I am not going to reveal my answer in this week’s mailbag because none of you asked for it. Instead, I bring this up because it relates to a different question that a reader named Derek submitted, which we’ll get to in a moment. But before we do, 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 an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about whether Mike Trout has become a boring baseball player, Paul Skenes almost perfectly replicating his sensational rookie season, and recent trends in pre-arb extensions, answer a listener email (57:39) about becoming a fan of the whole league instead of (or in addition to) one team, and (1:14:49) meet major leaguers Josh Simpson and Dugan Darnell.
We’re 10 years or so into the launch angle revolution, and the reasoning behind it hasn’t changed much. Groundballs have a .228 wOBA this season, while all other balls in play are at .462. Hit the ball on the ground, and you’re Christian Vázquez. Hit it in the air, and you’re Aaron Judge. Players are gearing their swings for damage in the air. They’re optimizing their bat path for an upward trajectory. They’re meeting the ball farther out in front. They’re looking to hit the bottom third of the ball. Knowing all this, I doubt you’d be surprised to learn that 2025 is shaping up to set the record for lowest groundball rate since 2002, when Sports Info Solutions first started tracking such things. But you might be surprised to learn just how extreme the shift has been.
So far, I’ve talked about all the reasons that batters have tried to put the ball in the air more, but that’s only half the story. Five years ago, Ben Clemens wrote a great article in which he tried to determine whether batters or pitchers exert more control over groundball rates. After separating the batters from the pitchers, he split each group into quartiles based on their 2018 groundball rates and then looked at the results when each group faced off in 2019. He found that the effect was nearly identical. When you moved the batter up one quadrant, the groundball rate of the new pairing went up by an average of 5.2 percentage points. When the pairing moved up a quadrant in the pitcher pool, the groundball rate went up by 4.8 percentage points. Knowing that, let’s not blame this all on the batters. Are pitchers as responsible as batters for the shrinking groundball rate across the majors? Let’s start by updating my 2023 league-wide update on pitch mix.
Are you a FanGraphs Member? Are you going to be in the Chicagoland area August 23-24? Would you like to attend Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball, also known as Saberseminar? Well great news! FanGraphs is doing a Saberseminar ticket giveaway for our Members.
Hosted by Illinois Tech at their Chicago campus, Saberseminar is a charity conference that brings together baseball fans, sabermetricians, data scientists, and front office personnel for a two-day showcase of the latest developments in baseball analytics. Researchers, students, and industry folks spend the weekend presenting their latest work. Last year’s conference featured talks from Reds senior director of analytics Nick Wan and Chicago White Sox senior advisor to pitching Brian Bannister, among many others, and this year’s lineup is similarly impressive. It’s also a place to network and build community across the industry, whether it’s with fans, reporters covering the game, scientists studying it, or front office personnel. Several FanGraphs writers past and present will be in attendance, including me! And all of the conference’s proceeds go to charity causes like the Alliance to Cure Cavernous Malformation.
FanGraphs has been a supporter of Saberseminar for over 10 years. This year, we’re giving away six tickets to the conference to our Members. To enter, simply fill out this Google form with your name and the email address associated with your Membership. This is important, as it is how we will verify your Membership status. You’re limited to one entry per email address. We’ll do a random drawing next Thursday, August 14, to determine who gets the tickets.
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Hermann Hall Conference Center at Illinois Tech
3241 S Federal St, Chicago, IL 60616 Full Schedule
Saberseminar Meetup (21-plus)
August 23 at 5:30 PM
Maria’s Community Bar Back Patio
960 W 31st St, Chicago, IL 60608
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