FanGraphs Baseball

Want to build a projection system? There are a lot of things you want to prepare for ahead of time, like fans thinking that you have a secret vendetta against their favorite team. The most practically important thing to know is that you are going to be wrong. Not just occasionally, but all the time. And assuring people afterwards that yes, 10% of players are supposed to fail to even meet their 10th-percentile projection isn’t going to get you off the hook, no matter how technically correct you are. Being wrong, however, is your opportunity to improve your model. Indeed, models learn a lot more from being wrong than being right.

When it comes to projecting the number of wins for a team, it mostly comes down to two big factors: how good the players are and who actually plays. Predicting the future is an incredibly difficult activity, and that is reflected in the variance in the probability “buckets.” ZiPS entered the season highly confident that Paul Skenes was a darn good pitcher, but even with that belief, ZiPS was only 50% sure that his 2026 ERA would fall between 2.37 and 3.20, and only 80% sure that it would land between 1.80 and 3.65. But as hard as it is to project how effective a player will be, that’s still easy compared to predicting who will play. Models can get a general idea of the likelihood of injuries from some specifics, like whether a player has missed a lot of time recently or just had Tommy John surgery. But what they don’t know, and certainly never will, is who will tweak their hamstring next Thursday and be out for the rest of the season, who will suddenly lose their velocity in their Labor Day start and need a UCL repaired, or who will be abducted by giant mutant ants and forced to toil in underground sugar caves.

So, which teams have suffered the most due to injury in 2026? If you ask fans, especially those of underperforming clubs, they’ll tell you that their favorite team has been uniquely put upon by injuries this season. But we’re numbers people here. We can do a bit better than that and see which team’s fans can justify their sad laments about the trials and tribulations of the hometown 26. Read the rest of this entry »

Tommy John spent 26 seasons pitching in the majors from 1963–74 and then 1976–89, more than any player besides Nolan Ryan, but his level of fame – and indeed, his contribution to the game — stems as much from the year that cleaves that span as it does from his work on the mound. As the first recipient of the most famous sports medicine procedure of all time, the elbow ligament replacement surgery performed by Dr. Frank Jobe in late 1974 that now bears his name, John endured an arduous year-long rehab process before returning to pitch as well as ever. His recovery gave hope to generations of injured pitchers whose careers might otherwise have ended.

By the count of analyst Jon Roegele, keeper of the Tommy John Surgery List, over 2,700 professional players have undergone some variant of Jobe’s pioneering surgery on John during either their amateur or professional careers. That list ranges from Brent Strom — who did not make it back to the majors after becoming the second recipient of Jobe’s ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction technique but went on to become a successful pitching coach — to Hunter Greene, who just underwent his second Tommy John last week. So far, only three are in the Hall of Fame, namely Paul Molitor (the first position player to undergo the surgery), John Smoltz, and Billy Wagner, but Justin Verlander, Chris Sale, and Shohei Ohtani will almost certainly follow in their wake, with more to come. By Roegele’s accounting, over 39% of all major league pitchers in 2025 had undergone Tommy John surgery.

On the mound, John was the epitome of the “crafty lefty,” so good at his vocation that he arrived on the major league scene at age 20 and made his final appearance three days after his 46th birthday. His 700 starts and 288 wins are both more than any other 20th- or 21st-century pitcher outside the Hall of Fame except Roger Clemens, but John’s longevity, his more dominant cohorts — including six 300-game winners — and the surgery that bears his name have overshadowed the rest of his on-field accomplishments. Between going 0-for-15 on BBWAA ballots (where he topped out at 31.7%) and 0-for-5 on Era Committee ballots (where he peaked at 43.8% on the 2025 Classic Baseball ballot), he never came particularly close to election, though in 2013, he got a share of the spotlight when the Hall honored Jobe. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to another edition of my Tuesday chat. I’m just back from a trip to Salt Lake City to celebrate my father’s 85th birthday and the upcoming birthdays of my daughter and niece. While in transit, I learned that Tommy John had passed away. My tribute to him just went live moments ago: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/tommy-john-1943-2026-crafty-lefty-and-firs…

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Not sure about 90%, but maybe 75%. I’d put in more Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black baseball players and strip out some of the 1930s guys who rode the Frisch/Terry Express. More starting pitchers from the 1980s to 2000s. More figures whose influence went beyond the numbers, including John Donaldson, Lefty O’Doul, Fernando Valenzuela, and yes, Tommy John (and Dr. Frank Jobe).

12:08

Jay Jaffe: I think some of it comes down to a perception and public relations. “Let’s get rid of these expensive acquisitions that were mistakes to acquire (Devers, Adames) and keep the homegrown guys we’ve nurtured (Webb) and that the fan base has grown to love.”

12:09

Jay Jaffe: But you’re right in that Webb has more trade value than a contract that is underwater or bordering on it

Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Detroit Tigers pulled off a truly delightful 1-5-4 double play. A picture’s worth a thousand words, and a video even more, so I’ll save everyone a lot of work and show it to you.

If you’re reading this, and you’re old enough to have lived through the war between small ball and sabermetrics in the early part of this century, you’re probably delighted to see a sacrifice bunt go awry like this. I lived through college baseball in the early-to-mid-2010s — if there was a war over sabermetrics, college ball at this time was its Stalingrad — so that was definitely my first reaction as well. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of great statistics in baseball these days. They measure everything! Swing path tilt? Contact point against center of mass? Exit velocity? Hard-hit rate on opposite field line drives? You can get a report on any of those things at the wave of a few fingers. Expected wOBA? Barrel rate? There are acronyms and stat blends and projection aggregates for days. It’s analysis paralysis; the hard part isn’t finding stats to describe hitters, but figuring out which ones not to use.

I don’t have a foolproof method for seeing through all the noise for you. But I do have a fun experiment in how to work with statistics in such an overwhelming environment. I want to suggest a method that I call, These Things Are Good. Basically, it boils down to this: Come up with some statistics that you think are good without pre-determining which players you’re looking for, measure how good the entire league is at your statistics in question, and see what shakes out.

How should we do this in practice? I started by saying that I think pulling the ball when you hit it in the air is good. That gives me the first statistic I care about: air pull rate. I turned that into standard deviations for every player in baseball so that we could compare apples to apples across multiple statistics, then started looking for who the standouts were across all categories.

Air pull rate is nice, but it’s certainly not the only statistic that I’m interested in. Next, I wanted guys who hit the ball hard when they put it in the air. After all, exit velocity matters far more when batters can elevate. I did the same thing and put that in z-score terms via standard deviations. If you’re wondering what kinds of hitters these two categories identify, Kyle Schwarber, Griffin Conine, and Junior Caminero are the top three. Read the rest of this entry »

If you want to point to an example of parity in baseball, just look at the AL Wild Card standings. There are six teams within 2.5 games of the final Wild Card berth. Yes, all six are below .500, but having that many clubs competing for one playoff spot at this point in the season should make for some very exciting baseball down the stretch.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format 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 between now and October, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise remains reactive to hot streaks and cold snaps. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab.

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 »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers are not the best team in baseball right now.

It’s been a tough go of late for the team supposedly breaking the sport. The Dodgers began August with a seven-game losing streak, and they’ve played two games below .500 since the All-Star break. They just dropped three of four to the Brewers over the weekend, ceding their standing as the top team in the majors.

Most slumping teams are slumping at the plate, and that’s certainly the case for the Dodgers. Their 93 wRC+ in the second half ranks 18th in the majors, after reaching the All-Star break with a best-in-show 115 wRC+. Their walk rate has dropped about three points, and their slugging percentage has dropped about 30 points. They’ve really struggled to get runners on, and when they do, the threat often ends in a popup or double play — sometimes even both. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who has heretofore been referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.

This is the last entry in the Early Shift. Starting today, I’m back on paternity leave for four more weeks, so I’ll see you in September. Thank you for reading and for all of your lovely, supportive comments.

June 21
At 3:40 AM, Derek Jr. awakes, screaming. It is Father’s Day.

I’m going to have to stop keeping this journal. I hope I can jump back in with updates from time to time, but I haven’t been able to keep up since I returned to work. I can’t seem to get more than a few sentences down before something more pressing forces me to stop or before I exhaust my meager supply of focus. I wrote so many of these entries in the early hours of the morning, and I can’t keep doing that when I’ve got to get up just a few hours later and do good writing. I’m not sure how many of those previous entries were substantive enough to get published, so let me tell you what you may have missed over the past month or so.

Derek Jr. is 12 weeks old. She is healthy. She is enormous. Like all the babies in both my family and my wife’s, she has big, chunky cheeks. When she’s been outside napping in the stroller for an hour or two, they get so rosy that it feels like Mike Elias will pop up any second to inform us that she’s been drafted by the Orioles. Even if she weren’t enormous, though, she’d still seem enormous to us. One thing I’ve learned about babies is that they always feel so heavy. They’re always growing, which means every single time you pick them up, they’re a little bit heavier than they were the last time, which means you’re always, every day of their lives, surprised by how heavy they are.

Derek Jr. is happy. She is such a happy baby. She smiles at us all day long. She laughs. She wants to play. Honestly, it’s a problem sometimes. It’s hard to put her down to sleep, because as I rock her, she’s looking up at me and smiling. Just seeing my face gets her too excited to sleep. Not that this means I’m special. Once I do get her to sleep, she’ll wake up 30 minutes later and stay awake because she’s too busy smiling up at her friend the ceiling fan. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Rainer is one of the game’s most promising prospects. Currently No. 25 on The Board and No. 3 in our Detroit Tigers rankings, the 21-year-old shortstop boasts elite bat speed — eye-opening exit velocities are part of his profile — as well as arm strength that Eric Longenhagen has described as “incredible.” Our lead prospect analyst’s preseason report elaborated that Rainer was “pumping mid-90s gas off the mound in high school.”

His pitching background is what I wanted to hear about when I sat down with Rainer last month. After beginning the campaign with a smattering of games at Low-A Lakeland, Rainer has put up a .267/.374/.455 slash line and a 118 wRC+ with the.High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. His left-handed stroke has produced a dozen home runs across 358 trips to the plate with Detroit’s Midwest League affiliate.

Just how good was the 11th-overall pick in the 2024 draft when he was toeing the rubber for North Hollywood’s Harvard-Westlake High School?

“I don’t really love talking about myself,” Rainer replied when posed that question. “That’s kind of how I was brought up when it comes to interviews, but now that I don’t pitch anymore, I will say that I enjoyed my time on the mound. It was fun. I threw pretty hard and was successful at it.”

Pressed for radar readings, the humble ex-hurler affirmed that he indeed sat mid-90s, adding that he would occasionally reach the upper 90s. Repertoire-wise, he was fastball/curveball/slider/changeup. As you’d expect, scouts for a multitude of MLB organizations were keeping close watch when he stood atop the bump. Read the rest of this entry »