BOSTON — The Cleveland Guardians drafted Parker Messick 54th overall in 2022, and the decision to do so is looking increasingly shrewd. Since making his major league debut on August 20, the 24-year-old southpaw out of Florida State University has taken the mound five times and fashioned a 1.84 ERA and a 2.50 FIP over 29 1/3 innings. And while his 18.3% strikeout rate in the majors isn’t impressive, Messick fanned 29.1% of batters prior to his call-up, suggesting the strikeout stuff is still to come. When Eric Longenhagen wrote about Messick in late May, he pointed out that the lefty “leads the minors in strikeouts since 2023.”

What makes Messick effective is a combination of factors that belie his pedestrian velocity and lack of an elite breaking ball. As our lead prospect analyst explained when ranking the 50-FV prospect fourth in the Guardians system, “Messick’s 92-mph fastball doesn’t have a ton of carry to it, but it does run uphill and can garner whiffs via its angle.” Eric went on to write that his “changeup is at least plus.”

Messick considers his changeup to be his best pitch.

“I would say that it is,” Messick told me when Cleveland played in Boston earlier this month. “As far as swing-and-miss goes, yeah. When it’s paired right with my other stuff — when I’m tunneling it off of my other pitches — is when it is at its best. It does have some sharp movement down at the end, I guess. It also has just enough speed differential to get that swing-and-miss at the bottom when they’re out in front of it.” Read the rest of this entry »

With just 12 days left to go in the regular season, two teams — the Brewers and Phillies — have clinched playoff berths, and on Monday the latter became the first to win its division. From among the four other division races, only in the AL West and NL West are the second-place teams closer than five games out, putting the chances of a lead change in the range of low-fat milk. With the exception of those two races, the lion’s share of the remaining drama centers around the Wild Card races.

Once upon a time, this space would be filled with my reintroduction of the concept of Team Entropy, but through the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement, Major League Baseball and the players’ union traded the potential excitement and scheduling mayhem created by on-field tiebreakers and sudden-death Wild Card games in exchange for a larger inventory of playoff games. The 12-team, two-bye format was designed to reward the top two teams in each league by allowing them to bypass the possibility of being eliminated in best-of-three series. Often, however, things haven’t worked out that way, because outcomes in a best-of-five series are only slightly more predictable than those of a best-of-three.

Aside from the Dodgers beating the Padres in last year’s Division Series, every National League team that has earned a first-round bye under the newish system had been bounced at the first opportunity, with the Dodgers themselves falling in rather shocking fashion in both 2022 and ’23. The AL has had only one such upset in that span: the 2023 Rangers, who beat the Orioles and went on to win the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — Let’s get one thing clear off the top: A splitter is not a fastball. Any confusion about this topic is understandable, seeing as the full government name of the pitch is “split-finger fastball.” Don’t be a captive to the inflexibility of language. The splitter is lying to you about its very nature.

The origin story of the splitter begins in 1973, when a Cubs minor leaguer named Bruce Sutter was recovering from offseason elbow surgery and struggling to regain his fastball velocity. A pitching instructor named Fred Martin approached the sore-armed 20-year-old with a new pitch. This would be a variation on the familiar forkball, held with index and middle finger spread as far apart as possible in order to impart downward movement.

But while the forkball came out of the hand with an identifiable knuckleball action, Martin had Sutter grip the baseball ever so slightly forward, getting similar action with fastball-like spin. Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball’s injured list is the sport’s unofficial 31st team, one that never makes the playoffs but always plays spoiler. In the last week, 22 players were placed on the IL. The biggest name was Will Smith, who late last week landed on the IL with a bone bruise on his hand, courtesy of a rather rude foul tip off the bat of Nick Gonzales.

The Dodgers aren’t known for having a great deal of injury luck, but as injuries go, Smith’s appears to be far less consequential than it could have been. Smith’s tests revealed no fracture, minimizing the amount of time he’s expected to miss. The 30-year-old catcher is having the best offensive season of his career, with a .296/.404/.497 slash line and a 153 wRC+, all except slugging percentage representing career bests. He has played in fewer games than usual, but that’s largely due to the team’s roster construction; he started 39 games at designated hitter in 2022-2023, but Shohei Ohtani’s presence now makes it far more difficult to sneak him into the lineup here when he has a day off of catching. The injury would be a big deal… if it were a big deal, but Smith could return as early as this upcoming weekend. It could have been even sooner, but Smith’s start last Tuesday after missing five games meant that the retroactive IL date was later than September 3, when the Gonzales foul tip occurred.

Smith and the Dodgers seem to have gotten lucky, but the Astros and Yordan Alvarez may not see the same fortune. Less than a month after returning from a broken hand that had cost him more than half of the 2025 season, Alvarez turned his ankle while touching home plate in an awkward fashion that is only appropriate on your Stretch Armstrong doll. He has not yet been placed on the IL, and the exact consequences are still to be determined, but it’s all but official that he is going to miss some time. We’ll know more after his MRI on Tuesday. A serious injury to Alvarez could imperil the Astros in their tight playoff race and beyond if they make it to October.

Alvarez has already spent 115 days on the IL this season, and the Astros have certainly felt his absence, but how do their losses this season compare to those of other teams this season? More broadly, which team has lost the most production to the injured list? If you ask the fans of an underperforming team, the near-unanimous answer will be “us,” but I think we can do better than that! Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks!

12:02

Jay Jaffe: For the fifth straight Tuesday, we’re doing this — which I think might be a season high. A lack of travel will do that.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Anyway, on Friday I wrote about Mookie Betts’ turnaround (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/mookie-betts-may-salvage-his-season-yet/), and yesterday he was named the NL Player of the Week and had a big night against the Phillies in a losing cause, with a solo homer and a pair of sac flies.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I wrote about the Mets’ slide; remarkably, they’ve gone 32-49 since Senga was injured on June 12. Their problems basically stem from running out of arms. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/amid-the-collapse-of-their-pitching-the-me…

12:05

Jay Jaffe: I’m working on a piece about the remaining playoff races. it’s not Team Entropy but it’s what we have, and it’s helpful to understand the tiebreakers and remaining scenarios

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Pouring one out for Robert Redford, whom I particularly loved in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Sting (both with Paul Newman). If you’re young enough that those movies aren’t familiar to you, by all means waste no time in seeing them. As for The Natural and the baseball connection, eh, i don’t hate the movie like i do Field of Dreams, but it’s got problems.

Read the rest of this entry »

Look, I get it. You keep refreshing FanGraphs, and it keeps saying that the Mets are 99.9999% likely to make the playoffs (okay, fine, 79.4%). You’ve seen the Mets play, though. They stink! They’re 32-48 since June 13. The White Sox are better than that! We think they’re going to make the playoffs? These Mets?! What, do we not watch the games or something?

Well, to be fair, our models don’t actually watch the games. They’re just code snippets. But given how the Mets’ recent swoon has created the most interesting playoff race in baseball this year, and given that our odds keep favoring them to pull out of a tailspin, the time is ripe to re-evaluate how our playoff odds perform. When we say a team is 80% likely to make the playoffs, what does that mean? Read on to find out.

In 2021, I sliced the data up in two ways to get an idea of what was going on. My conclusions were twofold. First, our model does a good job of saying what it does on the tin: Teams that we give an 80% playoff chance make the playoffs about 80% of the time, and so on. Second, our model’s biggest edge comes from the extremes. It’s at its best determining that teams are very likely, or very unlikely, to make the playoffs. Our flagship model did better than a model that uses season-to-date statistics to estimate team strength in the aggregate, with that coverage of extreme teams doing a lot of the work. Read the rest of this entry »

Freddy Peralta is having arguably the greatest season of his excellent eight-year career. The right-hander has ridden a career-best 2.69 ERA to a career-high 16 wins. However, I used the word arguably for a reason. Peralta’s 3.64 FIP is just the fourth best of his career, and his 3.93 xFIP is tied with 2024 for his fifth best. There’s a gap of 0.95 runs per nine innings between his FIP and his ERA. When you multiply that times his actual innings total of 163 2/3, FIP thinks he should’ve given up just over 17 more earned runs than he actually has allowed. None of this is surprising. Pitchers underperform or overperform their peripherals all the time. The interesting thing is that Statcast says that no pitcher has benefitted as much from the defense behind him as Peralta. When he’s has been on the mound, the Brewers defense has been worth just under 14 fielding runs. It’s neither this simple or this clean-cut, but it’s easy to combine these two numbers and make an inference: Defense can explain more than 80% of the difference between Peralta’s FIP and ERA.

On the other end of the spectrum is Peralta’s teammate Brandon Woodruff, who returned from shoulder surgery in July and has gone 6-2 over 11 starts and 59 2/3 innings. He’s posted a 3.32 ERA, 3.26 FIP, and 3.40 xFIP. In other words, FIP thinks Woodruff has gotten exactly what he’s deserved. However, Woodruff’s xERA is a scant 2.27. When you combine all those numbers, it means Statcast thinks several batted balls that should have resulted in outs instead fell in for non-homer base hits. The difference is a bit over six runs. Coincidentally or not, Statcast says the Milwaukee defense has been at its worst behind Woodruff, costing him just under five runs, once again just about 80% of the gap between an ERA estimator and his actual ERA.

That’s why we’re talking about Peralta and Woodruff. No two teammates have a bigger gap between the fielding run value of the defense behind them. It’s nearly an 18-run gap! It’s jarring. With 26 FRV, Statcast thinks the Brewers have the fourth-best team defense in the game, but somehow none of that brilliance has been shining on Woodruff. We’re going to use Statcast data to break down, as best we can, the reasons behind it. Hopefully, the comparison will show the various ways a team can provide defensive value. Let’s start with the catching numbers. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Meg’s reaction to the Mariners moving into first place in the AL West (at least temporarily), Jac Caglianone and the Royals’ woeful corner-outfield offense, whether major leaguers have gotten better at sliding, and an unjust byproduct of the zombie runner. Then (50:43) they bring on baseball researcher and Sports Reference designer Adam Darowski to discuss Robinson Canó’s 4000th professional hit and Adam’s work on the 4000 hits club.

Audio intro: Andy Ellison, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Alonso quote
Link to mustache/witch article
Link to more on the witch
Link to even more on the witch
Link to 2021 Stat Blast
Link to M’s pitching query
Link to B-Ref newsletter
Link to Langs M’s note
Link to team travel
Link to team extra innings pitched
Link to 2025 worst team LF/RF
Link to worst team LF/RF since 2002
Link to Royals LF
Link to Royals RF
Link to playoff odds
Link to Jac’s leading xwOBA-wOBA
Link to Moniak slide
Link to Moniak slide close-up
Link to Crizer on slides
Link to Cameron on slides
Link to Cameron on slides 2
Link to Treinen game
Link to previous Treinen-type losses
Link to Treinen nickname article
Link to @PitchingNinja tweet
Link to Treinen conspiracy posts
Link to Canó video
Link to Canó video 2
Link to Canó article
Link to Canó article 2
Link to Adam’s Canó post
Link to Canó Insta post
Link to Canó Insta post 2
Link to Canó Insta post 3
Link to Canó Insta post 4
Link to Canó Insta post 5
Link to Canó cards story
Link to Adam’s presentation
Link to Simkus SABR article
Link to BP 4K club article
Link to Adam’s website
Link to underarm serve article 1
Link to underarm serve article 2
Link to eephus pitch wiki

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All of a sudden the NL Wild Card race looks a lot more exciting, while the playoff picture in the AL had a big shakeup over the weekend. It’s bound to be an exciting final two weeks of the regular season.

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 »

Read the rest of this entry »