Keegan Matheson has a beard. Let’s start there. Matheson is MLB.com’s Blue Jays beat writer and he has a beard. It’s a big, glorious, pointy beard, and it’s attached to his face and everything.

Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman has a beard too. It’s not glorious like Matheson’s. The right-hander usually opts for a few days’ growth, but in recent weeks, he’s been going a step further. It’s still patchy in the cheeks. Closeups show you individual hairs splayed in whichever direction their whimsy takes them. All the same, more often than not, Gausman has been moving beyond stubble status and into the beginnings of beard territory. Gausman has also been pitching quite well lately, running a 2.25 ERA and 3.00 FIP over his past 10 starts.

Last Thursday, Matheson watched Gausman mow down the Astros, pitching a shutout with nine strikeouts, two walks, and one hit, and made the connection. “The nerds won’t tell you this because their charts won’t show it,” he posted on Bluesky, “but Kevin Gausman’s recent hot streak has a direct correlation to him embracing a beard. Something to monitor.” Read the rest of this entry »

Cam Schlittler was on the doorstep of the big leagues when he led Sunday Notes on the penultimate day of June. Just 10 days later, the 24-year-old right-hander took the mound at Yankee Stadium against the Seattle Mariners and earned a win in his MLB debut. He’s been a presence in New York’s rotation ever since. In 11 starts for the pinstripers, Schlittler has a 3-3 record to go with a 3.05 ERA and a 3.73 FIP over 56 solid innings.

The 98-mph cut-ride fastball that Schlittler addressed in the article has been his most prominent pitch. Thrown at a 56.2% clip, it has elicited a .202 BAA and just a .298 slug. Augmenting the high-octane heater are a quartet of secondaries — none of which is the offering he planned to add to his arsenal this season.

“When I talked to you in the spring, I was working on a splitter,” Schlittler told me at Fenway Park on Friday. “But I just couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t want to go into the season competing with something I wasn’t really comfortable throwing, so I stopped throwing it.”

The 2022 seventh-round pick Northeastern University product began this season in Double-A, where he attacked hitters with the aforementioned fastball, a sweeper, and a curveball. He introduced a cutter — “metrically, it’s kind of in-between a slider and a cutter” — in his final start before being promoted to Triple-A in early June. He’s since added a two-seamer, giving him a pitch he can use to bore in on righties.

Which brings us back to the shelved splitter. Why does the young hurler feel that he wasn’t able to master the pitch? Read the rest of this entry »

When Gerardo Parra took the mound for the Nationals on August 3, 2019, with his team trailing 11-4 in the eighth inning in Arizona, he had no way of knowing the dubious history he was about to make in the only pitching appearance of his 12-year career. He walked the first three batters he faced, allowed an RBI single to Alex Avila, and then walked Diamondbacks reliever Zack Godley to bring home another run. That was enough for manager Davey Martinez, who opted to replace Parra on the bump with second baseman Brian Dozer to face the lefty-hitting Jarrod Dyson. To set up his desired defensive alignment without making a substitution, Martinez moved third baseman Anthony Rendon to the keystone and sent the left-handed Parra to the hot corner — a position he’d never played before. Dyson doubled home two runs, both charged to Parra. As switch-hitter Ketel Marte stepped into the right-handed batter’s box to face Dozer’s floaters, Martinez flipped Rendon and Parra, who then made his first and only career appearance at second. Marte flied out to right before Eduardo Escobar, a switch-hitter also batting right-handed, launched a three-run homer, with the first of those runs also landing on Parra’s ledger.

Of course, three months later, the Nationals would win their first and only World Series championship, with Parra conducting rousing renditions of “Baby Shark” every time he batted in Washington, but on that particular early-August night, things got ugly. With his final line of zero innings, five runs (all earned), four walks, and one hit, Parra became one of only three players to allow five or more runs without recording an out in their only career pitching appearance.

I bring this up because the first question in this week’s mailbag is about the worst major league pitcher ever. Parra is not the answer because he was not really a pitcher, but his outing was a fun bit of trivia I came across in my research, so I had no choice but to share it with you. Before we get to the actual worst-pitcher-ever candidates, 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 the deepening twilight of Mike Trout, then (21:19) discuss why the so-called “death of expertise” sweeping society hasn’t swept sports in the same way, before answering listener emails (1:04:01) about whether the Rangers are good, how the count can be “quickly 0-2,” what makes a righty seem like a lefty, whether a player can be unclutch, the Rockies’ run differential, and the other kind of pitch clock, plus (1:37:58) a postscript.

Audio intro: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to The Athletic on Trout
Link to Woodrum on velo
Link to hitter pitch speeds
Link to previous Trout talk
Link to The Death of Expertise
Link to the WSJ on physics
Link to the New Yorker article
Link to Manfred analytics quote
Link to politics WAR
Link to Democracy at the Ballpark
Link to the Hard Knocks reference
Link to Paine on the Rangers
Link to Dubuque on Helman
Link to previous Burger banter
Link to BaseRuns standings
Link to playoff odds
Link to Brebbia report
Link to leaguewide late & close
Link to Alvarez late & close
Link to worst run differentials
Link to illustrated pitch movement
Link to Statcast spin direction
Link to clock-reading survey
Link to listener emails database
Link to Baseball Reliquary interview
Link to Buehler comments

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Aaron Judge stands alone. Well, Aaron Judge usually stands alone. This year, he’s got company. Judge leads all players with 8.3 WAR. Shohei Ohtani is right behind him with 7.8 total WAR (6.5 as a hitter and 1.4 as a pitcher), and Cal Raleigh is right behind him with 7.6. With a difference of less than three-quarters of a win, that’s an extremely tight race to be baseball’s WAR leader. It got me wondering how often these races are that tight, so I hit the spreadsheets. I pulled the top three WAR-getters in each season since 1901 and checked to see whether this year’s race is an outlier, and if so, just how out there it is compared to seasons past. The short answer is yes, this race is really tight by pretty much any historical standard.

Before we get into it, I’ve got to make a couple notes on the data and methodology here. First, I used FanGraphs WAR, both because I work here and because I’m a FanGraphs fan. (I’m also a fan of FanGraphs’ graphs, which makes me FanGraphs graphs fan. I could keep going.) Ohtani leads baseball in WARP, Baseball Prospectus’ version of WAR. As Ginny Searle wrote on Wednesday over at BP, Judge leads Raleigh by much more in both Baseball Reference WAR (which doesn’t incorporate pitch framing) and WARP (because DRC+ thinks Raleigh’s deserved offensive performance is slightly below his actual performance). Still, we’re going with fWAR, or as we refer to it here at FanGraphs, WAR.

Second, no matter which version you use, you’re really not supposed to dice WAR up like this. It’s a great stat that captures a lot, but it has error bars like any stat, and there are probably bits of value players produce that we can’t measure. If you’re selecting an MVP or comparing any two players based on fractions of a win, you’re probably doing it wrong. But I double-checked, and it turns out that nobody’s going to fire me for handling WAR slightly irresponsibly. Today, we’ll have some fun doing it wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

Mookie Betts entered the year as an eight-time All-Star, six-time Gold Glove winner, the majors’ only active position player with three World Series rings, and a likely future Hall of Famer. Not one to back down from a challenge, he’s turned himself into an exceptional shortstop after spending a good chunk of 2024 battling the position to a bloody draw. Yet after a mysterious illness knocked him out of the season-opening Tokyo Series and sapped his strength, he spent the first four months of this season struggling at the plate due to mechanical compromises and, by his own admission, a spiral of self-doubt. Over the past six weeks, he’s finally come around — and not a moment too soon as the Dodgers cling to a narrow NL West lead.

The offensive decline of the 32-year-old Betts seemed to come out of nowhere. Though he missed eight weeks last summer due to a fractured left hand, and didn’t hit the ball nearly as hard as in 2023, when he set a career high with 39 homers, Betts had an excellent season at the plate. He hit .289/.372/.491, with all three slash stats placing among the NL’s top eight and his 140 wRC+ ranking fifth — down 25 points from 2023, but matching his career mark to that point.

He hasn’t come close to approximating that level this season. Shortly before the Dodgers departed for Japan, Betts contracted a mysterious virus that not only sidelined him for those two games against the Cubs, but also prevented him from eating full meals and caused him to lose 23 pounds, no small matter for a 180-pound athlete. Yet he was back in the lineup for the Dodgers’ stateside opener against the Tigers on March 27, homered twice the next day, and started all but two of the team’s next 54 games. Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — Nostalgia for the 1990s is so back! The Mets are running back Generation K, and at an interesting time. As it stands, their playoff rotation could include three pitchers who were in the minors in mid-August: Nolan McLean, Brandon Sproat, and Jonah Tong. At least, all three should figure somewhere on the postseason roster, should the Mets stop playing with their food and sew up the playoff berth they’ve had a hand on all season.

I’m old enough to remember the 90s the first time around — an era of flared jeans and futurism, much of which was rebadged 1960s nostalgia. Not least in Mets pitching prospects, when Bill Pulsipher, Paul Wilson, and Jason Isringhausen were viewed as the second coming of Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Gary Gentry and/or Nolan Ryan.

There is nothing new under the sun. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. That title is quite a mouthful. Every time I submit it, our helpful back end interface informs me that it is “far too long.” You’re not wrong, WordPress. But I lifted the title and the inspiration for this column from Zach Lowe’s basketball feature of the same name, and every time I consider removing the parenthetical part of it, I remember that the frustrations and failures of the game are part of what makes baseball so compelling. If you never disliked anything about sports, they wouldn’t be so fun to follow. So while every item this week involves something I liked, they also all contain an element of something I didn’t care for. Missed plays, bobbled balls, artificially abbreviated outings, below-average defensive units, lengthy injury recoveries – there are things to dislike in each of these. They all brought me extreme joy anyway, though. Let’s get going.

1. Relatable Frustration
Mike Yastrzemski has been everything the Royals could have hoped for since he joined the team at the trade deadline. He leads off against righties, gets platooned against lefties, and plays his habitual right field. He’s been the team’s second-best hitter behind Bobby Witt Jr., a huge boon as they chase slim playoff odds. Also, when he goofs something up, his reactions are very relatable:

You can see what happened there right away. Yaz’s first step was in, but the ball was actually over his head, and tailing towards the foul line so strongly that he couldn’t reach it. Sure, it was only his second start of the year in left field. Sure, he hasn’t played left for more than a handful of games since 2019. And sure, the ball had plenty of slice on it. But he’d probably tell you the same thing you’re thinking: Major league outfielders, particularly solid ones like Yastrzemski, should make that play. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »