If you’ve ever struck up a conversation with a stranger at the ballpark, you might have noticed that the FanGraphs readers are easy to spot. Let’s say you find yourself discussing the Yankees. A FanGraphs reader might ponder whether the 30-point gap between Paul Goldschmidt’s wOBA and xwOBA will catch up to him, while a non-reader is more likely to fret over whether Brian Cashman is too reliant on analytics when constructing the team’s roster. But sometimes, the two groups ask the same thing. So today, let’s consider one of those broad questions: Should teams be intentionally walking Aaron Judge more often?

Admit it. You’ve wondered. If you’re a Yankees fan, you’ve wondered just how long Judge is going to be allowed to hit in big spots. If you’re a fan of the team the Yankees are playing, you’ve wondered how your team’s manager ought to solve this impossible puzzle. And if you’re a neutral fan, well, Aaron Judge is the biggest story in baseball right now. He’s having one of the best offensive stretches in the history of the game. Don’t you want to know if there’s anything that can be done about it?

Ever since Barry Bonds broke the sport in the early 2000s, every hot streak in baseball comes with questions about the “Bonds treatment.” Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean 120 intentional walks, Bonds’ tally in 2004 and the single-season record. (It’s the single-season record by 52 walks. Second place? Barry Bonds. Third place? Barry Bonds.) The best non-Bonds total was Willie McCovey’s 45 in 1969. The most Judge has ever racked up in a single season is a measly 20. So the question isn’t whether teams should treat him like Bonds, because no, they shouldn’t. But should they treat him like McCovey? And more importantly, how should opposing managers handle Judge in a playoff game, when all the chips are on the table? Let’s do some math. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re now a quarter of the way through the regular season, and even though the playoff races have largely taken shape, there’s still plenty of time for some of the early disappointments to get things right. Last week, it was the Twins and Cardinals who caught fire with matching eight-game winning streaks.

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.

…

The Dodgers split a big four-game series against the Diamondbacks last weekend, and Friday night’s game was an especially wild affair. There were four lead changes, and Los Angeles won after scoring six runs in the ninth inning, a rally that was capped off by a go-ahead three-run bomb from Shohei Ohtani, his fourth home run of the week. Freddie Freeman also hit four homers last week and collected 10 other hits. The Dodgers’ roster was depleted even further when Teoscar Hernández and Evan Phillips hit the IL on Tuesday — they now have 15 players on the IL — but they’ve continued to prove they have enough talent to maintain their spot as the top team in baseball.

The Mets took two out of three games in both of their series last week, but the Phillies did them one better, going 5-1 on their roadtrip through Tampa Bay and Cleveland. Suddenly, the NL East looks very tight at the top. New York is still in first place, but its hold on the division is now just 1.5 games, down from five as recently as April 26. The good news for the Mets is that, even as that gap has narrowed, Juan Soto’s bat has woken up; he blasted three home runs last week, the same amount he hit in all of April, and he’s up to five dingers since the calendar flipped to May. The Mets have a big subway series against the Yankees lined up for this weekend as they try to cling to their division lead. Meanwhile, the Phillies return home to host the surging Cardinals before the Pirates come to Philly for an intrastate rivalry series over the weekend.

So far, the Cubs have faced the toughest schedule in the majors by a pretty significant margin, which makes their 23-18 record all the more impressive. Thankfully, they won’t face another opponent with a record over .500 until early June, as their series against the Marlins, White Sox, Reds, and Rockies will take them through the rest of the month. Chicago was already without Justin Steele and Javier Assad when Shota Imanaga landed on the IL with a hamstring strain early last week. In response, the team called up its top pitching prospect, Cade Horton, to make his major league debut over the weekend, using him as the bulk guy in Saturday’s 6-5 win over the Mets. The easier schedule should alleviate some of the pressure on the patchwork rotation, though the Cubs will definitely want to find some reinforcements before the dog days of summer set in.

The Yankees snapped the Padres’ six-game winning streak on Tuesday, though San Diego got back on track with two wins against the Rockies over the weekend, including a 21-0 drubbing on Saturday. As for New York, the offense carried the team through two series wins last week. Aaron Judge went hitless in two games early in the week but got his bat going again against the A’s in Sacramento. He blasted two home runs on Saturday and collected four hits on Sunday, pushing his batting average back over .400. He enters Monday’s series opener in Seattle slashing .409/.494/.779 with 14 home runs, a 254 wRC+ and 3.8 WAR.

Speaking of the Mariners, their streak of nine consecutive series wins was snapped over weekend when they were swept at home by the Blue Jays. They’re still leading the AL West, but they have two difficult series ahead of them this week: the aforementioned matchup with the Yankees, followed up a three-game set in San Diego.

Over in the AL Central, the Tigers continue to hold onto the best record in the AL, but they dropped their weekend series to the Rangers. The Royals entered their weekend series against the Red Sox on a seven-game winning streak with five straight series wins before Boston’s pitching slowed them down. Kansas City lost on Saturday and Sunday and was held to just one run in each game.

The Cardinals and Twins are the hottest teams in baseball right now, with each club carrying eight-game winning streaks into the new week after struggling over the first month of the season. Ten days ago, St. Louis was six games out of first place and five games under .500; now the club is just a game behind the Cubs in the NL Central. Pitching has led the way for the Cardinals during their ascent, as they allowed a total of seven runs last week. Matthew Liberatore’s long-awaited breakout is the big story; he outpitched Paul Skenes in a seven-inning gem on Tuesday, giving up one run while striking out eight.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, Royce Lewis and Willi Castro were both activated off the IL last week, giving the roster a much needed boost. Likewise, it’s the pitching that’s driving their success; the Twins held opponents to two or fewer runs in their first five games last week before Sunday’s 7-6 walk-off win over the Giants. The offense still hasn’t really clicked, but their excellent run prevention has allowed them to post a +19 run differential despite sitting just a game over .500. Unlike the Cardinals, though, the Twins are still in fourth place and five games out of first because the AL Central — featuring the Tigers, who have the best record in the AL, as well as the Royals and Guardians — is one of the most competitive divisions in baseball.

In the wake of Triston Casas’s season-ending knee injury, the Red Sox unnecessarily walked into another ugly spat with their franchise cornerstone last week, when chief baseball officer Craig Breslow asked Rafael Devers if he would be open to playing first base. It’s not an outrageous ask from a baseball perspective, but the problem is the lack of clear communication, both public and private, between Boston’s front office and its most important player. Thankfully, none of this has affected Devers at the plate; he collected 10 hits last week, including two home runs, and his season wRC+ is now up to 146.

The Astros placed Yordan Alvarez on the IL early last week with some inflammation in his hand. Then, on Saturday, Jose Altuve exited the game early with hamstring tightness. Neither injury is considered serious, but it’s just another hurdle Houston has to overcome this year. The Astros are virtually tied with the Athletics in the AL West standings, two games behind the Mariners and a game ahead of the Rangers. Both Texas teams went 3-3 last week, while the A’s dropped both their series against the Mariners and Yankees.

The Cardinals’ hot streak has pushed the Brewers and Reds down a notch in the NL Central standings. Jackson Chourio is clearly talented, but his hyper-aggressive approach this season has led to inconsistent results. He’s supposed to be leading Milwaukee’s offense, but no one is really hitting right now. The pitching has been good considering all the injuries the staff has had to overcome — Brandon Woodruff and Aaron Civale are both nearing their returns — but a team that can’t score runs consistently won’t go anywhere.

For Cincinnati, a rash of injuries has derailed any success the team might have enjoyed earlier in the season. Hunter Greene, Noelvi Marte, and Jake Fraley all hit the IL last week, though thankfully Austin Hays returned from his own injury on Friday. After the Reds had scored just 10 runs across their previous six games, they erupted for 13 runs against the Astros on Saturday. Of course, they were shut out a day later; their offensive woes won’t be solved that easily.

After getting swept by the Twins, the Orioles bounced back with a series win against the Angels last weekend. If you’re looking for signs of hope, Zach Eflin was activated off the IL on Sunday and looked pretty good in a five-inning outing. On the offensive side of things, Jackson Holliday is showing some signs of life; he’s collected a pair of home runs and nine hits this month.

Both the Pirates and Rockies fired their managers last week, though neither Derek Shelton nor Bud Black were to blame for the struggles of their respective teams. Instead, the two managers are just the latest scapegoats for two beleaguered franchises going nowhere. At least Pittsburgh has some excellent pitching to witness every few days, with some more exciting prospects on the way. The situation in Colorado is much more bleak. The Rockies allowed a whopping 66 runs last week. On Thursday, they lost both games of a doubleheader by a combined score of 21-3, and somehow things got worse from there — they needed only one game on Saturday against the Padres to surrender 21 more runs. Final score: 21-0. Ouch.

Through his first three seasons in Detroit, Javier Báez was largely a disappointment, with a combination of flashy defense and free swinging that yielded such diminishing returns that he sank below replacement level while battling injuries last year. He missed the late-season run that helped the Tigers capture a Wild Card spot, and as spring training opened, a full-time place in their lineup wasn’t guaranteed. Amid a rash of injuries to other Tigers, he’s not only split his time between center field — a position he hadn’t played in a regular season game before — third base, and shortstop, he’s been a productive hitter thanks to better health and some adjustments to his swing.

Even while going hitless on Friday and Sunday against the Rangers, the 32-year-old Báez is hitting .300/.336/.455 with three homers and a 127 wRC+. The peripherals underlying that are admittedly shaky, and he’s walking just 3.4% of the time, but thanks to positive defensive contributions at comparatively unfamiliar positions, he’s fourth among the team’s position players with 1.1 WAR — and he’s done it for a team that has the AL’s best record (26-15, .634) and largest division lead (2 1/2 games). For the first time in awhile, watching him is a whole lot of fun.

The Tigers signed Báez to a six-year, $140 million deal in November 2021, after he’d split his season between the Cubs and the Mets (who dealt away Pete Crow-Armstrong in the package to acquire him) — a strong one in which he posted a 117 wRC+ and 4.1 WAR. He was serviceable at best during his first season in Detroit (.238/.278/.393, 89 wRC+, 2.0 WAR) but sank to .222/.267/.325 (63 wRC+) with 0.8 WAR in 2023, then hit just .184/.221/.294 (43 wRC+) in 80 games last year. He missed nearly a month in June and July due to lumbar inflammation; the problem flared up again in August, accompanied by right hip inflammation. Under the belief that the Tigers were going nowhere at 62-66, he played his last game of the season on August 22 before undergoing surgery. Without their highest-paid player — a coincidence that was tough to miss given his underperformance — the Tigers went a major league-best 24-10 and snatched the third AL Wild Card spot, their first playoff berth in a decade. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2019, Rafael Devers has put up 25.2 WAR for the Red Sox. Over that span, only one other player has even reached 10.0; it was Xander Bogaerts, who is no longer with the team. With the exception of the shortened 2020 season, Devers has never finished worse than second on the team in WAR. That includes last season, when he recorded 4.1 WAR despite playing through injuries to both shoulders. He was arguably the worst defensive third baseman in baseball, but he hit so well that he was inarguably the best player on the team, the face of the franchise, and one of the most productive third basemen in the game.

The Red Sox traded away Mookie Betts. They let Bogaerts walk. They kept Devers. When erstwhile chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom signed Devers to a 10-year, $313.5 million contract extension in January 2023, Michael Baumann’s headline read, “The Red Sox Have Finally Extended Rafael Devers.” He’s the longest-tenured member of the team, and only Kristian Campbell, whose extension contains team options for 2033 and 2034, is under contract further into the future. The Red made Devers the cornerstone, but in something straight out of a Suzy Eddie Izzard bit, they have spent the past couple months trying to dig him up and plop him down in different spots. The moves make baseball sense. That’s not the problem. The problem is communication. The team seems to be doing its level best to alienate its biggest star, repeatedly saying one thing in public, and then another to Devers in private. Read the rest of this entry »

A papal conclave is the ultimate news story. It’s an event shrouded in ceremony and secrecy, which takes place incredibly rarely; only three times in the past 40 years, in fact. Even in this era when seeing everything has made the mysterious mundane, the world is left waiting in total ignorance for news of white smoke. Billions of observers, Catholic or not, look on in rapt fascination. And when the conclave produced the first American-born pope, Leo XIV, things only got more fascinating.

I come from a Catholic extended family, but for the most part, I was a devoted low-church protestant in my youth and am largely irreligious now. Nevertheless, I’ve always held the Vatican in a certain esteem. Its grandeur, its rituals, its dense and ancient jargon — all of that looks mystical and romantic from a distance. Is it the sole conduit to Almighty God? Perhaps not, from where I sit. But it’s a fascinating institution nonetheless.

That cloud of fairy tale wonder evaporated in an instant on Thursday, when the cardinal electors chose Cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago to inherit St. Peter’s throne. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Bacsik is best known for having surrendered Barry Bonds’s 756th home run. The August 7, 2007 bomb at San Francisco’s AT&T Park gave Bonds the most in MLB history, one more than Henry Aaron. Unlike the legendary bashers, Bacsik is but a mere mortal. A left-handed pitcher for four teams over parts of five seasons, the now-Texas Rangers broadcast analyst appeared in 51 big-league games and logged a record of 10-13 with a 5.46 ERA in 216 innings.

Despite his relative anonymity, the gopher wasn’t the only noteworthy happening in Bacsik’s career. Moreover, those didn’t all take place with him on the mound.

“In my first 14 at-bats, I didn’t get a hit, didn’t strike out, and didn’t walk,” explained Bacsik, who finished 5-for-50 at the dish. “Apparently that’s a record for not having one of those outcomes to begin a career. I didn’t know this until last year when we were in Detroit and they brought it up on the broadcast.”

In Bacsik’s next three plate appearances, he doubled, singled, and struck out — all in the same game. Two years later, in his 44th time standing in a batter’s box, he drew his only career walk.

The first home run that Bacsik allowed — there were 41 in all — was to Kevin Millar. It isn’t his most-memorable outside of the Bonds blast. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Ben Clemens of FanGraphs banter about the latest positional drama regarding Rafael Devers, then discuss whether and why pitchers leaguewide are Yu Darvish-ing and Tyler Holton-ing—that is, throwing more pitch types, and varying their pitch types more based on batter handedness—before answering listener emails about home strike zones and combining bad teams to make a good team. Then (44:42) Ben continues the “baseball jobs” series by bringing on Adam Auer, major league dietician for the Brewers and former minor and major league strength and conditioning coach, to talk about how teams are improving player performance through nutrition, exercise, and recovery, followed (1:41:49) by Emory Brinkman, senior editor for Stats Perform, who discusses generating viral fun facts, parsing statistical qualifiers, and data-wrangling.

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In the introduction to their 2023 Saberseminar presentation, Scott Powers and Vicente Iglesias hit on a fundamental truth about pitching: The variable that bests predicts the outcome of a pitch is the location where it crosses the plate. For a case study, look no further than this tweet from MLB.com’s David Adler about Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s splitters.

Hitters have swung 74 times at Yoshinobu Yamamoto's splitter this season …

38 of those swings are whiffs (51%)

Another 17 are foul balls

That leaves 19 balls in play

18 of those 19 are ground balls (95%)

Only 1 of Yamamoto's splitters has been hit in the air pic.twitter.com/ggLR1qHYZW

— David Adler (@_dadler) April 22, 2025

If Yamamoto buries his splitter arm side, he’s probably getting a whiff. If it’s on the edge of the zone, it’s likely a foul ball. If it catches plate, it’s getting put in play. The location dictates the outcome.

Given this truth, pitchers who command the ball best ought to dominate. But there’s a catch. As Powers and Iglesias noted, the location is also the variable with the least predictive reliability. If you see a pitcher throw a fastball 98 mph, you can be pretty sure he is going to do it again. A dotted backdoor slider, on the other hand, does not guarantee an entire game of dotted backdoor sliders. Command is both the most important and the least reliable quality for a pitcher.

Nobody can nail the corners with every pitch. But pitchers can at least minimize the variance of their locations, finding relative reliability within the chaos of command. And in 2025, there is perhaps nobody more reliable than Jacob deGrom.

deGrom’s flat attack angle fastball and firm slider have (justifiably) built his reputation as a stuff monster. Even after easing up on the gas pedal this season, deGrom is still a darling in the eyes of the models. His overall Stuff+ is in the 80th percentile for starters with at least 30 innings pitched, fueled by his depth-y 89-mph slider. PitchingBot likes deGrom even more, ranking him in the top 10 among those pitchers. Over at Baseball Prospectus, the StuffPro model believes deGrom wields four pitches — his curveball and changeup, in addition to the heater and slider — that all grade out as plus.

But stuff is no longer deGrom’s carrying tool. Possibly as a function of his decision to throw slower, possibly as a positive outcome of aging, deGrom’s standout skill these days is his command.

deGrom’s unbelievable precision came to my attention while writing about Hunter Gaddis for a piece that was published on Monday. As part of my effort to discern whether Gaddis owed his early-season success to slider command (the verdict: inconclusive), I created a version of the Kirby Index for sliders to see where he landed. That metric measured the variance in release angles and release points and distilled those figures into a single score that captured command ability. Originally, it was designed for fastballs, which tend to be thrown to all parts of the strike zone. It perhaps works even better for sliders, which generally are thrown to fewer targets. Gaddis’ rank among his fellow pitchers was nothing remarkable, but deGrom’s name sitting at the very top caught my attention.

As I wrote earlier this year, a more straightforward implementation of the Kirby Index would be to just measure the variance of the actual pitch locations. For this story, I calculated the standard deviation of the vertical and horizontal locations of a given pitcher’s sliders; once again, deGrom found himself at the top of the pack. Look at how much distance there is between him and the next closest pitcher:

Random tangent here, but you have to admire Luarbert Arias for refusing to throw his junky 82-mph slider anywhere but inside the strike zone.

Anyway, measuring location densities, ultimately, could just point at pitchers who fill up the strike zone; the real test of command is a pitcher’s ability to hit his actual target. To that end, Driveline Baseball provided me with a sample of their proprietary miss distance data. Using Inside Edge tracking data, Driveline measures the distance from the intended target to the actual location of the pitch.

No surprise — deGrom’s slider miss distance ranked first among all pitchers. The league-average miss distance for sliders is about 12.5 inches; this year, deGrom is missing his target by under nine inches, nearly three standard deviations below the average. Any way you slice it, deGrom is commanding his slider like no one else in the sport.

The outcomes have been unassailable. So far, deGrom’s slider has returned a run value of -3.2 per 100 pitches thrown, the best mark for any slider thrown by a starting pitcher. Not only is he getting a bunch of swing and miss — a 38.1% whiff rate, as of this writing — it’s also grabbing a ton of called strikes. When batters do manage to put it in play, they can’t do much with it. The average launch angle on the pitch is just 2°; the xwOBA is a meek .227.

The harmless outcomes on balls in play are a function of deGrom’s targets. To right-handed hitters, he targets the classic low-away corner, breaking off the plate. Note the bimodal distribution on the heatmap — there’s a large concentration of sliders he’ll throw in the zone for strikes, and then another cluster right below the zone that generate chase.

These intentions can be seen in the filtered heatmap clusters. When deGrom throws sliders to righties in zero-strike counts, he tends to be in the zone:

In two-strike counts, he chases the swing and miss:

To lefties, deGrom shows a similar bimodal distribution, but the pattern appears reversed. In early counts, he’s aiming just below the zone; in late counts, he’s looking for called strikes. This sequence to Athletics rookie Nick Kurtz, which featured four sliders, gives a sense of the approach. On 1-0 and 2-0, deGrom tries to bait a chase, but the big lefty resists.

Down 3-0, deGrom fires a middle-middle heater in an auto-take scenario, then returns to the slider in a 3-1 count. Here, deGrom dials in his robotic precision, dotting the lower edge of the strike zone to bring the count full.

On 3-2, he goes there again. Kurtz takes it and pays the price. Though the superimposed strike zone on the broadcast says this pitch is just low, my sense is he deserves that call; if he’s consistently landing pitches within inches of his intended target, you sort of just have to hand it to him.

deGrom isn’t just painting with the slider. I calculated the Kirby Index for four-seam fastballs thrown to righties in 2025; incredibly, he also sits in first place on that list.

As nice as it would be to think that deGrom can be just as good even after dropping two ticks off the fastball, it just isn’t true. Absent improvement elsewhere, losing stuff will bring him back to Earth. But deGrom is far from stagnant. In 2019 — his last full big league season, amid the most dominant phase of his career — his fastball command measured as below average by miss distance. Six years later, it’s hard to argue his command is anything but 80-grade. And as long as the elbow cooperates, it will help him defy gravity.

Read the rest of this entry »