Before they fell into the turbulent wake of the white-hot Brewers, the Cubs were flirting with the best record in baseball for much of the season. You know the highlights: Pete Crow-Armstrong flies through the air and smacks homers. Kyle Tucker is a superstar making a name for himself before hitting free agency. Michael Busch is having a mini-breakout of his own. Seiya Suzuki is a consistent power threat. Dansby Swanson is a metronome in the form of a glove-first shortstop.

You can keep naming names for quite a while, in fact, before you get to the Cubs’ two longest-tenured hitters. Ian Happ debuted way back in 2017. He’s transitioned from a superutility role to the corner outfield while featuring in the middle of the lineup for nearly a decade, a first-division regular though rarely an All-Star. He’s not the focus of today’s article, though. That would be the other longest-tenured Cub, Nico Hoerner.

Hoerner got a cup of coffee at the end of the 2019 season, played a bench role in 2020, and got injured repeatedly just as he seemed to be settling in as a starter in 2021. He’s been a locked-in everyday guy ever since, at shortstop for a year and then at second after Swanson signed with the team in free agency. And between a succession of newer and more exciting Cubs debuting and the jack-of-all-trades nature of his game, Hoerner’s stardom is often overlooked. But overlooked or not, Hoerner is a star, and so I thought I’d examine his consistent excellence as he churns through yet another quietly outstanding season. Read the rest of this entry »

I owe Luke Keaschall an apology. Last night, the 22-year-old second baseman put up the first oh-fer of his brief and brilliant major league career, the predictable result of my decision to write about him today. In the series opener in the Bronx, the Yankees beat the Twins, 6-2, and Keaschall watched from the on-deck circle with an 11-game hitting streak on the line as Ryan Jeffers struck out to end the game. This is my fault. I knew that by pitching an article about Keaschall, I was condemning him to this fate. I really do feel bad about jinxing him, but it was time to highlight just how impressive his start has been. Keaschall will turn 23 on Friday, which makes him exactly three years older than FanGraphs.

Permit me to exclude Monday’s stats momentarily for the sake of painting a picture. Through the first 12 games of his career, Keaschall ran a 234 wRC+, slashing .415/.500/.707, homering twice, and stealing five bases. He’s one of just 10 players in the last 30 years – a list that also includes his manager, Rocco Baldelli – to start his career with an 11-game hitting streak. Keaschall also started his career with a 12-game on-base streak. Yes, that is possible; I’ll explain in a moment. With a nice round 1.0 WAR (which dropped to 0.9 on Monday; again, I’m so sorry, Luke), he ranks eighth among Minnesota’s position players. He has five multi-hit games. He was just named AL Player of the Week in his second week as a big leaguer. On Sunday, he achieved his first three-hit game with a walk-off homer against the Royals in the 11th inning. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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.

Audio intro: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Trout hypotheticals
Link to 2025 TTO% leaders
Link to Trout TTO% by year
Link to leaguewide TTO%
Link to older hitters wRC+
Link to Trout’s Savant page
Link to Trout’s $ value
Link to Dalton photo
Link to pitcher WAR since 2024
Link to Skenes pitch-type splits
Link to Paine on extensions
Link to listener emails
Link to new debuts
Link to Simpson wiki
Link to Simpson interview
Link to phantom ballplayer wiki
Link to 2024 Simpson article
Link to 2025 Simpson article
Link to ERA-xERA leaders
Link to Dartmouth draftees
Link to Princeton draftees
Link to Yale draftees
Link to UPenn draftees
Link to Harvard draftees
Link to Brown draftees
Link to Columbia draftees
Link to Cornell draftees
Link to Ivy draftees ranking
Link to Darnell wiki
Link to Darnell article 1
Link to Darnell article 2
Link to Darnell article 3
Link to Darnell article 4
Link to Darnell article 5
Link to team RP WAR

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