In the summer of 1872, Martin Malone pitched three complete games in three days for the Brooklyn Eckfords of the National Association. In today’s game, a pitcher who threw three complete games in three days would be hailed as something of a miracle, but Malone’s accomplishment loses a bit of its luster when you consider the context of the era. According to the numbers in our database, starters went the distance 83% of the time that season. Another piece of context scrapes the rest of the shine off with a machete: Over his three games, Malone allowed 86 runs on 96 hits. You will not be shocked to learn that he went 0-3.
Nineteenth century record-keeping being what it is, those are Malone’s only three games in our database, and for several reasons, that’s not quite fair. First, those three games don’t represent anything like a complete picture of his total performance. Malone first suited up for the Eckfords five years earlier. “It is surprising that all of Malone’s vital statistics remain undiscovered,” wrote David Nemec in Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, “for he seems to have been an integral part of the Brooklyn baseball scene for more than a decade.”
Next, Malone’s pitching may not have turned out well, but he did go 5-for-16 with a walk, for a .313 batting average and 115 wRC+ at the plate. Last and most important, it’s hard to say how much credit Malone really deserves for all the runs he gave up. He only allowed one home run. He didn’t walk anybody and he didn’t strike anybody out. He did what so many pitchers have been implored to do over the course of baseball history: He let the offense put the ball in play and trusted the defense behind him. It was a catastrophic mistake. Read the rest of this entry »
Last season was the year of the left-handed pitcher. Southpaws combined for a record 142.3 WAR in 2025, and their collective 3.84 ERA was nearly half a run lower than right-handers’ 4.28 mark. That’s the largest difference between righty and lefty run prevention in recorded major league history, surpassing the gap from 1886, when lefties like Toad Ramsey, Lady Baldwin, and Cyclone Miller took the league by storm.
While the names might not have been quite as much fun to say in 2025, the pitchers were just as fun to watch. (I mean, I presume. I’m slightly too young to have seen Ramsey, Baldwin, or Miller in action.) Tarik Skubal took home his second straight Cy Young award, and Garrett Crochet made him earn it. Max Fried signed the richest contract a left-handed pitcher has ever seen, and wasted no time demonstrating why the Yankees thought him worthy of it. Cristopher Sánchez proved he belonged in the conversation with those bigger names, earning himself an extension on top of an extension this spring. And it wasn’t just the stars doing the heavy lifting. You could remove Skubal, Crochet, Fried, and Sánchez from the equation, and lefties still outperformed their right-handed counterparts by more than a third of an earned run. Simply put, left-handed pitchers dominated, and those of us watching couldn’thelpbuttakenotice.
A big reason left-handed pitchers were so successful in 2025 was how well they handled right-handed hitters. We expect lefty pitchers to dominate same-handed matchups, and they had no trouble doing so last year. Left-handed pitchers generally hold left-handed batters to a wOBA about 15 to 25 points below the overall league average. In 2025, they held them to a .292 wOBA, while the league average was .313. That’s a 21-point gap, perfectly within the typical range. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s no secret that I’m an obsessive chronicler of bunting in the big leagues. Very good and very bad bunts frequently populate my Five Things column. I’ve written about the best and worst bunts you’ll see in a season, the optimal strategy for bunting in extras, and any number of otherinterestingbunting-related things – or at least, bunting-related things that are interesting to me. And there’s another great bunting topic to write about right this instant. See, bunts are making a comeback, and for once, they’re doing it for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. So let’s celebrate the return of the bunt – and also think about why it’s back.
So far this year, batters have bunted the ball into play (or struck out by bunting the ball foul) 640 times. That’s 0.9% of all the plate appearances in the majors in 2026, and while that might not sound like much, it’s a new high in the universal DH era, 25% higher than the 2025 season, which was itself the bunt-heaviest year in that stretch at 0.7%. There were a lot more bunts in the days when pitchers batted in National League parks, of course. But if you limit the search to American League parks and reach into the past, a clear trend emerges. Bunting declined as teams thought more about how bad sacrificing an out is. But then it bottomed out, and now teams are starting to bunt more often:
This is just a chart of how many bunts there are, not how good those bunts have been. In fact, the reason the bunt started to decline in the first place is that many bunts were counterproductive. Sacrificing a runner from first to second at the cost of an out is usually a bad decision on the run-scoring front. It might be a fine fail case – if you fail to bunt for a hit and accidentally sacrifice, that’s not so bad – but pure surrender bunts only make sense in very limited circumstances. Read the rest of this entry »
The best teams in baseball continue to separate themselves from the huge morass of mediocre clubs in the middle of the standings. That means the division races might not as exciting, but both Wild Card chases should more than make up for that.
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 »
The 2026 season has not gone the way the Houston Astros envisioned. After Sunday’s loss to the Athletics, the Astros are 30-37 and in fourth place in the AL West. The only reason they’re even within shouting distance of first place is because the entire division has been mediocre so far. However, that doesn’t mean that everything’s gone wrong for them. One thing that has gone decidedly right for Houston is Yordan Alvarez’s comeback season. A fractured hand cost the three-time All-Star nearly four months of the 2025 season and, combined with a sprained ankle in September, limited him to a total of 48 games, his fewest since a torn patellar tendon wiped out all but two games of his 2020 campaign. But now he’s back with a vengeance, hitting .316/.431/.650 in 65 games for 3.3 WAR. He also leads the American League in home runs, RBI, and is second in batting average, behind only Yandy Díaz, at .325. We’re well into the third month of the season, which means the Triple Crown discussion is more than just silly speculation. Not that I’m above that, of course.
It’s true that two of the three Triple Crown stats have lost a significant amount of their analytical heft in recent decades, but it’s still a rare achievement for a player to finish the season leading his league in batting average, home runs, and RBI. More than that, though, Triple Crowns are cool. In the nearly 60 years since Red Sox legend Carl Yastrzemski won the AL Triple Crown in 1967, only Miguel Cabrera has managed to pull it off, in 2012 with the Tigers. No NL player has secured a Triple Crown since Joe Medwick in 1937.
For better or worse, Alvarez has tended to be overshadowed by Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani when the masses talk about baseball’s most feared sluggers. It’s hard for a huge power hitter on a successful franchise to be underrated, but I’d argue that Alvarez is actually one of those few examples. His 165 wRC+ ranks 11th in baseball history and fourth in the expansion era among players with a minimum of 3,000 plate appearances, and while that is bound to come down during his eventual decline phase, he’s set himself up nicely to be one of baseball’s all-time-great sluggers. He offers little defensive value, but he’s an incredibly well-rounded offensive player; he’s not a swing-and-miss hacker like many huge power hitters, and his production doesn’t diminish against left-handed pitchers. In fact, as Matt Martell explained in a Members-only mailbag column in January, Alvarez is the best left-on-left hitter since Barry Bonds. And even when we lower the minimum to 1,000 plate appearances, Alvarez is fifth in batting average among active players. 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 will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 1
During the undocumented morass of the first two weeks of Derek Jr.’s life, my computer died. Allow me rephrase that: We murdered my computer. At some point one delirious night, I sat on the ottoman in our living room only to jump up in shock with sodden, clingy pants. The ottoman was sopping wet. We never figured out how it got that way. That’s a decent metaphor for the experience of having a brand new baby. A piece of furniture was totally soaked – I mean 100% saturated; it must have contained half a gallon of water – and we literally had no idea how it got that way. We still don’t. Later that night, my computer wouldn’t turn on, and I put two and two together. It must have been sitting on the ottoman at some point. It must be dead now. The Apple store confirmed it. The computer was dead. Cause of death: Drowning.
It was lucky that the computer died at a time when I didn’t have to work, but it was still a catastrophic situation. The technician at the store was not at all sanguine about my chances of recovering the contents of the computer, and one of the many things that I had neglected in the frenzy of getting ready for a baby was backing up my hard drive. I had just offloaded onto that hard drive roughly 90% of the pictures from my camera roll in order to make room for baby pictures. I’d be losing a million health insurance forms from the pregnancy and God knows how many other important documents. The one that hurt the most, though, is that I had dozens and dozens of songs in various stages of completion. I have been working on a bunch of records at once, and I have a ton of older, unreleased songs and projects sitting around and waiting for the right situation. It was painful to even think about the sheer tonnage of lyrics, chords, artwork, voice memos, demos, and fully-recorded songs trapped on my pickled computer.
It took three weeks and three different computer shops, but I found out yesterday that the data has been recovered! It’s saved! Are there any baseball songs among the masses that just found salvation? Why don’t you ask this demo that I recorded in 2016 and which I was probably saving for a compilation of outtakes:
I head in to Manhattan to pick up an external hard drive containing my recovered data. The technician at the store is watching the Yankees pregame show on his computer. We chat about the AL East as he waits for someone from the backroom to bring out the hard drive. The Yankees are looking unbeatable in a division that’s looking much worse than expected, and Ben Rice and Cam Schlittler look like they’re going to be pinstripe-clad stars for a long time. But the party’s almost over. The owner of the shop walks out of the backroom instead. He tries to keep it under wraps because there’s a customer present, but he’s clearly furious that his employee is watching sports on the job. I wish I could’ve done something to keep this guy from getting in trouble, but it all happened so fast.
Regardless, it’s a huge day. It’s officially May, so we’re finally allowed to go crazy over what’s been going on, and a lot has been going on. Yordan Alvarez leads all position players in WAR. Maybe this will be the year he finally puts together a healthy season and snags an MVP, but the Astros, already nine games below .500, could cost him that shot. Rookie shortstops Kevin McGonigle and JJ Wetherholt are second and third. Rice and Elly De La Cruz, two young players who are hugely exciting for hugely different reasons, are fourth and fifth. Perhaps most improbable of all, Mike Trout is looking like Mike Trout again in sixth place.
To celebrate the miracle of the hard drive, here’s one more song that got saved. It’s from a new children’s album that I was really, really hoping to have finished before Derek Jr. arrived. I didn’t quite make it, and God knows when I’ll get to finish it now that she’s here. It’s really frustrating. I think this batch of songs contains some of the most fun stuff I’ve ever written, and it’s going to sit around for months at the very least, just waiting either for me to finally record the last few songs or for another computer disaster. Anyway, this is the one my wife likes best:
May 2
I should start by explaining that I am already close to broken before Derek Jr. wakes. I haven’t gotten much sleep recently. It has been a rough day. And night. She hasn’t slept as much as she needs to. At one point, I change her diaper five times in one hour. She’s ravenously hungry, so hungry that at one point we give in and feed her more than her stomach can handle. It’s a rookie mistake and it goes exactly how you’d expect. She finally goes to sleep, only to wake up a short time later because she’s spit up in her crib.
She goes down again, but awakes at 11:30 PM screaming for food. I change her diaper and haul her writhing body to the kitchen to retrieve a bottle from the fridge. The only game still going is the Mets and the Angels in Anaheim. We catch the top of the seventh as she eats (with interruptions for two more diaper changes, naturally). The Angels are up 3-1 thanks to a dominant performance from Reid Detmers, and Kurt Suzuki handles the situation like the old-school catcher he is. He rides the hot hand and leaves his ace out there for the seventh. (I guess Reid Detmers is an ace now. Maybe?) It’s a rookie mistake and it goes exactly how you’d expect. Double, single, sac fly. Another single and the game is tied. Two more singles and the bases are loaded. Suzuki finally decides that maybe Detmers isn’t his ace after all.
That’s all I remember, but Sam Bachman apparently wriggled out of the jam with a groundout and a strikeout, and the Angels eventually walked it off in the 10th on a single from Oswald Peraza. Presumably, Derek Jr. and I got some sleep somewhere in there too.
As is so often the case, I don’t have pictures of the hard times in the dead of night when my only companions are Derek Jr. and the pressing awareness of all the sleep that’s slowly slipping away. It’s too dark for pictures, and besides, no matter what camera settings I use, the pressing awareness of disappearing sleep doesn’t show up in photos. What I do have is pictures from the daytime, when everything is light and breezy:
And what a wild table it is. Brooks Raley has secretly been way better than I’d realized. I bring this up to illustrate how dominant Jason Adam has been over the past five years: By most measures, one of the best relievers in baseball. By ERA, the best reliever who’s had a remotely normal career. Adam’s breakout season was 2022, and since then he’s posted an ERA under 2.00 four times in five years, including 2026. His one down year: 2023, when he posted a 2.93 ERA in 54 1/3 innings. Most pitchers would kill to struggle like that. Read the rest of this entry »
Jesús Luzardo has been pitching better than you might think. The 28-year-old Philadelphia Phillies left-hander is an uninspiring 4-4 with a 4.56 ERA over 13 starts covering 73 innings, but his surface stats only tell part of the story. Luzardo has a 3.40 FIP — it was a sparkling 2.77 prior to his most recent outing — while his 26.7% hard-hit percentage ranks second lowest among qualified pitchers. Moreover, he misses his fair share of bats. His 25.6% strikeout rate ranks in the 73rd percentile, while his 30.7% whiff rate is in the 86th. Good fortune simply hasn’t been on his side. At .343, Luzardo has the highest BABIP among qualified pitchers.
The lefty’s lack of luck isn’t what I wanted to talk to him about when the Phillies visited Boston in mid-May. Rather, I was interested in how he has evolved as a pitcher since we first spoke nine years ago. At the time, Luzardo was a 19-year-old Oakland Athletics prospect who was playing for the New York-Penn League’s Vermont Lake Monsters. A lot of water having gone under the bridge, change was inevitable.
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David Laurila: We talked back in 2017 when you were getting your feet wet in short-season ball. Just how much have you changed as a pitcher since that time?
Jesús Luzardo: “I have a little bit different repertoire now. I’ve added some pitches. I’ve fine-tuned my mechanics. Along the way, I’ve just matured as a pitcher. I mean, I feel like I still have a long way to go, that I can get even better. I haven’t reached my full maturity as a pitcher. But I’m definitely a lot more polished. I know more about myself, what makes me me.” Read the rest of this entry »
Shane Baz features a five-pitch mix: a four-seam fastball and a knuckle curve being the most prominent in terms of usage. The Baltimore Orioles right-hander also throws a cutter, a curveball, and a changeup. And then there is the offering that reluctantly remains in his back pocket. Baz would love to one day unleash his knuckleball on major-league hitters.
“I threw one when I was a kid, up until I was probably 13 or 14,” explained Baz, who was a big Tim Wakefield fan while growing up in Tomball, Texas. “It was my only off-speed pitch up until then — I was just fastball/knuckleball — so I’ve got a lot of experience with it. I actually try to throw it in every bullpen [session]. I’ll definitely get it into a game, eventually. I just have to convince [pitching coach Drew] French to let me throw it. Maybe next spring training I’ll be able to mix some in and show him what it looks like in a game. I mean, it’s pretty good.”
Baz went on to say that that he threw his pet pitch with a three-finger grip — “fingers on the horseshoe, right by the label” — in his younger days, but once his hands got bigger he went to “the traditional two-finger knuckleball.” And while he basically stopped throwing it in games once he matured and developed more pitches, he’s never lost his affinity for baseball’s butterfly.
At 96.1 mph, Baz’s four-seamer is above average for velocity, but while extra oomph is advantageous for heaters, that isn’t the case for low-spin floaters.
“I can get it up to about 80, but those aren’t as good,” Baz said. “I think it’s best when it’s like 70 to 75. That’s when I have the best control of it and can keep the spin really low. When I’m trying to throw it hard, it starts spinning more and not having as much knuckle effect.”
His overall understanding of the pitch is impressive, and that includes spin properties. Read the rest of this entry »
