The Chicago White Sox have two of baseball’s most promising pitching prospects. Noah Schultz, a 22-year-old left-hander who was drafted 26th overall in 2022 out of an Oswego, Illinois high school is currently no. 22 on The Board with a 55 FV. Hagen Smith, himself a 22-year-old southpaw, was drafted fifth overall in 2024 out of the University of Arkansas and is no. 81 with a 50 FV. Each possesses a power arm, and both have a lot to prove in the forthcoming season — albeit for different reasons. Schultz was limited to 73 innings this year due to injury, while Smith dealt with command issues and lacks a solid third pitch.

I asked White Sox executive vice president/general manager Chris Getz about the young pitchers during last week’s GM Meetings in Las Vegas.

“For Noah, it was an inconsistent year,” Getz said of the 6-foot-10 Schultz, who struggled to the tune of a 4.68 ERA between Double-A Birmingham and Triple-A Charlotte. “Much of that was related to his knee — he had patellar tendonitis — and he needed be to shut down. He’s doing [physical therapy] and strengthening right now. I anticipate that once the knee is completely healed, once it is healthy and completely strong, we are going to get the version of Noah that made him a top prospect in our game. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Texas Rangers.

Batters

Finishing the season with an exactly .500 record seems a fitting fate for the 2025 Texas Rangers, a team that spent most of the year jumping into and out of the playoff race, until their demise was eventually sealed by an eight-game losing streak in September. The oldest team in baseball this year, the Rangers got a lot of production out of their core performers, but a pitching swoon in August and September, and holes at the offense-heavy positions, left the team short of its goal of getting back to the playoffs and grabbing a second World Series trophy. That 2023 championship campaign is the only season in the last nine in which Texas finished with a winning record. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben, Meg, Michael Baumann, Ben Clemens, and Chris Hanel congregate to review the results of the 2025 minor league free agent draft (11:45) and recap their 40 bold preseason predictions (19:01), following quick games of “2025 College World Series Starting Pitching Matchup or First Amendment Supreme Court Case” (2:58) and “Cedar Rapids Kernel or Character in the Star Wars Universe” (7:42).

Audio intro: The Shirey Brothers, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Daniel Leckie, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to free agent draft episode
Link to draft history
Link to preseason predictions episode
Link to predictions game history
Link to EWStats site
Link to EWStats on Bluesky
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Link to Chris’s website
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I don’t want to overstate the value of raw financial power in baseball. The Mets spent more than $320 million on player salaries, not counting luxury tax penalties, and they finished four games over .500. Money can’t buy happiness, or even a spot in the playoffs.

It can, however, buy you a closer and a major upgrade to your bench. So the Braves demonstrated Wednesday, when they re-signed closer Raisel Iglesias for one year at $16 million, and swapped utility infielders with the Astros, sending Nick Allen west in a 1-for-1 trade for Mauricio Dubón.

The Braves went into last season as one of the favorites to win the NL pennant only to tumble to fourth place behind the Marlins (the Marlins!) after befalling a series of farces and calamities that recall A Serious Man. Jurickson Profar got popped for PEDs, Spencer Strider and Ozzie Albies lost their juice, half the roster got hurt, it was a huge mess. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

For four years now, I’ve been updating you on the changing contours of the strike zone. By my count, this is the 10th installment in that series and the sixth specifically about the accuracy of ball-strike calls on the edges of the zone. With the implementation of the ABS challenge system in 2026, these updates will no doubt start to look a bit different. This is our last umpire accuracy update of the pre-ABS era, so let’s take stock of where we are at the end.

After a tiny dip in 2024, umpires were back on track in 2025, posting a record-high accuracy rate of 92.83% overall. In fact, 2024 was the only year in the pitch-tracking era in which umpires didn’t set a record for accuracy. However, this latest record came with a bit of controversy. Early in the season, pitchers and catchers picked up on the fact that the strike zone seemed to have shrunk. The league tightened up the standards that it used to grade umpires, reducing the size of the buffer zone around the edges of the zone. As a result, accuracy shot up specifically on pitches outside the zone, even more specifically, on pitches just above the top of the zone, causing pitchers and catchers to complain that they were losing the high strike.

This graph reminds us of a couple facts that might just be so obvious that we rarely think about them. First, the vast majority of takes come on pitches outside the strike zone. Of course they do; those are the pitches you’re not supposed to swing at. This year, for example, 68% of the calls umpires had to make came on pitches outside the strike zone. Second, it’s easier to identify balls than it is to identify strikes. Of course it is; the area outside the zone is a lot bigger than the area inside the zone. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Detroit Tigers.

Batters

This year was like two very different seasons in one for the Detroit Tigers. Through July 8, their high-water mark in 2025, the Tigers had the best record in baseball, and held an imposing 14 game lead over the Twins and Royals. Over the final three months of the season, however, they barely played .400 ball, and won less often than any of the White Sox, Pirates, or Nationals. While the threats from the Twins and the Royals didn’t prove to be fatal, the Guardians made up a 15 1/2 game gap to grab the division at the last moment, and the Tigers just barely snuck into the postseason on the strength of a tiebreaker with the Astros. By comparison, the humiliations of the 1978 Red Sox and 1969 Cubs (nine games) were minor. While the Tigers were able to get revenge against the Guardians in the Wild Card round, they were bounced by the Mariners in a 15-inning Game 5 nail-biter in the ALDS. But in what might end up being Tarik Skubal’s final season with the team, the Tigers don’t have much time to brood on the summer of 2025. Read the rest of this entry »

“OK, but what if you could steal first base?” is surely a thought that’s occurred to just about every baseball fan. We’ve all seen players come up who look like absolute studs, except for one thing: They can’t hit. It’s only one skill, but it’s the most important skill for a position player.

I remember having a simply overpowering version of this thought in the press box at Camden Yards during the 2024 ALDS. Maikel Garcia’s tools sizzled and crackled with potential. He’s stolen 37 bases in 39 regular-season attempts. His defense at third base was very good, good enough to play shortstop on a team that had not been built around the best shortstop on the planet. Garcia played 157 regular-season games for the Royals in 2024, and he was about as good a player as you can be with a single-digit home run total and a .281 OBP.

Those two headline numbers do limit one’s potential, unfortunately.

In October, Garcia poked enough grounders through the infield to eke out a .318 batting average in Kansas City’s six playoff games, teasing us with the hope of what could have been if he just learned how to hit. Read the rest of this entry »

Hall of Fame season is underway, and in addition to working my way through the eight candidates on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committtee ballot, I’ve gotten a start on the annual BBWAA ballot. With the latter, it’s time to launch what’s become a yearly tradition at FanGraphs. In the spirit of our annual free agent contract crowdsourcing, we’re inviting registered users to fill out their own virtual Hall of Fame ballots using a cool gizmo that Sean Dolinar built a few years ago. I’m also going to use this page to lay out a tentative schedule for the remainder of the series, as well as links to the profiles that have been published.

To participate in the crowdsourcing, you must be signed in, and you may only vote once. While you don’t have to be a FanGraphs Member to do so, this is a perfect time to mention that buying a Membership does help to fund the development of cool tools like this — and it makes a great holiday gift! To replicate the actual voting process, you may vote for anywhere from zero to 10 players; ballots with more than 10 votes won’t be counted. You may change your ballot until the deadline, which is December 31, 2025, the same as that of the actual BBWAA voters, who have to schlep their paper ballot to the mailbox. Read the rest of this entry »

I was in Hawaii this past weekend, taking a nice vacation to wind down from the end of the baseball season, when I found myself thinking about intercept points. Weird? Overly baseball obsessed? Maybe. But in my defense, a kid at the pool kept swinging at a Wiffle ball almost hilariously late, spraying it “foul” every time. “Oh look, the next Luis Arraez,” I thought, before going back to my umbrella-adorned drink. But that stuck with me, and when I got home, a database query leapt out of my head fully formed, like Athena after Zeus’ headache.

Where is the optimal place to make contact with the ball? It depends on who’s swinging. Statcast measures every single swing’s contact point relative to a hitter’s center of mass, and that data clearly shows that there are many ways to succeed. That’s always stymied me as I’ve looked into swing path data. But that small child gave me an idea when he got off the best swing I’d seen all day, a Wiffle ball line drive that would have been a screamer down the left field foul line (he was batting lefty). Because his normal swing was so late, his best contact was ever so slightly less late. What if I bucketed hitters based on their own swings to look for swing timing clues?

I took every batter who produced 300 or more batted balls (foul balls or balls in play) in 2025. For each of those hitters, I took aggregate statistics for all of their results, then also split their batted balls into three groups: deepest contact point, middle contact point, and farthest forward contact point. You can think of it as late, on time, and early, adjusted for that player’s swing. The later you start your swing, the more you “let it travel,” the deeper your contact point relative to your center of mass. The earlier you start, the more you “get out in front,” the farther forward you make contact. Read the rest of this entry »