This is not the company the Red Sox hoped they’d be keeping. When they face off against the Brewers tonight, they’ll be trying to avoid joining the Rockies, White Sox, Pirates, and Rays as the only teams in baseball with three separate losing streaks of at least four games this season. Boston currently sits fourth in the AL East and 2 1/2 games out of the final Wild Card spot. According to our playoff odds, the Red Sox have seen their postseason probability fall by more than half since Opening Day, dropping from 56.2% to 25.3%. Only the Braves, Orioles, and Rangers have had a bigger decline.

Boston’s most recent win also provided its biggest loss of the season thus far. When Alex Bregman signed back in February, there was every reason to believe that the Green Monster would be his best friend. His game is designed around lifting the ball to the pull side, and he’s already bounced five doubles and a single off the wall on the fly, to go with three homers launched over it. But the Monster betrayed Bregman on Friday. In the first game of a would-be doubleheader against the Orioles (the second game was postponed, and Saturday became a doubleheader instead), Bregman scorched a single that short-hopped the wall, but as he chopped his steps to back off an aggressive turn, something looked off.

“I was rounding first base and digging to go to second and I kind of felt my quad grab, so I didn’t continue running to second base for the double,” Bregman said. “I just kind of stopped and came back to the bag so I wouldn’t make it any worse. After I felt it, I knew I needed to come out and see the trainer.” Bregman left the game with right quad tightness, telling reporters that he initially feared that the injury might be more severe, but that he felt more positive after the game and hoped he could avoid an IL trip. “Hopefully, I sleep good and it feels great,” he said. “We’ll just see how it presents and take the next step there, just kind of follow the training staff, their lead. But right now, it’s just quad tightness.”

Bregman didn’t sleep good. Pain from the quad kept him up during the night, and an MRI on Saturday morning revealed a “pretty severe” strain. Bregman compared it to the left quad strain he suffered in 2021. That strain kept him out 69 days, from June 17 to April 25. In case the Red Sox are looking for consolation, Bregman looked like himself upon his return that season, running 115 wRC+ before the injury and a 112 wRC+ (with better exit velocity numbers) after he came back. But that’s cold comfort. With a 160 wRC+ this season, Bregman has been the team’s best player, and he’ll be out for at least two months. Read the rest of this entry »

In Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers don’t lack for superstars with potent bats, but so far this season, Will Smith is swinging — and, notably, not swinging — just about as well as any of them. The two-time All-Star catcher is off to an exceptionally hot start, particularly with runners in scoring position, and the Dodgers recently shook up their roster with an eye towards helping him maintain a high level of production later into the season.

The 30-year-old Smith is hitting .333/.456/.511, good enough to lead the NL in on-base percentage and to rank third in wRC+ (175) behind only Freeman (191) and Ohtani (182). Often batting ahead of either Max Muncy or Michael Conforto — both of whom have struggled thus far this year — he’s been pitched around to some degree, and he’s shown exceptional plate discipline:

Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! I hope you all had great holiday weekends here. The weather in NYC was great, allowing for a lot of outdoor time — I avoided Friday night’s rain at Citi Field and caught Dodgers-Mets the next night. Wrote about Will Smith and Dalton Rushing in a piece that will be up soon.

12:03

Jay Jaffe: On Friday, I wrote about the Astros’ Christian Walker (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/christian-walker-hasnt-fixed-the-astros-fi…), who hit a walker-off home run yesterday. (sorry, not sorry)

12:05

Jay Jaffe: if you missed “Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe, and the Hall of Fame” — the SABR roundtable I did with Rose biographer Keith O’Brien, ESPN reporter Don Van Natta Jr., and Black Sox expert Jacob Pomrenke, it’s now up on YouTube here

12:05

Jay Jaffe: and with that, let’s chat…

12:07

Jay Jaffe: no sooner had I written about a set of twists and turns in the Red Sox infield — Trevor Story’s slump, Kristian Campbell’s work at first base, and Marcelo Mayer’s work at second (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/trevor-storys-slump-and-the-never-ending-s…) than Bregman got injured, leading the Sox to try Mayer out at third.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re almost through the first two months of the season, and playoff races in both leagues are shaping up to be pretty entertaining this summer. All but three teams in the AL are within three games of a postseason berth, which makes for a very crowded field. The NL is a little more stratified, but there are four Wild Card hopefuls hanging four or five games back in the standings.

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.

All power rankings stats, including team records, are updated through Sunday’s games. The rest of the information below is current as of Tuesday morning. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2024, Tarik Skubal won the American League Cy Young. It was unanimous, and deservedly so. However many superlatives you can think of for his production, he probably deserved them. He shouldered a heavy workload, combined devastating movement and velocity with great command, and led the Tigers to the playoffs in the bargain. It’s the kind of year that stands as the best season of many players’ careers.

That might sound like I’m calling Skubal a one hit wonder, but I’m absolutely not. We projected him to be the best pitcher in baseball before the season started. We also projected him to strike out fewer batters, walk more, allow more home runs, and post a higher ERA and FIP than he did in 2024. You can be great and still worse than Skubal was in 2024. In fact, almost all great pitchers are worse than he was last year. It’s hard to be that good!

You’ll note that I didn’t say it’s impossible to be that good. That’s because, uh, have you seen Tarik Skubal pitch this year? His statistics sound almost made up. He’s the class of baseball, very clearly the best pitcher in the game this year. Of course, if you’ve kept up with our leaderboards and watched highlights, I’m not telling you anything new. But on the occasion of the best game of Skubal’s career, I thought it would be fun to dig into his marvelous season and just admire it for a bit. Tarik Skubal is everything, everywhere, all at once. His 2025 is the best in every way it’s possible to be the best. We don’t always have to wonder whether something is sustainable. Sometimes we can just appreciate it. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, an article titled “Executive’s View: How Have Analytics Impacted a General Manager’s Job?” was published here at FanGraphs. Featured were Ross Atkins, Brian Cashman, Jerry Dipoto, and John Mozeliak, with the foursome sharing their perspectives on this ever-evolving aspect of their shared position.

Shortly after the piece ran, two people suggested David Stearns as a followup interview subject. That’s understandable. Now in his second season as the president of baseball operations for the New York Mets, the 40-year-old Ivy League product has two decades of experience within the industry, almost all of it in front offices.

A summer intern with the Pittsburgh Pirates prior to graduating from Harvard University in 2007, Stearns subsequently worked in MLB’s central office, then served as co-director of baseball operations with Cleveland, became an assistant general manager with the Houston Astros, and, in 2015, was hired by the Milwaukee Brewers as general manager. His data-driven approach was a common thread throughout. Moreover, he has remained true to his analytic bent since assuming his current position following the 2023 season.

Stearns was at Fenway Park this past week when the Red Sox hosted the team whose front office he now leads, so I took the opportunity to get his perspective on the subject at hand. Here is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

———

David Laurila: I’ll start with the question I asked Atkins, Cashman, Dipoto, and Mozeliak: How has the continued growth of analytics impacted the job?

David Stearns: “Over the span of my career, we’ve been inundated with more and more sources of information — information sources that are increasingly granular in nature, increasingly have to do with the processes of playing baseball, and not necessarily the results or outcomes of playing baseball. Those lead towards more and more complex algorithms and models that require greater numbers of analysts, and really smart, creative people to have in a front office. So, one of the greatest changes is just the size of the departments within baseball. The information has grown to such a enormous extent that we need more and more people to manage the information. That’s the first thing that comes to my mind. And then we need to make all that information actionable.” Read the rest of this entry »

Spencer Schwellenbach had just two big-league games under his belt when he was featured here at FanGraphs early last June. The most recent of them had come a few days earlier at Fenway Park, where he’d allowed six runs and failed to get out of the fifth inning. Two starts into his career, the Atlanta Braves right-hander was 0-2 with an 8.38 ERA.

Those initial speed bumps quickly became a thing of the past. Schwellenbach allowed three runs over his next two outings, and by season’s end he had made 21 appearances and logged a 3.35 ERA and a 3.29 FIP. Counting this years’s 10 starts, the 24-year-old Saginaw, Michigan native has a 3.41 ERA and a 3.41 FIP over 185 innings. Moreover, he has a 23.5% strikeout rate and just a 4.7% walk rate. Relentlessly attacking the zone with a six-pitch mix, Schwellenbach has firmly established himself as a cog in Atlanta’s rotation.

On the eve of his returning to the mound in Boston last Sunday, I asked the 2021 second-round pick out of the University of Nebraska what has changed in the 11-plus months since we first spoke.

“Honestly, when we talked last year I was just throwing the ball to the catcher,” claimed Schwellenbach, who was a shortstop in his first two collegiate seasons and then a shortstop/closer as a junior. “It was really only my second year as just a pitcher, so I was very young-minded with how I pitched. Now that I’ve got 30 or so starts, I have an idea of what I’m trying to do out there. Being around guys like Max Fried, Charlie Morton, and Chris Sale last year was obviously big, too. I learned a lot from them, as well as from [pitching coach] Rick Kranitz.”

Morton, who is now with the Baltimore Orioles, helped him improve the quality of his curveball. Their mid-season conversation was the genesis of a more efficient grip. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Rockies being so bad that mostly innocuous stories about them now seem like examples of organizational incompetence, a wild loss by a Rockies affiliate, and why recent terrible teams have been so bad, then (36:56) answer listener emails about catchers framing poorly on purpose, penalizing hitters when their bats make contact with catchers, whether the draft should be helping the worst teams more, and a potential sac-fly tactic in a walk-off situation, plus a Stat Blast (1:17:59) about runners making up for bad baserunning plays, pinch running too late, failed team attempts to reach .500 for the first time, and a piece of baseball wall art, followed (1:43:28) by postscript updates.

Audio intro: Luke Lillard, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Kite Person, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to WhatIfSports offer page

Link to worst 50-game starts
Link to Dollander call-up story
Link to Dollander IL stint
Link to Gelb tweet
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Link to walk-off story 1
Link to walk-off story 2
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Link to FARTSLAM post 1
Link to FARTSLAM post 2
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When the Astros signed Christian Walker to a three-year, $60 million deal in December, it felt like a reasonable solution to a longstanding problem. The Astros have rarely gotten good production from their first basemen in the past decade, and while Walker hasn’t quite been All-Star caliber, in recent years he’s generally provided solid offense with exceptional defense for the position. So far this season, he’s struggled mightily, which unfortunately for the Astros has come at a time when other key players have also failed to hit, and the rotation has weathered numerous injuries as well.

Last year, Walker hit .251/.335/.468 (119 wRC+) with 26 homers and 3.0 WAR for the Diamondbacks, while over the past three seasons, he averaged 32 homers, a 120 wRC+, and 3.6 WAR; his 2024 shortfalls mainly owed to his missing a month due to an oblique strain. Even with time missed, that 2024 production looks like the second coming of Jeff Bagwell next to the .226/.291/.360 (87 wRC+) performance of Astros first basemen last year, with 18 homers but -1.4 WAR, a total that was somehow not quite as bad as the first basemen of the Rockies and Reds. Starter José Abreu crashed and burned and was released in mid-June despite only being about halfway through his three-year, $58 million deal. Thereafter, Jon Singleton did the bulk of the first base work, sharing the job with Yainer Diaz and Victor Caratini on days when one or the other wasn’t catching. It wasn’t great, but it at least stopped the bleeding in that Abreu alone produced -1.5 WAR, while the rest — a group that also included Zach Dezenzo, Mauricio Dubón, and three players who made a single appearance at the position — netted 0.1 WAR.

As Michael Baumann pointed out when Walker signed in December, first base has been a multiyear problem for the Astros. During the 2022-24 span, only three teams had lower WARs at a single position — right field for the White Sox, Rockies, and Pirates — than the Astros’ -2.7 WAR at first. Over the past decade, Yuli Gurriel was the only Astros first baseman to exceed 2.0 WAR in a single season (he did it twice), and five times in the past six seasons, the team’s regular or co-regular first baseman finished with negative WAR. Read the rest of this entry »