Dan Szymborski: I’m here, sorry, got caught up in Hulk Hogan news!
12:12
Justin: Hi Dan, what is it about someone like Brandon Marsh that allows him to consistently have a high BABIP?
12:12
Dan Szymborski: Solidly above average speed, while he’s not a grounder machine, he hits a lot of *hard* grounders
12:14
Mitchell: Seems every article on deadline trade candidates includes Ryan McMahon. I get the guy packs a good glove, but he hits like a second division 2nd baseman, and that’s playing half his games in Denver. Why do we think he’s a desirable asset for a team trying to win?
12:14
Dan Szymborski: Theres’ the hope he got his crap together after an AWFUL April. He’s actually been solid since
12:14
Ryan: What lower level prospects are you intrigued by who no one is talking about?
There is a time in life when you expect the world to always be full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of space where the memories are.
– Helen Macdonald
On Tuesday night, Rich Hill made his first major league start of the season and his first ever as a Kansas City Royal. Although he took the loss, the game lived up to its billing as a feel-good story. The 45-year-old lefty went five innings against the second-best offense in baseball, allowing one earned run and two unearned. He walked two Cubs, struck out one looking, induced 11 groundballs, and left the game with a 1.80 ERA. Stylistically, it was a vintage Rich Hill performance (from a vintage Rich Hill), featuring not-so-fastballs, loopy curves, and dropdown frisbee sliders. It was also a vintage Hill performance from a sensorial perspective, in that it involved a whole lot of strange human sounds.
I mentioned Hill’s vocalizations when I wrote about the minor league deal he signed with the Royals back in May. They’re right there in my mental map of a Hill start. But memory just can’t do justice to some things. It fades. It falters. Even the events that imprint upon us most deeply tend to loosen their hold with time. It’s cruel, but it’s for the best. If our memories could transport us exactly to who we were when we felt that first rush of puppy love, heard that one perfect song, tasted that one croissant in Paris, would we even bother to seek out new experiences, or would we just live within the old ones and keep playing the hits? All of this is to say that I thought I was prepared for the Rich Hill experience. I tuned into the game Tuesday night expecting to hear the man grunt. But then I actually heard the man grunt. I was not prepared. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh is on vacation, so Meg asked me to keep his seat warm for one episode of the podcast. And she was even kind enough to pick out a listener email that would give us something to talk about. I’ll skip over some extraneous context; if you want to hear the whole question go listen to the episode. The question comes down to this: If I were given the power to negotiate on the MLBPA’s behalf in the next CBA negotiation, what would it take for me to agree to a salary cap? Read the rest of this entry »
As is tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the lead-up to the trade deadline to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at the players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.
For those of you who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2026-2030, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2030 (assuming the player is under contract or team control for those seasons). Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2024 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his technical wizardry. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all of the players who have been ranked up to this point.
A note on the rankings: As we ascend towards the top of the list, the tiers matter more and more. There are clear gaps in value. Don’t get too caught up on what number a player is, because who they’re grouped with is a more important indicator. Today, the rankings pivot around Tarik Skubal. The players listed ahead of Skubal belong in a different tier than the players behind him; I’m a lot less picky about how you’d order them within those groups. Additionally, Skubal himself has some flex room, as I’ll explain in the blurbs. This high on the list, though, everyone is great. There are no injury rebounds, no stars having awful years. Everyone here is playing well right now, and everyone except Skubal will be around for a while too. As I mentioned in the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, I’ll indicate tier breaks between players where appropriate, both in their capsules and bolded in the table at the end of the piece.
Andrew Abbott is establishing himself as a top-shelf starter. Now in his third big league season, the 26-year-old southpaw has a record of 8-1 to go with a 2.13 ERA and a 3.42 FIP over 97 1/3 innings. Moreover, he represented the Cincinnati Reds in last week’s All-Star Game. An honorable mention in Ben Clemens’ ongoing Trade Value series, Abbott merits attention — and he’s been receiving his fair share of it here at FanGraphs. Jake Mailhot wrote about him in mid-May, and Michael Baumann followed up by doing so in mid-June; Baumann also covered Abbott as a rookie in this piece from August 2023.
Accuse us of being AbbottGraphs if you’d like, but the University of Virginia product is getting yet another write-up courtesy of yours truly. Being a big fan of crafty lefties, I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to talk to Abbott — as well as to others about Abbott — when the Reds visited Fenway Park earlier this month.
Not surprisingly, his self-assessment pretty much matched what I’ve read and seen.
“I’m not an overpowering guy,” acknowledged Abbott, whose 92.4-mph fastball velocity ranks in the 21st percentile. “Mixing speeds and getting guys off balance has always been the name of the game with me. That and staying in the zone as much as possible. I also take pride in being available, being able to throw 100 pitches every fifth day.” Read the rest of this entry »
Every baseball season, we see something unexpected. “You can’t predict baseball,” in the words of an axiom from a decade ago. And it’s true. But because baseball occurs in such great volume, over such a long period of time, unexpected things can happen in different ways, and at different rates. Sometimes, an overachieving team picks up one extra game every two weeks, gently floating to the top of the standings with minimal fuss. We get drip-fed this surprise gradually, like an irrigation system designed not to drown your basil plants.
And sometimes you fall into a lake.
On either side of the All-Star break, the Milwaukee Brewers won 11 games in a row. Even after that streak ended with a paper-thin 1-0 loss in Seattle on Tuesday, they are the hottest team in baseball right now. They’re red hot. No, white hot. They are, to quote the poet, so hot it’s hurting everyone’s feelings. Read the rest of this entry »
As is tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the lead-up to the trade deadline to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at the players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.
For those of you who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2026-2030, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2030 (assuming the player is under contract or team control for those seasons). Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2024 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his technical wizardry. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all of the players who have been ranked up to this point.
A note on the rankings: As we ascend towards the top of the list, the tiers matter more and more. There are clear gaps in value. Don’t get too caught up on what number a player is, because who they’re grouped with is a more important indicator. The biggest split so far in the rankings is between 20-29 and 31-50, the Ketel Marte pivot. I think that all the players I’m discussing today fall in a relatively narrow band, though with meaningfully different risks and upsides. I’ll note places where I disagreed meaningfully with people I spoke with in calibrating this list, and I’ll also note players whose value was the subject of disagreement among my contacts. As I mentioned in the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, I’ll indicate tier breaks between players where appropriate, both in their capsules and bolded in the table at the end of the piece.
The midseason is a good point to catch up on one’s mistakes, to see where reality has crushed your predictions. We’re nearly half a year from the most recent iteration of the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects, and with a flurry of trades likely to happen in the next week, it seems to be time to check in on how the algorithms which have seized my life and crushed all traces of humanity ZiPS projection system is doing in the prospnostications for 2025.
For each of the top 100 prospects, I’m including a chart of their 2025 minor league translations and how their 2026-2030 WAR has changed since February. Last year was my first midseason review of the prospect list, and some of my charts just made things confusing, so I’m making them less dense/opaque this time around, in the hopes of communicating the data better. The translations and projections are through Monday’s games. As a quick reminder, ZiPS ranks prospects by the average of their 20th-percentile and 80th-percentile career WAR projections, and explicitly leaves out players for which it has nothing to bring to the table, so no high school hitters or pitchers without professional experience.
ZiPS is naturally a bit down on Carson Williams given his struggles offensively this year, but he still has the glove, and a 102 wRC+ in Triple-A for an excellent defensive shortstop isn’t so bad that it would send him tumbling down the ranks. If February ZiPS had known about the first half of the 2025 season, it would have had Roman Anthony hurdle over Williams, Roki Sasaki, and Samuel Basallo to be the no. 1 prospect in baseball. Unlike Williams, Basallo has been very good, it’s just that Anthony has been even better. Read the rest of this entry »
Meg Rowley and guest co-host Michael Baumann discuss the Brewers’ recent win streak, what’s contributing to their success, and the general state of the National League playoff field and what it might mean for the trade deadline. Then they consider the worst ways to lose (and win) a baseball game on the back of the Phillies’ walk-off no-swing catcher’s interference versus the Red Sox and discuss the merits of various sauces. Lastly, in response to a listener email, they contemplating what, if anything, they could see the players asking for in exchange for a salary cap in the next CBA negotiation, leading Michael to offer a bold proposal. Lastly, with the Tour de France underway, Michael tells Meg about the effects that PED use had on the world of cycling and its fans.
Yesterday, I wrote up the news that David Robertson had signed with the Phillies. In my (and, I assume, everyone else’s) favorite paragraph, I mentioned that several teams had reportedly been in on the veteran right-hander. Ken Rosenthal and Jon Heyman combined to mention interest from the Mets, Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, and “many others.” Depending on your perspective, this marked either the last We Tried of the 2025 free agency period or the first of the trade deadline period. As a quick refresher, We Tried is a catch-all term for any time we find out, after a player has ended up with one team, that another team also tried to land them. In its purest form, the We Tried is a front office’s bid for partial credit, an attempt to curry favor with the fans by demonstrating that it is trying to build a winner for them. I spent the offseason documenting each and every one in a disturbingly comprehensive spreadsheet.
I didn’t make a meal of this yesterday, mainly because Robertson’s free agency was a real outlier. The offseason ended months ago. He’s a 40-year-old reliever who didn’t get an offer he loved, so he stayed in shape and spent the spring hanging out with his family, then held a workout for teams on Saturday in order to sign before the deadline. Lots of teams were in on him and lots of teams showed up to watch him pitch, so word of who was there was bound to come out at some point. It definitely represented a We Tried, but it didn’t seem earth-shattering, and it was by no means a typical one. Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Szymborski: I’m here, sorry, got caught up in Hulk Hogan news!
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