On Wednesday afternoon, Paul Skenes and Jacob Misiorowski met in one of the most exciting pitching matchups of the season so far. Skenes is the best pitcher in baseball, while Misiorowski is the hardest-throwing starter. It was must-see TV. Michael Baumann covered the event in the most Baumann way possible, focusing on its hugeness — literally. “As impressed as I was with this display of firepower, awe at the future of pitching was not my primary takeaway. No, watching Skenes and Misiorowski do battle made me feel uneasy,” Baumann wrote. “See, these guys are huge.” He followed those words up with one of my favorite paragraphs in the illustrious annals of baseball writing:

This is too big. Both of them. The modern baseball field was designed for Scots-Irish immigrants with bad childhood nutrition and kidney disease. When 5-foot-11 Honus Wagner was the biggest, strongest player in the league. If you told the founding fathers of baseball that one day ballplayers would get so big they couldn’t borrow pants from Dave Bautista… well first of all, I guess you’d have to explain Dave Bautista to Abner Doubleday and Alexander Cartwright. You get my point.

I’m not going to write about the Skenes-Misiorowski matchup. What more could I possibly add? Instead, I will begin this week’s mailbag by answering a question about Misiorowski’s earth-shattering velocity. Before I do, though, 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 next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Kutter Crawford’s mysterious wrist accident, then discuss Wander Franco’s conviction (14:58) and Walker Monfort’s promotion (19:57) before checking in (33:36) on the players and teams on pace to overperform or underperform their preseason projections the most at the precise halfway point of the season. Finally (1:12:44), they answer listener emails about “secret teams” in MLB, throwback, quiet games at the ballpark, and Denzel Clarke.

Audio intro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme 2”
Audio outro: Cory Brent, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to WhatIfSports offer page

Link to Crawford story 1
Link to Crawford story 2
Link to Sale accident
Link to Barmes story 1
Link to Barmes story 2
Link to Kent story
Link to injury cover-ups
Link to Franco story 1
Link to Franco story 2
Link to Monfort story
Link to halfway point
Link to Rays playoffs story
Link to projections comparison spreadsheet
Link to preseason projections
Link to on-pace projections
Link to preseason playoff odds
Link to listener emails database
Link to Belanger club
Link to most PA with low OPS+

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Mets. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret the Dodgers have been hurting for pitching because, well, their pitchers have been getting hurt. As during last October’s championship run, at times they’ve resorted to bullpen games, including a couple with Shohei Ohtani serving as an opener while rebuilding his pitch count following UCL reconstruction surgery. Taking a page from previous seasons under manager Dave Roberts, they’ve also snuck in a handful of innings from position players, not only when they’ve been on the short end of blowouts, but when they’ve led. Enrique Hernández has pitched five times, four in games in which the Dodgers thrashed opponents. Even with tighter rules in place for when teams can hand the ball to position players, the trend is nearing its height in popularity again following a recent dip.

It’s been nearly three years since I checked in on the trend of position players pitching. What was once a fun little beat to cover became less enjoyable as the practice proliferated to the point that Major League Baseball had to codify when teams could do it. Thankfully the occasions themselves are still appropriately light-hearted, full of giggles, eephus pitches, and batting-practice fastballs.

Here’s the evolution of the trend over the past decade, expressed as a percentage of total relief appearances:

Read the rest of this entry »

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Nico Hoerner hit a home run on Tuesday. It wasn’t exactly a tape measure shot – the ball left his bat at 97 mph and traveled a projected 364 feet, making it 31 feet shorter and nearly 8 mph softer than the average home run this season – but he certainly got all of it. Plenty of players have hit even softer and shorter homers. It was mostly noticeable because it was Hoerner’s first home run of the season.

Among qualified players, Hoerner ranks in the bottom 10 in hard-hit rate, barrel rate, and both max and 90th-percentile exit velocity. He’s a contact hitter, not a power hitter, and it works just fine. He’s running a 102 wRC+ this season, a mark he’s bettered in each of the last four seasons. Still, he’s hit at least seven home runs in each of the last three seasons, and he was due to get on the board at some point. You can’t say the same for Xavier Edwards.

Over three partial seasons in Miami, the 25-year-old Edwards has hit just one home run in 678 plate appearances. He’s the only qualified player this season with a barrel rate of 0% — that is to say he has not yet hit a barrel over his 291 plate appearances and 216 batted balls. I bring all this up because Hoerner’s home run leaves Edwards as the only player who currently has enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title without a single home run. He’s the only player on pace to join an increasingly exclusive fraternity: The Homerless Qualifier Club.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I got a chance to see many of my favorite baseball happenings this week: catchers making tough plays, exciting pitching matchups, and stars of the game at their absolute best. We also have plenty of goofy but delightful coincidences, just as Five Things patron saint Zach Lowe intended. A quick programming note: I’ll be on vacation, a nice restorative pre-deadline trip, for the next week and change. Enjoy baseball in the meantime – it’s a wonderful time of year for it.

1. Athletic Catchers
It’s amazing how much baseball knowledge your brain absorbs without actively thinking about it. For example, when you see an outfielder throw the ball home to cut down a runner trying to score on a single, you’ll immediately anticipate that the batter who hit that single might try to advance to second base. You might not even realize you’re thinking this. It’s just the natural timing of the sport. Long throw, cutoff man missed — how in the world is the catcher going to attempt a tag and then find a way to get the ball down to second base? It just doesn’t happen.

Or, well, it’s not supposed to happen. But Carlos Narváez doesn’t care what heuristics are stored in your brain:

What a weird play. The Red Sox correctly played to prevent the runner from scoring, and that let Wilmer Flores round first and get a great look at the play at the plate to see if he should advance. Right around this point, Narváez seemed to have no shot at throwing out Flores:

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I’ve had to re-evaluate a strongly held belief. It’s an important thing for responsible adults to do every now and then; even if the opinion wasn’t wrong at the time, conditions can change. And I’m not too proud to identify such a situation now.

Here’s the old take, the one I’m revising now: Jeremy Peña is the most overrated player in baseball. At the time, it made sense. But it definitely doesn’t now. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Dicky, er, Richard Lovelady’s short tenure with the Mets, round one of Paul Skenes vs. Jacob Misiorowski, the nature of modern pitcher’s duels, a Jacob-related fun fact, updates on Juan Soto and Jo Adell, revisiting childhood favorites through the lens of advanced stats, and public funding for the Diamondbacks, then (47:14) discuss fans crossing the line, player reprisals, and (1:08:07) Fernando Tatis Jr. suing Big League Advance.

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

Link to MLBTR on Lovelady
Link to Dietrich call-up
Link to Baumann on Skenes vs. Miz
Link to Jake/Jacob fact
Link to Opta interview
Link to Miz fact
Link to shutouts stat
Link to Wilson Fortnite story
Link to Diego Segui news
Link to David’s PED admission
Link to Diamondbacks funding story
Link to Field of Schemes on Arizona
Link to Marte story
Link to Santana story 1
Link to Santana story 2
Link to Santana story 3
Link to Duran story
Link to Hendriks story
Link to MLB harassment story
Link to NHL harassment story
Link to Francisco story
Link to Simpsons clip
Link to AP on BLA
Link to Calcaterra on BLA
Link to BLA EW interview
Link to FG post on BLA
Link to Taylor play 1
Link to Taylor play 2
Link to Taylor play 3

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