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A year ago Sunday, Anthony Volpe went down in a heap after diving for a grounder in the 5-6 hole. The Yankee shortstop felt a pop in his non-throwing shoulder, but he stayed in the game, and imaging didn’t turn up anything untoward.

At least not in the moment. The shoulder nagged Volpe for the rest of the season, and after the Yankees’ ALDS loss to Toronto, he went in for surgery to repair a partially torn labrum. Shoulder surgery has a long timeline for rehab — even when performed on the non-throwing shoulder of a position player — so Volpe missed all of spring training. He reported to Double-A for a rehab assignment on April 14, and when his 20 days were up, the Yankees activated him… and optioned him straight to Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Read the rest of this entry »

You’re forgiven if you’re not exactly familiar with Diamondbacks utilityman Ildemaro Vargas. Though he’s spent parts of 10 seasons in the majors, the switch-hitting 34-year-old has been designated for assignment seven times, suited up for five different teams, and has never played more than 97 major league games in a season. From 2017–25, he netted a grand total of 1.5 WAR in 460 games, reaching 1.0 WAR in a season just once, in 2022. Yet Vargas just finished the hot streak of his life, one that made a bit of history. His 4-for-4 performance against the Cubs on Friday afternoon pushed his batting average to .404 and marked his 27th consecutive game with a hit dating back to last season, the longest in the majors in seven years and the longest ever by a Venezuela-born player; meanwhile, his 24-game streak to start the season is the second longest of the integration era. Vargas was finally held hitless on Saturday, but maintained a lofty perch on the batting leaderboards after a 1-for-4 performance on Sunday.

Vargas ended the weekend hitting .382/.406/.657, good enough to lead the majors in batting average and the National League in slugging percentage, thanks in part to his six home runs — a total that’s already matched his career high, set with the Diamondbacks in 2019. His 195 wRC+ leads the NL as well, while his on-base percentage ranks fourth in the league and his 1.5 WAR is virtually tied for seventh. Small sample though it may be, that’s a remarkable performance coming from a player who did not figure to be central to the plans of the Diamondbacks after hitting a meager .270/.292/.383 (85 wRC+) in 38 games and 121 plate appearances for the team last year.

Vargas was originally signed by the Cardinals out of Venezuela in 2008, so this is his 19th season of professional baseball. He’s now on his fourth stint with Arizona, which first signed him out of the independent Atlantic League in 2015, after he had been released by St. Louis. He reached the majors for a couple sips of coffee in 2017, and continued to shuffle between the minors and the majors until being DFA’d and traded to the Twins in August 2020. From there, in rapid succession, he bounced to the Cubs (2020), and then to the Pirates and back to the Diamondbacks (both 2021). He split 2022 between the Cubs and Nationals, the latter of whom kept him around through the ’24 season and gave him more regular play than any other team. The Diamondbacks signed him to a minor league deal in late January 2025; he exercised an opt-out in late May but quickly re-signed with the team. Four weeks later — after just 10 games in the majors — he was hit on the right foot by a curveball, fracturing his fifth metatarsal and sidelining him for about eight weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago Cubs. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the sixth 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 »

When David Morgan was profiled in last year’s rankings of the San Diego Padres’ top prospects, it was pointed out that the 26-year-old right-hander had joined the organization as a non-drafted free agent in 2022. Moreover, he’d barely taken the mound. A two-way player at Hope International University — an NAIA school in Fullerton, California — Morgan had thrown just nine-and-a-third innings. At the time he signed, he was playing for the Portland Pickles in the summer collegiate West Coast League (for which Rob Neyer is the commissioner).

Morgan’s backstory sets him apart him from his MLB brethren, but what about from a pitch-specific standpoint? Are there any differentiating characteristics?

“My ability to pick stuff up and kind of run with it is probably the most unique thing about me,” said Morgan, who made his big-league debut last May and has since logged a 3.41 ERA and a 4.15 FIP over 52 appearances comprising 60-and-two-thirds frames. “Last year, when I had to throw a sinker, it wasn’t really a learning process. It was in-between innings. I came into the dugout, grabbed a new grip, and threw it the next inning.”

The outing, his sixth in the majors, came on June 10 with the Padres holding a commanding late-inning lead against the Los Angeles Dodgers. When Morgan returned to the dugout after working the eighth, pitching coach Ruben Niebla pulled him aside and asked if he’d ever thrown a sinker. The answer was yes and no. Morgan had toyed around with one, but that was about it.

With the game not in doubt — San Diego led 11-1 — Niebla “gave [him] a grip and said to go out and throw it next inning.” Morgan did, the pitch “danced around a little bit,” and the rest is history. By season’s end, he’d thrown his sinker at a 21.5% clip, and this year the usage is up to 34.7%. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t pay too much attention to the standings in April. I look at them, of course, but that’s more a matter of routine than a desire to learn something substantial. It’s hard for teams to pull ahead of the pack this early in the season, and I’d rather not read too much into the fact that, say, the banged-up Blue Jays are a few games below .500, or that none of the five teams in the NL Central has a losing record. It takes time for these things to sort themselves out.

And yet, upon checking the standings Friday morning, I found myself pondering the significance of what I saw: specifically, that only three teams in the American League had a winning record. After a dizzying 20 minutes of digging, I lifted my head from my laptop in a daze, wondering how the heck I ended up staring at Baseball Reference’s playoff odds for the 14-18 White Sox. I think seeing the number 16.1% is what snapped me out of my stupor. (For what it’s worth, our Playoff Odds gave the South Siders a 2.2% chance to make the postseason, double their odds on Opening Day.) Anyway, about those three AL clubs above .500, the Yankees (20-11) were expected to be one of the best teams in baseball, so their place atop the standings wasn’t surprising, but the strong starts of the Rays (18-12) and Athletics (17-14) caught me a bit off guard. I thought Tampa Bay was destined for last place when the season began, and our Playoff Odds agreed, projecting the team to finish with 79.7 wins and giving it a 28.9% shot to reach the postseason. Entering May, the Rays have only added about two wins to their median projection (81.9), but they now have a 45.6% chance of making the playoffs. Meanwhile, I believed the A’s would be better this year, but better meant maybe a third-place finish in the AL West and an outside shot to snag the final AL Wild Card spot. Still, I figured they were more likely still a year or two away from true contention. Our preseason Playoff Odds tabbed them for 78 wins and a 21.4% shot at the playoffs. Now, they’re up to a projected 81.3 wins and 43.1% odds. I still don’t think either team will play postseason baseball this year; according to both their Pythagorean and BaseRuns records, the Rays have played more like a .500 team than one that’s on pace to win 97 games, while the A’s simply don’t have enough pitching. Remember, it’s only the start of May. There’s so much more baseball still to be played.

OK, that’s enough about the Rays and A’s in this week’s mailbag. Today, we’ll be answering your questions about how good Shohei Ohtani would be at basketball, whether James Wood is one of the best lefty batters ever at hitting the ball the other way, which batter has the most hits against a pitcher without recording an out, and what would happen if ZiPS forgot about 2020. But before we get to all of that, I’d like to remind you that 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 an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball’s rules have been in a constant state of flux during the 2020s, with the implementation of the extra-innings runner (the so-called Manfred Man), the universal designated hitter, the three-batter minimum, the pitch clock, the disengagement rule, larger bases, and the infield shift ban accompanying additional changes to roster sizes and the injured list. Most — but not all — of these rule changes have been aimed at livening the game up, with more action and fewer dead spots, and have generally favored offenses rather than pitchers. This year’s Big New Rule is the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System, which has shaken up batters’ and pitchers’ understanding of the strike zone. With the month of April now behind us, it’s worth checking in on this season’s numbers, in part to see what kind of impact the ABS is having.

For starters, scoring levels are up, both relative to last year as whole and to the opening month, by which I mean April plus the handful of games in March that preceded it (a convention I’ll maintain throughout this article). In a vacuum, that would rate as a bit of a surprise, since temperatures are generally cooler in the opening weeks than in the summer months, reducing the extent to which fly balls carry, and thus scoring levels. On the other hand, pitchers tend not to throw as hard as they do later in the season, which would favor hitters, as well. Yet through the end of April, teams are scoring more runs per game than in all but one of the past five seasons’ opening months:

I’ve included a bunch of numbers there to unpack, but first I’ll note that the timing of Opening Day influences the size of these samples. The 2021 season began on April 1, while the owners’ lockout delayed the start of the ’22 season until April 7. With the ensuing Collective Bargaining Agreement creating the need to shoehorn an additional round of playoffs into the schedule, Opening Day is now routinely a March thing, and it often begins with the baseball equivalent of an amuse-bouche. While all 30 teams kicked off play on March 30 in 2023, in ’24 a pair of games in Seoul on March 20–21 preceded the stateside Opening Day of March 28. The 2025 season began in similar fashion, with a pair of games in Tokyo on March 18–19 before everybody else got down to business on March 27. This year featured one game on March 25, with just about everybody else starting on March 26. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets lost 12 games in a row earlier this month. You might’ve heard something about this. You also might be aware that the Mets were without their best player, Juan Soto, for that entire 12-game skid. Soto, who’d be the best player on most teams, was on the shelf with a strained calf.

Soto came back on April 22, and as if by literary contrivance, the Mets’ skid stopped immediately. One 3-2 win at home against the Twins, and the Mets were all set to try to dig themselves out of that hole.

Or so you’d think. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Throw the bums out!” is a rich American tradition. While most used in the context of the messiness of that whole democracy thing, it’s also applicable to sports. When you’re a fan, especially a passionate one, and things are going horribly wrong for your favorite team, there’s a real sense of wanting the perpetrators of these crimes against excellence to be figuratively carted out in tumbrels and to meet their makers like Danton or Robespierre. And heads do roll in baseball when things are going badly, because someone has to take responsibility for a team’s crapitude, and it’s not going to be the team’s owner. Most often, it’s someone public-facing, as fans will not be appeased by the firing of some relatively anonymous staffer in operations. Since general managers and team presidents get first priority to hold the axe (but not always), and individual coaches don’t usually have wide-enough authority to take responsibility for the whole team, that leaves managers as the common sin eaters.

The moment of catharsis happens, and lo and behold, teams play a lot better, vindicating the demise of the ex-manager. It certainly feels that way, and it’s not the craziest idea in the world to think that there’s something to it. While you would expect teams in the midst of a spate of sucking to be underplaying their talent level rather than overplaying it, when you drive by an accident with a car that’s been unfortunately integrated into a telephone pole, it’s also quite likely that the driver had something to do with it.

Two managers have already been fired this season, after their large-payroll teams with championship aspirations got off to awful starts. Surprisingly, Alex Cora was first to go, as Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow canned not just Cora, but also anyone on the coaching staff considered to be one of Cora’s guys, on Saturday night after the team started the season 10-17. Then, on Tuesday, the Phillies fired Rob Thomson after they began the year 9-19, a woeful start that included a 10-game losing streak. Four years ago, Thomson became one of the most successful midseason replacement managers ever, as he steered a sinking Phillies ship back from a 22-29 start all the way to the World Series. Mets manager Carlos Mendoza can’t be comfortable about his job security right now, despite the team’s insistence that his job is safe. Read the rest of this entry »