Welcome to PhamGraphs

“It’s not being quantified like it should.” That’s what Tommy Pham told Will Sammon and Eno Sarris of The Athletic. Pham isn’t your stereotypical ballplayer who hates advanced stats. He’s a visionary who wants them to be even more advanced, to factor in even more context, to do an even better job of turning every tiny thing that transpires on the field into cold, hard numbers that can be credited to or debited from a ballplayer’s account. On Monday, Sammon and Sarris published an article that described Pham’s dream of a brighter sabermetric future. “I want to create a system that is going to change all that,” he said. Tommy Pham, the old school grit-and-grinder with 12 years in the majors under his belt, wants us nerds to get even nerdier, and he’s here to help. He even has a name in mind: PhamGraphs. “It’s pretty self-explanatory,” he said.

First and foremost, we here at FanGraphs want to let Tommy Pham know that we are going to sue your ass back to the stone age for trademark infringement so incredibly flattered by this charming homage. Moreover, we are here to help. We are up for the challenge. We want in. Welcome to PhamGraphs.

I can relate to Pham’s plight personally, because once upon a time, I, too, created my own FanGraphs knockoff. Specifically, I experienced a burgeoning enthusiasm for apples in the summer of 2016, so I started a spreadsheet where I’d list all the apples I ate, rate them on a scale of one to five, and write a review. The spreadsheet was titled AppleGraphs, and I figured it that if I really liked tracking my apples, I’d eventually turn it into a blog. Instead, I kept it up for a couple months and then forgot about it. I never showed it to anybody. Here’s an excerpt.

I wrote a total of 13 entries before it petered out (though if some venture capitalist is reading this and wants to throw a million dollars my way, I will gladly resurrect AppleGraphs as a blog or a newsletter or a zine or whatever unwieldy medium you and you blood money would prefer). You can read the whole thing here, but only if you really, really don’t have anything better to do, because, once again, it was just a spreadsheet where I described apples as a way of killing time at my desk until FanGraphs published a new article for me to read.

My extraordinarily roundabout point here is that, as someone with experience ripping off David Appelman (with apples, no less), I am determined to take Pham very seriously and answer his points as best I can, one by one. However, I want to note first that Pham’s comments revealed two overarching concerns. First, he wants the numbers to feature more context, to get into deserved performance rather than actual performance. Weighted Runs Created Plus, our flagship hitting metric, is park-adjusted and league-adjusted. The numbers are measured against the league average, which is always 100, and they’re adjusted based on the hitting environment of the park a hitter plays in. But they’re not designed to show deserved performance. They’re designed to show how well you performed relative to the league average. They don’t factor in strength of opponent or batted ball luck or a host of other factors. However, those numbers are available to Pham if he wants them. DRC+, or Deserved Runs Created Plus, is the flagship offensive metric of Baseball Prospectus. Deserved performance is what they do at BP. That may just be the site for Pham, and he may want to rethink his branding.

Actually, now that I mention it, I should probably note that Baseball Reference WAR also takes the strength of your opponent into account. The point is, Pham can keep his options open. The sabermetric community is a big tent. We’re all Pham.

That said, you have to stop somewhere. It’s impossible to factor everything in. There’s no shortage of examples. If you’re Randy Johnson and you detonate a mourning dove that divebombs into the path of your fastball, and the umpire calls the pitch a ball (which would have been the right call), should that ball really count against you? If you’re Rafael Ortega and a double falls in over your head because a territorial goose has colonized deep center field and forced you to play too shallow, should you really have your defensive metrics docked? If you’re Cody Bellinger and some room service chicken wings give you such horrendous food poisoning that you have to miss a game and bat .143 with a 24 wRC+ over the next two weeks, is that really all your fault? Shouldn’t some of the -0.2 WAR you put up over that timeframe be doled out to the chef at the hotel, to Perdue AgriBusiness, and to the chickens themselves? I could keep going all day. I’m not even done with the bird examples yet. You could keep going forever because everything’s connected. At some point, you just have to draw the line and look at what happened on the field.

Pham’s second overarching concern was, obviously, to burnish his numbers. He’s a 37-year-old free agent who is looking for a deal. He has played for nine different teams over the last five seasons and put up a combined 0.1 WAR across the last two, and he’s been on something of a media campaign recently (and not so recently). In November, Pham revealed that he’s been playing through plantar fasciitis since the second half of 2023, but, conveniently, he’s all better now. These new comments no doubt express his true beliefs, but they also seem designed to put a positive spin on his performance in order to get himself a good deal – or as Zach Crizer put it over at The Bandwagon, “Tommy Pham has some ideas about stats that would make Tommy Pham look better.”

Now let’s get to Pham’s issues. He made two particular points. The first was that playing for a losing team, especially one that loses a lot of close games like the Pirates, means that you tend to face better pitching, because all the opponents who end up beating you have to use their high-leverage arms in order to close out their victories. The close-game qualification is an important one, and it takes some of the sting out of Pham’s argument, because bad teams end up in just as many blowouts as good teams, and the leverage is low for both teams at that point. If the Phillies are blowing your doors off, they’re not going to waste Jhoan Duran in a non-save situation. Now, the back of a good team’s bullpen is sure to be better than the back of a bad team’s, but the difference isn’t going to be quite as big.

Still, Pham is right that he’s been facing tougher arms than usual. In addition to noting all the close games the Pirates played last year, he mentioned that he switched teams twice during the 2024 season, and that those moves came at inopportune times. A series of scheduling quirks caused him to catch three straight prolonged stretches where his current team was facing off against particularly stiff competition. As a result, he believed that he faced much better pitching than most batters. (He also mentioned that he discussed this with his agent, who confirmed his hunch, and I have to admit that I’m a sucker for this line of reasoning. Anyone who has ever had an argument with a significant other has heard some version of the line, “I asked my friends, and they all think I’m right and you’re wrong.” No matter how bad the fight, it’s always at least a little bit amusing.)

We checked this out, and when I say we, I mean David Appelman. David calculated the average ERA and FIP of the pitchers that every batter faced in both 2024 and 2025. In 2024, the pitchers Pham faced had a combined ERA of 4.02, the 19th-lowest among all batters with at least 400 plate appearances. That put him in the 90th percentile. In 2025, his opponents had a 4.17 ERA, which put him in the 75th percentile. He really has faced tough pitching over the last two years. It’s not unprecedented – somebody’s got to be in the 99th percentile every year (sorry Royce Lewis) – but it is real.

Unfortunately, Pham’s argument falls a little bit flat at this point. If you try to give him credit by regressing his performance to account for this greater degree of difficulty, you learn that the effect is much smaller than you’d expect. In 2025, Pham faced pitchers whose combined ERA was 0.08 points lower than the league average, so let’s give him credit for those extra points. There are several ways to run the numbers, but Ben Clemens showed me a quick and dirty way to do it using constants from The Book. Skip the rest of this paragraph if you don’t like math. One point of wOBA works out to roughly half a run per 600 plate appearances, and 600 plate appearances works out to roughly 141 innings. Half a run over 141 innings works out to 0.032 points of ERA. Now we have a conversion rate: one point of wOBA equals 0.032 points of ERA.

That means if we give Pham 0.08 extra points of ERA to bring him up to the league average, it only adds 2.5 points to his wOBA. That’s it. He goes from .308 to .311. Among the 215 players with at least 400 plate appearances in 2025, that takes him from the 150th-highest wOBA to the 145th.

If we use FIP rather than ERA, which Pham would presumably prefer because it’s a better indication of a pitcher’s true talent level, we’d add only 1.3 points of wOBA. (We can go even further: If we use the pitchers’ projected ERA or FIP at the time of each plate appearance according to Steamer – effectively showing how good everybody thought the pitchers were at the time – then Pham actually faced an easier slate of pitchers than the average batter!) As I mentioned earlier, DRC+ takes the strength of opponent into account, and that’s likely why it graded Pham higher than wRC+ over the last two seasons, but that bonus was just three points in 2024 (a 92 wRC+ and 95 DRC+) and four points in 2025 (a 94 wRC+ and 98 DRC+). None of this turns him into even a league-average bat. So yes, Pham faced tough pitching, but no, it doesn’t make all that much difference.

That said, I don’t want to let all these numbers get in the way of a good story. While we’re talking about all the high-leverage arms Pham has faced, we need to note that he was great in high-leverage situations. In 2025, he ran a 168 wRC+ across 40 high-leverage plate appearances, batting .355. Over the past two seasons, his 136 wRC+ in high-leverage situations puts him in the 80th percentile of all hitters (minimum 80 high-leverage plate appearances). If I were Tommy Pham, I’d be making sure that high-leverage situations were part of the conversation, too.

Pham’s second point was about how wind can play havoc with outfield defense, and here I’ll rely on an excerpt:

Pham remembers a particular play from last season that frustrated him as it related to how defensive metrics are used to value players. In a game against the Milwaukee Brewers, he was playing left field. A ball hit approximately 360 feet with a 90-mph exit velocity short-hopped the outfield wall. The wind carried it. Pham was playing in, so he couldn’t get to the ball. The play reflected poorly in his defensive numbers.

“I got docked on the ball because Statcast doesn’t factor the wind part,” Pham said. “When I learned that, I’m like, OK, if the wind’s blowing out, I need to play a little bit deeper.

“It’s a really flawed system. But it’s getting factored into our value.”

Before we get into the play in question, let’s start with the part where Pham says that he didn’t learn until age 37 that he should probably play a bit deeper when the wind is blowing out really hard. That seems – how do I put this respectfully? – unlikely to be true. Surely, this sabermetric visionary had, you know, thought about what the wind does before the year 2025. Pham makes a valid point about how defensive metrics have so far been unable to account for wind, but the example he uses to illustrate it is, by his own account, just a story about how he was positioned poorly.

Some of the details are off, but I was able to find the play in question. I understand why Pham has it stuck in his mind. It cost the Pirates a game. It was a line drive double from Caleb Durbin on May 25. It left the bat at 97.1 mph, traveled 371 feet, got over Pham’s head, and short-hopped the wall. The Pirates were leading 5-3 in the top of the eighth, and because the tying run was on second base, Pham was playing a bit shallower than usual. In 2025, the average left fielder at PNC Park played 301 feet deep, and Pham averaged 295. On this play, he was at 293 feet. He was making sure that he’d be able to hold the runner at third if Durbin singled. For that reason, I’m not so sure that he would’ve been playing deeper even if he had factored in the wind. The double scored two runs, tying the game at five, and Durbin scored the game’s deciding run when the next batter also doubled to Pham in left field.

Pham was right that the wind aided the ball a bit. Over the course of the 2025 season, 12 balls were pulled at the same launch angle and exit velocity off the same pitch type, and they traveled an average of 353 feet. This ball went an extra 17 feet. Still, his argument has several problems. The first is that Statcast only gave this ball a catch probability of 30% to begin with, thanks to the wall penalty. It graded out as a four-star play, which means that it was so difficult that it barely hurt Pham’s numbers. Second, at this stage of his career, Pham doesn’t make four-star catches anyway. His numbers going back on the ball have been bad for years now. He’s 37 and not that guy anymore (unless his plantar fasciitis really is gone forever). In fact, less than a week earlier, Elly De La Cruz hit a nearly identical ball to Pham in left field. Durbin’s ball required Pham to travel 79 feet over 4.7 seconds. De La Cruz hit his harder, but it required Pham to travel 78 feet over 4.7 seconds, and it landed in pretty much the exact same spot. On both balls, Pham had a chance to make the catch but decided to slow down — especially on De La Cruz’s — rather than risk injury by crashing into the wall.

Third, it’s also important to note that the Statcast numbers here, at least to some extent, factored in the wind already. Those catch probability numbers aren’t perfect, but this is exactly the kind of batted ball where they work well. Pham isn’t getting graded based on the launch angle and exit velocity; he’s getting graded on the hang time and the distance he had to travel. Statcast is accounting for those extra 17 feet in its grading system, and then it is knocking off some of the difficulty because the ball landed near the wall. It’s not taking off a couple extra percentage points because the wind made the ball move unexpectedly, and Pham is right that in a perfect world he would get credit for that. However, this is pretty tame in terms of wind effects. The ball didn’t change direction because of a sudden gust, and it didn’t move unpredictably due to swirling conditions. It just had a tailwind that allowed it to get on top of him. Maybe we’ll get there one day, but right now, it’s hard to imagine any system detailed enough that it could put a specific number of catch probability percentage points on just how much harder the tailwind made this play, let alone do so accurately enough to be worthwhile.

To return to the most important point, why wasn’t Pham taking the wind into account already? He got docked because he didn’t catch the ball, but he did not get docked (at least not by Statcast) for his positioning. In fact, because he started out so far from where the ball landed, Statcast gave him more leeway, reducing the catch probability, and thus the hit to his OAA. Other systems like DRP and DRS factor in positioning, and they may well have docked him for playing too shallow here. Or, maybe the opposite is true; maybe they would’ve recognized that he was playing shallow in order to hold the runner at third on a base hit, and would’ve considered his positioning to be correct even though it didn’t work out. If that were the case, perhaps they wouldn’t have held it against him either. There’s always more context to take into account, even when there are no birds in sight.

I should also note that Pham once again came close to touching on something that would have made him look great. Did you know that our splits tools allow you to check how a player performs based on the wind conditions? We can’t split out outfield defense, but it turns out that Pham is actually a great hitter when it’s windy. Over the course of his career, we have him credited with making 164 plate appearances when the wind is blowing at least 18 mph. In those plate appearances, he’s batted .354 with a 197 wRC+. Our database shows 513 players who have at least 60 plate appearances in those conditions. Pham’s 197 wRC+ ranks eighth, just a couple of spots behind Aaron Judge and Juan Soto. Yet again, Pham is doing the right thing by bringing wind into the conversation.

Before I leave you, I want to mention that, although I’ve made plenty of jokes and taken a critical eye to the issues he raised, I think Pham has the exact right attitude here. Like every player, he’s run into some bad luck at times. And, like every player, he’s also faced some good luck. Here’s a popup that turned into a double only because Pham had the good fortune to hit it to Teoscar Hernández:

Pham doesn’t sitting around thinking about all the times he got lucky, and for good reason. He plays the game at the highest level, where failure lurks around every corner. Nine years ago, right around the time I started the now-legendary AppleGraphs, I was playing in a pickup baseball league in Queens and saved this quote from Grégor Blanco. Coincidentally, it too appeared in an article by Eno Sarris:

“These things are going to happen. You go up and you go down. When you go down, you need to realize that it happens. Don’t let frustration get you. Try to simplify the game. Take some pitches, start seeing the ball again. Build that confidence again. You need to start seeing it inside yourself. ‘I got a walk! That’s good. I hit the ball hard.’ Sometimes in a streak, you hit the ball hard right at someone, and you think, ‘What do I have to do?’ Instead, say, ‘Yeah, that’s what I want. I hit the ball hard.’”

I saved it because, even in this silly adult league, I found it useful to trick myself into staying positive. When I hit a bloop single or reached on an error, I’d tell myself, ‘Great job, you got on base.’ When I lined out, I’d tell myself, ‘Great job, you hit the ball hard.’ In other words, I found a way to take something positive out of nearly every at-bat.

Pham has a tattoo that reads “Believe in Yourself” on his left arm, just below the spot where his sleeve ends. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that it was a huge missed opportunity for him not to spell it ‘Yourselph,’ but I’m sure the location was no accident. I’m sure the tattoo is right there so that Pham can look down to remind himself of that whenever he feels the slightest bit of doubt creep in. If he wants to create his own statistics in order to help him follow the instructions on his arm, then we here at FanGraphs and PhamGraphs are happy to do our part.