As you all probably know, at the start of every season, the FanGraphs staff puts together our bold predictions for the coming year. Each is, to varying degrees, plausible but unlikely, which is what makes it such a fun exercise. Anyway, entering the 2025 season, my bold prediction was: Corbin Carroll will become the fifth-ever 20/20/20/20 player — 20 doubles, 20 triples, 20 home runs, and 20 stolen bases in a single season — joining Frank Schulte in 1911, Willie Mays in 1957, and Curtis Granderson and Jimmy Rollins, who both did it in 2007. Carroll ultimately fell just three triples short of the threshold, while tallying 32 doubles, 31 homers, and 32 steals.

I decided not to run it back this year, figuring that wouldn’t be as fun, though I am very much still rooting for it to happen. The 20/20/20/20 Club is one of the most exclusive baseball has to offer. Pulling it off requires a precise combination of power, speed and instincts, and it has to happen at the exact right moment in a player’s career. As I wrote in my bold prediction: “A player needs to have enough pop to hit 20 homers, but not so much that the majority of his extra-base hits land in the seats. He also needs the speed to steal bases and stretch singles into doubles and doubles into triples. His instincts must be sharp, so he can know when to attempt the extra base without running into outs.”

Last Saturday, when I saw that Carroll had doubled and tripled in a 10-3 Diamondbacks win over the Braves, I pulled up his player page to check on his progress. He was up to 26 doubles, 15 triples, 18 homers, and 16 steals. He stole a base the next day, and after going without an extra-base hit in Arizona’s three-game series against the Red Sox, Carroll entered play Friday at 26 doubles, 15 triples, 18 homers, and 17 steals with 34 games left to play. This prompted my own question for this week’s mailbag, which I will get to momentarily. We’ll also answer your questions on the worst player to ever hit three home runs in a game, the biggest drop-off for a player in the season after finishing second in the MVP voting, and teams missing the playoffs despite leading the league in run differential. But first, 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.

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How likely is it that Corbin Carroll records the fifth-ever 20/20/20/20 season?

I asked Dan Szymborski to fire up ZiPS to project the probability that Carroll would reach all four of the 20/20/20/20 thresholds this season. As of Friday afternoon, those odds are, poetically, 20% — a one-in-five shot to become one of the five 20/20/20/20 players is so perfect that I now think that it’s definitely going to happen.

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Question regarding Joshua Báez’s three-homer debut: Who is the worst player ever to hit three home runs in a major league game? I guess what I’m really asking is: How much should we raise our estimate of how good Joshua Báez is based on his first game? — Jeremy

Michael Baumann: You’ve come to the right place, Jeremy. I’m fascinated by the idea that a player can do so well in his major league debut that whatever follows is a letdown. I wrote about this on Opening Day, when a bunch of highly touted rookies had big days. Kevin McGonigle, for instance, is having a terrific rookie season, and looks like he’s going to have a terrific career. But his lifetime batting average is never going to be higher than .800, which is where it stood after his first game in the majors.

And McGonigle didn’t hit even one home run in his first big league game. What an underachiever. So that sentiment goes double for Báez.

I also spent every free moment from age 6 to age 13 poring over random books about baseball history. I remember vividly coming across a book about the players who’d hit four home runs in a game, expecting to see nothing but a list of the greatest power hitters ever. Indeed those hitters were present — Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt — but so was some joker named Pat Seerey, whom I’d never heard of.

Since 1901, 496 players have at least one game of three home runs or more in AL/NL play. Johnny Mize, Mookie Betts, and Sammy Sosa have done it six times each, which is the career record.

If you want to find guys who could absolutely rake, “Has this person ever hit three homers in a game?” is a terrific weed-out question. Those 496 players include 68 of the 165 Hall of Fame position players who have appeared in a game since 1901, as well as 77 of the 145 position players and two-way guys who have been named MVP of the AL or NL. That’s 108 distinct players, once you account for the considerable overlap between the two populations.

So in his first big league game, Báez joined a club in which 21.8% of members are either MVPs or Hall of Famers. Those criteria are so strict that a lot of all-time great hitters don’t make the cut: Manny Ramirez, Juan Soto, Albert Belle, Lance Berkman, Mark McGwire, and Yordan Alvarez (at least for another two and a half months), just to name a few.

The large number of active players on this list of 496 players complicates the pursuit of an average hitter with a three-homer game. No one who hits 200 homers with a 114 wRC+ calls it quits after 1,400 career games and a career WAR total in the mid-20s. Imagine a hybrid of Bryan Reynolds and Byron Buxton and you’re in the right ballpark.

That’s a really good player! Turns out that most guys with even one three-homer game have quite a bit of juice.

But Jeremy asked what happens when you turn the leaderboard upside-down. I expected Báez, with six career games as of this writing, to be at the bottom of the career WAR leaderboard. Not so.

Báez does have the lowest positive WAR total among three-homer hitters, at least for now. The Cardinals play twice between when I’m writing this and when the mailbag is getting published, and Báez is about one five-thousandth of a win behind Liover Peguero for 478th all-time. In other words, Báez is probably going to move up the leaderboard a bit by the time you read this.

No matter, because 17 of the 496 players with a three-homer game in the majors have contrived to post a negative career WAR total. WAR is a blunt instrument rather than a precision tool, and if you go back into the 20th Century, that reputation only gets more true. WAR says Babe Ruth is the best player ever, followed by Barry Bonds, Mays, Ty Cobb, and Honus Wagner. If you put that forward as a list of the five greatest position players of all time (not counting active players like Shohei Ohtani), I don’t think any serious baseball fan would give you much grief.

But back in the 1900s, before baseball found out about math, GMs and managers were flying blind when it came to filling out a lineup. They didn’t know (or care) about a lot of factors that end up having a pretty big impact on WAR. And even if they had known, they didn’t have the tools to measure it accurately.

So occasionally in history you get guys with comically bad WAR totals because no one figured out they were playing the wrong position, or that chasing productive outs is a much worse tactic in the long run than just trying to hit the ball hard. I’m disinclined to rip on a replacement-level guy from antiquity (read: the 1970s) who was considered a useful player at the time.

Only one of those 17 negative-WAR players is currently in the majors: Michael Toglia. He’s dead last in career WAR on the three-homer list, almost a full win out of 495th place. Toglia is 493rd in batting average, 490th in on-base percentage, and 458th in slugging, despite playing his home games at Coors Field for most of his career. Toglia is 494th, or third from the bottom, in career wRC+, ahead of two players with careers half as long as his.

Reasonable people can disagree; journeyman catcher Michael Pérez is one of the two players who trails Toglia as a hitter, with a wRC+ of 52 in 599 career plate appearances. But I find the whole body of work for Toglia pretty persuasive.

What does this mean for Báez? Well, I think it’d be pretty glib to pencil him in for Cooperstown on the strength of one game, impressive though it was. Our prospect guys gave him a 45+ FV grade in his last two trips through the rankings, which is one grade short of the global top 100(ish) list. That grade reflects some extremely encouraging gains in approach for the young Cardinals slugger, and you have to be impressed by the manner in which he went about his record-setting debut. But power was never the issue for Báez. A single three-homer game isn’t going to shift the paradigm the way a long strikeout-less streak would have, for instance.

Nevertheless, the mean and median career WAR totals for players with a three-homer game are better than the equivalents for players who were drafted first overall. It’s not that hitting three home runs in a game makes you a middle-of-the-order threat on its own, but doing so — especially as a rookie — is evidence of impressive underlying skills.

In short, the Michael Toglia or Pat Seerey path is still wide open for Báez. But a week ago I wouldn’t have given him a second thought, and he’s got my attention now.

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Has anybody who finished number two in the MVP voting like Cal Raleigh did last year had such a big fall-off in the subsequent season? — David

Ben Clemens: There’s a really clean answer to this question. One player finished second in MVP voting and then lost double-digit WAR the next year. That player? Ted Williams, naturally; he got absolutely robbed in the 1942 AL MVP voting, finishing in second place to Joe Gordon despite an outrageous .356/.499/.648 batting line. Williams led the AL in homers, walks, runs, RBI, and each triple slash category. That season was worth 11.5 WAR. The next year, he was one of the best in his field again – but that field was naval aviation, because he enlisted in the military during World War II.

That might be the right technical answer, but I don’t think it gets at what you’re asking for. Neither does the case of Sandy Koufax, who finished second for NL MVP in 1966 (1.73 ERA, 9.1 WAR in 323 innings) and then retired after the season. We probably shouldn’t count 1943 AL runner-up Luke Appling or 1942 NL runner-up Enos Slaughter, either, because they also joined the military during World War II. And it’s kind of harsh to put 2019 Alex Bregman in here; he put up 8.3 WAR in that season and a mere 1.3 WAR the next, but that’s at least partially because COVID cut the 2020 season to a mere 60 games.

If you’re looking for comparisons to Raleigh, the cleanest one is Jacoby Ellsbury, who had a huge 2011 season (9.5 WAR, 150 wRC+) and finished second to Justin Verlander in the AL MVP voting. The following year, Ellsbury had a complete bummer season; he got hurt and also hit poorly, and managed only 0.8 WAR in 74 games. But that’s not quite the same as Raleigh, either; sure, he’s been hurt, but he’s already managed nearly 100 more plate appearances than Ellsbury in 2012, and there’s plenty of year left too.

Raleigh, who as of Friday afternoon was slashing .156/.273/.296 with 13 home runs, a 71 wRC+, and 0.8 WAR in 94 games, almost stands alone in terms of big downswing from a second-place MVP finish, when he slashed .247/.359/.589 with 60 homers, a 161 wRC+, and 9.1 WAR in 159 games. But there are a few at least rough comparables. There’s Adrian Beltré, who nearly won the 2004 NL MVP with the best year of his career (9.7 WAR) before signing with the Mariners after the season and scuffling to a 90 wRC+ and 2.4 WAR the next year. Or what about Victor Martinez? A surprise second-place finisher in the 2014 AL MVP voting, he managed only 4.6 WAR that year, so he’s not in the same stratosphere as Raleigh for quality of season, but Martinez posted a shocking -2.0 WAR – yes, negative two – the next year. Oof.

Those are the two closest matches in terms of a player putting up a career-best year and then falling back to Earth with a crash in the next one. But I’ll also submit one other player who lost six or more WAR after nearly winning MVP and might be a close Raleigh comp. Magglio Ordonez had a spectacular 2007 season (8.0 WAR, 169 wRC+) and then a meh 2008 season (1.7 WAR, 130 wRC+) thanks to some of the worst baserunning and defense of his career, which is saying something for a guy who was a combined 150 runs below average in those phases of the game when he retired.

The path from near-MVP to near-replacement-level is not a commonly walked one. Almost everyone who has done it has done so in the context of a global conflagration of one sort or another, or a massive loss of playing time due to injury or retirement. But seasons like Raleigh’s do happen every once in a while. Sometimes a career year at the plate is just that, and some cruel twist of variance follows that career-best season with a career-worst one. And hey, maybe Martinez and Ordonez never really recovered from their pratfalls, but the bulk of Beltré’s best years were still ahead of him when he had his own big swoon. But ouch, Mariners fans; the closest comp to Raleigh is a guy Mariners fans do not have fond memories of, because Beltré didn’t truly return to form until he left Seattle. In any case, what a great question, and a fun trip down memory lane.

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Since the expanded playoffs, has there ever been a team that led its league in run differential and didn’t make the playoffs? — Jason

Davy Andrews: No Jason, that has not happened since the expanded playoffs. A handful of run differential leaders have made it into the playoffs with a Wild Card berth — the 2023 Rangers, 2004 Red Sox, and 2002 Angels being the most notable among them — but even if you’re really unlucky, it’s hard to lead the league in run differential while missing out on the playoffs. The only time it’s happened in the Wild Card era was 2005. Cleveland led the AL with a differential of 1.1 runs per game, but, at 93-69, finished a whopping six games behind the White Sox for the AL Central lead and two games behind the Red Sox for the sole Wild Card spot. Sometimes the Sox just have your number.

That Cleveland team was great. It went 34-14 in blowouts for a .708 winning percentage. But in one-run games, it went just 22-36, a .379 winning percentage that crushed those playoff hopes. The White Sox, on the other hand, went 35-19 in one-run games, and then those lucky ducks went on to win the World Series.

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For the New York Mets, the 2026 season has been an almost unmitigated disaster. Widely expected to compete for the NL East crown, the Mets got off to a brief hot start. And by brief, I mean brief, as the season’s high point was knocking out Paul Skenes in the first inning on Opening Day against the Pirates. From there, the season unraveled like the finances of Mike Campbell from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Gradually and then suddenly.

The Mets ambled around the .500 mark for another week or so, until a 12-game losing streak knocked them firmly into the league basement, where they have mostly stayed. By the time the calendar flipped to August, they had long come to terms with the idea that they would be sellers at the deadline. Recently, though, the Mets have gone on a tear, winning 11 of their 15 games since their deadline fire sale, giving some fans an excuse to dream on a miracle wild card run. That almost recently won’t happen, but their abysmal season doesn’t have to signify the start of a long rebuild. In fact, New York teams with massive payrolls aren’t generally extended much rope, with the hope being that the club will find its way back to contention quickly. Can the Mets do that in 2027?

Whether you call it a bounceback or a rebound or a dead-cat bounce or, as Bill James dubbed it, the Plexiglass principle, baseball has a rich history of teams having dreadful seasons despite lofty expectations, and then coming back to right the ship the following year.

Since I have a couple decades of preseason projections to stand in for expectations, courtesy of ZiPS, I whipped up a quick table on how these underperforming teams did the following season. The pool here is all teams that were projected to win at least 85 games in a season (or 32 games in 2020), but underperformed by at least 10 wins (four for the 2020 teams). Going back to 2005, there are 37 such teams.

As in most situations in life, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the teams that underperformed generally played better the following season, with 27 of the 37 teams getting some kind of positive bounce. The bad news is that after being projected collectively as 90-win teams and only winning an average of 74 games, the typical comeback season only got the teams back to a .500 record (.499, technically). On average, only a little less than half the typical underperformance was recovered the next year. If the Mets had a typical bounceback season compared to the group, they’d only gain back seven wins in 2027, which would be rather unsatisfying given that they’re playing at a 73-win pace right now.

Projections let us do better than generalities, though, and the Mets do have a lot of things going in their favor. In 2027, they’ll likely get a better season from Francisco Lindor and a healthier one from Juan Soto. After a rough start, Carson Benge has been quite solid, and now has a better seasonal wRC+ (112) than even the most optimistic preseason projection (ZiPS at 108). No horrible injuries have befallen the team’s ace, Nolan McLean, either. The Mets also compensated for disappointing minor league seasons from Jonah Tong and Jacob Reimer by acquiring their now top prospect, shortstop Jefferson Rojas (50 FV), along with right-hander Gary Gill Hill (45 FV) and the man who forced me to learn how to put an accent on a capital E (alt-0201), second baseman Émilien Pitre (40 FV).

So, where do the Mets stand? Let’s start by getting some projections for plausible roster additions in 2027. The Mets cleared out most of their free-agent eligibles, and with Bo Bichette very likely to pick up his two-year, $84 million option, Luis Robert Jr. is their only pending a free agent, after they presumably turn down their $20 million club option.

Though ZiPS no longer considers Brett Baty or Mark Vientos as viable starting options after 2026, it does see A.J. Ewing as a better one than it did in the preseason. That gives the Mets a decent six-man offensive core, with Soto and Lindor at its center. Not included in that core is Jorge Polanco. Even as ZiPS expects Polanco to bounce back some next season, attributing some of his woes this year to his various injuries, it views him as being in contract-eating territory. A Soto-Ewing-Benge outfield is solid, as is Francisco Alvarez behind the plate and the Lindor-Bichette left side of the infield. That leaves some unanswered questions at first base, second base, and DH. With the Mets almost certainly too far back to make a playoff run, there are worse ideas than to continue playing Marcus Semien and Baty to see if they can salvage enough of their individual 2026 campaigns to make them decent options for the 2027 Mets. My guess would be “maybe” on Baty, and no on Semien.

There are alternatives at these positions in free agency. Yandy Díaz projects as far better than any in-house option at first base, and there are several strong upgrades available at second base, including Brandon Lowe, Gleyber Torres, and Luis Arraez, among others. [Oops, I thought the Díaz option was a player one, not a club one. I need to get the hang of trusting my 48-year-old brain a lot less -DS]

There’s more work to do on the pitching side of things. McLean is obviously somewhere at the top of the rotation, with Christian Scott plopped down in the middle. ZiPS is a quick believer in Zac Thornton, and he has another six weeks or so to continue to make the case for 2027. After that, it becomes problematic, especially if the Mets intend to contend. They certainly hope for a better Tong season next year (and he’s been better lately), and for Tylor Megill to be back from Tommy John surgery, but they can’t count on either. ZiPS is really worried about Senga as a 2027 option, which particularly displeases me as I’m a forkball connoisseur.

Fortunately for the Mets, there are plenty of great frontline starters available in free agency that a big-spending team could afford, most notably Tarik Skubal, but also Kevin Gausman, Robbie Ray, Casey Mize, Trevor Rogers, and Clay Holmes, the last of whom they just traded to the Cubs for Rojas at the deadline. Other top starting pitchers who could be available, depending on their respective player or mutual options, include Sonny Gray, Michael King, and Dustin May.

As it stands, the Mets’ bullpen also looks rather thin, though ZiPS thinks Daniel Duarte and Nathan Lavender are solid options for 2027 leading up to closer Devin Williams. Unlike with starting pitchers, the pickings are thin at top of the market for relievers, with the exception of Adrian Morejon. The Mets may have to go for quantity more than quality here.

So, where do the Mets stand entering the offseason? Short of any major changes to the current projections over the rest of the season, ZiPS puts the Mets at 82-80 in a league in which everyone can only use their signed players. That’s a good starting point for a team that always has the willingness to spend.

The all-but-guaranteed lockout, unfortunately, complicates matters somewhat. If the brawl between MLB and the MLBPA ends with some flavor of salary cap, soft or otherwise, or additional luxury tax penalties, the Mets already have a lot of money committed to this 82-80 team, with our estimate of their 2027 luxury tax payroll landing right around $217 million. There’s at least a possibility that the Mets simply don’t have the option to spend heavily in free agency to fill these holes. In that case, president of baseball operations David Stearns, should he survive any postseason organizational purge, might have to be as creative at adding inexpensive talent to the Mets as he was with the Brewers. But the new CBA and its ramifications are issues for Future FanGraphs to worry about!

There’s not much for the Mets to take away from 2026, but their problems aren’t so significant that they’re fated to wander the wilderness next year. The Mets do still have the foundational pieces to quickly build a winning team, especially given the ample financial resources from which they can draw. But, as the historical record demonstrates, a comeback season won’t take care of itself, and the Mets will have to be active to write a better story in 2027. The team still needs another impact bat, some oomph in the rotation, and quite a bit of bullpen help. If the new CBA leaves team owner Steve Cohen free to attack the problem by splashing cash, meaningful October baseball should be within reach for the Amazin’s. If not, Stearns may have to prove that the Mets can get back there by taking the considerably harder way.

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If the 2026 regular season finished today, not only would a sub-.500 team qualify for the playoffs, but Shohei Ohtani’s run of three straight Most Valuable Player awards — the last two in the National League, since signing with the Dodgers — would probably end. Pete Crow-Armstrong has been absolutely on fire since late May, as substantial adjustments to his mechanics and approach have helped his offense catch up to his already-elite defense. The 24-year-old center fielder has overtaken Ohtani on the WAR leaderboard at a time when the two-way superstar has been shut down from pitching, and this week, he put himself in the history books in a few different ways.

On Monday night at Wrigley Field, Crow-Armstrong put on a particularly entertaining show against the White Sox, going 4-for-5 with a pair of home runs, a stolen base, two runs scored, and three runs batted in. Batting leadoff for the Cubs, he began the home half of the first inning by homering on Luis Castillo’s first pitch of the evening, a four-seamer on the inner edge of the plate. He singled off Castillo in the second, and after taking strike three looking on a sinker in the fourth, he drew a walk against reliever Tyler Schweitzer in the sixth, doubled off Trevor Richards in the eighth, then capped his night with a walk-off two-run homer off a hanging slider from Hagen Smith in the 10th.

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Crow-Armstrong became just the sixth player to hit both a leadoff and walk-off home run in the same game, after the A’s Vic Power (May 7, 1957 vs. the Orioles), the Angels’ Darin Erstad (June 25, 2000 vs. the Twins), the Blue Jays’ Reed Johnson (June 15, 2003 vs. the Cubs), the Rangers’ Ian Kinsler (July 19, 2009 vs. the Twins), and the Diamondbacks’ Chris Young (Aug. 7, 2010 vs. the Padres).

But wait, there’s more! PCA’s game-winning homer was his 30th of the year, making him the first player to reach 30 homers and 30 steals this season (he stole his 30th base on August 7 against the Royals). It’s his second season in a row going 30-30. I’ll have more on that topic momentarily, but not before acknowledging that he also led off the home half of Tuesday night’s game with another homer, this one off the White Sox’s Bryan Hudson. According to Elias, he’s the 13th player (and first Cub) since 1900 to follow a walk-off homer with a leadoff homer in his team’s next game; the Astros’ Jose Altuve was the last to do that, on June 15–16, 2021 against the Rangers. It was Crow-Armstrong’s sixth leadoff homer of the season — tying him for fourth in the majors in that category — and his second time connecting for one on back-to-back days; he also did it on June 15–16 against the Rockies:

As for 30-30, last year a record-high seven players reached both plateaus in the same season, up from three in 2024 and four in ’23. That unprecedented swell owed plenty to the 2023 rule changes — the pitch clock, limitations on pickoff throws, and slightly shorter distance between bases — that favored base stealing; previously, the highest total of 30-30 seasons across a three-year span was 10, from 1996–98, and one had to go back to 2007–09 to find three consecutive seasons that featured at least one such performer. As colleague Michael Baumann noted on Thursday, not only are stolen base attempts and successes down slightly (from 0.94 per team per game in 2024 to 0.91 in ’25 to 0.88 this year in terms of attempts, and from 0.74 to 0.71 to 0.68 across that span in terms of successes), but the power hitters have backed off. Only two other players have at least 20 homers and 20 steals at this juncture, namely the Nationals’ CJ Abrams (29 homers, 24 steals) and the Reds’ Elly De La Cruz (20 homers, 22 steals), making PCA’s feat stand out all the more. Oh, and there’s this: He has joined Bobby Witt Jr. and Julio Rodrígeuz as the only players to bank two 30-30 seasons through their age-24 campaigns.

Crow-Armstrong’s season stands out in several other ways. He’s hitting .279/.378/.550, with his 154 wRC+ first in the NL, his slugging percentage second, and his on-base percentage sixth. By comparison, Ohtani is hitting .291/.388/.554, but even with a higher OBP and SLG, his wRC+ is just 152. Our park adjustments put Wrigley Field as a slightly tougher hitters’ park than Dodger Stadium — a concept that would have once seemed outrageous given the longstanding reputations of the two parks — but the bigger driver is that wOBA doesn’t value intentional walks at all (I don’t love that, but I’ll save my quibble for another day). Ohtani holds a 16-5 edge on Crow-Armstrong in that department, but if you remove those intentional walks from his batting line, his OBP drops 20 points, whereas PCA’s drops only six points.

Given that he banked his first Gold Glove last year, it’s no surprise that Crow-Armstrong has been a human highlight film in center field.

Not surprisingly, he’s the runaway leader at the position in FRV, with 24 runs above average. Statcast attributes 20 of those runs to PCA’s range, with the other four to his arm; he only has five assists, but runners don’t test him that often, with his -4% advancement attempts above average ranking sixth. Not only has Crow-Armstrong nearly lapped the field in FRV — Ceddanne Rafaela ranks a distant second with 13 — but he’s just one run short of the record for center fielders, set by Byron Buxton in 2017. Buxton played 137 games and 1,143 innings in center that season, by far the most of either in his injury-wracked career; Crow-Armstrong has played 124 games and 1,083.2 innings in center, and should easily pass him for playing time and FRV. PCA doesn’t fare as well in DRS as he does in FRV; his total of 14 is third behind Rafaela (19) and Andy Pages (89). But including the additional value of his baserunning (including 31 steals in 38 attempts), he’s got a two-win lead over the field in position player WAR:

Armstrong not only has a higher position player WAR than Ohtani, he’s got a higher mark than Ohtani and his teammate Pages combined, though to be fair, that comparison doesn’t include Ohtani’s contributions as a pitcher. Early in the season, free from the constraints relating to last year’s comeback from his second UCL reconstruction, Ohtani looked as though he could contend for a Cy Young award. He put up a 0.74 ERA and 2.40 FIP in 61 innings over his first 10 starts, and while the BABIP gods soon took their toll, his 1.79 ERA and 2.60 FIP in 85.2 innings through July 3 was still quite impressive. Unfortunately, inflammation in his left knee led the Dodgers to pause his pitching, and subsequent discomfort in his biceps slowed his rehab. He only resumed throwing bullpen sessions off a mound earlier this week, and with the Dodgers eying October, he may not build up to a full starter workload before the end of the regular season. Instead, he could work in multi-inning stints as an opener, as he did last year during the final phase of his rehab from his September 2023 UCL reconstruction.

Still, Ohtani has already contributed 3.0 WAR in his limited time as a pitcher. That closes the gap, but Crow-Armstrong still has an edge:

While I think it’s reasonable to take Crow-Armstrong’s outlier fielding value with a grain of salt, I’ll add that DRS and Baseball Reference’s more gentle position player adjustments for designated hitters give Crow-Armstrong a 7.8 to 6.8 edge over Ohtani in that flavor of WAR. It’s also worth noting that he has another point in his favor when it comes to situational hitting, with an edge over Ohtani in WPA, 5.32 (first in the NL) to 2.98 (third), and in our Clutch score, 1.44 (sixth) to 0.33 (67th). If the season were to end today, I think Crow-Armstrong would be the MVP.

That said, a lot can still happen over these final five weeks to change voters’ impressions. PCA has hit .313/.419/.683 (195 wC+) since June 1, that while averaging a modest 88.9 mph exit velocity, with a .252 xBA and .485 xSLG, suggesting that he’s bound to cool off at some point. Ohtani, who produced a 177 wRC+ from 2023–25, is better suited to reel off a stretch with a 195 wRC+; in fact, he hit .333/.435/.656 (191 wRC+) — with a .309 xBA and .652 xSLG — in June before cooling off while banged up in July. All he had to show for his .312 xBA and .632 xSLG that month was a .273/.330/.557 (127 wRC+) line.

But this isn’t about litigating the NL MVP race to death with roughly 20% of the season remaining so much as it’s about appreciating Crow-Armstrong’s massive step forward on the heels of signing a six-year, $115 million extension in March. Last year he emerged as a star, hitting a wobbly but productive .247/.287/.481 (109 wRC+) with 21 FRV and 5.4 WAR, though his production plummeted from .265/.302/.544 (131 wRC+) in the first half to .216/.262/.372 (72 wRC+) in the second. His splits tell a story of a free-swinging player who tried to get more selective over the course of the season, but his process didn’t pan out; while he cut his chase rate from 43.7% in the first half to 37.7% in the second, with his swing rate dropping from 61.3% to 56.9%, his barrel rate dropped from 14.2% to 10.8%. He overperformed his .507 xSLG by 37 points before the All-Star break, then underperformed a .420 xSLG by 48 points after.

Crow-Armstrong has improved by making some significant adjustments to his mechanics and approach. North Side Baseball’s Matthew Trueblood took a deep dive in early June, just as PCA heated up, noting that he was standing closer to the plate and more upright, with his feet closer together, his stride more controlled, and his swing faster. Two months later, we can see that his setup has been in continual flux from month to month:

Relative to last season, the big changes are a deeper setup in the box, a dramatic decrease between the distance of his feet, and a slight closing up of his stance. Crow-Armstrong went from averaging 32.8 inches between his feet in March and April (when he hit just .241/.307/.362 for an 87 wRC+) to 18.3 inches in June, the first full month of this tear:

On a year-to-year basis, PCA’s average bat speed has increased from 72.7 mph (with a 28.5% fast swing rate) to 74.8 mph (with a 50.3% fast-swing rate), though he was up to 75.3 mph in May and June. Along with these mechanical adjustments, he’s become more discerning, cutting his chase rate from last year’s 41.4% to 33.8%, and his swing rate from 59.5% to 49.2%; those are both the largest decreases in the game by a couple of percentage points. Here’s how it has looked on a rolling 15-game basis dating back to the start of last season:

You can see the aforementioned change in his approach in the second half of last season wasn’t accompanied by an increase in production, but this year, those adjustments have paid off. He’s not actually hitting the ball much harder, but he is hitting it in the air and to his pull side more frequently:

Crow-Armstrong’s pulled air rate jumped from the 61st percentile to the 97th from 2024 to ’25; he ranked ninth in the majors last year, but now he’s third behind only Isaac Paredes and Kyle Schwarber. Meanwhile, his walk rate has jumped from 4.5% to 11.9%. That’s the majors’ largest increase from last year, and a worthwhile payoff even as his strikeout rate has climbed from 24% to 27%.

I think it’s fair to say that at this juncture, Pete Crow-Armstrong is probably on his way to the NL MVP award (and deservedly so) but more emphatically appears to be the majors’ most improved player relative to last year, coupling a huge step forward offensively with perhaps the best center field defense of the Statcast era. At just 24 years old, he’s carving a spot among the game’s elite, and it’s a sight to behold.

Source

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Welcome to Mathemadage, a new series where I investigate time-honored baseball adages using whatever data I can get my hands on and explore whether there’s any validity to them. I’ll apply my normal Ben Clemens mixture of a bit of math, a bit of intuition, and plenty of healthy doubt in declaring strong solutions to complicated problems. I hope to demonstrate that some of these true and others false, but I’m sure that many will end up in a suggestive but unprovable middle ground. And true to the premise of the series, we’re starting off with a fun adage that resists easy conclusions.

If you watch a baseball game from start to finish, you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a hitter get tied up on an inside fastball. “Got jammed,” the announcer might say, or maybe, “He just couldn’t get around on that one.” It’s a visual reminder of one of the pitching truisms that I learned as a kid and haven’t forgotten since: hard in, soft away.

I intuitively look for this pitching pattern when I’m watching a game. Hitters look incredibly uncomfortable when they’re trying to get their bat around a fastball in on their hands. Now that we have a few years of bat tracking data, though, I can do better than just vaguely searching for this effect. So this week, when I saw someone get jammed, I winced in sympathy and then started furiously downloading spreadsheets.

I had a theory: Fastballs are effective inside because fastballs are fast. To measure this, I took advantage of contact point relative to a batter’s center of mass, a new-ish Statcast metric. Every batter has different timing, of course, but by gathering all of the data for a given hitter, you can figure out their “normal” contact point. That lets you measure whether someone is early or late to the ball; if they’re ahead of their normal contact point, they’re early, and vice versa.

Well, kind of. You have to do some adjusting, of course. Batters don’t take the same swing at every pitch. “On time” doesn’t mean the same thing in every location. So I took the data and sliced it up, controlling for pitch location and count to get an idea of where a swing can be considered on time in various locations. This let me start to explore two key questions: How much does it cost to be late on an inside fastball, and how much does it cost to be late on an outside one?

I started by limiting my data to just fastballs and splitting the plate in three. I picked eight inch wide strips, so that “middle” means four inches on either side of the center of the plate, “inside” is between four inches and a foot towards a given batter from the center, and “outside” is four to 12 inches away from the center of the plate. I used all swings, whether or not the hitter made contact, to calculate where “on time” was for each hitter, separated by year to avoid aging effects. Then I graphed wOBACON based on where hitters make contact with the ball relative to expectations:

What does this mean? The easiest way for me to think about it is that on inside pitches, there’s a big slope in play. The earlier you get to the ball, the more damage you do. There’s plenty of jaggedness in all of these lines, but if you fit a regression line to these slopes, every inch forward that a batter contacts the ball is worth about four points of wOBA on the inner third. In the middle of the plate, there’s very little slope; for every inch further out in front, wOBACON drops by 1.5 points. On the outer third, the slope is extremely negative; every inch forward costs batters six points of wOBA.

That’s the argument for inside fastballs in a nutshell. Fastballs in general create deeper contact points. They’re moving faster, after all, which gives hitters less time to react. Being late is bad on inside fastballs, but it’s relatively good on middle and outside fastballs. In other words, getting inside on hitters with your fastball lowers their production on contact.

It’s not quite that simple, of course. I’m measuring all of this relative to what I’m estimating is normal for each hitter, but that’s not really knowable. What’s more, expectations are almost impossible to account for this way. There’s so much game theory to an inside fastball. If a hitter thinks it’s coming, he can speed up, and look at the incredible value added by getting in front of an inside pitch. This data isn’t the whole answer, but there seems to be something there. Meanwhile, breaking balls don’t follow the same pattern at all:

There’s your first sign that there’s something here. Fastballs have meaningful early/late splits when it comes to damage on contact, while secondary pitches don’t display the same tendencies. At a basic level, the inside of the plate is where making batters swing late on fastballs pays dividends, and luckily, fastballs tend to produce late swings.

Of course, balls in play don’t tell the entire story; in fact, they often mislead. Luckily, Statcast also measures estimated contact points for swings that don’t hit the ball. That sounds weird, but you can think of them as where the swing and the ball cross planes, even if they don’t make contact. So if you swing under the ball, there’s still a “contact point” where your path and the ball’s cross. There’s some valuable information to be gleaned from this chart:

If you’re late to a fastball, you’re far more likely to miss, regardless of where it’s located. That makes sense to me just from a physical standpoint. Late, deep contact is associated with starting your swing late, or the classic theory of “time yourself for their secondary and speed up to hit the fastball if necessary,” or even just generally not expecting a hard pitch and getting your bat into the hitting zone slower than you’d like. And there’s a good flip side to the intuition; early swings, ones with contact points in front of average, produce more whiffs on secondary pitches:

If you squint, you could call those curves U-shaped, but the key signal is on the right side of the chart. Again, this all makes logical sense: Hitters miss by being early against secondary pitches or late against fastballs. Even if you never saw this data, I’m confident that you’d be able to guess the direction of these lines fairly easily.

So did we just prove “hard in, soft away?” Well, not really, as it turns out. I do feel comfortable saying a few broad things about pitches. Fastballs produce later (deeper) contact points in general. Later contact points suppress production on contact on inside fastballs to a large degree, but that relationship doesn’t hold over the middle of the plate or away. This just makes good logical sense. Imagine a hitter poking a fastball the other way on a pitch that they have to lunge outside for. Now imagine them trying to do that against a pitch on the inside of the plate. Late contact outside is often what hitters want to do; inside, it never is.

But there’s a large countervailing effect that completely cancels out that contact advantage. Let’s look at the whiff-per-swing graph for fastballs again:

Yes, late swings are more likely to miss regardless of where the ball is located, but outside fastballs produce more whiffs per swing across the board. If you’re very late to an outside pitch, you might punch it the other way, but you’re also extremely likely to miss it entirely. In fact, outside fastballs put the hitter in more of a bind than inside fastballs. What’s the right thing to do against an inside fastball? Get the bat head out! It makes you less likely to whiff, and also more likely to do damage. But what are you supposed to do against an outside fastball? Well, stay back, of course, but not too far back. Here’s the run value per 100 swings in the same type of chart. This combines whiff-per-swing, production on contact, and the cost of foul balls, and lower numbers are better for the pitcher:

The same graph for secondary pitches is a bit less cut and dried:

If batters are able to stay back on inside and middle secondaries, they can produce good results. But almost regardless of batter timing, locating secondary pitches away produces better results. That’s because batters do meaningfully less damage on soft pitches away. In my head, that’s just a physical phenomenon; batters like to take outside pitches the other way, and it’s harder to leave the park when you’re hitting the other way. On the other hand, it’s easy to conjure up a mental image of a hitter catching a hanging breaking ball and pulling it into the seats. Meanwhile, the misses mostly come out front, and no location has an obvious advantage in producing whiffs. Thus, the on-contact advantage of “soft away” makes it look like the best option for non-fastballs in the data.

If you used these charts to produce a conclusion, it’d be “hard away, soft away.” Inside fastballs might look like a good option because they suppress damage on contact, but the problem is that throwing them gives the hitter a good solution. Getting the bat started early decreases whiff rate and increases damage on contact. Outside fastballs don’t make it so easy on the batter; being late means plenty of chance at whiffing entirely, but being early increases your chances of rolling over the ball and lowers your expected damage on contact.

But even these conclusions aren’t all that robust. Hitter expectations have a huge role to play in this. What they’re looking for goes a long way towards determining the timing and shape of their swing, and that’s not a variable that we can access here. Maybe some of the value of a fastball away comes because many fastballs are inside. If hitting is timing and pitching is upsetting timing, there can’t be a single solution, because varying the looks that a batter sees is more important than showing them any one look.

That said, I still think this data supports the concept of “hard in, soft away” on balance, particularly to same-handed hitters. The strong signal in the data is that breaking balls away are valuable. Inside fastballs tunnel off of outside breaking balls thanks to the way each pitch breaks. Against opposite-handed hitters, there’s a natural pairing between fastballs away and changeups away, so maybe that’s the best option there. This data doesn’t exist independently of the usual cat-and-mouse games involved in the batter-pitcher confrontation, so it’s best to think of it in conjunction with how a pitcher’s arsenal fits together, rather than considering location on its own.

That feels like a good stopping point for the inaugural Mathemadage. As will often be the case, the truth is a lot more complicated than a pithy four-word saying. The truth is fascinating, though! And plenty of confounding variables can render even these conclusions less useful. For example, slow fastballs perform abysmally over the middle of the plate, but fast ones don’t. Batters might do more damage when they get to inside fastballs, but they also have a much larger variance in swings inside – more swings way behind and way ahead as they try to time things up while simultaneously pulling their hands in. Heck, the timing gap between where batters make contact with secondaries and fastballs is widest inside, even if that doesn’t produce the worst results, so there might be something to learn about how to exploit that gap in hitter ability.

I’m not sure what the final conclusion is, but at the very least, I’d say that “hard in, soft away” passes a fairly rigorous mathematical investigation. Oh, and please, give me more old sayings to explore. I can’t promise that I’ll write about any of them soon, but I plan on making this a recurring feature when I have some time to spare and a problem that I feel like applying a little bit of computer programming to.

Source

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a Chris Sale vs. Jacob Misiorowski matchup and how often anticipated pitching duels live up to the hype, a controversial fair/foul call and ball-tracking tech in baseball compared to other sports, and what stadium decibel levels say about whom baseball belongs to, then (57:26) answer listener emails about the AL MVP race, Brayan Bello’s bullpen turnaround, the highest-scoring game in which each run was driven in by a different batter, the potential downside of a closer entrance spectacle, the oldest player who could go yard in a home run derby, the value of freezing time on the field, a game between players dressed as their teams’ mascots, and what makes players fun.

Audio intro: PJ Harding, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Nate Emerson, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Sale vs. Miz article
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2:01	Jason Martinez: Welcome to the RosterResource chat! Playoff races heating up and still several prospects who can potentially impact it. Should be an exciting next 11 days as teams decide who to make eligible for the post-season. Here we go …

2:05

Jon Becker: My best guess is that there are two factors at play here: This is the first full season in a big-league rotation for both Leahy and McGreevy, and perhaps they think that putting them on a minors-esque six-man schedule would be detrimental to their development and ability to pitch a full season next year rather than keeping them in a five-man the rest of the season. I think this is probably less likely than 1., but Mathews was really inefficient in both of his starts. Of course, the best way to get more efficient is to face MLB hitters more, but it’s a tough ask for a seven-man bullpen to keep picking Mathews up, especially when they’re keeping Leahy on turn but also limiting him to 5ish innings per start. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Mathews this year, though.

2:09

Jason Martinez: The downside is that there is a sub-.500 team currently in a playoff spot and a division leader that is 1 game over .500. But it’s highly unlikely it finishes that way. Still plenty of time for 1-2 teams to get hot and separate from the pack and with a good enough roster to compete against other playoff teams. The other negative is that several playoff contenders that have exceeded expectations acted as if they were just happy to have exceeded expectations and didn’t really do much at the trade deadline. Of course, this allows a team like the Dodgers to be the winner of the Skubal sweepstakes just like it allowed them to get Betts and sign Freeman and several other players because other teams were too cheap to retain their star players. Cheap owners who don’t try is still the biggest problem in baseball. But, overall, I think baseball is doing great with so many reasons to still be paying attention in late August.

2:11

Jon Becker: Look, Will Klein threw four shutout innings in a World Series game last year, so anything’s on the table. He’s been legitimately good for months now but it’s been cool to see Yoendrys Gómez be pretty central to the Twins’ surging playoff hopes after he was DFA’d by the Rays. Joey Ortiz has been the Brewers’ best hitter for a month now. It really takes a village to make it to the playoffs in a 162-game season and we’re going to get a lot of surprising performances down the stretch and into the playoffs.

2:16

Jason Martinez: Kikuchi with 1-yr and $21MM remaining on his deal is actually something other teams would likely be willing to take on if the Angels want to trade him during the offseason. Even if he doesn’t throw another pitch in 2026, teams would be willing to bet on him bouncing back. But, as things stand, I doubt another team would take on the entire salary or offer much back in return. Now, if he does return in 2026 and is the good version of himself for at least a handful of starts, I think the chances of getting a good return increase. In addition, the Angels (especially Mozeliak) want to see for themselves what he looks like before they make that decision for 2027. They need to get a better understanding of how much they can rely on him.

2:18

Jon Becker: To add context here, this is about the Twins bringing Alex Jackson back to replace Austin Martin on the roster instead of calling up Henry Mendez, Ben Ross, or Gabriel Gonzalez. We’ve seen teams use worse or less useful players for that 13th spot because it’s so little used, and I think that’s what the Twins are doing here. You don’t mind a guy like Jackson rotting on the bench (especially when you’re paying him anyway), but it could be actively bad for the others’ development to have them just hanging out.

2:22

Jason Martinez: I’m guessing he’ll get that opportunity in 2027. I think only Cavalli has a spot locked up and then guys like Alvarez and Irvin have a pretty good chance. Connelly Early would be in if healthy. And then I’d expect them to be aggressive in pursuit of another frontline SP. So there should be a path for Gray to be in the Opening Day rotation. Howeever, he has only thrown a total of 6 innings (all rehab assignment) over the past 2 seasons and he just made his 1st appearance of 2026. I think he can probably build up to 3 innings and possibly become a piggyback option in mid-to-late September. Not enough time to do much more than that. And then I’d imagine he won’t cost more than $2.5MM for his final season of arbitration so they’ll likely keep him around. But he’d be a bullpen option if he’s not one of their best starters. So I imagine the Nats also want to see how he looks out of the bullpen, even if it’s only a few appearances.

2:25

Jon Becker: It might not even be that big of a logjam if Ramos and Jones continue to slump; Jones would be easy to send down at at that point and perhaps Ramos gets shielded from more righties when Bellinger is back. There’s still the question of whether they’d send down Caballero or DFA Rosario if it came to deciding one or the other, but that’s a weeks-away decision at best and these things often have a way of working themselves out anyway.

2:29

Jason Martinez: Don’t know about all that roto stuff but you got a guy in Melton who is establishing himself as at least a solid No. 3 starter with potential to be more if he can miss more bats, a guy in Montgomery who might be the Pirates’ current closer and will be the projected closer in 2027, and a guy in Susana who will be one of the most anticipated arrivals in 2027 if he can stay healthy . He’s returning from a lat injury but I believe he had been previously shut down with an elbow injury. All starting pitchers have injury concerns but he’s barely pitched in the last few seasons and tough to imagine him not having innings limitations in 2027.

2:31

Jon Becker: I’ll take a shot and say he’s either a reliever for the Mets or starting for another team when the season starts next year. He’s taking to the one-inning role really nicely and they no longer have to accommodate him with a six-man rotation. Plus, they’ve got McLean, Scott, Manaea locked into rotation spots for next year, Thorton has a leg up on the rest of the competition, and Megill returning from TJ. And that’s before any external additions. Tough to see Senga getting a spot there anyway.

2:36

Jason Martinez: Sounds like Cabrera will be returning in a relief role and Peterson will be the No. 5 SP with Assad and Rea the other rotation options the rest of the way. I think they are going to trust Counsell on figuring out bullpen usage. They are going to have so many high-leverage options between Palencia, Webb, Cabrera, Ben Brown, and Shelby Miller (if he avoids the common setbacks that occur during recovery process; so far, so good). Their lefty options aren’t as good but mixing and matching with Milner, Thielbar, Peterson, and Rolison is fine. They’ll be important in a series vs the Dodgers. Justin Steele returning would obviously be a potential difference-maker. I think it’s going to be an underrated part of their playoff roster, especially if Cabrera and Brown can show some level of consistency.

2:37

Jon Becker: I think it really depends on which of the two got hurt in your scenario. Fermin is playing a little less than Campusano anyway so if he got hurt I think they’d just go with Duran, who profiles similarly. But Campusano provides a lot of offense and if he went down, perhaps they’d go bigger and call Salas up.

2:41

Jason Martinez: I’m assuming this is a Danny Jansen vs Alejandro Kirk question. Kirk struggled a bit earlier in the season but his numbers are nearly identical to 2025 and he’s slashing .282/.350/.425 with 22 HR over the past 2 seasons. Super reliable and getting the majority of starts over rookie Brandon Valenzuela. Jansen has been bad but he should get the majority of starts over Elias Diaz and you never know when the power surge will come. I’d still pick Kirk over Jansen.

2:43

Jon Becker: He’ll absolutely have a spot, but remains to be seen in what role. Normally when a guy is doing this well out of the bullpen it’s tough to see him transitioning to the rotation, but unlike a lot of dominant young relievers, Taylor has a four-pitch mix that could actually be conducive to getting outs in the rotation. Wouldn’t surprise me to see him stretched out to at least some extent in spring training and then they go from there.

2:47

Jason Martinez: Once they promoted Lombard (and since), it was pretty clear that Volpe no longer has a path to be the Yankees’ SS. So it makes sense to audition him at 2B and keep their options open for 2027. They can’t predict how the offseason will go so they need to have an open mind. If they use their resources elsewhere (not 2B), they could probably feel good knowing that some combination of Caballero/Volpe would be decent. My guess is that they’ll look to upgrade at 2B and will be open to trading Volpe (not giving him away for nothing) if they do.

2:49

Jon Becker: Huge, legit power, a lot of swing-and-miss on breaking stuff from righties. A little Esmerlyn Valdez-ish but less plate discipline and better in-zone contact. I don’t think he’ll be handed a starting role for next year barring a great finish to the season (which he’s certainly capable of), but I don’t think they’re going to add a free agent to clearly block him, either.

2:53

Jason Martinez: Bader earned a starting CF job with his performance in 2025 and that’s what the Giants signed him to be in 2026-27. But based on his performance and inability to stay healthy this season, I think he’s back to being a 4th OF/platoon in 2027. Gilbert’s performance (119 wRC+ vs RHP; adequate defense in CF) also has a lot to do with it. In all likelihood, I’d project a Gilbert/Bader platoon in CF in 2027 with Bo Davidson also in the mix at some point.

2:55

Jon Becker: I’d push back on the idea that Priester is likelier than Gasser/Drohan because a lot hinges on how his TOS recovery is going and if he looks anything like his 2025 self, if he needs more time on the IL, etc. May has a mutual option and those never get exercised so we can toss him out. I’ve been most impressed by Drohan so I’d give him a leg up over Gasser and Priester if he shows up iffy. Also in the mix: Coleman Crow, Colton Gordon, Tyson Hardin.

2:59

Jason Martinez: Projected rotation is easy/boring because they’ll only have 5 starters on the 40-man and they’re all MLB pitchers … Bradish, Baz, Young, Povich, Gibson It’s the next wave of prospects that is super interesting with Forret, De Leon, and German all expected to reach the majors in 2027 and Ayanson and Dzierwa also capable of moving quickly. That’s already an impressive group but probably not enough certainty for the big league rotation. I think they’ll add another frontline starter and then still end up relying heavily on that deep group of young starters.

3:01

Jon Becker: That sounds about right to me, assuming neither Ohtani nor Glasnow is built up enough for full starts. I do wonder what they’d do if everyone is built up to 5ish innings. Does someone (probably Glasnow) go to the bullpen anyway? Is someone left off the roster entirely for a short series? Do they really get granular with matchups?

3:06

Jason Martinez: Moving Abrams to 2B was going to happen eventually and I initially thought the timing could’ve been about Seaver King getting the call soon. But maybe not. This front office hasn’t been in a hurry with much and getting an early look at King might not be on the horizon. I’m sure they expect Willits to move quickly (I’d guess 2028) and they also have guys like Devin Fitz-Gerald and Ronny Cruz who could be MLB shortstops. But I’m not sure if they’d go into 2027 with Nuñez as the starting SS unless they felt really good about King or Fitz-Gerald being ready to take over at some point. TBD.

3:07	Jason Martinez: That will do it for today. Thanks for all the great questions. We’ll be back next Thursday.

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In 1981, when a seven-week players’ strike split the season into two “halves,” and in 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic shortened the season to 60 games, teams with sub-.500 records snuck into the postseason via expanded playoff formats created to accommodate the unique and extraordinary circumstances. No team finishing below .500 over the course of a full schedule has received a playoff berth, but the possibility looms large this year. With five and a half weeks and about 35 games per team still to play, the American League has just five teams above .500, including one — the AL West-leading Astros — that entered Wednesday right at that mark before beating the Angels. It’s not out of the question that two sub-.500 teams could make the playoffs, but for all of the owners’ carping about a lack of competitive balance, messy free-for-alls such as this are just what Major League Baseball wants.

If the postseason were to start today, the Rays (76-50) would win the AL East by five games and White Sox (66-60) the AL Central by four games, with both earning first-round byes. The Yankees (71-55) and Red Sox (68-59) would qualify as the top two Wild Card winners; as the fourth and fifth seeds, they would square off in a best-of-three Wild Card Series as they did last season. But from there, things get ugly. The Astros (64-63) are currently clinging to a two-game lead over the Rangers (62-65) atop the AL West, but with a projected win total of 82 wins according to our Playoff Odds, they don’t have much margin for error when it comes to clearing the .500 bar, and could join or surpass the 2005 Padres (82-80) and 1973 Mets (82-79) in terms of mediocre division winners. The 1994 Rangers were a whopping 10 games below .500 at 52-62 but one game ahead of the A’s (51-63) when the players’ strike put them both out of their misery, though MLB does not consider any first-place teams from the shortened season to be official division winners. That’s how the Braves, who trailed the NL East-leading Expos by six games when the strike hit, are still considered to have won 14 consecutive division titles from 1991–2005 (an assertion I take issue with, but that’s an argument for another day).

Here’s how the AL Wild Card picture looks, with playoff odds as of 9 AM on Thursday morning:

Minnesota currently “leads” the race for the third spot, with two other teams within a single game and four more within two and a half games. The Twins are currently on track to square off against the third-seeded Astros in a Wild Card series that isn’t far from pitting two sub-.500 teams against each other. One would advance, but I’d hardly call that a win for baseball.

You may recall that just over two weeks ago, as the trade deadline approached, the Tigers traded away both Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize, the Blue Jays dealt Kevin Gausman, Jeff Hoffman, and Daulton Varsho, and the Orioles parted with Adley Rutschman, Taylor Ward, and Tyler Wells. Moves such as those suggested “wait ’til next year,” even if those teams generally acquired major league talent to replace them. The Tigers won five of their first seven games after the deadline, but they’ve since cooled off and are now 7-8 since the bell rung, as are the Orioles. Those two teams have at least fared better than the Mariners (5-9) and Guardians (4-10), both of whom actively tried to shore up their rosters for the stretch run. Their playoff odds have dropped by 18.4% and 27.4%, respectively, though their overall odds remain higher than those of the Blue Jays, Tigers, and Orioles since the door to a division title remains ajar. Meanwhile, Toronto has gone 9-6 to climb back into the picture despite additionally losing both Trey Yesavage and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to the injured list; their odds have increased by an AL-high 12.1% since the deadline.

The likelihood of scrums such as this increased significantly with the 2022 expansion of the playoff field from 10 teams to 12. MLB and its 30 teams money their money very money, and not only are networks willing to pay significantly more to televise postseason games than regular season ones, but the possibility of a .500ish David upsetting a Goliath in a short series — à la the 2023 Diamondbacks (21st in payroll) over the Dodgers (fifth) and Phillies (fourth) — allows the owners to have their cake and eat it too, even if it doesn’t always work out for the networks. Fans love a Cinderella story now and again, and such runs help front offices justify aiming for the slightly-upper middle-of-the-pack (see Jerry Dipoto and his infamous 54% comment) instead of spending even more heavily to improve their odds of winning. After all, over the course of a three-, five-, or seven-game series, anything can happen.

Once upon a time, this close late-season clustering at least offered the tantalizing possibility of end-of-season chaos in the form of tiebreaker games. In 2018, the NL West’s Dodgers and Rockies and the NL Central’s Brewers and Cubs played Game 163 tiebreakers, with the winners claiming division titles and the losers pushed into the one-and-done Wild Card game. That format is now as bygone as pitchers hitting, and so Team Entropy — the concept of rooting for results that create chaos rather than pledging allegiance to a given team — is no more. Instead we’re left with the excitement of playoff spots and seeding being decided by mathematics. Since most baseball fans are at least somewhat numbers-oriented, this isn’t quite as perverse as hitting yourself in the thumb with a hammer just to feel something, but it ain’t great.

Appropriately as we bemoan the Death of Fun, MLB has five steps for breaking the ties, one for each stage of grief:

1. Head-to-head records: This is self-explanatory when it comes to two-team tiebreakers, and if they played an odd number of games against each other, which is currently the case if they’re in the same division, then no other steps will be necessary. If more than two teams are involved and they have identical records against each other, then the team with the best combined winning percentage against the other teams within the tie wins the tiebreaker. If it’s still relevant, the remaining two teams are un-tied via head-to-head records and on down the line.

   If more than two teams are involved and they do not have identical records against one another, but one team won its season series against each of the other teams, then that team wins the tiebreaker. Otherwise, it goes in order of combined winning percentage against the other teams they’re tied with, as above.

2. Intradivision records: This one is relevant only for two situations: multi-team scenarios where the teams all have the same head-to-head records within the group, or for two Wild Card teams in different divisions. In the latter case, there’s still a good chance they played seven games against each other instead of six.
3. Intraleague records: A team’s record against all three divisions in the same league.
4. Last half of intraleague games: If a team has played 48 interleague games, then this would be decided based on their winning percentage over the last 57 (half of 114) games against teams in their own league. And if that doesn’t work…
5. Last half of intraleague games plus one… or more, as needed: Under the above scenario, this would be decided based on their winning percentage over the last 58 intraleague games, then 59, 60, 61… as many as it takes.

In practice, this rarely gets past intradivision records even when gaming out hypothetical scenarios, and under the new format, the teams that have missed the postseason because of tiebreakers did so on the basis of head-to-head records. Last year featured one such case in each league. The Tigers beat out the Astros (both 87-75) for the third AL Wild Card spot, and the Reds beat out the Mets (both 83-79) for the third NL one, both on the basis of 4-2 season series wins. In 2024, a three-way tie for the second and third NL Wild Card spots involving the Braves, Mets, and Diamondbacks (all 89-73) left Arizona outside. The Braves won their season series against both teams, and the Mets went 4-3 against the Diamondbacks.

It’s too early to game out every scenario given the number of teams involved. Hell, it’s too early to be talking about any of this stuff, but welcome to seasonal creep, please buy a 12-foot skeleton before you check out. So long as we’re on the subject, here I present to you the big board showing the seven “aspiring” Wild Card teams plus the AL West-leading Astros, since it won’t take much for them to find themselves viewing the playoff picture through that lens:

The tables show each team’s head-to-head record against the others, the number of games remaining between those two teams at home and on the road, and their overall intradivisional records — enough information to cover the first two steps of the tiebreaker process. I didn’t have room for teams’ intraleague records, but I’ll present them here within a lightning-round summary of where they stand.

Astros (48-43 intraleague): The AL West leaders have just two games remaining against any of these seven other teams, a pair against the Mariners, to whom they’ve already lost their season series. They’ve won their season series against the Rangers, but in the event of a three-way tie with Texas and Seattle atop the division, they currently have the lowest winning percentage (.458, 11-13) of the trio, behind the Rangers (.478, 11-12) and Mariners (.571, 12-9).

Rangers (42-47): The good news is that the Rangers have already clinched four season series against these other teams. The bad news is that their .472 intraleague winning percentage is the lowest here. Note the overlapping tiebreakers in the AL West: the Astros won the season series over the Rangers, who won the season series over the Mariners, who won the season series over the Astros.

Twins (47-39): The Twins are the only team here above .500 in terms of both intradivision play (.514) and intraleague play (.547), with the latter mark the highest of any team here.

Blue Jays (40-43): The Blue Jays have the greatest control of their destiny within this cluster, with a total of 18 games remaining against the other seven teams, and a tie for the most such games at home (nine, as many as the Twins).

Guardians (40-43): Cleveland’s .528 intradivision winning percentage is the second-highest here, but an 18-11 May is the team’s only month above .500.

Tigers (44-47): The Tigers have the lowest intradivision winning percentage of any team here (.371), they’ve already lost their season series to the Guardians, and they trail their season series against the Twins. From among the teams here, they do have the highest run differential of (+82), Pythagorean winning percentage (.570) and BaseRuns winning percentage (.564). In other words, they’re a major league-high 11 wins off their projected pace. With two pitchers who were key parts of the run prevention end of things now relocated to the NL West, they’re less likely to close that gap.

Orioles (46-45): The division is a problem, as the Orioles not only have a .429 winning percentage within the AL East but trail the season series with the Blue Jays, though they do have six games remaining against them. Like the Guardians, they have just one month above .500, having gone 15-8 in July. It’s tough to take them seriously here; note that their playoff odds are the lowest within this group.

Mariners (43-46): Things look bleak for the Mariners right now, and with just eight games remaining agains the other teams here, they have relatively little control over their destiny. However, they do hold a few cards that could help in certain scenarios: They’ve secured the tiebreaker advantage over the Astros; they have the lead in the three-way head-to-head with Houston and Texas; and they have the highest intradivision winning percentage (.606) of any team here. None of that will matter if they don’t play better, however.

This jumble of teams isn’t particularly appealing from an aesthetic standpoint, but as The Bandwagon’s Zach Crizer pointed out earlier this week, Manfred and friends are plenty happy to have found this particular sweet spot. Shifting the focus from the battle for the fourth- or fifth-best record to the sixth-best tends to guarantee the most competitiveness down the stretch, which is something to remember as MLB wages its propaganda war against the players union with regards to the upcoming Collective Bargaining Agreement. You want competitive balance? You’re soaking in it.

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Noah Schultz remains a work in progress. Fifteen outings and 65 1/3 innings into his major league career, the recently-turned-23-year-old southpaw has a 3-9 record to go with a 6.06 ERA and a 4.86 FIP since debuting in April. Ranked second in the Chicago White Sox system coming into the season, Schultz is currently doing more fine-tuning in Triple-A, having been sent down to Charlotte earlier this month.

Two days before his August 8 demotion, I caught up to the 6-foot-10, high-ceiling hurler to ask how much he has learned about pitching since being drafted 26th overall in 2022 out of an Oswego, Illinois high school.

“A ton,” Schultz replied. “I didn’t know anything when I signed. I didn’t know anything about metrics. I knew that spin rate was good — I knew that I spun the ball well — but that was about it. Velo and spin rate. So, I’ve definitely picked up a ton over the past few years.”

Enough that he would now consider himself a data nerd?

“I would like to say no,” Schultz said to that supposition. “But yeah, I probably am. There are a lot of fun numbers, things like BABIP, and different things about myself as a pitcher that I’ve learned. For example, I know that my four-seam doesn’t get a ton of vert, but it has a better approach angle than some guys. That adds some play to it. My changeup… we’re working on getting more depth to it, but I’m a guy that gets more run than depth. I’m understanding things like that, and talking to my coaches how to go about it. Instead of trying to have my pitches, my shapes, look like someone else’s, I’m seeing what works best for my arsenal.”

That doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some tinkering, or that his tinkering days are done. Again, he’s still a work in progress. Schultz has thrown just 300 innings at the professional level — injuries have played a part in that — and as James Fegan wrote prior to the season, Schultz possesses “a profile built around the absence of a bat-missing fastball.” Hence the efforts to optimize an arsenal delivered from what Fegan described as “a funky low slot.”

“There are some things we’ve experimented with, trying to get different shapes on different stuff,” Schultz told me. “My old slider that I’ve thrown my whole life… we tried throwing a sweeper, but it came out being, really, a different pitch. We also tried to incline my arm slot to get a little more vert on the four-seam, but that changed the shapes on some other pitches. So, there is a lot we’ve experimented with this year, including in spring training.”

I asked Schultz if he could elaborate on the sweeper efforts.

“My whole career, it had kind of always been described as a sideways curveball,” the low-slot lefty replied. “It was never really a slider. It was a curveball grip, but from my angle it was -3, -4 [inches of vertical movement] and 10 horizontal. It was kind of my pitch. The last year or so, we added in the sweeper, wanting it be around zero and 15 to 16. A lot of other guys are throwing sweepers of that type, but we found out that by increasing the vert on it, I wasn’t necessarily missing right-handed bats at all.”

“The last couple of weeks, we’ve added back a little more depth to it,” Schultz went on to say. “Instead of ranging between +3 and -1, now it is from -3 to as low as -6. Those few inches make a huge difference as far as getting under bats. I’ve always been more of a groundball pitcher, and I think that plays better for me.”

Again, a work in progress. Schultz’s groundball rate over his 65 1/3 big league frames is just 34.6%, whereas last year it was 47.2% between the Double-A and Triple-A levels. Moreover, it was an even-higher 51.7% in 2024. Given that he hasn’t exactly thrived this season, might a permanent move away from his sweeper be in order? Perhaps not. As Schultz explained, having a variety of shapes in your arsenal is advantageous. Much for that reason, he views the pitch as being in his back pocket, as opposed to scrapped for good. Reintroducing it in the future remains a distinct possibility.

Factor in the need for Schultz to improve his command — never one of his strong suits — and it is readily apparent, arsenal certainly included, that Schultz remains an unfinished product.

“That’s probably a good way to put it,” said Schultz. “You’re always trying to evolve with the game. Every few years there are pitches that everyone seems to start throwing, and recently that has been a sweeper. Who knows what the next pitch is going to be? You need to be able to adjust to that on the fly, but at the same time, know what works for you. I feel like I’m getting there.”

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