The most important thing to know about the initial proposals for baseball’s next collective bargaining agreement is that they were designed to be rejected. It’s the end of May, meaning we still have a little more than six months to go before the current CBA expires at 11:59 p.m. ET on December 1. That’s when the owners are expected to lock out the players and initiate the game’s second work stoppage of the 2020s, but if the last CBA negotiation is any indication of how this one will play out, it’ll take at least another month and a half from then for bargaining to begin in earnest.

The purpose of the initial proposals released this week, by the MLB Players Association on Wednesday and MLB on Thursday, was to set the starting line from where each will slowly, but inevitably, concede ground. We likely won’t see much movement for a while, but once the owners and players start inching toward one another, they’ll point to their proposals from this week as evidence of their efforts to make a deal. Theoretically, in a labor negotiation, you want to set your starting point far from where you want to end up, so that you can abandon some of what you were asking for and still end up with a favorable agreement. So just because, in the words of Ben Clemens, “opposing sides aren’t speaking the same language” right now doesn’t mean we’re any more or less likely to miss games next season. That said, it also doesn’t mean that there’s nothing for us to learn from the proposals. Rather, as Ben explains, “these early offers are revealing of what each side cares about most. The specific numbers quoted are unlikely to survive multiple rounds of bargaining, but the concepts and structures that each side favors at this stage could tell us a lot about what an eventual compromise looks like.” In his piece from Friday, which you can find here, Ben does a great job of laying out everything you need to know about the start of bargaining. You should definitely check that out.

That’s the last we’ll talk about baseball labor in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions on overlooked MVP candidates, how different baseball would be without Tommy John surgery, and which pitchers actually benefit from throwing first-pitch strikes. Before we do, 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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What would modern day baseball or the record books look like if Tommy John surgery were never a thing and a torn UCL were a career-ending injury? — Matt

Michael Baumann: I love a good counterfactual, and this here is a doozy. It’s a short list of inventions that have changed baseball more than Tommy John surgery, and I’m counting things like the glove.

I don’t think we appreciate how quickly the state of the art on Tommy John has changed. It gets treated like an inconvenience now; sure, you’ll be out for 12 to 18 months, but recovery rates are so high you can pick up where you left off. Position players get an internal brace over the offseason and barely miss any time.

And yet it was only about a decade ago that a torn UCL was still a career-altering injury. Recovery was not taken for granted. A janky UCL ruined Brady Aiken’s career before it started. Jeff Passan’s The Arm — the seminal work on the UCL crisis — came out in 2016.

Tommy John had his famous medical procedure in 1974 and pitched until 1989, which means his career overlapped with the first Hall of Fame pitcher to undergo Tommy John surgery: John Smoltz.

Smoltz pitched from 1988 until 2009, and it’s possible that his career overlapped with the last Hall of Fame pitcher (or at least, the last pitcher elected by the BBWAA) who didn’t undergo Tommy John surgery. Here are the retired pitchers who have their original UCL and a serious Hall of Fame case, as well as the active pitchers mentioned in Jay Jaffe’s most recent Cooperstown Notebook, from last August.

If you’re looking for other active pitchers with even a remote chance to be Hall of Famers, good luck. Justin Verlander’s had it. Chris Sale’s had it. Jacob deGrom’s had it. Gerrit Cole, Zack Wheeler, Shohei Ohtani, Tarik Skubal, Yu Darvish: All had Tommy John surgery.

There are five active pitchers with 30 career WAR and all the UCLs they were born with: Scherzer, Kevin Gausman, Sonny Gray, Aaron Nola, and Jose Quintana.

Maybe Paul Skenes could do it, but he’s only 23, and is at least seven more seasons removed from Hall of Fame consideration. And the ligament fairy comes for everyone eventually. We thought Verlander and Cole were immune, but it got them in their mid-30s.

Back to the original question: Where would we be?

Obviously, pitching pedagogy would’ve taken an unrecognizably different course since the 1990s at the latest. If you look at all the competing incentives for a pitcher, we’ve basically found our Nash equilibrium: Go max-effort, throw all those sliders, and when you blow out, you go to the shop and spend a year on the bench. A pitcher who doesn’t pitch like this risks not only losing games, but his livelihood. Now, there’s a high-success surgery to fix a torn UCL and basically no stigma associated with undergoing it. You can blow out and still get paid.

If a torn UCL were a career-ender, pitchers would obviously not be so cavalier about their elbows.

We know what that world looks like, because it’s the world that inspired Tommy John to let Dr. Frank Jobe cut him open in the first place.

When I was a kid, I spent countless hours playing historical sim baseball games on my computer, and I loved the 1970s Reds. How could you not? At one time or another, the Big Red Machine had two players who are probably the best ever at their respective positions (Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan), plus Hall of Famer Tony Perez, plus MVPs Pete Rose and George Foster, plus multi-time All-Stars Lee May and Ken Griffey.

But I always wondered why their pitchers weren’t up to that level.

The truth is, the Big Red Machine had plenty of good pitchers. They (Gary Nolan, Don Gullett, Pat Zachry) just all blew out their elbows and/or shoulders and were done by age 30. Pitchers in the 1970s weren’t throwing 100 mph or chucking sweepers 30% of the time, but they were running up huge pitch counts and throwing on short rest and doing all sorts of other things that are bad for your arm. And while the occasional Nolan Ryan or Steve Carlton or Tom Seaver — who was traded to the Reds toward the end of the Big Red Machine years — poked through, the Gary Nolans, Denny McLains, and J.R. Richards outnumbered those guys five to one.

If that had continued through the ensuing 50 years, one of three things would’ve happened. First, absent some surgical breakthrough to repair a torn UCL, medical science almost certainly would’ve figured out a training technique or a pitching motion to throw hard without putting such strain on the elbow. If you’re old enough to remember Mike Marshall’s day in the sun, it might’ve looked something like that.

Second, the rules would’ve changed to protect players from themselves. Football and hockey changed their rules and their equipment because paying customers started to get antsy about watching their heroes suffer catastrophic head injuries every game. Maybe that means WBC-style pitch-count limits, or rosters with 30 pitchers, or a change to the mound or the baseball itself. In the non-Tommy John timeline, FanGraphs in 2026 is routinely posting articles about the days of 250-inning pitchers with a mixture of fascination and horror. Like how the Oakland Raiders used to have their linebackers wear concrete casts during games. Wow, weren’t we so barbaric then, and aren’t we so evolved now?

Option no. 3: Nothing changes, and we continue to let young pitchers blow out and get used up. In that case, a pitcher like Verlander would become a folk hero for just making it to his age-37 season before his arm finally gave out. Stephen Strasburg turns out to be a bust and puts a whole generation of GMs off college pitchers. The Hall of Fame standard for career wins drops to 100.

In any case, I don’t think pitchers take their foot off the gas in the interest of self-preservation. For all but the most talented few, anything short of max effort means getting shelled. Sure, maybe all those other guys burned out, but I’m built different.

Offense skyrockets as the most talented pitchers struggle to last through their 20s. And rather than juicing the ball to bring life into a three true outcome-dominated world, MLB is able to restore the game to balance by deadening the baseball. On a game-to-game basis, I don’t think a world without Tommy John surgery would be too different from our own. You’d just have to learn a new slate of pitchers every three to five years.

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Hi mailbag gang from the U.K.,

Dr. Plantwrench

Jay Jaffe: For those not in the know, Grich was something of a proto-Chase Utley, except he batted right-handed, but he similarly combined on-base skill, power, and infield defense (primarily at second base) for some very good teams during a 17-year career with the Orioles (1970–76) and Angels (1977–86). A six-time All-Star and four-time Gold Glove winner, he went one-and-done with 2.6% of the vote on the 1992 Hall of Fame ballot and has never gotten another sniff from the Veterans or Era Committees. I know all of this almost off the top of my head because he was one of the 14 players I covered at length in The Cooperstown Casebook. Since its 2017 publication, 11 of those players have been elected (Dick Allen, Andruw Jones, Edgar Martinez, Minnie Miñoso, Mike Mussina, David Ortiz, Tim Raines, Mariano Rivera, Ted Simmons, Alan Trammell, and Larry Walker), and a 12th came close but blew up his own candidacy (Curt Schilling). A 13th at least finally landed on an Era Committee ballot and fared respectably after going one-and-done on the BBWAA ballot (Lou Whitaker). Grich is the only one who hasn’t come any closer to election since the book.

The season to which Dr. Plantwrench refers is Grich’s 1973 campaign, when, as the 24-year-old second baseman for the Orioles, he hit .251/.373/.387 (116 OPS+) with 12 home runs, 17 stolen bases, and 107 walks in 162 games. To that he added elite defense, leading all AL second basemen in putouts, assists, and double plays, and winning his first Gold Glove. Total Zone estimates his defense was a whopping 29 runs above average, boosting his WAR — the Baseball Reference version, which I’ll be using throughout this answer so I can more easily connect it with the site’s MVP voting logs — to an AL-best 8.3. Yet he finished 19th in the MVP voting, with a smattering of down-ballot mentions. Meanwhile, A’s slugger Reggie Jackson, who hit .293/.383/.531 while leading the league in slugging, homers (32), and RBI (117) while finishing second behind Grich with 7.8 WAR, won the award unanimously. It’s not hard to understand why: He was the lineup centerpiece on an A’s team in the midst of three straight championships, and put up big offensive numbers, particularly in two of the three Triple Crown categories. WAR hadn’t been invented yet, and Grich’s hitting stats were hardly eye-catching, so it’s unsurprising he didn’t win; that he didn’t even get a second look from most voters probably owed to his low batting average.

In unpacking your question, my assumption is that we’re not talking about “most overlooked MVP-level season” in the sense of simply not winning; Grich is hardly an analogue to Ted Williams in 1941, Mike Trout in 2012, or Cal Raleigh in 2025, guys who had historic seasons but finished second in the voting because another player did something pretty historic as well. We’re talking about guys whose seasons were seriously underestimated for one reason or another.

I wrote a whole spiel about MVP awards in a previous foray on the topic (least deserving MVP awards), but the short version is that in coming up with an answer, it’s sensible to begin with 1931, when the BBWAA took over MVP voting. Its predecessor, the AL’s League Award, was issued from 1923–28 but didn’t allow for a player to win multiple times and limited voters to considering one player per team, so you have absurdities like Babe Ruth not getting any votes for his 60-homer 1927 season because he won in 1923. An NL counterpart with different voting rules was issued 1924–29. Also, it makes sense only to consider full(ish) seasons as well, so the 1981 and ’94 strike years are out, as is the pandemic-shortened 2020; I think the 144-game 1995 season is reasonable enough to include. And, regrettably, this has to be limited to position players, since pitchers have only been sporadically considered in the voting. For example, Bob Gibson won the NL MVP and Cy Young in 1968, the year he put up a ridiculous 1.12 ERA and led the majors with 11.9 WAR (including offense), but when he led the majors again the next year with 11.3 WAR, he finished 30th in the NL MVP voting. This has become more of a problem since the Cy Young was established in 1956, as — to use a cutoff to which I’ll return — two of the four 10-WAR seasons by pitchers in the 1931–55 window were recognized with MVP awards (Lefty Grove in 1931 and Hal Newhouser in 1945). For the other two, Bob Feller finished sixth in the AL MVP voting in 1946, when he put up 10.0 WAR while going 26-15 with a 2.18 ERA and 348 strikeouts, and Grove finished 15th (!) in 1936, when he went a fairly pedestrian 17-12 but with a 2.81 ERA (189 ERA+). So let’s leave pitchers out of this.

I thought about answers along two lines. For the first one, I evaluated the MVP support for all the position players who produced 10-WAR seasons since 1931. There have been only 36 such seasons, producing 21 MVPs, seven second-place finishes, and one third. Among the remaining seven, one sticks out like a sore thumb:

Holy cow! I think it’s fair to say that for all but Petrocelli’s season, voter fatigue or a lack of novelty was a factor. The 1931 season was Ruth’s age-36 season and the last of his 10 (!) with at least 10 WAR (including pitching). Gehrig had won the League Award in 1927 (instead of Ruth) and in the BBWAA version had finished second twice and fourth once from 1931–33 before slipping to fifth in 1934, when Tigers catcher-manager Mickey Cochrane won after leading Detroit – to which he’d been traded the previous December — to a pennant but putting up just 4.5 WAR. Mays averaged 9.5 WAR annually from 1954–66 while leading the NL 10 times and reaching 10 WAR six times, but won MVP awards only in 1954 (the year the Giants won the World Series) and 1965, when he set career highs with 52 homers and 11.2 WAR. He had five top-four finishes between those two wins, but was generally overshadowed by players from pennant-winning teams. Yastrzemski had won the AL Triple Crown and MVP in 1967, but the next year was “The Year of the Pitcher,” and the MVP went to 31-game winner Denny McLain. Petrocelli, a shortstop on a third-place team, got lost amid the game’s offensive resurgence in 1969. Harmon Killebrew, of the AL West-winning Twins, won on the strength of his league-best 49 home runs, while Frank Howard (48 homers) placed fourth, and Jackson (47 homers) fifth, with two players from the pennant-winning Orioles (Boog Powell and Frank Robinson) second and third, and McLain sixth.

Which brings us to Ripken, the AL Rookie of the Year in 1982, when the Orioles lost the AL East race to the Brewers on the final day of the season, and its MVP in 1983, when the O’s won the World Series. Ripken had better Triple Crown stats that year (.318-27-102) than in 1984, plus league bests in hits (211) and doubles (47). He reached the 10-WAR threshold for the first of two times in 1984 thanks to his defense, with 23 runs above average according to Total Zone (his first of five seasons with 20 or more fielding runs). But the perception of an offensive dip set against the backdrop of the 85-win Orioles slipping to a distant fifth behind the 104-win Tigers doomed his candidacy. It didn’t help that the voters seized upon Detroit reliever Willie Hernandez, who made 80 appearances with 32 saves and a 1.92 ERA, as worthy of both the Cy Young and MVP; the Royals’ Dan Quisenberry and his league-best 44 saves finished third. Ripken scored just one point in the voting, for a single 10th-place mention.

Ripken’s unjustly ignored season sets up another way to look at your question that also ties to Grich. There have been 13 times that a player led his league in WAR while putting up at least 3.0 dWAR, meaning his Total Zone or Defensive Runs Saved value plus the positional adjustment, converted from runs to wins; all of them are either shortstops, second basemen, third basemen, or center fielders, positions of greater defensive importance and hence with higher adjustments. Four of them won MVP, two more finished in the top five of the voting, and three others in the top 10:

Ripken and Grich rank second and third in terms of lowest MVP finish, sandwiched by two seasons from Nettles, whose power hitting was often undervalued because of his modest batting averages, and whose spectacular defense often went under-recognized because Brooks Robinson took home 16 straight Gold Gloves from 1960–75. Nettles won only Gold Gloves in 1977 and ’78, but he’s eighth in fielding runs (140) and 12th in JAWS, the highest-ranked third baseman outside the Hall of Fame. Cleveland went 60-102 in 1971, which explains why Nettles wasn’t considered more strongly that year. In 1976, he helped the Yankees to their first pennant since 1964 while leading the AL in home runs, but it was teammate Thurman Munson — a catcher who hit .302/.337/.432 with 17 homers, 105 RBI, and 5.3 WAR — who won MVP.

I can point to some other injustices along these lines, but at the risk of going even longer, I’ll circle back to my Grich comparison. In 2008, Utley hit .292/.380/.535 (136 OPS+) with 33 homers, 104 RBI, and 9.0 WAR (second in the league behind Albert Pujols), including 3.5 dWAR. Yet he finished 14th in the MVP voting while Pujols won. That’s just maddening, as is the fact that Utley never won a Gold Glove, but perhaps if he’s elected to the Hall of Fame (he’s trending in that direction), it will prompt a closer look at Grich.

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Phillies radio announcers today were talking about how important it is for Andrew Painter to throw first-pitch strikes so as to get ahead in the count. Obviously, every pitcher gets much better results when they’re ahead in the count. But are there some pitchers who benefit much more than others from getting ahead 0-1? — Jeremy

Davy Andrews: What a fun question, Jeremy. It also makes for a great Stathead query, because Stathead lets you look up splits not just for a specific count, but for any plate appearance that reaches a specific count. I started with 0-1, pulling the stats of any pitcher this century who’s thrown at least 250 innings worth of plate appearances that started out 0-1. Then I pulled the stats for those same pitchers during the plate appearances in which they fell behind 0-1.

It’s a sample of 548 pitchers, and as you’d expect, every single one of them pitched better when they got strike one. The average pitcher’s OPS swung 204 points depending on whether the first pitch was taken for a strike or a ball. That’s a colossal difference, and it’s universal. Only five pitchers in the whole sample had a gap below 100 points.

We’re leaving out an important factor, though. It’s not as simple as either getting ahead or falling behind on the first pitch. The first pitch can also be put into play, and when it does, it tends to get crushed. Since 2008, the league has run an overall wOBA of .317 and a .386 wOBA on the first pitch. For context, Albert Pujols had a career wOBA of .385. The average player, when they hit the first pitch, turns into a Hall of Famer. That makes throwing the first pitch in the zone way more dangerous than the numbers would lead you to believe.

To account for that, I combined the 0-0 and 0-1 results for each pitcher, then compared them to their 0-1 results. The average difference in OPS dropped from 204 points down to 149. It’s still definitely better to throw the ball in the zone in search of strike one, but the gap is a lot smaller than you might think.

A few fun facts from this new data. We now have two players on our list who actually pitch better when they fall behind 1-0, and both are pitching right now. Tanner Bibee allows a .681 OPS after he falls behind 1-0, but his OPS on the first pitch and when he gets ahead 0-1 is .704. It’s a difference of just 23 points, and Bibee doesn’t have the longest track record around, but it seems safe to say that he’s good working from behind. The other pitcher with a negative split is Sandy Alcantara, who has a meatier sample of more than 1,150 innings under his belt. Alcantara’s 1-0 OPS is three points better than his first-pitch/first-strike OPS.

Matt Martell asked Bibee’s old manager, Terry Francona, about this the other day, and Francona seemed to think pitching from behind is a skill. “I think some guys have a better ability to climb back into a count than some other people, maybe,” he said. Asked what skills might help those pitchers climb back into the count, Francona answered with one word: “Command.”

I also noticed several current Dodgers are at the other end of the list, the side with the biggest splits. Blake Snell, Tyler Glasnow, Blake Treinen, and Edwin Díaz are all down there with differences of over 220 points of OPS. If you’re looking for pitchers who really need to get ahead in the count, that’s the team to watch. Snell is a particularly interesting name, because his whole deal as a pitcher is that he’s not afraid to fall behind or issue a walk. He’ll just keep nibbling until somebody swings at the pitch he wants them to swing at. If anybody shouldn’t be bothered about falling behind 1-0, it’s Snell, right? Wrong! When he falls behind 1-0, his OPS shoots up a whopping 239 points – the 21st-highest mark on this list of 548 pitchers! – but that approach has won him two Cy Young awards anyway. So maybe we don’t know anything at all.

Are there players who are better or worse at pitching from behind? Maybe? A little bit? I think there are some really good pitchers who are good no matter the count, and I think some players really struggle once they’re behind, but the vast majority of pitchers are in the middle. They’re significantly worse once they fall behind 1-0, just not Blake Snell worse.

But here’s the most fun part of this whole exercise. The numbers will be different by the time this runs on Saturday, because Painter is pitching on Friday night, but as of Wednesday, he’s actually been better when he throws a ball on the first pitch than when he throws a strike. Painter, the guy who started this whole conversation! It’s close, but he’s got a .786 OPS after falling behind 1-0 and a .793 OPS after he gets ahead 0-1. To be clear, the difference is negligible, and the sample size here is so small as to be completely meaningless, but as of right now, there’s no actual evidence that points to singling him out as someone who really needs to avoid ball one.

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Enhanced Games and whether they would watch a baseball league where PEDS were explicitly permitted, Abner Uribe’s crotch-chop suspension, and (34:40) the most disappointing and surprising (in a positive way) teams of 2026, then (55:37) answer emails about raising a girl who likes baseball, how a salary cap would affect prices for fans, home runs on the first pitch of the game, the Hall of Fame prospects of Kenley Jansen, Craig Kimbrel, and Aroldis Chapman, the most players appearing in a game against their former team, and how to evaluate whether a team’s player development was responsible for a player’s success or failure.

Audio intro: The Shirey Brothers, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme”

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A long time ago, Keibert Ruiz was one of the top catching prospects in baseball. He was so highly regarded that he was a significant piece of the Nationals’ return in the Max Scherzer and Trea Turner trade with the Dodgers in 2021. After a solid first full season in Washington the following year, he signed an eight-year extension worth $50 million in March 2023. Unfortunately, that’s when the bottom fell out. Over the last three years, Ruiz has been the worst qualified position player in baseball, “accumulating” -1.9 WAR.

When the Nationals acquired Harry Ford in a trade with the Mariners this offseason, it was fair to wonder if Ruiz’s days as the team’s primary backstop were numbered. He had been a disaster both at the plate and behind it. His 79 wRC+ over the last three years was a hair higher than Patrick Bailey’s 76 mark, but instead of offsetting that offensive futility with elite defense, Ruiz was the worst defensive catcher in baseball. It’s shocking, then, to see that he has so completely turned things around this year; he’s already accrued 0.8 WAR and has been the 11th-most valuable catcher in baseball in just 34 games.

Let’s tackle the most surprising development first: All of a sudden, Ruiz is providing positive value behind the plate. Among the 53 catchers who caught at least 1,000 innings over the last three years, Ruiz was the second-worst framer, the second worst at throwing out base stealers, and the sixth-worst blocker. This year, he’s added two runs via framing and has been a slightly above-average blocker. His throwing hasn’t improved all that much according to Statcast, but he also hasn’t been challenged very often, so that area of defense hasn’t really affected his overall defensive value.

Last year, Ruiz suffered two concussions within a few weeks of each other. The first came on June 23, when an errant foul ball hit him in the head while he was sitting in the dugout. The second came just a week and a half later — and just two days after he had been activated off the 7-day concussion IL — when a foul tip struck him in the mask. He attempted to return to play in September, but he was shut down from his rehab assignment after his concussion symptoms returned. In an effort to reduce his risk behind the plate, the Nationals had Ruiz adjust his stance so that he’s now crouching lower to the ground:

In the picture above, you can see that at the pitcher’s release, Ruiz’s back isn’t as upright and his head is a little lower to the ground. The team thought that a lower stance would allow more foul tips to fly over his head instead of into his mask. That might have been the intended goal of the new position, but the effect on Ruiz’s ability to receive pitches has transformed his defensive metrics. If we look at Statcast’s detailed framing data, over the last three years, Ruiz had really struggled to receive both low pitches and pitches to his right:

It’s reasonable to think that sitting lower in his stance has helped him to frame those low pitches much more effectively. What’s even more surprising is that the right-hand side of the plate is now his strongest framing zone. In addition to benefiting his receiving, a lower crouch has probably helped him block errant pitches that he might not have been able to get to previously.

Going from being one of the worst defensive catchers in baseball to an above-average one is a tremendous improvement on its own, but Ruiz has also taken a step forward as a hitter. Ruiz got off to a familiar slow start at the plate this year; though May 6, he was running a .182/.203/.303 slash line, with a hugely disappointing 37 wRC+. As Spencer Nusbaum of The Athletic reported on Thursday, Ruiz met with the Nationals coaching staff on May 7 to build a plan for improvement. That same day, he smacked a pair of doubles and a home run. Over his last 11 games, he’s collected 16 hits, seven doubles, and three home runs, raising his season line to .262/.277/.486 (109 wRC+). The plan seems to have worked.

Two things keyed this offensive outburst. First, Ruiz is being more selective when it comes to which pitches to swing at, and second, he’s swinging to do damage when he gets a good pitch to hit. Here’s how manager Blake Butera put it in an interview with Jessica Camerato of MLB.com:

“That’s the one thing with Keibert is, he can cover a lot of pitches but he can also hit the ball really hard. And it’s really hard to hit pitches hard when you’re swinging at everything and just making contact. So one thing we put on him was, shrink the zone a little bit, trust your hand-eye coordination, even if that means taking some borderline pitches that are strikes. Wait until you get a good pitch to hit. Then he’s doing the work from there.”

Throughout his career, Ruiz has displayed excellent bat-to-ball skills and a fantastic ability to cover the entire plate; it’s the reason his career strikeout rate is just 11.1%. But his aggressiveness and propensity to put the ball in play is also why his career walk rate is just 4.7%. With a new selective approach in mind, Ruiz has cut his overall swing rate to 47.5%, a five point drop from where it’s been in the recent past. He’s given up nearly all of those swings on pitches located in the zone; his chase rate is essentially unchanged, but his zone swing rate is down nearly 10 points.

Despite that increased selectivity, he’s still making contact just as often, only now that contact has a little more oomph behind it. Ruiz has significantly improved his contact quality, and most of the improvement has come as a right-handed hitter. Throughout his career, he’s run a neutral platoon split as a switch-hitter, but his underlying batted ball metrics were significantly worse from the right side despite the results indicating otherwise:

This year, Ruiz is doing a ton more damage against left-handed pitching. He’s increased his bat speed from the right side by more than two ticks and has seen huge improvements in every meaningful batted ball metric. He’s also seen a jump in batted ball quality from the left side, albeit a smaller one. That growth appears to stem from his intent at the plate. He’s seeking good pitches to hit and is looking to drive them in the air to the pull side. His pull rate is all the way up to 67.4%, the largest increase of any batter this year, and he’s elevating his contact a lot more often as well. The results over the last few weeks speak for themselves.

For now, Ruiz is still splitting time behind the plate with Drew Millas. He has started a little over half of the Nationals’ games this season and just 11 of the 20 games since the fateful meeting that set him on this course. Millas was a well-regarded catching prospect in his own right not too long ago, but he hasn’t exactly impressed during parts of four seasons in the big leagues. He’s currently running a 41 wRC+ with adequate defense behind the plate. And Ford isn’t knocking on the door of the big leagues, either; the young catcher has mustered just a 74 wRC+ in Triple-A this year. If Ruiz continues bashing the ball and is able to keep up the good work defensively, it wouldn’t be surprising to see him reclaim his role as the team’s everyday catcher in short order.

With their plan for improvement in place, the Nationals have to be thrilled to see such positive results so quickly from Ruiz. I’m sure there will be bumps in the future — we’re talking about just 43 plate appearances since he made these changes to his approach — but with the support of the coaching staff, Ruiz appears to have been set on a path to success.

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Spencer Strider had a fascinating first inning at Fenway Park on Tuesday. The Atlanta Braves right-hander threw 10 pitches in the frame, and it took him just five to retire the final three batters he faced. The first two batters were another story entirely. Jarren Duran walloped the second of Strider’s offerings over the right field fence, and Ceddanne Rafaela followed by depositing his fifth bullet over the Green Monster. The Red Sox led 2-0 before he had recorded an out.

What was that inning like for Strider? Wanting to find out, I approached him the next day to see if he’d be amenable to a pitch-by-pitch revisiting of what had happened. We’d had such a conversation back in his rookie season, albeit under far different circumstances: He’d fanned the side on 11 pitches in his lone inning of work.

Strider was happy to oblige, so I began by asking him if his game plan differed from 11 days prior, when he’d started against the Red Sox in Atlanta.

“There was some variation,” the righty replied. “I walked Duran to lead off the game in the previous outing, and I felt like some of that was a game-plan thing where we wanted to go with the heater; the walk was a lot of arm-side heaters. For my stuff, and kind of my mechanics, we wanted to target the glove side and get ahead [on Tuesday]. And I did, although I kind of pulled it down a little bit more than we were trying to do. Then we went back to it, as was the plan, and I kind of threw it in the same spot. The down-and-in heater to lefties isn’t a spot where you want to go, especially when they’re sitting heater. Maybe he pops it up or grounds out. Maybe he takes it again. Instead, he hit a homer. Big league hitters do that.”

The three pitches he threw to Rafaela were all elevated.

“We went fastball up for a swing-and-miss,” recalled Strider. “A lot of times you would probably go back to that. Kind of a don’t-leave-fish-to-find-fish mentality. If a guy swings and misses on a pitch, why would you try something else? But some of it is a scouting thing, a game-plan thing, in terms of how we want to attack him and get him out.

“On 0-1, we went slider,” Strider continued. “It missed up, a really bad slider. Very rarely will I ever try to throw a slider up in the zone. Then, I think [catcher] Sandy [Leòn] felt the same way that I did at the moment: ‘OK, if we can throw a well-executed slider here, we’ve got him in a good spot.’ He’s shown that he’s looking for a heater — he’s on that timing — so I threw another slider. It was another hanger up in the zone. I don’t know if there are legitimate parameters to define a hanger, but it hung.”

In stunning fashion, Strider had been taken deep by the first two batters of the game. What was he thinking as Rafaela was rounding the bases?

“That I should probably stop throwing pitches exactly where we’ve identified we shouldn’t,” he replied. “That would be a good idea.”

The next pitch he threw was a curveball that Wilyer Abreu drove to deep right-center field, where it was caught on the warning track, 362 feet from home plate.

“Off the bat, I thought it was an out,” Strider said. “The crowd, after two homers, saw another ball in the air and got excited, but I was pretty confident that it was an out.”

Abreu hits breaking balls well, and he’s been one of Boston’s best hitters. Was it was the right pitch to throw at the time?

“There’s no wrong pitch, ever,” Strider opined. “It’s about execution. I mean, if you execute a pitch, then… hindsight is always 20-20.

“The idea of hot and cold… everybody is a big leaguer,” he continued. “Everybody can get you at any time. There are very few hitters who are going to hit well against executed pitches. Most guys are making their money on mistakes. The guys who are hitting executed pitches are having induction ceremonies.”

The right-hander proceeded to record his second consecutive first-pitch out, getting Willson Contreras on a routine popup to the infield. “I got it to that upper rail, where we wanted to go” he said of the 95.7-mph four-seamer. “It’s what I’d like a fastball to do on 0-0, get a one-pitch out.”

Strider didn’t get that result on his first pitch to Masataka Yoshida, but it wasn’t long thereafter that the eventful first inning was over.

“It was a fastball, strike looking on the outer half, a curveball, strike looking, and then a changeup below the zone for a swing-and-miss,” Strider said of the three-pitch strikeout. “It wasn’t a preplanned sequence. The previous pitch was a well-executed fastball with good shape, to Contreras, and we kind of built off what the last thing was. The idea of getting a quick out there, if we could, would be good, so we threw the heater. He takes it. At that point, I’m thinking — I think Sandy was as well — that something starting out as a ball is something he won’t swing at. That’s the idea of the curveball there. Of course, he takes it. Now he’s going to have to protect; there is no chance he’s going to take something starting as a strike. He’d just seen a ball move toward him, so you might as well throw something soft away.”

The conversation with pitching coach Jeremy Hefner once he returned to the dugout?

“There wasn’t a conversation,” explained Strider. “I think there was a consensus opinion that I did not execute some pitches, and guys hit homers off of them. That’s what happened.

“The reality is, if I give up five runs in the first inning, I still have a bullpen that’s going to be hard-pressed to cover a whole game,” Strider added. “We also have an offense that wants to get back in the game. You have to keep perspective of what your job is. It’s not always going to be to throw a no-hitter. Just do your job. Even if my outing has been tarnished in the first inning, I have to do my job.”

At game’s end, Strider had allowed just three hits and three runs over five innings. He was credited with the win, his third in as many decisions.

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1:09	higginsford: I just submitted several questions about power breakouts and promptly remembered Brendan mentioning it’s tough to tell cus of the ball. Oops

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When I announced my intention to write about Antonio Senzatela, Jon Becker burst into my Slack DMs like the Kool-Aid Man to demand I use a Penn and Teller-based headline. Credit where due: It was a great idea.

You know what’s not traditionally a good idea? Writing about Antonio Senzatela.

The rigorous study of baseball empirics has made us all smarter and better, but there are a few things I miss about the old days. Foremost among them is Nichols’ Law of Catcher Defense, an old pre-sabermetrics axiom which states the following: A catcher’s defensive reputation is inversely proportional to his offensive abilities.

Now that we can evaluate a catcher’s defense empirically, we can prove that Austin Hedges or Patrick Bailey, or [Insert Guardians Backstop here] is, in fact, a good defender, rather than throwing up our hands and assuming there must be some reason they keep getting work.

There’s a related fallacy regarding starting pitchers, which, while true, has not been formally stated as far as I know. (As an aside, it is my no. 1 career goal to end up on the greatest Wikipedia page: List of eponymous laws. If someone wanted to formalize Baumann’s Corollary to Nichols’ Law and post it there, that’d be neat.)

Back to the original point: A starting pitcher’s strikeout rate is negatively correlated to his reputed ability to generate soft contact. Surely, if he’s not striking opponents out, he must be good at something.

You know how I know that’s not true? Antonio Senzatela.

If you wanted to pick an avatar for the current Rockies regime’s time in the wilderness, Senzatela would be a good choice. A reliable innings-eating youngster on the last good Colorado teams of 2017 and 2018, Senzatela has lasted a decade in the big leagues with a career strikeout rate of 14.9%. Among pitchers currently on active rosters, with a minimum of 200 career innings, that’s the second-lowest strikeout rate. He also has the highest career opponent batting average of that group: .290.

Senzatela has the eighth-highest ERA since 2010 among pitchers with at least 500 innings pitched, though eight of the top nine names on that list are Rockies, so maybe it’s unfair to single him out. He has his positive attributes — decent fastball velocity, high groundball rate, relatively low walk rate — but this is a pitcher who was born to be sacrificed to the God of Innings and forgotten when arbitration hits. Instead, the Rockies gave him a five-year contract extension.

That contract turned out to be a nightmare, even by Colorado’s standards. Senzatela pitched around a couple minor injuries to post a 5.07 ERA in 19 starts in the first year of the deal. Then he tore his ACL. He came back from the torn ACL in early 2023, made two appearances, and blew out his elbow, wiping out almost all of 2023 and 2024 as he recovered from Tommy John surgery.

In 2025, finally healthy (more or less), Senzatela went 4-15 with a 6.65 ERA, a 6.97 ERA, and a 5.48 FIP. He struck out 11.8% of opponents, which was the worst figure among 298 pitchers who threw at least 20 innings last year. Opponents hit — and I’m sorry, there’s no polite way to say this — .341 against him over 130 innings.

Even the Rockies couldn’t stand this any longer, and so as of 2026, Senzatela is a relief pitcher. And for the first time in the length of his extension, he is finally making good.

Over 33 innings and 16 relief appearances, he has an ERA of 1.36. I know! I couldn’t believe it either!

If you take “believe” to mean “think Senzatela will continue to put up Prime Dennis Eckersley numbers,” there’s reason to be skeptical. Senzatela’s running a .198 BABIP, an 87.8% strand rate, and a 5.4% HR/FB rate, which is a little over a third of what it usually is. All of those are big, honking regression indicators.

But where should we expect Senzatela to regress to? Well, his FIP is 3.19 and his xERA is 3.09. Not only are those numbers really good for a multi-inning reliever, full stop, they’re also about half of what he was running last year. That’s a huge improvement. He’s like a new pitcher.

So what’s different?

The Rockies have done some weird stuff with bullpen roles this season (pre-injury Chase Dollander’s stint as the world’s greatest bulk reliever comes to mind), and they’ve been similarly creative with Senzatela. He’s faced at least four batters in all 16 of his appearances this year, and recorded five or more outs on 14 occasions. He’s yet to pitch on back-to-back days, and he’s turned over the lineup more often (five times) than he’s pitched on just one day’s rest.

Whether this is the best way to use Senzatela is a different question; I’m skeptical that the ideal relief pitcher usage pattern is one inning of max effort every other day, so I’m always happy when a team (even the Rockies) thinks outside the box.

All this is to say that while Senzatela is pitching in shorter stints than he did as a starter, he’s not just going out there, closing his eyes, and Joe Kellying the ball to home plate as hard as he can.

Nevertheless, he’s throwing two miles an hour harder than he did last year. That’s massive, because Senzatela’s four-seamer was horrendous last year.

On Baseball Savant’s pitch arsenal stats leaderboard, the three least valuable pitches in baseball (and four of the bottom five) last year were four-seam fastballs thrown by Rockies. Senzatela’s heater wasn’t quite as bad on a rate basis as Angel Chivilli’s or Bradley Blalock’s, but he threw 56.9% four-seamers as a starter with a fairly high workload. That comes to 1,299 instances of a pitch against which opponents slugged .538.

This year, Senzatela has been one of the best fastball pitchers in the league. And while I would never want to underestimate the value add of a 2.2-mph uptick in velocity, that’s the only thing that’s changed about his four-seamer.

But that’s no longer the only fastball Senzatela throws.

In 2025, Senzatela toyed with a sinker in April and a cutter down the stretch. He didn’t throw either that frequently — about 100 four-seamers for every sinker and 30 four-seamers for every cutter — and with good reason. He threw 12 sinkers last year and got one whiff while surrendering four balls in play. Those four balls in play: one groundout and three hits, including a 433-foot home run.

Apparently there’s a part of Coors Field where 433 feet is a wallscraper. Still, you wouldn’t think that throwing more of that pitch is a good idea.

Senzatela threw a sinker fairly frequently before he blew out his knee five years ago, and he’s just now reintroducing it to his repertoire. And importantly, he’s throwing it almost as hard as the four-seamer. Opponents have matching .214 batting averages against both his sinker and four-seamer.

And they’re hitting just .143 against his cutter, which has turned into his best pitch. The cutter, which averages a hair under 92 mph, has obviated the need for a hard slider. That was his primary breaking ball last year, and opponents registered a .330 batting average with seven home runs against it. It was an albatross, and he’s only thrown it 14 times so far this season.

Now, Senzatela is throwing his four-seamer and cutter about a third of the time each, to both lefties and righties. Right-handed hitters are also getting a heavy dose of sinkers; all told, same-handed batters are getting 82% fastballs from Senzatela. Lefties see fewer sinkers, but more changeups and curveballs. Both pitches come in fast — both relative to last year and relative to the league average — with tight movement and not a lot of drop.

Senzatela has completely reinvented himself. Last year, he was throwing batting practice fastballs and slop breaking stuff. Now, he’s steamrolling hitters with a full set of fastballs. That means I have to drop a dollar in both the Ben Clemens Memorial “He should learn a cutter” swear jar and the collection plate for the Zack Crizer Foundation for the Three-Fastball Solution.

Truly, I’m awestruck. One of the worst starting pitchers in baseball has turned into a dominant multi-inning reliever, just by learning a cutter. There’s magic in that pitch.

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Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. This is the second installment of that series. You can read all of the entries here.

April 17

Like any new parents, my wife and I spend a lot of time staring at our baby and talking about how beautiful she is. Of course we do. Evolution has programmed us to be completely overwhelmed by the baby’s beauty so that we don’t leave her on the doorstep of the nearest convent when we get fed up with the wailing and the sleepless nights and the relentless, unceasing, never-ending pooping. It has worked. We are ensorcelled. Derek Jr.’s future is wimple-free. But I’m starting to think it has hit my wife harder.

I say this because she has started to insist that Derek Jr. is “an objectively beautiful baby.” Objectively beautiful. You’re familiar with beauty, right? The thing that is, famously, in the eye of the beholder? Apparently one beholder knows better. It’s not enough that she thinks the baby is beautiful, and that everyone tells her all day long how beautiful the baby is. She now needs it to be proven empirically.

I used the word “insist” earlier because I have been pushing back ever so slightly on this one. I spend a whole lot of time analyzing players or trends, and it requires rooting out biases and confounding variables. Call me crazy, but I’m picking up on a possible conflict of interest here. I’m not prepared to get in a fight over this, but I have gently pointed out that the fact that my wife is throwing around the word “objectively” here is — objectively — hilarious.

Gentle though I’ve been, I’ve apparently hit a nerve. Twice now, my wife has gotten off the phone with a friend and informed me that the friend agrees with her: objectively beautiful baby. After all, what could be less subjective than the opinion of someone whose options were: 1) Destroy a lifelong friendship by informing someone that her newborn baby is, in fact, a total uggo, or 2) Say “Uh, sure” and move on?

I’m able to get Derek Jr. settled in for her final bottle of the day on the earlier side again. It’s about 10:30 PM, so if I can get her down to sleep successfully once she’s done eating, then I’ll get to go to sleep at a normal human bedtime. As she starts in on the bottle, I pull up the Brewers-Marlins game, which is in the 10th inning. Unfortunately, Trevor Megill notches the game-ending third strike on Otto Lopez at that very instant. We flip over to the Reds and Twins, but once again, the game ends at the instant we arrive. We just catch Byron Buxton grounding into the 27th out. We are become death, destroyer of baseball. I put the phone away and feed Derek Jr. with no accompaniment, holding her warm little body in the crook of my arm as she pulls at the bottle and curls her tiny fingers around my thumb. She’s the most beautiful thing this world has ever seen. Don’t tell my wife.

April 18
A diaper situation wakes Derek Jr. up around 11:30 PM. I resolve that situation, get her settled and calm, resolve the inevitable second, even messier diaper situation, then feed her a bit more because all those diaper changes have awakened her enough to make her realize that she’s ravenously hungry.

She crushes the bottle of milk. It resembles something like an inverted keg stand. I pull up the Padres-Angels game on my phone. The Padres lead, 2-1, in the bottom of the eighth, but the Angels have two on and two out. If Jo Adell can notch a hit off Jason Adam, the Angels will at the very least tie the ballgame. More importantly, they’ll ruin my first chance to see Mason Miller, who is off to a historic start, striking out 77% of the batters he’s faced without allowing a single run in his first 9 1/3 innings.

Adam, I notice, barely has a pitching motion at all. He starts out like any other pitcher, holding his glove low against his belt like a respectable right-hander and following it with a traditional leg kick. His delivery even features a couple of old-school flourishes. He starts with his shoulders pointed toward home plate but his feet closed off, and he pats the ball against the palm of his glove before breaking his hands for good. After that, though, he’s got a hitch. There’s a weird pause in the delivery, and from there, all pretense is dropped. Following that normal leg kick, he just kind of puts his front foot straight back down. He barely bends his back leg. He doesn’t take much of a stride. His arm swing is nonexistent. He just stands up straight, rears back and raises the ball to his ear, and hucks it in there. He’s a nine-year veteran with a career ERA of 3.25, but he looks for all the world like he was converted from catcher some time this morning, like he’ll do his best to look how a pitcher is supposed to look at the beginning, but at a certain point, he’s got to throw the ball home and only knows one way to do that.

I keep feeling like there’s an apt analogy for Adam’s delivery, but I’m tired and can’t crack it. Adam does his job, inducing Adell to ground out twice to Manny Machado at third base, once on a ball a few inches foul, and then again on a fair ball. The inning is over. Miller is in line to come in for the save in the ninth. In the meantime, though, Derek Jr. has drained the last drop of the bottle, and after I burp her, she’s making it clear that she’s still hungry. If I’m going to watch Miller blow the Angels away, I’ll have to head to the kitchen, decant an ounce of formula into this bottle, and get back to the rocking chair before the top of the ninth is over, all while holding a rapaciously hungry, and therefore particularly squirmy, newborn. This is a tricky proposition, and while there’s a certain art to it, I can’t pretend it’s graceful.

During a visit with a lactation consultant, we were taught that the proper technique for burping a baby isn’t to raise them up to your shoulder and pat gently the way you see people do on television. Rather, we were encouraged to pound on Derek Jr.’s back with gusto, and taught to sling her up over our shoulder, to the point where her center of mass is nearly on top of our shoulder like a tiny human teeter-totter. An ancillary benefit of this more extreme positioning is Derek Jr. is pretty well balanced. If I lean my head against her tightly, the way you’d cradle a phone when you need to write down a message, I can — very carefully, and while bouncing slightly and using my most reassuring tone of voice to say that I respect her hunger and am doing my utmost to procure further sustenance with all the alacrity I can muster (it’s never too early to make sure she’s got a robust vocabulary) — use both my hands to open the fridge, unscrew the top off the bottle of formula I made earlier and the current bottle, pour one ounce into the current bottle, hold it up to eye level to make sure I’ve measured it right, replace both lids, put the first bottle back in the fridge, race back to the baby room, return to my seat in the rocking chair, and get Derek Jr. in position for another slurp, all within a half inning. By the time I return, there are two on and two out and the Padres have pushed the score to 4-1. I’m now in danger of missing out on Miller from the other direction. Should Fernando Tatis Jr. drive in a run here, it won’t be a save situation anymore and the Padres probably won’t bring him in after all. Luckily, Tatis goes quietly.

Once again, Derek Jr. absolutely houses her ounce, and by the time Miller is ready to blow away the Angels, she’s curled against my chest, fast asleep. She is the most perfect thing this world has ever seen. Miller, on the other hand, is uncharacteristically imperfect. He still slams the door on the Angels, holding them scoreless and striking out two, but his control is iffy. Yoán Moncada battles back from 0-2 and works a seven-pitch at-bat before shooting a single through the right side of the infield.

Vaughn Grissom has one of the most absurd plate appearances I’ve ever seen. He walks on four pitches. On two of the first three, he looks terrified of the baseball. The first pitch is a slider that misses inside. It’s not particularly close to Grissom, but he buckles like a high schooler who’s never seen a curveball that actually curves before. The next two pitches are four-seamers up above the strike zone; Grissom flinches a tiny bit at the first and a lot at the second. But the 3-0 pitch is yet another 100-mph four-seamer up above the zone, and this time, not only does Grissom manage not to flinch, he plays it nonchalant. He flips his bat behind him, then his shinguard, and trots off to first. Flinching at the first three pitches is totally understandable. Miller is firing bullets up around neck level; even a professional baseball player is allowed to be scared of those. But you can’t do that and then play it cool! Grissom has a career wRC+ of 82, and he spent the first three pitches cowering in terror, but now he’s Johny Walks-a-Lot.

After all that, Derek Jr. doesn’t stay down. I’m up with her for several more hours. She’ll sleep in my arms, but being put down or swaddled is enough to wake her up and make her uncomfortable. It’s a long shift, and at a certain point, rocking her there in the dark, I finally find the analogy for Jason Adam’s pitching motion. It’s how I feel as a parent right now, and how I imagine many parents feel. The preamble was convincing enough. We did all the things you do to get ready for having a baby. We read pregnancy books, then parenting books, we took classes, we found a pediatrician, we got rid of half our stuff, turned our tiny second bedroom into an adorable little nursery, and filled it with baby stuff. We felt like we were as ready as we could be. We were Jason Adam standing there confident on the rubber and showing off a smooth leg kick.

And then, three weeks ago, a nurse deposited a baby in my arms — just cleaned off the vernix, borderline forced me to cut the umbilical cord, and plopped her in my arms — and all of our carefully choreographed preparations revealed themselves to be hilariously inadequate. I don’t know how many books you’d need to read to actually be ready to care for a baby on day one, but it’s definitely more than you could fit in our apartment. No matter how lovely our nursery, we’re now Jason Adam halfway through his delivery. We’re actually in it, scrambling as we try to keep this baby happy and alive.

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It’s May 29, roughly two full months into the regular season, which means, given the year, that it’s time for everyone’s favorite pastime: parsing competing proposals for a new collective bargaining agreement. Wednesday, the MLBPA released its first proposal for a new agreement. Thursday, MLB followed suit with a proposal of its own. Both are best thought of as opening offers, likely to be heavily modified as the negotiations heat up ahead of the existing agreement’s December 1 expiration. But that doesn’t mean that they’re meaningless. I think these early offers are revealing of what each side cares about most. The specific numbers quoted are unlikely to survive multiple rounds of bargaining, but the concepts and structures that each side favors at this stage could tell us a lot about what an eventual compromise looks like. So without getting too bogged down in the details, let’s peruse both proposals and try to tease out what each side is trying to accomplish.

The MLBPA’s Proposal
The players’ first salvo focuses on two things: revenue sharing and early-career pay. Revenue sharing is going to be a key point of discussion in this negotiation. The league has raised competitive balance concerns for years, and it’s clear that there’s public interest in leveling the playing field. Collectively bargained labor agreements don’t solely play out in the court of public opinion, but making the sport more interesting and marketable is a benefit for both sides, so a more balanced system of distributing revenue seems like a clear path towards sustaining the game’s recent growth.

The central piece of the MLBPA revenue sharing proposal is a redistribution of TV money. Currently, teams share a flat 48% of all local revenue, TV included. The MLBPA proposal would change that significantly. In their framework, the first $50 million from each team’s local TV contract, and two-thirds of the amount above $50 million, would be pooled centrally, along with all national TV revenue.

Without comprehensive TV rights details, the exact redistributive nature of this proposal isn’t precisely measurable, but it’ll be a lot. Based on the last public set of local TV revenues I was able to source, local TV revenue sharing under the current CBA amounts to roughly $1.1 billion in pooled and redistributed money. The union’s proposal would increase that pool to roughly $2 billion. That’s a rough match for the league’s current national TV revenues.

The new method for pooling TV money would be redistributive, particularly for teams at the top end. The Dodgers and Yankees each have deals that reportedly pay them well into nine figures. A team that makes $200 million in local TV revenue today keeps about $140 million of that money after accounting for what they pay into the revenue sharing pool plus their share of the pooled local TV money. Under the new system, they’d only keep around $116 million. Conversely, a team with a $35 million local deal takes home $55 million in total local TV money under the current system; they’d get $67 million under the union’s proposal.

This TV money goes towards one of the union’s headline points: Each team will receive $240 million in revenue sharing from the league (subject to increases over time). To handle the fact that TV revenue is uncertain but $240 million is a fixed number, revenue from local income streams aside from TV would be redistributed at a flexible rate determined by the minimum amount necessary to fill the pool enough to distribute $240 million to each club. The numbers are inherently subject to change, but given the current amount of central revenue and national TV deal money already being divided, this would result in a meaningful decrease in local revenue sharing, partially offsetting the increase in TV-based sharing. In other words, teams would pocket a greater amount of their in-stadium revenues, but share the wealth on broadcast deals, resulting in a net increase in redistribution.

A number of ancillary proposals further this attempt. Teams that receive revenue sharing money – “payees” – would be eligible for a variety of incentives, from extra revenue sharing for posting a winning record or making the playoffs, to bonus draft picks for signing top free agents. A “competitive integrity tax” set at half the CBT threshold would withhold revenue sharing from teams that don’t meet a minimum payroll. Proposed changes to the allowable structure of transfer payments between RSNs and teams would make it tougher for teams to hide revenues behind co-ownership deals with local networks. Broadly speaking, the union’s proposal would increase revenue sharing, and it would focus on TV revenue to do so.

On the player compensation side, the proposal contains a laundry list of changes. There’s one clear throughline, though: increasing compensation for players who have not yet reached free agency. First, the minimum salary would rise to $1.5 million in 2027 and continue increasing from there. Similarly, the minimum arbitration tender would become $3 million – a de facto minimum salary for arb-eligible players. Finally, past arbitration awards would be adjusted higher for the purposes of future comps – by 20%, up to a maximum of $2 million.

The first two changes are self-explanatory. The last one is more complex, but it would increase arbitration awards, with the greatest percentage increase going to players who earn arbitration salaries in the high single-digit millions. As a ballpark figure, I estimate that these early-career salary reforms would add $450 million to $550 million to annual player salaries, meaningfully narrowing the gap between the salaries paid to free agents and those paid to the rank-and-file players who populate the league.

A number of additional changes are designed to further these goals. The pre-arbitration bonus pool would more than double, and it would no longer pay incentives to players who have signed long-term extensions. Draft pick rewards for early promotions would be expanded. Super-Two eligibility would be expanded. Certain older players would reach free agency a year earlier, though their team could guarantee them a salary similar to the current qualifying offer to retain that extra year of team control.

The MLBPA proposal also contains a number of points that I think we’re too early in the process to have much clarity on. The proposal includes an increase in the CBT threshold, naturally. The exact number ($300 million) and the new thresholds, bands, penalties, and so on are all subject to change. I don’t take concrete numbers exchanged this early in a negotiation process seriously. Finally, a number of small changes – tweaks to the draft lottery, guaranteeing arbitration awards, ending the qualifying offer – will no doubt be negotiated further, but don’t seem to be a part of the key points being debated here.

At its core, the union’s proposal is about overhauling revenue sharing and increasing the salary paid to early-career players. I think their revenue sharing changes are good, but they don’t radically alter the existing landscape. The increased redistribution of TV money makes good sense to me. The amount that revenue sharing would change by comes out to just around 15-25%, per my back-of-the-envelope math. What’s more, the total change in revenue sharing payments would likely be lower because of the proposed higher CBT thresholds. But given that those higher thresholds are likely to change, and given that teams change their behavior based on those thresholds, I didn’t feel comfortable estimating the magnitude of that effect. At the end of the day, though, this proposal mostly leaves baseball’s revenue sharing intact, with its main effect being that it bulks up the existing system’s ability to redistribute TV money.

The increase in salary for early-career players is something I’m strongly in favor of, and I think that the union’s proposals are steps in the right direction across the board. I also think that leaving the existing arbitration system mostly intact makes sense; if we were starting from scratch, I’d prefer designing a different system, but there’s strong institutional inertia that isn’t worth counteracting. Making changes to the league minimum and adding to the pre-arb bonus pool are both huge, obvious wins for the players.

MLB’s Proposal
As expected, the league proposed a hard salary cap and floor, the first time MLB has proposed such a system since 1994, with an initial $171.2 million minimum and a $245.3 million maximum. Players would receive 50% of “baseball revenue,” left mostly undefined by the league but used for the remainder of this article as a term of art. Teams would share all TV revenue, both local and national, equally. Those are the key parts to the league’s proposal. Everything else appears to be left either vague or simply unaddressed so that more attention can be focused on the cap/floor system.

The cap numbers look arbitrary, but they seem based around keeping the total payroll outlay in the league unchanged. If you apply MLB’s cap and floor numbers to our estimated 2026 payroll numbers, bumping the 12 teams below the floor up to $171.2 million and moving the eight teams above the cap below $245.3 million, league-wide projected CBT payroll moves from $6.185 billion to $6.189 billion. In other words, this initial offer seems based specifically on stabilizing the amount that teams are paying to players at the current amount, with levels chosen with that goal in mind.

I don’t think you should focus too much on the specific numbers in the league’s proposal, though. “No increase in player payroll” on its own would be an aggressive stance to take into a contract negotiation. Offering that while also agitating for a salary cap, the single biggest line for the union, suggests to me that these numbers are either a public negotiating stance or simply an illustration of what the cap might look like if applied to this year’s payrolls. Leagues with a salary cap don’t have hard, negotiated limits; the cap fluctuates based on revenue. Thus, the devil here is in the details.

A cap and floor system depends on several things. First, it isn’t workable without a strong revenue-sharing mechanism. Second, it isn’t credible without a contractually guaranteed split of revenues, with a fixed percentage earmarked for players. The league’s proposal addresses these two aspects, but only in generalities; specific information is likely to emerge at a later date.

The league goes slightly further than the union proposal in reallocating TV revenues. MLB’s proposal would pool all local TV revenue, period, while the union proposal is more like 90% of all revenues after applying their sliding scale. For the most part, though, the two sides seem to agree on this point. That’s a good sign that some version of expanded local TV revenue sharing will end up in any eventual agreement.

The rest of the team revenue sharing changes are broadly unaddressed. The league’s proposal is heavy on broad, un-fleshed-out ideas. I approximated the change in revenue sharing in the MLBPA proposal, but an estimate based on the league’s proposal is impossible without more details than we currently have. I think a reasonable assumption is that transfer payments would be largely unchanged under this proposed system, because the increased TV money would be offset by the roughly $400 million in tax payments that the nine teams that exceeded the 2025 CBT threshold made last year vanishing. About half of that was transferred directly to revenue sharing receivers. No luxury tax, no luxury tax transfer payments.

It’s likely that there are some unreported mechanisms for further revenue sharing, but I was unable to confirm any specific details. A fuller discussion of the particulars will no doubt happen over the coming months. But it’s likely that any mechanisms will be heavily focused on one thing: increasing franchise values. The league has been clear and open about this. Any change in revenue sharing, and indeed the push for a salary cap, will be built around finding a way to make teams worth more money. Thus, the more important part of the league’s proposal is how it defines the amount of money going to the players.

In keeping with the rest of the publicly available details of the league’s proposal, we don’t know much about how MLB would define “baseball revenue.” It’s clear that this is a difficult needle to thread. Rob Manfred himself has said that players received less than 50% of baseball revenue in 2024, the most recent time he spoke on the split, which makes the league’s position somewhat confusing. The league seems to have picked its cap levels to keep payroll constant, and it also declared that there would be a 50/50 revenue split, but it appears to believe that players currently receive less than 50% of baseball revenue. Something doesn’t add up, which only furthers my conviction that this plan is aspirational, not specific.

Total revenue for a sports league is hard to define, and it’s particularly hard to define in baseball, where TV rights are sold locally, partial team ownership of regional sports networks is common, and more than a few teams own real estate ventures around their stadiums. A robust proposal for a salary cap would include an exhaustive accounting of how revenue is calculated. The incentives to hide or miscategorize revenue are meaningfully larger when payrolls vary as a function of revenues. We’re probably too early in the negotiations for that, and neither side is likely to trust the other to define it correctly, but it’s worth keeping an eye on as negotiations continue.

The exact details on what “baseball revenue” entails would be important if this offer from the league were a serious negotiating stance, but I think it’s fairly clear that it’s just posturing. This proposal contained no details about minimum salaries, arbitration, player salaries, service time, pre-arbitration bonus pools, carve-outs to the cap, implementation methodology, or even a discussion of how a salary cap might come into being in 2027 while the Dodgers are more than $100 million over the proposed upper bound in committed salaries. It’s clear that nothing about this deal is supposed to be binding or a final offer.

The league’s complete lack of interest in details makes sense if you believe that it’s committed to gaining a cap and completely agnostic about how the players divide up whatever money is allotted to them. If you add a salary cap, player compensation becomes a zero-sum game. Free agency details? What does the league care? It’s set a contractual level of payroll. Increased minimum salaries? That money wouldn’t be coming out of ownership’s pocket.

The cap and floor numbers are also quite wide for a salary-capped league. The NFL floors team salaries at 89% of the cap, on a four-year average basis. The NBA floors team salaries at 90% of a soft cap, but “cap” isn’t well-defined in basketball thanks to an escalating structure of over-the-first-cap rules that approximates the current MLB competitive balance tax. The NHL floor is around 75% of their cap, though at much lower levels than the other leagues. The proposed MLB structure would set the floor at 70% of the cap, the widest by a fair margin and much wider than the sports that MLB is most directly akin to – the NHL is just a far smaller outfit overall.

That leads to further questions about the structure that would also need to be fleshed out. With a contractual salary split, a team moving from the bottom of the band to the top of the band could mechanically push other minimum-salary teams below the minimum, thanks to the way escrow and clawback mechanisms work. Likewise, a team reducing its spending in one year could push other high-spending teams above the cap as equalization payments went out to players. Tighter bands between ceiling and floor would make this less of an issue, but I’m fairly certain that MLB pushed the floor as high as they could given the contingent of small-market owners who have consistently resisted any increase in spending. The resulting system seems very difficult to balance, at least until we get further details that change my understanding of this agreement.

I’ve seen a fair bit of handwringing that the distance between these proposals, and the language in them, signals that we’re sure to lose games next year. That may well happen, but here I’ll just note that negotiations involve antagonistic bargaining. No negotiator worth their salt would say that the other side’s initial offer was good. For that matter, no negotiator worth their salt would propose something the other side might accept as an initial offer. Brinksmanship means that an agreement is unlikely until we face real deadlines, and hyperbolically portraying your opponent’s position in public is a time-honored negotiation strategy in labor disputes. Why do you think both sides are talking about competitive balance so much in a negotiation about franchise values and revenue splits?

In any case, my takeaway from these two competing proposals is that they had very different goals, and thus were very different, to the point of being in different languages. The MLBPA proposal is incremental; it goes into great detail about a few specific changes – TV revenue sharing and early-career salary – and largely leaves the broad structure of baseball economics alone. MLB’s proposal is the opposite. It’s so alien to the existing system that they didn’t really bother with details. It’s a think piece, essentially – imagine the league if it were very different, then try to fill in the details at a later date. Neither of them has a remote chance of being accepted without major modifications.

It’s easy to understand why the league’s proposal is unlikely to be accepted. The MLBPA has drawn a bright line around a capped system, and the league isn’t even offering a single enticement to try to change players’ minds. That’s not a real offer. The players’ offer doesn’t touch a third rail in the same way, but it purposefully asks for more than the owners will accept. They want to increase early-career pay – great! They also want to raise the CBT by a ton, and let guys reach free agency sooner, and rebuild arb, and make more players eligible for Super Two, and plenty more. There aren’t a lot of concessions in this proposal, not much to entice the owners. It’s an initial position, so that’s kind of the point, but neither of these is a realistic picture of what baseball will look like next year.

There’s a lot of room between the two initial proposals, but I think that it’s fairly clear that TV revenues are going to get shared more evenly at the end of this process. That’s one of Manfred’s long-term goals, which makes it an owner priority, and it’s also a clear way to increase competitive balance without directly constraining player salaries, which means the union is on board. What else will come out of this? I’m not sure. But so far, the opposing sides aren’t speaking the same language. Baseball is in full swing, and there’s little pressure to bring this negotiation to the foreground while fans are focused on actual on-field delight instead of dry arguments about money. Come November, the urgency will pick up. But at the moment, my only takeaway is that next year, TV revenues aren’t going to be shared the same way that they are now, and we have a long way to go before we get there.

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Audio intro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Drellich on franchise values
Link to MLBPA proposals
Link to Drellich on the MLBPA proposals
Link to Normandin on the MLBPA proposals
Link to Mains on the MLBPA proposals
Link to Drellich on the MLB proposals
Link to Meyer statement
Link to Caplin statement
Link to CBA math post 1
Link to CBA math post 2
Link to Episode 1542
Link to Passan’s CBA proposals breakdown
Link to Ben’s bargaining primer
Link to Hershberger’s 1876 post
Link to Sam on challenge rates
Link to challenge leaderboard
Link to Andrews on Wood’s challenges
Link to pitcher-pace leaderboard
Link to batter-pace leaderboard
Link to George injury article
Link to bat-dog suspension article 1
Link to bat-dog suspension article 2
Link to “Pups in the Park” page
Link to 2025 bat-dog call-up
Link to Pérez injury article
Link to Reddit comment about Ben
Link to MLBTR on Brebbia
Link to MLBTR on Jones

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After posting an excellent 125 wRC+ over his first two seasons, James Wood is establishing himself as one of the best hitters in baseball this year. The 23-year-old National is running a 169 wRC+, third best among qualified batters, and he’s on pace for 43 homers, 26 stolen bases, and 7.2 WAR. Everybody knows the parameters of Wood’s game by now. He’s 6-foot-6, extremely choosy at the plate, and so spectacularly powerful that his proclivity for whiffs and groundballs barely holds him back. This year, he’s improved on both fronts, dropping nearly 10 percentage points from his groundball rate and adding nearly four points to his contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. It’s huge news – James Wood-huge even – and if he can hold on to even some of those gains, he’s going to live at the top of the leaderboards for a long, long time. Today, however, we’re going to talk about a leaderboard where Wood ranks dead last.

If you head over to Baseball Savant’s new ABS challenge leaderboard, you’ll find Wood all the way at the bottom. A big caveat before we get going: The challenge system is very new, and because each player challenges so few times, the sample sizes are very small. Moreover, everyone involved is still adjusting to the system, so the trends we’re seeing now are likely to change. In this article, I’m going to be overreacting to these early numbers. It’s way too soon for big proclamations. However, I don’t think it’s too soon to look for patterns and draw some early conclusions about players who stand out as starkly as Wood does. End of caveat.

Now let’s go to the leaderboard and sort by either Net Overturns or Net Runs. There’s Wood, dead last. According to Statcast’s reckoning, an average batter who saw the same pitches Wood has seen would have made 4.8 more successful challenges and netted their team 1.4 more runs. No player has been worse, and even if you ignore the advanced numbers for a moment, Wood’s record tells you all you need to know. He’s made 13 challenges. He’s won three of them and lost 10. For those of you keeping score at home, that stinks. The average batter has won 47% of their challenges, twice as many as Wood.

Here’s what’s really going to pickle your cabbage. Wood’s teammate CJ Abrams, who is having his own massive season at the plate, is at the very top of the Net Overturns leaderboard. He’s 7-for-7 on challenges. No other player has made so many challenges without getting one wrong, and as a result, Abrams has added 1.1 runs of value, fourth most in baseball. Oh, and you know how Wood is known for his patience at the plate? Abrams is a free swinger who’s never finished better than the 24th percentile in chase rate or the 34th according to Robert Orr’s SEAGER metric for selective aggression. Just to reiterate, the guy with terrible plate discipline is the best challenger in baseball, whereas the guy who never chases is the absolute worst. Once again, we don’t know how predictive these numbers will be and it’s too early to make any real judgments. But still, that’s pretty wacky.

Let’s step away from Wood and Abrams for a moment to talk about how those advanced numbers work. Statcast helpfully classifies each pitch as either reasonable or unreasonable to challenge. If a pitch missed the zone, it’s automatically reasonable, but other factors can come into play too. If it does touch the zone, but it’s in a spot (and situation) where the average player would challenge at least 20% of the time, it’s classified as reasonable. The last condition is more specific: If the pitch is within three inches of the zone and an overturn would gain at least 0.3 runs in run expectancy, then it’s reasonable. Let’s look at some unreasonable challenges to get a sense of how that works, shall we? Toronto’s Andrés Giménez can help, as he’s a shocking 0-for-5 on challenges this year. All five were also deemed unreasonable:

How did Giménez end up whiffing so spectacularly on his challenges? For starters, he wasn’t particularly strategic with them. Most came with his team already down a couple runs, and most came very early in the count. Two came with nobody on, and only one came with a runner in scoring position. They weren’t likely to result in big swings in run expectancy, even if he’d been successful. But it’s hard not to notice that these are bad challenges in terms of location – all five pitches are at least halfway in the zone – and reflect on the fact that Giménez possesses a particularly bad batting eye. Aside from the short 2020 season, he’s never finished above the 21st percentile in SEAGER or the 14th percentile in chase rate. He’s a step below even Abrams. It’s too early to say that a player’s plate discipline will inform their challenge decisions; I’m not even sure that will turn out to be true, as Wood and Abrams are making clear. In this case, though, it’s hard to ignore the connection.

So a good challenge, according to Statcast, is one that involves a pitch that isn’t very close to the zone, one that most other players would make, and one that could have a big impact on the game if it’s successful. Knowing this, how is it possible that Wood, who is known for his extremely discerning batting eye, has cost his team more value than Giménez, who has not made a single successful challenge? It starts with strategy.

Wood’s three successful challenges came in an 0-0 count, an 0-1 count, and a 1-0 count. In fact, 11 of his 13 challenges came on either the first, second or third pitch of the plate appearance. Clearly, Wood’s priority is getting ahead in the count, but that makes his challenges worth less in terms of run expectancy than pitches that would overturn a strikeout. Moreover, all three successful challenges came with nobody on base. It would be hard to pick worse pitches in terms of expected run value.

Next comes discretion. Wood is one of the choosiest players in the game, ranking near the bottom of the league in swing rate both inside and outside the zone. But when it comes to challenges, he’s on the other end of the spectrum. He’s made 13 challenges, but based on the pitches he’s seen, Statcast thinks he should have challenged roughly half as many. (Still, Wood’s approach might not necessarily be a bad thing. As Sam Miller recently argued, good hitters like Wood should use challenges freely, as they have the potential to do the most damage.) Clearly, he feels that he knows the strike zone, and he’s putting his money where his mouth is. That’s all well and good if you win your challenges – Davis Schneider has made nearly three times as many challenges as Statcast expected, and because he’s gone 9-for-12, he’s been one of the league’s more valuable helmet tappers – but Wood is challenging the wrong pitches. His 10 lost challenges are tied with Nolan Schanuel for the most in baseball. Statcast classified just 23% of Wood’s challenges as reasonable, whereas the average player’s rate is 66%, nearly three times higher!

So Wood is getting docked a few ways here. His successful challenges haven’t netted him much value, both because they’re relatively obvious and because they aren’t increasing the run expectancy much. Meanwhile, he’s costing his team by wasting valuable challenges in low-leverage spots, and, crucially, on the wrong pitches. Although he’s challenging more than you might expect, he’s still leaving challengeable called strikes on the table. Wood has challenged 14% of reasonable opportunities, below the league average of 19%. He’s had 18 strikes called against him on pitches that missed the zone (not including the three he’s had overturned), tied for 16th most in the league.

Here’s the part I find really fun. These numbers are interesting, and we’ll find out in time how useful they end up being. Right now, though, I think the best way to break things down is by looking at the pitches themselves, which you’ll see below. On the left is the pitch chart of Wood’s challenges. The black circles are unsuccessful challenges and the teal circles are successful challenges. On the right is the heat map of the 18 incorrect called strikes that have gone against Wood. These are pitches that missed the zone, were called strikes anyway, and went unchallenged. We should give Wood some grace here, as some of these pitches likely came in game or count situations where it would have been unwise to challenge, or when the Nationals didn’t have any challenges left, but even so, the way the two maps line up provides a lot of information:

Niether chart shows many pitches above the zone, because the top of Wood’s zone is super-duper high and umpires find it hard to call strikes at that altitude. Likewise, like many tall players, his zone tends to get unfairly extended below his knees. But clearly, Wood is challenging two kinds of pitches: low and in, and high and away. Low and in makes sense because he’s seen so many bad strike calls down there. He’s challenged about half of them, it just turns out to have been the wrong half. But he really can’t abide a close call if it’s middle-up on the outside corner. On the other hand, if you ring him up on a pitch up and in or low and away, he’s unlikely to challenge it. Eleven of his 18 unchallenged called strikes fit into that box. Even this early, he’s got some pretty clear tendencies.

Last year, I noted that Wood is particularly bad against pitches low and away. He likes the ball up and in. That gave pitchers, understandably terrified of throwing him anything over the plate, a valid reason to nibble on the outside corner, and nibble they did. They pounded him low and away at one of the highest rates in the league. Pitchers have strayed from that plan a bit in 2026, but Wood is actually swinging at those pitches less often than ever. The charts above make clear that those pitches really are dead to Wood. He’s gotten several called strikes off the plate low and away, but he’s hardly challenged any pitches in that quadrant of the zone. If I had to guess, I’d say that he just dismisses that pitch out of hand, and he’s so used to getting rung up on called strikes in that quadrant of the zone that he’s unlikely to object to even the most egregious ones.

As for higher in the zone, it seems like it’s reversed. Wood likes the ball inside, and that viewpoint seems to inform his idea of the zone. The outside pitches he doesn’t like look like balls, so he challenges them. But he likes the ball up and in, so those pitches look good to him, even when they’re outside the zone. Obviously, these are just inferences based on 30 or so pitches. But look at the same charts for Abrams:

As I’ve mentioned, Abrams is a particularly free swinger, but the book against him is very clear. Pitchers are pounding him low. The average pitch he sees crosses the plate 2.2 feet above the ground, lower than 79% of the batters in the league. Clearly, he’s gotten to know the bottom of the zone pretty well. Six of his seven challenges came on pitches just beneath the zone. So far at least, if he gets a strike on either edge of the plate, he’s willing to let it slide, but he knows where the bottom is.

I’m anxious to see what happens to ABS challenge numbers over time. How strong will the correlation be between the first and second half of this season? Between this year and next year? How will the trends we’re seeing now shake out once the league gets more comfortable with the challenge system? For now, though, I think it’s fair to start differentiating between knowledge of the strike zone and knowledge of which pitches you can hit. The two are strongly related, of course – and I imagine some players excel at both – but Wood has always provided a good example of their divergence. He doesn’t swing at pitches outside the zone, but he doesn’t swing at all that many pitches inside the zone either. That plan wouldn’t work for everybody, but because pitchers are deathly afraid of throwing him a pitch he can hit, all those takes turn into lots of walks. He’s not looking for a strike as much as he’s looking for a pitch he can crush. His challenges indicate that this mentality also informs his idea of the strike zone. There’s low and outside, where he’s given up all hope, and there’s up and in, where everything looks good. Maybe I’m making too much of random variance, or maybe Wood will get better at choosing the right pitches to challenge. Either way, he’s hitting well enough that nobody is going to mind a few more bad challenges.

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