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

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

OK, that’s enough about the Rays and A’s in this week’s mailbag. Today, we’ll be answering your questions about how good Shohei Ohtani would be at basketball, whether James Wood is one of the best lefty batters ever at hitting the ball the other way, which batter has the most hits against a pitcher without recording an out, and what would happen if ZiPS forgot about 2020. But before we get to all of that, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.

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Would Shohei Ohtani be better at basketball than Michael Jordan was at baseball? — Jeremy William Fox

Michael Baumann: I like this question quite a bit, Jeremy William Fox. Ohtani is 31, the same age as Jordan was when he took his baseball sabbatical, and if you’re making a list of modern athletes for whom no hypothetical seems too outlandish, Jordan and Ohtani would be near the top of any list. Though some believe Jordan’s baseball career was actually an under-the-table gambling suspension, and Ohtani… oh, did you do that on purpose, Jeremy William Fox? How naughty! How insouciant!

When it comes to basketball, I’m about a 90th-percentile Jordan hater. Not only do I think LeBron James is the greatest basketball player ever and find most arguments in Jordan’s favor specious at best, I’m exhausted by Jordan’s whole shtick. In most anecdotes you hear about the competitiveness that made him great, Jordan comes off as somewhere between selfish and sociopathic. It’s 20 years of all-time-great basketball, written in the style of a Taylor Sheridan power fantasy.

I say that so you know I mean what’s about to come: I’ve written about Michael Jordan’s stint in the minors at some length before, and came away astounded by how good his baseball career was. If anything, Jordan doesn’t get anything near the credit he deserves for jumping straight into Double-A and not embarrassing himself.

At 6-foot-6, 200 pounds, Jordan did not have the right body to hit, and his gangly, knock-kneed hitting action showed. He was also coming back to baseball — as a hitter, not a pitcher — after almost 15 years away from the sport. And it’s not like he had a cup of coffee in the big leagues at 20; he topped out playing high school baseball in North Carolina. So to even hit .200 jumping straight into the high minors with all that going against him… honestly, I think that’s better proof of Jordan’s singular athletic ability than anything he did on the hardwood.

In other words: Ohtani’s got a high bar to clear.

Literally. Ohtani is a big man, 6-foot-4, 210 pounds. At certain points in his career he’s had plus-plus speed — I think it’s fair to assume that he’s a reasonably strong and explosive athlete, and that his exceptional intelligence and coordination would translate to basketball.

But they’re not doing this in the NL West.

And this isn’t even the best basketball player out there. From what I understand, Jamal Cain is just some guy. If Ohtani isn’t careful, he’s gonna end up on a lot of posters.

The level of speed, passing, shooting, and overall skill and athleticism in the NBA right now beggars belief. We’ve got 7-foot-3 guys who move like guards did 30 years ago. Everyone can shoot three-pointers. (Did you know Andre Drummond is a good three-point shooter now? Andre Drummond!) On the other hand, you can finish hard at the rim without getting punched in the throat by Bill Laimbeer or Charles Oakley, which was definitely not the case in Jordan’s prime. Would it be more difficult for Ohtani to play in pro basketball now than in 1994? I don’t know for sure, but certainly the nature of the challenge has changed.

Let’s say the equivalent of hitting .200 in Double-A is playing 12 minutes a night in the G-League and more or less blending in. Could Ohtani do that?

I’m not convinced. Ohtani’s got the body to play professional basketball, but as a wing at best. That means he’s got to be quick, he’s got to be able to dribble, shoot and pass, and play defense without falling on his backside every time he sees a crossover.

In other words, I think skill is a bigger question than athleticism. How much so, I don’t know, because I have no idea how good Ohtani is at basketball. As far as I know, he’s never played any kind of organized basketball. Jordan had probably at least hit against breaking balls and reasonable velocity as a high schooler in the early 1980s. Ohtani is, of course, married to a professional basketball player, so I presume he knows the rules well and has at least a fundamental understanding of technique and strategy, but skills aren’t transmissible through marriage.

Absent evidence of Ohtani’s basketball skill, I have to go with Jordan. But if Ohtani shows up at South Bay Lakers training camp with 30-foot shooting range and an old man YMCA post game, and jumps passing lanes like he’s got eyes in the back of his head, it wouldn’t be the most shocking thing in the world. I’d love to be proved wrong.

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Hello —

Thanks very much,
deaconblueray

David Laurila: Great question, deaconblueray. The answer is no. According to our database/number-cruncher extraordinaire Jon Becker, Horwitz’s 10-for-10 versus Martinez is tops, followed by a trio of 8-for-8s: Will Clark against Julio Santana, Jay Payton against Jimmy Haynes, and Rob Mackowiak against Scott Baker. Another six batters have gone 7-for-7 against an individual pitcher, with Wade Boggs (versus Tom Tellmann) and Fred McGriff (Ryan Glynn) most notable among the names.

Barring a trade, the record that Horwitz currently holds is safe at least through this season. Their respective teams — Horwitz is a Pirate, Martinez a Ray — won’t face each other again in 2026. If there are any future matchups, the astounding, as you put it, record will be in serious jeopardy.

For those wondering about the opposite end of the matchup spectrum, the record for most at-bats against an individual pitcher without a hit belongs to Mike Jorgensen. The erstwhile 1970s-1980s first baseman went 0-for-32 against the legendary Dock Ellis. Two other batters went 0-for-29: Deron Johnson against Ron Reed, and Eddie Mathews against Bob Veale. The latter of those is noteworthy, as Mathews punished no shortage of pitchers on his way to the Hall of Fame.

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Is James Wood becoming one of the best opposite-field left-handed hitters ever? — Justin

Ryan Blake: Yes.

I mean, it really is that simple. We publish batted ball data going back to 2002, and searching for performance on batted balls to the opposite field returns this table:

Wood is simply the best we’ve seen on a rate basis at going the other way over the last two decades, regardless of handedness. He’s not quite the most extreme at using the opposite field (30.5% oppo rate is about the 90th percentile), but the production he gets in that direction is pretty close to outlier territory.

Now, the sample is still quite small. If we were to look at a counting stat like wRC (no plus), Wood is tied with Marco Scutaro and Mookie Betts at 73 wRC, for 363rd place. That’s actually kind of incredible if you consider the list is 1,534 hitters long, and most of those batters have played many more games than Wood. But that’s a bit of perspective on how far Wood has to climb before the title is truly his.

Another way to look at this is how much of Wood’s total production comes from hits to the opposite field. We see Judge high on the leaderboard, but that’s only because he’s high on every leaderboard. Wood is a true oppo hitter.

I took the wRC for plate appearances ending in an opposite-field ball in play and divided it by total wRC across all plate appearances. And, yup, about 40% of Wood’s total production has come on batted balls to the opposite field. Of course, this list isn’t quite so impressive, but it highlights how few hitters at Wood’s level are truly living in the opposite field.

Unlike Mauer and LeMahieu and the other good hitters at the top of this list, Wood isn’t simply slapping the ball the other way. He’s throttling it. Wood has a 17.2% barrel rate on batted balls to the opposite field for his career — third best in the majors since tracking began, behind only Judge (21.1%) and Alex Avila (17.9%). Most sluggers try to pull the ball, because the pull side is where the fence is closest and often where players make the best contact. Wood is the rare batter whose swing simply creates better contact to the opposite field. He gets more oomf going the other way, and he can elevate:

That elevation has been more frequent in 2026, too. I touched on this last week when I wrote about Wood and the Nationals’ surprisingly good lineup. He struggled in his first two seasons to get the ball off the ground, which limited him to being merely very good instead of elite. This year, he’s raised his oppo-air rate from 19.7% in each his first two seasons to 29.6% this year. That’s an exciting premise. We’ve seen few, if any, batters hit the ball the other way as well as Wood, and at age 23, he seems to still be getting better.

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This one’s for Dan: What if ZiPS ignored 2020?

It was such a weird season that I basically pretend it didn’t happen. Now that we have five full seasons since the pandemic, I’m curious to see a comparison of the accuracy ZIPS gets in two scenarios: one in which it uses the 2020 data (using any adjustments/weighting/etc. that you put in place to account for the weirdness) vs. a second scenario in which it completely ignores 2020. — Keith

Dan Szymborski: Hi Keith,

While I can’t expect any pity spared for the poor predictive algorithm baseball guy given the devastation that COVID-19 caused the entire world and the lives it took, there were definitely some awkward decisions that had to be made dealing with 2020 baseball in order to have 2021-2024 projections. Normally, when changes are made to ZiPS, they’re tested with live data for years to make sure they improve the model, since that’s kind of the gold standard. But that wasn’t really an option in this case; I couldn’t very well message David and Meg and say, “Hey, ZiPS is going on hiatus for four years or so!” Unfortunately, shortened seasons like 1994-1995 and 1981 couldn’t provide a ton of guidance. Those were much smaller disruptions for less horrifying reasons.

So I treated MLB data in 2020 like it was in-season data in a normal year. That means the 2021 projections looked like what a projection run would have looked like if 2020 had been a normal 162-game season, and I was doing an updated projection run at the end of May. ZiPS formed a hybrid “2020 season” by combining the numbers for the actual 60-game season, and the rest-of-season projection for the other 102 games that didn’t exist. For minor league data, ZiPS does have awareness history of non-injury missed seasons, and basically treated the players who didn’t play like they went on a year-long sojourn to play the zither, get hands-on experience making Prosciutto di Parma, or take a 75-day rafting trip that faced misfortune and led to 290 days of foraging for food in the wilderness.

With this methodology, looking at the 362 players with at least 200 plate appearances in 2021, the hitter projections for that year had a median absolute error of 14 points of wRC+, a mean absolute error of 17 points of wRC+, and an RMSE of 22 points of wRC+. If I totally wiped out the existence of 2020 and reprojected the 2021 season as if it were 2020, these numbers rise to 17 points, 23 points, and 31 points, respectively. Turns out, the 2020 campaign did convey some useful information about players that we lose by pretending the awful year didn’t happen. The same thing works with pitchers: 21, 28, and 34 points of ERA+ for pitchers, respectively, with 50 innings in 2021, and 24, 31, 37 points if we wipe out 2020.

It didn’t work out too badly in the end. The 2021 projections were slightly more accurate than the 2019 or 2018 projections, but there were also iterative improvements over that time that are really tricky to rewind. The 2022 projections were only slightly more accurate than the 2021 ones. Realistically, a lot of the improvements in projections these days are long-term projections; short-term projections are calibrated quite well and most players are going to have a hard time moving the needle much at this point. Even so, I’m quite happy to be back to doing projection things that are testable instead of having to pull something like this out of thin air again.

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

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

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

So yes, scoring is up nearly 4% relative to last season’s March/April stretch, but a more modest 1.5% relative to last year’s overall scoring level of 4.45 runs per game. This was the highest-scoring opening month since 2023. To find one higher than that, we only need to go back to 2019, when teams scored 4.62 runs per game, albeit under an increasingly outdated set of rules, but the last time before that when opening-month scoring exceeded 4.50 runs per game was 2010.

As you can see from the table, the league-wide batting average, slugging percentage, and home run rates have barely budged relative to last year, and aren’t as high as in 2023. Those changes don’t appear to be much to write home about, and contrary to years past, we haven’t heard much complaining about the makeup of the ball itself. According to the Statcast Drag Dashboard, which measures the estimated mean coefficient of drag (CD) of the baseball based on four-seam fastball trajectories, this year’s CD of 0.3513 is just an eyelash behind last year’s (0.3518); per the explainer at that page, that .0005 decrease would correspond to an increased carry of 0.25 feet on a ball with a 100-mph exit velocity — not nothing, but comparatively minimal. By contrast, the 2024 CDs ranged from 0.3411 to 0.3471; the difference between this year and the lowest CD (from 2021) would mean an increased carry of five feet.

The most notable change above, outside of the scoring level itself, is in the league-wide walk rate, which if it were maintained over the course of a full season would be the highest mark since 1951:

The only time in this millennium that the league-wide walk rate was at 9% or higher was in the shortened 2020 season, which we can rightfully dismiss. Before that, you have to dial back to 2000, the tail end of a six-season stretch — the start of a very high-offense era — in which walk rates reached 9% four times. Prior to that, they hadn’t reached 9% since 1975, and then only fleetingly. As you can see from the table, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, when walks were roughly as common as strikeouts, walk rates hovered close to 10%, even exceeding that benchmark a couple of times.

That said, in recent years we’ve seen March/April walk rates reach or exceed 9% several times — 10 from 2001–25, in fact — though again, none of them finished with a full-season rate at that level since we can’t include 2020:

For that stretch, the median change from the opening month walk rate to the final one is -0.50%.

This year’s higher walk rate is likely attributable to the introduction of the ABS system, which has redefined the strike zone as a two-dimensional rectangle in the middle of the plate, with the top and bottom of the zones adjusted based on each individual batter’s height (53.5% of that height at the top, 27% at the bottom). As Ben Clemens estimated earlier this week, “The total area of the strike zone has declined, likely by between eight and 22 square inches, somewhere between 2% and 5% of the total strike zone area.” Seemingly a small change, but not nothing.

On April 22, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported — with some alarm — that hitters were walking 9.9% of the time, and that batter swing rates were down 1.4 percentage points relative to last year. As illustrated above, the league-wide walk rate has come down since then, while swing rate has gone up, and if we break the data into week-long samples (with the March 25 Yankees-Giants opener tacked onto the first week), we see some evidence of batters and pitchers acclimating to the system:

First, note the two highlighted cells showing the walk rates of the past two weeks, which are still higher than normal but closer to more familiar territory. Second, observe that the zone rate is down roughly three or four points relative to last year, depending upon whether we measure the change relative to Statcast’s legacy setting, the system that it used to slice and dice the strike zone prior to this year, or the new, mathematically defined ABS setting. In the first week of the season, batters collectively swung at a rate matching last year’s opening month, which meant that they were chasing far more pitches, and as one result, strikeout rates were two points higher than in the opening month of last season. In the second week of the season, batters dialed back their swing rates, and their walk and strikeout rates converged. Since then, they’ve gradually increased their swing rates, with their walk rates falling back toward the higher end of normal while their strikeout rates remain closer to (but below) last year’s rate. The year-to-year gap in swing rate has shrunk from the 1.4-point decrease that Passan highlighted to a 0.5-point decrease rather quickly.

Here I should note that while walk rates are up, likely due to the smaller strike zone and the lower swing rates, pitchers and catchers are actually winning more challenges — that is, turning called balls back into strikes — than batters are. The overturn rate on challenges is 60% for pitchers and catchers (Statcast just groups them together as fielders) but just 46% for batters turning called strikes into balls. That still appears to be offset by the lower swing and zone rates.

In the grand scheme of things, the league-wide increase in walk rate itself might not be perceptible to the average fan, in that the per-game increase is 0.51 walks per team, meaning an extra walk per game between the two teams relative to last season, or a few extra walks per team per week. Pitchers are throwing slightly more pitches per plate appearance, and the extra walks amount to roughly an extra plate appearance per game between the two teams. Plate appearances themselves aren’t lasting much longer, which is to say that I don’t think it’s the ABS challenges themselves that are adding significant time; rather, it’s the walk rates. But it does all amount to an extra five minutes per game relative to last season, countering some of the effect of the 2023 introduction of the pitch clock. Here’s a comparison to some recent full-season numbers:

Even with more pitches per plate appearance than in 2022, the last season before the pitch clock was introduced, and more plate appearances per game, the plate appearances themselves are about 21 seconds shorter (0.35 minutes shorter) than in that season, and so games are 21 minutes shorter. That still looks like a big win.

So the extra walks are yielding more baserunners and thus more runs, though not such a dramatic increase in scoring that people are talking about juiced baseballs. Indeed, this year’s Statcast contact numbers aren’t dramatically different from last year’s March/April numbers, whether we consider all batted balls or just fly balls and line drives.

Overall, hitters are producing slightly lower barrel and hard-hit rates relative to last season’s opening month. While they’ve produced a slightly higher slugging percentage on balls in the air, the percentage of line drives and fly balls has fallen from 49.9% last year to 49.4% this year — meaning fewer well-struck balls in the air. We’ll see what the warmer weather brings.

In the service of rounding up these numbers, I did check in on a couple more areas worth highlighting, at least in brief. For one thing, the average fastball velocity is on the rise, both in terms of four-seamers and sinkers:

Four-seam velocity is up 0.4 mph relative to last March/April, while sinker velocity is up 0.5 mph, both the largest year-to-year jumps within this limited timeframe. Both velocities are already slightly ahead of last year’s full-season marks, and we should expect them to go higher based upon the clear in-season trends in the table. Some of this is happening because — stop me if you’ve heard this one before — starters aren’t working as deep into games, leaving a higher share of innings to relievers who don’t have to be as mindful of pitch counts. This year’s average start has lasted 5.09 innings, down from 5.20 last year, 5.24 in 2024, and 5.17 in ’23.

All of that is a story for another day. For now, I think we have much to chew on in understanding the extent to which the implementation of ABS is affecting offensive levels, and therefore game length. I do think this is far from a settled matter; on both sides of the ball, players’ acclimation to the new system will take time, and the effect of the new system on scoring could be influenced by the temperatures of the coming months, since we understand how variations in climate can affect the carry of the ball. But now that we’ve got a significant chunk of data to ponder, we shouldn’t be surprised if the new ABS system ends up providing offense with a bit of a goose relative to recent seasons.

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

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

Or so you’d think.

The very night the Mets broke their losing streak, Francisco Lindor suffered a calf injury of his own. Last time a group of people had this much calf trouble, the story ended with Moses destroying the original copy of the Ten Commandments. (If you’ve ever had to make a panicked late-night Kinko’s run, know it can always get worse.) With starting first baseman Jorge Polanco already on the IL with wrist and Achilles injuries, Lindor’s injury left the Mets without half their starting infield.

But wait, there’s more! On Tuesday, the Mets placed Kodai Senga on the IL with lumbar spine inflammation. On Thursday morning, they did the same with center fielder Luis Robert Jr., who also has a lumbar spine injury.

There’s no timetable for Senga’s return, though the good news is that Robert’s injury is slightly different. The outfielder is receiving treatment for spinal disc herniation, better known as what, Steve Levy?

Robert is getting an epidural to take the edge off, and is not expected to miss much more than the 10-game minimum. That’s not too big a concern; over 162 games, just about every player is going to herniate or strain or subluxate something and need a week off his feet.

Lindor, however, faces a much longer spell on the sidelines. And the Mets started the season without starting pitcher Tylor Megill and high-leverage relievers A.J. Minter and Reed Garrett, who are all carrying injuries from 2025.

This list doesn’t include every potential contributor. Mike Tauchman has a torn meniscus, but even the most ardent Mets fan would concede that any season that hinged on Tauchman’s knee had already been lost. I wasn’t even going to include Young, but he went 7-for-20 with two doubles before his own meniscus tear. (Why are all these injuries coming in pairs? Are the Mets getting a BOGO deal at the urgent care?)

That makes Young the Mets’ fourth-most valuable position player by WAR so far this season, behind Soto (oops), Lindor (double oops), and Francisco Alvarez, who despite being outrageously injury-prone throughout his career, has yet to come to grief this season.

Knock on wood.

The Mets have had a tough go of it on the injury front, but that’s not a unique problem. Let he who is without injury throw the first stone. (Actually, he who is without injury is probably more capable of throwing a stone than he who is recovering from shoulder surgery.)

But the Mets have had their two best players in the lineup at the same time for a total of four and a half innings since April 2. And because a bunch of other stuff has gone wrong (Robert’s injury, slow starts for returners Mark Vientos and Brett Baty, slow starts for newcomers Bo Bichette and Marcus Semien, Carson Benge taking a while to adjust to the majors), the Mets have had to do some weird stuff to compensate.

Specifically, we’re looking at no. 3 hitter MJ Melendez. Suffice it to say, that’s not a position any team wants to be in this early in the season. Melendez is in his fifth major league season, and across his first four trips through the big leagues, he only got above replacement level once, and that time by less than half a win. He’s one of those players you can’t describe accurately without sounding like you have it in for the guy.

Melendez has good bat speed and is a decent athlete, and yet last year, the Royals left him in Omaha for most of the season. The same Royals who needed pop so badly they let Jac Caglianone hit .157 in 62 games. I was going to make a snide comment about how big the downgrade is from Lindor to Ronny Mauricio at shortstop, and yet… Mauricio has a career wRC+ of 78. Melendez, who is a corner outfielder, and not a good one, has a career wRC+ of 90.

Just having Melendez on the roster, let alone in the middle of the lineup, is the equivalent of sending up distress flares. And yet, Melendez has been by far the best thing about the Mets so far this season.

Sure, it’s only 11 games, and he’s struck out 12 times in his first 33 plate appearances, but the Mets aren’t exactly short on reasons to worry about the future. Let’s enjoy this one. On Thursday afternoon, Melendez went 2-for-2 with a home run and a sacrifice fly, bringing his total batting line to .346/.406/.655 — exactly the same batting average as Soto’s. Melendez drove in three of the Mets’ four runs before he left the game in the eighth inning.

Not to worry: Melendez is in perfect health. Carlos Mendoza pinch-hit Austin Slater for Melendez with the left-handed Richard Lovelady on the mound for Washington. Slater grounded out, and yanking the team’s new folk hero didn’t exactly go over well with Mets fans, but that’s probably the right move from a dispassionate tactical standpoint.

The Slater-for-Melendez incident does relate to the bigger issue: There’s not really a whole lot the Mets can do about this injury bug. I mean, stretch, stay hydrated, and try to only get hurt one at a time if possible. But I’d blame their awful April less on injuries and more on the fact that Soto and Melendez are the only ones who are holding the right end of the bat at the moment.

The Lindor injury is a major blow, especially because he’s been so durable throughout his career, and double-especially if this calf injury sidelines him for a long time. But apart from that: Robert is going to be back soon. Minter, because of when he started his rehab assignment, has to be back in the majors within the next nine days. Megill is not a load-bearing part of the rotation, and while Senga arguably is, the Mets have made do without him before.

They need their remaining players — Baty, Benge, Bichette, and various other non-alliterative individuals — to start putting runs on the board. If not, there’ll be no hope left for Lindor to come back to.

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

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

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

(Editor’s note from Matt: As I edit this piece on Thursday afternoon, I keep checking to make sure the Mets haven’t fired Mendoza after yet another brutal loss.)

The point is, the first step for a struggling team that was supposed to be a contender is to get rid of its manager. A fresh start with a new skipper, though, doesn’t automatically mean things are going to get better. So, what’s a realistic expectation for a team that replaces the manager in-season?

There have certainly been occasions when teams made stunning comebacks immediately after replacing their manager. I already mentioned how the Phillies won the NL pennant after firing Joe Girardi. But there’s also the 2004 Astros, who were 44-44 when they replaced Jimy Williams with Phil Garner; they went 48-26 from that point on, made the playoffs, and advanced to the NLCS, where they lost to the Cardinals in seven games. (The next year was the Brad Lidge–Albert Pujols home run year, and that was now more than 20 years ago and I feel really old.) But most of the time, things don’t turn out that well. We just have a tendency to remember the outliers.

But how to measure the effect of a midseason firing, if one exists? I went through every midseason managerial firing/hiring going back to 2004 (so that there’s projection data, but we’ll get to that a little later). I intentionally excluded April and September firings in order to make sure both the incumbents and the replacements got more than a handful of games to influence their teams. After all, it wouldn’t be quite fair to expect, say, Freddie Benavides to meaningfully change the trajectory of the 2024 Reds after David Bell was gratuitously fired with just five games left. I also have not included the games for guys who only filled in for a game or two.

For each of the 40 managerial firing/hiring transactions that have come during the season since the start of 2004, I tallied up the team’s record under the fired skipper and its record under the replacement.

(There were two other midseason managerial moves that were not due to a firing. On July 1, 2007, Mike Hargrove unexpectedly resigned as Mariners manager; at the time, Seattle had won eight straight games and was in second place. He didn’t give a reason publicly, though according to his SABR bio, “almost immediately speculation arose that he was forced out because of his increasingly toxic relationship with the team’s star, Ichiro Suzuki.” It’s worth mentioning that his contract was up at the end of the season. Bench coach John McLaren took over for Hargrove. Then, last June, Ray Montgomery replaced Ron Washington as the manager of the Angels when Washington was placed on medical leave. Soon after, Washington underwent quadruple bypass heart surgery.)

On a fundamental level, the teams did play better ball after firing their manager. The teams had a .414 winning percentage when their managers were fired, and the replacements accumulated a .467 winning percentage the rest of the way. Thirty two of the 40 teams saw their record improve. The 2010 Orioles even did it twice, with their .278 winning percentage under Dave Trembley improving to .331 during Juan Samuel’s 51-game stint as skipper; they then played nearly .600 ball after Buck Showalter took over in August.

But how much of this is the manager’s doing, and how much of this is underperforming teams simply regressing toward the mean? After all, Thomson was fired with the Phillies on pace for a 52-110 season, and I don’t think anybody on this planet honestly believes they would have lost 110 games if he had kept his job. You could find a TaB-branded soda machine that hasn’t been plugged in since 1989 from an abandoned Amoco station in Dubuque, Iowa, make that the Phillies manager, and the team would improve on Thomson’s record — and it would have little to do with the magic of saccharin and caramel color.

To get an idea to an extent of the good vibes from new managers, I went back to the point of firing and got rest-of-season projections from the moment the new managers took over. While projections are no doubt going to have significant error bars, they also care little about the good feelings of a new manager, and if managers are changing something fundamental about the roster, you’d expect those teams to exceed their projections as a group. From 2014 on, I used the FanGraphs projected records, since FanGraphs is conveniently updated every morning. For 2004-2013, I ran a ZiPS projected standings for the date, certainly a more time-consuming task, but at least I have the projection data to do it!

Across 3,061 games managed, the new managers won 1.5 fewer games than expected. This is a statistically insignificant difference, of course. Incidentally, this can be taken as yet another data point in favor of the notion that projections aren’t too slow in lowering the projections for underperforming teams. But that’s a piece for another day!

Does this mean that new managers don’t matter? That would be a preposterous conclusion, one too heavily drawn from the information available. It’s certainly quite possible that if these managers had been doing an especially poor job, their teams would’ve continued to fall short of expectations. Taking a team that’s usually playing miserably and at least getting it back on track is a good thing.

But what this does mean is that, at least based on the last couple of decades, new managers shouldn’t fundamentally change how we look at a team’s performance. If the new managers, Don Mattingly and the Non-Diamondback Chad Tracy, get their teams playing like they should, they deserve credit for that. But for those of you expecting sorcery, I’m sorry we live in this thoroughly unmagical world.

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Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) In Baseball This Week. This column isn’t running every week this year, which means the title is more of a suggestion than a rule. There are some plays from last week, some plays from this week, and future editions will probably break that convention even a little more. I can’t imagine that’s all that big of a deal. After all, “I Liked” is a bigger part of why I enjoy writing this series than “This Week.” So sit back, relax, and check out some of the most delightful baseball happenings of the second half of April. And of course, thanks again to Zach Lowe of The Ringer, the progenitor of the “X Things I Liked This Week” format and my inspiration for this column.

1. Inevitability
If you tune into a baseball broadcast with a runner on third base and less than two outs, you’re liable to hear a discussion of an “undefendable play.” That play is some variation on a safety squeeze: The batter bunts, the runner gets down the line as far as he can safely and waits to see where the bunt is headed before committing, and the defense has very little hope of making a tag play in time. Batters have attempted 24 of these bunts in 2026, and defenders have only retired the lead runner four times. Safety squeezes were equally hard to stop in 2025, this hilarious double play notwithstanding. But maybe they’re even better than those success rates would imply. Maybe there’s some kind of supernatural force that makes safety squeezes work. How else do you explain this nonsense?

Taylor Walls is the most prolific safety squeeze bunter in baseball, and he tried it in extras against the Pirates last week:

Yohan Ramírez made an excellent play there. He no doubt had this particular play on his mind – this is Walls’s seventh squeeze attempt in the last two years. Ramírez made an extra effort to get himself into a good fielding position after throwing the pitch, and he knew what to do immediately. He charged, called off catcher Henry Davis, and delivered an accurate shovel with plenty of time:

But clearly, the baseball gods wanted that run to count. How else can you explain what happened next? Ramírez caught Walls leaning off of first, threw over, and all hell broke loose:

Sorry, that was only some hell. I said all hell broke loose:

The Pirates made a litany of mistakes there. Ramírez should have gone to second base, not first. Spencer Horwitz should have come off the bag to smother that ball instead of trying to pick it clean. Bryan Reynolds was far enough from the line, and slow enough off the jump, that he and Horwitz got to the ball at the same time even though Horwitz started flat-footed in the infield and the ball rolled all the way to the cut-in deep in right field foul territory.

But maybe that’s not the true fault here. Maybe that run was just destined to score. Man on third and one out? The Rays have a method for converting that into an out and a run. They did exactly that here, just with a few extra steps. Maybe the safety squeeze really is undefendable.

2. Accuracy
When lefties punch grounders the other way, they tend not to have much control over where the ball is headed. Those are mishits, mostly; they’re trying to hit the ball in the air to right, not on the ground to left. Watch this perfect-game-breaking infield single by Alec Burleson from Monday night, and you can see what I mean:

That ball was hit weakly, and straight into the ground. It reached third baseman Nick Gonzales on five hops, and even though Burleson gets down the line like a man who is unsure whether both of his shoes are tied, he beat the throw anyway.

By itself, that’s not a particularly remarkable play. There were some nice aesthetic touches – Burleson’s little hop as he realized this was going to be a footrace, his emphatic safe signal, and the half-beat where Gonzales appeared to be deciding if it was even worth trying to make this throw. But plays like that aren’t exactly rare. If Burleson was done, he wouldn’t be in this column.

Obviously, then, he wasn’t done. The next time he batted, he hit the ball even more softly than before:

First of all, amazing. Second of all, amazing! Gonzales couldn’t believe it. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a ball hug the chalk that far down the line before:

Burleson wasn’t trying to do that. He wasn’t trying to do anything like that. And for the record, I appreciate that neither broadcast went with the old “you couldn’t roll it out there any better” trope. That’s not true. You couldn’t roll it out there anywhere close to as well as Burleson did. Ask a bocce player whether they could land the ball on a thin chalk line 80 feet away.

The first infield single broke up a perfect game. The second one came in the middle of a four-run rally that flipped the game from a 2-0 Pirates lead to a 4-2 Cardinals win. Those are two of Burleson’s three infield hits this year. When you’re the recipient of that much good fortune, it’s time to celebrate. That’s just what the Cardinals did:

3. Repetition
As I mentioned in the last edition of Five Things, I love watching called strikeouts. I find myself following along with the pitcher when I watch games – after all, we’re seeing the field from the pitcher’s perspective – and every called strikeout makes me feel like I am (along with the pitcher) getting away with something. But if one looking strikeout is good, three must be better. An entire inning of called strikeouts is rare, though it’s not impossible, of course. Because Mason Miller accomplished it a few weeks ago:

That was cool – and I especially loved Don Orsillo saying, “You don’t challenge the reaper,” after Cole Young fruitlessly tried to extend the game by challenging a pitch several inches in the zone – but we can do better. Only a few days later, Yoshinobu Yamamoto one-upped him. A perfect inning with three called strikeouts? Pretty good. Three straight called strikeouts, but all on fastballs? Ludicrous:

What were the Giants doing? Well, they got set up. Yamamoto’s splitter tunnels well with his fastball, and he loves to start it low in the zone. Drew Gilbert had laid off a splitter in the dirt one pitch prior to striking out:

Then he saw the same pitch – right up until it wasn’t the same pitch:

Patrick Bailey laid off an even better splitter two pitches prior to his strikeout. He’d seen a ton of splitters all day, and hadn’t made contact with a single one. He was expecting anything low in the zone to be some kind of downward-breaking secondary. But instead, a four-seamer held plane and carved him up.

Willy Adames fell victim to a different act of deception. Yamamoto set him up with a tight slider that broke toward the left-handed batter’s box and barely held the zone:

That had Adames looking outside, and thinking outside. And then Yamamoto started his next pitch on a trajectory that would take it way off the plate away. Adames gave up on it right out of Yamamoto’s hand – and then the sinker took a hard right turn and ended up splitting the middle of the plate:

Pitching is incredibly hard, but Yamamoto sometimes makes it look incredibly easy. Oh, and shout out to Kyle Finnegan, who accomplished something similar and simultaneously funnier a few days later. He, too, struck out three batters looking in the same inning. Just one minor problem: He faced five batters that inning, and the other two cracked a double and a homer. Live by trying to sneak something down the middle for a called strike, die by trying to sneak something down the middle for a called strike:

4. Close Calls
Dillon Dingler can’t catch a break this year. He’s absolutely destroying the ball so far, with the seventh-best xwOBA in all of baseball. He’s barely striking out, and he’s barreling the ball up at more than double his prior career rate. Somehow, though, he’s only 59th in wOBA, because these rockets he’s hitting keep finding a glove. Take a look at what should have been a clean double:

That’s just outrageous. That’s a home run in a third of the stadiums in the majors. Even when the ball stays in the park, that’s not one that fielders typically run down. Kyle Isbel had to cover 110 feet, running away from the ball and looking over his shoulder to track it. He also had to deal with an irregular wall, the cut of the warning track, and a 6-foot-4, 250-pound Jac Caglianone coming directly at him. Oh, and he had to slide, too, because otherwise he was going to slam into that wall at full speed.

This reverse angle feels almost like watching a car crash:

There’s not enough space there for these two huge guys! Why is he sliding? Why are there walls? How can this be safe?!? Look at how much momentum Isbel had – he slid about two body lengths and still hit the wall hard.

Even more impressively, this catch came directly after a long rain delay. The field was soaked. The warning track was muddy. The overcast sky was surely not the greatest target to pick out a ball against. And again, I can’t emphasize enough, this is a ridiculous position in which to make a catch:

I’m sure Dingler’s luck will turn around. But my goodness, don’t hit the ball anywhere near Kyle Isbel. That’s one of the best catches I’ve seen in a while.

5. Hilariously Long Replay Reviews
Like seemingly all sports fans, I dislike the way that replay reviews interrupt the flow of the game. Replay challenges often occur at key points in the game, because otherwise they probably wouldn’t be worth challenging. They’re often tough calls – that’s why they’re going to replay in the first place. Thirty seconds? Fine. A minute? Boy, this better be a really close call. Anything longer than that? Intolerable.

But while a long delay is annoying, a very long delay goes all the way back around to making me laugh. On Monday night, the Rangers were trying to rally from a three-run deficit when Joc Pederson hit a chopper to first base that the Yankees couldn’t field cleanly:

The play at first was incredibly close, Pederson was called safe, and the Yankees challenged right away. The first look wasn’t quite definitive; all it did was make clear that the play was bang-bang:

A minute went by. Two minutes went by. Managers in both dugouts started to chirp. The broadcast ran out of replay angles to show. Before long, they went into Inception mode: a broadcast shot of the stadium replay board showing the New York replay room’s TV setup:

Three minutes elapsed. Meanwhile, Aaron Boone was getting an arm workout:

He was yelling at the umpires there, asking for an explanation. But the umpires didn’t have one, of course. The replay center handles those calls. The on-field crew also has to wait for the decision. Nevertheless, Boone persisted:

The replay wore on. Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Jake Burger, former teammates with the Marlins, milled about and watched the replay themselves:

This wouldn’t be enjoyable if it happened all the time. But you know how jokes often start funny, get less funny with repetition, and then get funnier again when you keep hearing them? That’s what was going on here. Players were laughing. Coaches and others in the dugout – except for Boone – were laughing. The sheer absurdity of how long it was taking put a buzz into the crowd. At the three-and-a-half-minute mark, we finally got an answer. The call on the field was overturned. Pederson was out. The Yankees won the game. And while I still dislike the interruption of flow that most replays create, the utter ridiculousness of this one made me chuckle quite a bit. So yeah, long replays are miserable, but sometimes they have a silver lining.

Source

Apparently Luis Arraez is good at defense now. This took me by surprise, and perhaps it also took you by surprise, or perhaps it is at least taking you by surprise in this exact second, as you ingest this blog. Because if there’s one thing you know about Luis Arraez, it’s probably… well, it’s that he is incredible at contacting the baseball with a bat. But if there’s a second thing you know about Luis Arraez, it’s that he is not very good at defense.

This fact is a key totem in the still-raging Arraez Wars of the 2020s. Those who like baseball played the old-fashioned way insist that he is an MVP-level talent, enraging most contemporary baseball fans who understand that singles are only so valuable, especially for a guy who can’t run well or hold down a defensive position.

When Arraez signed with the Giants this offseason under the condition that he would only play second base, the universal reaction was something like, “OK, well, good luck with that.” Such pessimism was warranted. In 2024 — his age-27 season! — he graded out as -7 outs above average at second base in just 42 games played there; given a full season, he would’ve easily been the sport’s worst defender at the position. In 2025, the Padres punted him down the defensive spectrum to first base. But even at first, Arraez looked nearly unplayable, racking up another -7 OAA at the notoriously easy position. (It’s not that hard, tell ’em Wash, etc.) Those lacking the range to play first base often find themselves consigned to designated hitterdom sooner rather than later.

Not so fast, Arraez said. On February 13, Susan Slusser of the San Francisco Chronicle published a story with a shocking lede: “Luis Arráez’s fielding at second base is already vastly improved, at least according to San Francisco Giants infield coach Ron Washington, and Arráez agrees.” Slusser cited Arraez’s hard work over the offseason as the catalyst.

Strong claims in February have their way of softening by the time April rolls around. But here we are, a month-plus into the 2026 season, and who is it that leads all second basemen in defensive value? Yes, it is he, Luis Arraez, towering over the competition at +6 OAA. It’s not just among second basemen, either; his +5 fielding run value is tied for third among all defenders who don’t wear masks. Here is the non-catcher leaderboard: Pete Crow-Armstrong, Bobby Witt Jr., Nico Hoerner, and Arraez. In other words, the three consensus best defenders in baseball, and also a guy who looked like he couldn’t handle first base as recently as last season.

This, in my view, calls for a good old-fashioned investigation. How? Why? Through what means?

Perhaps Arraez hit the gym, injected some peptides, got swoll and speedy, and turned into a completely different athlete. But the evidence does not point in that direction. His sprint speed is virtually unchanged. His arm strength budged only a tick. He is the same guy. And so the peptides theory doesn’t hold much water.

In lieu of more invasive biodata, I figured the only other way to get to the bottom of this was by watching every play that Arraez has made (and not made) in the 2026 season. Longtime fans may remember my application of this method in the case of one Jorge Polanco upon his re-signing with the Mariners in the 2024-2025 offseason. In that article, I noted that there is no easy way to glean how much OAA a player gained or lost on any specific play. But I also mentioned a workaround in the back end of Baseball Savant, albeit a messy one. As I wrote then, the only identifying information given by Savant to conduct this analysis is the month when the ball was hit, the exit velocity, the handedness of the hitter, and whether the game was played home or away. This is not an amazing amount of information. But it is enough to narrow it down to three or four possible plays in most cases, and then common sense can be applied from that point to ascertain which of those is the relevant play.

And so I went through this process to better understand how Arraez is racking up crazy defensive numbers. Some of it was no doubt fluky, or at least suggestive of computer error. His “best” play this season looks pretty unremarkable to my eye; he crosses over the bag and then flips the ball to the shortstop. He was given nearly 0.85 OAA for this play. I’m not sure I see it.

Here’s another ostensibly quite valuable play, allegedly worth one-sixth of an OAA. I don’t see anything special in particular here, either:

But, like the best outfielders, my suspicion is that Arraez is grading out well because, by the time the camera cuts to him on the diamond, he’s done all the hard work to make a tough play look easy.

His speciality, it seems like, is squaring himself up on groundballs to his right. Generally, players can make this play look a little flashier by backhanding the ball and throwing with their weight moving away from the bag, like a shortstop in the six hole. But in the play below, Arraez gets to the spot early, negating the need for a tough backhand pick and an even tougher throw.

These high-quality anticipation skills have been on display in situations where Arraez is pulled in close to cut off the run at home. These plays make an argument that he’s been even better than his OAA, because he received virtually zero credit for these two excellent run-saving efforts:

Arraez hasn’t done anything too highlight-reel worthy, save for an impressive play he made to his left that was spotted by Ben Clemens a couple weeks ago. But Arraez has taken care of nearly every easy play. Here’s one glaring exception, according to Savant, at least:

This graded out as 90% likely to be an out, which feels a little harsh, given Jake Cronenworth smoked it 109 mph and Arraez had to field it on a short hop.

This play is more reflective of his potential weaknesses – he was given a 68% chance to make this play, and just didn’t have the raw speed to make up for a so-so jump:

Even with below-average footspeed, Arraez appears to have become good at second base defense by just improving his reflexes. There’s no Driveline for fielding (yet); that’s probably because, unlike with pitching and hitting, there aren’t any clear training exercises to improve the key performance tool (velocity for pitching, bat speed for hitting). Perhaps as a result, and also due to defense peaking earlier than all other skills, it feels like drastic defensive improvements occur less frequently, and there is less of a blueprint for this kind of turnaround. There is no clear smoking gun for Arraez’s improvement; he’s just more frequently in spots where he used to not be.

On the offensive side of the ball, the story is much the same as always. He’s managing just-above-average production by hitting the ball very softly, mostly between the left fielder and center fielder. He hasn’t hit a single ball harder than 98.1 mph. But the defense totally changes his trajectory as a player. He’s even stealing bases! He’s not relying on super speed or physical tools to pull this off, but the changes look real, and fixing these parts of his game is the smartest thing he could’ve done to reposition himself for a multiyear deal when he once again hits the free agent market after the season.

Source

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about whether Dodgers catcher Dalton Rushing is the new reigning redass of MLB, and the first in-depth he-said, they-said mud-slinging about Craig Breslow and Boston’s coaching cull. Then (35:19) they Stat Blast about the longest streaks of series wins and non-losses to start a season (or at any point in a season), lapping the league in run differential, and batterymates who were previously exchanged in a trade, before bringing on Ben Clemens of FanGraphs (49:36) to talk about whether Munetaka Murakami’s hot start is sustainable (and if so, why he was widely underestimated), how the strike zone has been shrunk and reshaped in the ABS era—somewhat counterintuitively, not just because of overturned calls—and the potential short/long-term effects on scoring.

Audio intro: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Kite Person, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme 2”

Link to “redass” definition
Link to Carig on “redass”
Link to Rushing timeline
Link to “fishy” comment clip
Link to “fishy” comment article
Link to Rockies celebration
Link to Lee incident clip
Link to Rushing denial
Link to Lee incident article
Link to Amaya incident clip
Link to Hoerner comments
Link to Rushing’s slide
Link to Arraez comments
Link to timeout request
Link to 2015 Williams feature
Link to Breslow/Boston report
Link to fatberg wiki
Link to streaks spreadsheet
Link to Columbus Solons wiki
Link to traded batterymates
Link to Ben’s catchers research
Link to Shackleton wiki
Link to Clemens on Murakami
Link to chase rate leaderboard
Link to Passan on Ohtani in 2018
Link to Passan’s follow-up
Link to Clemens on the strike zone
Link to strike zone definition
Link to Trueblood on the strike zone
Link to Trueblood on challenges
Link to Sam on 3-0 autostrikes
Link to 2025 buffer zone change
Link to ump accuracy over time
Link to Ben on umpire grading
Link to kernel regression wiki
Link to 2024-26 MLB rates
Link to 2025 MLB rates through same date
Link to 2024 MLB rates through same date
Link to highest full-season rates
Link to Federer Hawk-Eye stance 1
Link to Federer Hawk-Eye stance 2

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2:02

Jason Martinez: Welcome to the RosterResource Chat! Big day today with the release of our new Roster Grid. Great job by Jon, who has re-created an old MLBDepthCharts feature and added some really cool stuff to it. For those of you who have ever wanted to see all 30 teams on one page or download all 30 teams in one click, this is where to go … https://blogs.fangraphs.com/instagraphs/the-rosterresource-roster-grid… Let’s chat.

2:04

Jon Becker: Not really, but not for any reason that’s his fault. Daniel Palencia’s lat strain appears to have been extremely mild and they’re debating activating him this weekend without a rehab assignment. That’ll put Brown back into a multi-inning fireman role and he’ll continue to be crucial while there are still a bunch of relievers on the IL and Phil Maton hasn’t gotten it going yet. That new sinker has been massive for him.

2:05	Jason Martinez: Probably not until there is a lane for everyday at-bats. 4th OF/platoon vs LHP is not an easy role and especially not for a 23-year-old rookie. That’s why someone like Austin Slater is getting a shot because he’s had success at it before and better-suited for that limited role.

2:07

Jon Becker: He wasn’t hitting at all before he got hurt, but with Lukes on the IL (right after he got his vertigo symptoms sorted out and started hitting himself), there’ll be plenty of playing time for Barger in right field against RHP. My best guess as of now is that Pinango is optioned down for Barger and they go with Sánchez/Schneider in left and Barger/Straw in right.

2:09

Jason Martinez: Back when he was with the Padres, he was demoted to the lowest role possible a few times. He’d pitch the 9th with like a 6-run lead and they’d still end up bringing in Josh Hader to clean up the mess and close things out. And the Padres still kept him after a couple of those disastrous outings. And then other teams have still continued to give him an immediate chance. The stuff is still great so I imagine he’ll continue to get chances as long as he throws mid-to-high 90s with crazy movement.

2:09	Jon Becker: I’m pretty sure he’ll be pitching (somewhere on earth, maybe not MLB) when he’s 45.

2:11

Jon Becker: I think Joyce. Was at 97-101 in his first rehab outing so there shouldn’t be any concern that his velo has tanked coming off shoulder surgery. I get that they aren’t exactly teeming with options but I’m surprised that the Angels keep trying Zeferjahn for multiple innings when his stuff is always so much worse in the second inning of work.

2:14

Jason Martinez: He’ll play just about every day while Eugenio Suarez is on the IL so there should be plenty of time to establish whether he should remain there once everyone is healthy. And I think Stewart at 3B, however often that happens, will be a chance for them to see how that would look on a more regular basis. Because the only way Suarez and Lowe are in the lineup together is if Suarez or Stewart play 3B.

2:16

Jon Becker: Castillo to the bullpen has to at least be under consideration with how he’s pitched, but I think I’d be pretty surprised to see it happen this early on. So their other options are the straightforward six-man rotation, or maybe experiment with some piggybacking (Castillo and Hancock? Miller and Castillo? Hancock and Miller?). The former’s a lot easier to manage around but they’d also want to maximize outings for Gilbert/Woo/Kirby.

2:19

Jason Martinez: And he was probably in there yesterday because Swanson had some minor issue from the day before. On paper, it’s not difficult to project a “bench player” to have 350-400 PAs, but it’s easier said than done for a manager to make it happen. And an injury or two is usually when they get a big portion of those actual PAs. It’s not always easy to give regular at-bats to someone who isn’t a lineup regular. Especially because most of their regulars have a track record of playing on most days. I think Shaw had 2 starts in 9 games prior to starting 3 of 4. Good place to view that … https://www.fangraphs.com/roster-resource/player-usage-defensive-lineu… He’s been great so far. They have a deep lineup so they just have to hope he continues to produce regardless of how often he plays. Not easy for a youg player in their 2nd season.

2:22

Jon Becker: I’ll answer these together since they go together. I know he talked about the struggles of adjusting to MLB, but I would think that that’s an incredibly common struggle and I would hope that the Astros are working to increase his comfort level and ability to adjust when he’s back from the IL. As for the second question, no, they couldn’t just trade him back to NPB — it’s a completely different league and Imai is making something like four times as much the highest-paid NPB player now. If he wanted to go back and simply refused to pitch in MLB ever again then the Astros would presumably be able to void his deal under the overarching “failure to uphold the contract” (paraphrasing) clause, but that would take some time to sort out.

2:25

Jason Martinez: I’m surprised DeLuca hasn’t been cutting into Mullins’ playing time a bit more. Typically, for a proven veteran, they’ll get 4-5 weeks to get back on track if they struggle at the start of the season. Most do get back on track. Not sure if there is an easy way to do it (I’d like to create something) but if you were to find the worst 75-125 PA samples of a player’s career, it would be surprising to see how often they’ve been as bad as they are during an early-season slump. It just happens later in the season when it’s not as noticeable. MLB hitters can be really good or really bad for weeks at a time.

2:27

Jon Becker: When Crochet is also back (he thinks it’ll be a minimum stay on the IL), I think it’s got to be under consideration unless Bello turns it around in the next 2-3 starts while he still has a rotation spot. If the Red Sox are going to turn it around they’re going to have to put the best performers out there and I have a hard time seeing Bello proving himself as one of their five best starters over the next couple weeks.

2:30

Jason Martinez: Wouldn’t surprise me if 2 of those 3 did it. No team in the majors looks great right now. Those 3 rosters (NYM/PHI/BOS) are flawed but still good enough to turn things around. Sometimes you just have to unplug something and plug it back in. Unfortunately, that can mean a managerial change. But it can reset things and a team can get back on track. Phillies did it a few years back when they fired Girardi.

2:32

Jon Becker: I’d say “absolutely” if Simeon Woods Richardson wasn’t out of options. But even with SWR being one of the worst starters in the league this year, the Twins have to decide if it’s worth sticking him in the bullpen as a “break glass in case of emergency guy” instead once Abel is back and they’ve got six starters. Unfortunately for Prielipp it’s not always a meritocracy and optionability/roster flexibility comes into play here.

2:34

Jason Martinez: Yep. He was just about there before his bad outing yesterday. Still an opportunity for him,  Edgardo Henriquez, or Kyle Hurt to work their way into that primary right-handed setup man role. Brock Stewart is close to returning, too. He could also be that guy if Treinen falters along the way. He’s been really good, though, aside from one disastrous outing.

2:37

Jon Becker: I don’t really view Junis and Myers as comparable. Junis hasn’t started since 2023 (he was an opener for 1-2 innings a few times in 2024), and I’d argue that Myers was much more than a throw-in; it’s five years of club control for a guy who was really, really good in 2024. Junis being undervalued is I think because he’s not a big stuff guy and is probably on the back nine of his career (he’s 33 now), so he doesn’t have that much room to get worse, so to speak.

2:39

Jason Martinez: Only 2 starts and 28 PA vs LHP thus far so they are clearly being very careful with him. Not sure what the quality of at-bat has been like, but I assume that the priority is to put him in the best possible position to succeed. And starting him against LHP, especially ones who are tough on lefty batters, probably isn’t ideal early in the season. So it’s more about that and not that there are better options vs LHP. My guess is that they’ll continue to ease him into an everyday role.

2:42

Jon Becker: Yes! We’ve got the Probables Grid, which gives you the next ten days of probable pitchers and the handedness of the starter. You’ll have to bounce around to see opposing (though you can go to the top of each RosterResource page for the next seven days of opposing starters), I can add that to the list of things to add though!

2:45

Jason Martinez: I think he’s there now. At least it seems that way with the current roster. Even with Rooker back from the IL, Butler’s ability to play CF allows them to start Cortes vs RHP. As long as they’re comfortable with Butler in CF, it shouldn’t be difficult to get Cortes at-bats until Denzel Clarke returns in a few weeks. And if Cortes has continues to produce at a high level, moving Clarke to a 4th OF/defensive specialist role would be a strong possibility.

2:47

Jon Becker: Option rules are option rules and you can’t supersede them with contract writing. A 5+ service time player with options remaining can consent to being assigned to the minors, but an out of options player can’t have something contractually added that they’re allowed to be options. That would be way too big a financial cudgel that some teams could wield and others wouldn’t want to, I’d say.

2:50

Jason Martinez: He’s on the roster for one reason only and that’s to hit vs LHP. This season, he has a 103 wRC+ in 30 PAs against them and he’s not playing ahead of anyone who is a better option. So he’s locked in for now. Ideally, he’s much closer to his career numbers (156 wRC+ in 177 PA vs LHP since 2024), but he’s in a good spot because of that track record.

2:52

Jon Becker: Depends on the situation. I think if you have a real chance to score (RISP for example) or if you’re down by a chunk and just need to get things going, make the move that’s in front of you right now. But if it’s a close game (I think especially when you’re in the lead and probably if it’s a tie too) and nobody on base I’d probably not make the move. I wouldn’t like giving the opposing manager a really easy pocket of RHH or LHH to manage against.

2:54

Jason Martinez: Unless he starts to show at least a little bit of power (0 HR, 3 doubles, 14 singles thus far), I think he’ll be limited to a bench role. And I think his bat works there (high OBP, contact rate), but only if he provides some value defensively. And I’m not sure how he’s looked at 2B or 3B thus far. But it’s a small sample either way. To answer your question, maybe he fits into their long-term plans if they think he can start at 2B or 3B at least a couple times per week.

2:57	Jon Becker: Roster Grid is right above the team selector in the first tab of RR, next to Platoon Lineups. You can also get to all of the RR features at the main FanGraphs nav bar.

3:01

Jason Martinez: Not really sure how to put a $ figure on it, but having that flexibility is super valuable to a team for several reasons. Depth is integral because of pitcher injuries, inconsistency, and inning limitations for young pitchers and pitchers returning from injury. Having as many reliable pitchers as possible in AAA who can be recalled and optioned throughout the season is important. Having a struggling pitcher locked in to 1 of 14 roster spots is not ideal.

3:02

Jon Becker: Brandon Woodruff was throwing 84-86 and left his start with what sounds like dead arm (Pat Murphy said nothing was hurting but that the ball just wasn’t coming out firmly at all, clearly), which might have just bought Sproat some more time. He’s also looked pretty good in the early portion of his last few starts before running out of gas in the middle innings, so maybe the Brewers start getting creative with how he’s used.

3:05

Jason Martinez: In this case, it’s almost a guarantee that Hinch will be asked about it post-game and his answer should give us some indication whether it was just a reset, temporary demotion out of the closer’s role, or whether they’re going to some sort of committee. Remember that Hinch wouldn’t say Kenley was the closer throughout Spring Training. Still, it wasn’t a surprise that he’s been their primary closer but it also won’t be a surprise if he goes back to what he was saying before the season … “we have a lot of guys who can close and I won’t hesitate to use multiple guys to close out the game”.

3:08

Jon Becker: I’ve thought a decent amount about this and what I’ve noticed is that teams are normally pretty aggressive with that first challenge and then if they burn it early they’re very reticent to use it until it’s a leverage spot in the 7th inning or later. Of course there are some exceptions there but I think that no matter how many challenges you gave (n), teams would settle in to being pretty aggressive with n – 1 challenges and the time it would take them to get to one left would be about the same. I’m also cool with two seconds, I like the instantaneous nature of it and preventing players looking into the dugout for feedback.

3:10

Jason Martinez: They have so many options to work through between guys like Lambert, Bolton, Teng, and Alexander. They’re probably hoping a couple of those guys can stabilize the rotation until Brown and Javier return. And they really need Imai to figure things out. The higher upside prospects like Pecko, Ullola, and Bryce Mayer could factor in later in the season.

3:10	Jason Martinez: That will do it for today. Thanks for all the great questions! We’ll be back next Thursday.

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It’s not obvious why Landen Roupp is good, but it’s probably time to find out.

Roupp’s 2.54 xERA is seventh among qualified starting pitchers. He’s striking out batters, getting groundballs, and working deep into games. He’s tied for 15th in the majors with 0.9 WAR. That’s about 70% of what he was projected for by FanGraphs Depth Charts in the preseason. It’s one of the most surprising performances of April.

Most pitchers “get good” because they miss bats, or attack the zone, or both. That doesn’t apply to Roupp this year. His 25.1% whiff rate is about the median among qualified pitchers, and his 37.1% zone rate is bottom five. Frankly, he doesn’t throw a ton of strikes.

The underlying “stuff” metrics aren’t any more impressive.

Roupp doesn’t throw particularly hard, or display outlier movement, or place near the top of any leaderboard I know to check. And yet, he excels. Where is all that value coming from?

Well, he happens to be the last qualified pitcher of 2026 who has not allowed a barrel. His 25.0% opponent hard-hit rate is the best in the majors, and his .277 xwOBACON allowed is second best, just behind Max Fried and just ahead of Shohei Ohtani. Batters seem incapable of squaring him up, pounding grounders into the dirt 56.0% of the time, or otherwise getting jammed on soft lineouts.

This contact suppression all starts with the sinker. He throws its about 40% of the time, regardless of batter handedness. It’s been worth seven runs above average so far in 2026, tied for third among the most effective pitches of the season. It doesn’t have outlier velocity or movement, but it still shows that heavy, bowling-ball action that’s proven to be quite effective at getting grounders.

It’s worth pointing out Roupp has gotten a bit lucky with that sinker to this point, with just one hit allowed on 20 grounders — xwOBA thinks his sinker is among the luckiest pitches on contact this year. Still, the contact he’s allowed is soft, on the ground, and generally non-threatening. A few more singles here and there shouldn’t impact his line much going forward.

The other pitch he features is a big, bendy curveball. It’s simply tremendous, and it always has been. In fact, Eric Longehagen and Travis Ice gave it an 80/80 grade in their report on Roupp on the 2024 Giants Top Prospects list (despite a more modest 40-FV grade overall). He throws it about 29% of the time, which is actually down quite a bit from his days as a prospect, when he was among the rare primary-hook pitchers (something he discussed with David Laurila last year).

The pitch has tons and tons of movement, especially toward the glove side. It’s great at getting whiffs, it’s great at getting chases, it’s great at inducing soft contact. I mean, just look at it:

What’s interesting is none of this has really changed. He had the sinker and curveball last year, as well as the less-used changeup and cutter. Granted, the cutter is a bit different now, with a touch more movement to the glove side. But, fundamentally, the stuff he throws and the way he throws it is identical — it just happens to be working all of a sudden.

To be clear, Roupp wasn’t bad by any means last year. His 3.92 FIP was more than passable as a mid-rotation starter, even if a bout of minor elbow inflammation and a comebacker off the knee cut his season short. But he certainly wasn’t a top-10 pitcher in the majors, or someone you would have bet on becoming one.

Here’s the only real change I could spy:

Roupp is releasing the ball nearly a full inch farther from third base than he was in 2025. Again, the arm angle is the same, and he’s not releasing the ball much differently. Instead, he’s moved from smack-dab in the middle of the rubber to standing as far off to the side as a right-handed pitcher can possibly stand. Look at the two screenshots below, with this season on the left and last year on the right:

The question then becomes, does this matter? I don’t know. Truly, this starting spot is the only change that I could find, unless we’re counting the tweaks to the cutter (which he’s thrown only 12.4% of the time). The only other thing I can think of is, you know, small sample size, and that’s just not a fun answer.

But the theory of change here is hard to wrap my head around. My initial thought was perhaps this new stance is allowing Roupp to throw to better spots. That isn’t really the case. In some ways, his command has gotten worse this year — walks are the one thing he hasn’t done well so far.

Instead, what I think is happening is Roupp has changed the angle at which his pitches approach the plate horizontally. The sinker especially is entering the zone from a far steeper left-to-right angle, jumping from a 70th-percentile approach angle in 2025 to a 95th-percentile one in 2026, according to Baseball Prospectus. To be clear, I’m not Alex Chamberlain, who wrote the primer on horizontal (and vertical) approach angle for this website years ago. I’m also not any of the other authors who wrote about approach angle and pitcher stance several years ago. This is far from my area of expertise, but my understanding of what’s happening here is it’s complicated, with such a change having a variety of causes and effects.

Still, I think this makes sense intuitively for two reasons. One is probably the most obvious: A different approach angle is going to find a different part of the bat, and that part of the bat so far has been quite literally everything but the barrel.

But I also wonder if this changes the way batters see the pitch coming in. Roupp doesn’t score well by the various arsenal and tunneling metrics from BP. His sinker and curveball look like two distinctly different pitches out of hand, and batters should be pretty good at guessing which is which. Last year they were.

Maybe switching sides of the rubber changes that perspective. For instance, righties are now seeing the sinker from the first base dugout and lefties are seeing it zip in from behind their ear. Then there’s the big, slow hook, moving violently in the opposite direction. Mix in Roupp’s funky-hitch windup and low arm slot, and he creates a bizarre, rather extreme look from a repertoire that’s anything but.

Take this outing against Bo Bichette. Roupp gets him in the first inning on a backdoor sinker that Bichette is clearly in between on.

Then, in his next at-bat, Roupp starts Bichette with the curve, roughly in the same spot, getting a wild chase and miss.

I like this perception theory because of this next table. One of the things we know about the pitcher-hitter matchup is that hitters start to gain an advantage as they get familiar with an arsenal. This was an issue for Roupp last year because, again, he struggles to disguise his pitches with his release point, without the raw stuff to make up for it. Once the batter gets a look, the jig is up.

This year, wouldn’t you know it, Roupp is actually becoming more effective as he works into the game.

Again, not much has really changed about how he’s releasing the ball, and neither has his tunneling or stuff. My hunch is it’s simply the way the ball appears to batters that’s making them miss, helping his sinker play up while the curveball lurks menacingly.

If this represents a new level for Roupp, I can’t help but find this amusing. He is unremarkable in so many ways, and shifting to the other side of the rubber is about the simplest change a pitcher could possibly make. And yet, sometimes that’s all it takes.

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