Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Angels unexpectedly announced that longtime owner Arte Moreno had agreed to sell the organization to Stan Kroenke, the icositetra-billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL, the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, the Colorado Avalanche of the NHL, the Colorado Rapids of MLS, the Colorado Mammoth of the National Lacrosse League, and Arsenal Football Club, both the men’s team of the English Premier League and the women’s team of the Super League. The deal is reportedly for $4 billion, a record price for the sale of a controlling stake in an MLB franchise, surpassing the $3.9 billion sale of the San Diego Padres to Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano earlier this summer.

Forbes estimates Kroenke’s net worth to be $24.3 billion, making him the new wealthiest MLB owner, ahead of Steve Cohen, who’s worth about $23 billion. Ben Clemens wrote about the sale on Wednesday, and I’d encourage you to check it out for everything that you need to know about the Angels under Moreno and the ever-increasing values of MLB franchises. That second part is what I want to stress, especially as it pertains to the seemingly inevitable lockout coming this offseason. Rob Manfred and the 30 team owners are going to push for a salary cap, and to support their case, many of them will both cite the need for competitive balance and claim that baseball is a bad business. When they do, think back on the two record-setting sales from this year and understand the real reason why management has shut down the sport. But let’s not get too caught up in the doom and gloom right now, because the upshot of the sale is the Angels’ future looks a whole lot more promising under Kroenke than it did under Moreno.

That’s the last we’ll talk about the business of baseball today. Instead, in this week’s mailbag, we’ll answer your questions about teams that finished the season below .500 with a positive run differential, the single-game feat most correlated with career success, the pitchers who had the longest careers while pitching their first and last games on the same field, and the ideal hot dog per game ratio. But first, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.

__

As Detroit’s ship continues to sink, it’s looking possible that the team will finish with 90 losses this season. Yet the Tigers maintain a strong run differential, and could still end the season in the black. What is the worst win percentage achieved by a team with a positive run differential? And to also ask the inverse: What’s the best win percentage by a team with a negative run differential? Thanks! — LMOTFOTE

I really enjoyed researching this question, but I spent way too much time digging into the first part of it, so I decided to break up my answer across two weeks, one for each part. I’ll answer the first part today and then tackle the inverse in next week’s mailbag.

From 1901 to 2025, 72 teams finished the season with a losing record and a positive run differential. The worst of those teams was the 1972 Giants, who went 69-86 for a .445 winning percentage while scoring 0.1 more runs than they allowed per game. Like the Tigers this year, those Giants were something of a disappointment.

In 1971, the Giants made the playoffs for the first time since their heartbreaking seven-game World Series loss to the Yankees in 1962, and entering 1972, there was some hope that San Francisco could build on the momentum from the year before. But Willie McCovey got hurt just four games into the 1972 season, and with both the Giants and Willie Mays, now in his age-41 season, struggling over the first few weeks, San Francisco traded the franchise icon to the Mets. McCovey didn’t return until early June, by which point the Giants were 17-31; they lost their first eight games with Stretch back in the lineup before finally winning the second game of a doubleheader against the Cubs on June 11. At the end of that day, with a record of 18-39 (.316), the Giants had a per game run differential of -0.948. After that point, the Giants went 51-47 (.520) with a per game run differential of 0.683.

You’ll notice that the Giants played only 155 games that year. That’s because a 13-day player’s strike delayed the start of the season, and the previously scheduled games were not made up.

In your question, you mentioned 90 losses as a possibility for the Tigers. Well, if they did reach the 90-loss threshold, they would become the new worst team to finish with a positive run differential in a full-length season. The current club with that designation is the 2001 Rockies, who went 73-89 (.451) while scoring 0.105 more runs per game than they allowed.

You’ll remember that during the 2000-2001 offseason, the Rockies went all-in to bolster their pitching staff. First, they signed veteran left-handed starter Denny Neagle to a five-year, $51 million contract before famously handing lefty Mike Hampton an eight-year, $121 million deal — which at the time was the largest contract in major league history — to be their ace. Neither pitcher lived up to the billing. Hampton regressed from 4.6 WAR, a 3.14 ERA (71 ERA-), and a 3.82 FIP (83 FIP-) across 217 2/3 innings in 2000 with the Mets to 1.9 WAR, a 5.41 ERA (104 ERA-), and a 5.21 FIP (107 FIP-) over 203 innings in 2001. Neagle’s peripherals improved some from 2000, but his ERA ballooned from 4.52 (94 ERA-) to 5.38 (103 ERA-) in 170 2/3 innings. Overall, Rockies pitchers dropped from 16.4 WAR (12th in the majors) in 2000 to 10.4 WAR (21st) in 2001. They allowed 5.593 runs per game in 2001, down from 5.537.

Interestingly, though, Colorado’s bigger problem might’ve been its decline on offense. In 2000, the Rockies led the National League with 968 runs scored, for a per game average of 5.975; the next season, they still led the NL, but with 923 runs and 5.698 per game. That difference of 0.333 runs in scoring margin seems to have factored into the Rockies’ losing nine more games in 2001 than they did the year before.

Here’s a sortable table of the complete 72-team list:

Two initial things stand out. First, including the 1972 Giants, 11 of the teams played in a season shortened either by the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), labor disputes (1994-95, 1981, 1972), or World War I (1918-19).

Second, the Pirates lead the way with seven losing seasons with a positive run differential; the Red Sox and Orioles have six such seasons, the second most for any team, though one of Baltimore’s came while the franchise was still the St. Louis Browns.

There have been 13 different seasons in which multiple teams finished with a losing record while posting a positive run differential. Three of those seasons featured three such teams (2006, 1973, 1964). Twice, in 1995 and 1954, both teams played in the National League, while only once, in 1918, were both from the American League.

Relatedly, two of the three losing, positive-scoring teams in 1964 met in the World Series the following year, when the Dodgers beat the Twins in seven games. The 1964 Dodgers were the only team whose losing season with a positive run differential was sandwiched between two World Series titles. Two other teams above won the pennant in both the season directly before and directly after they finished below .500 with a positive run differential: the 2020 Astros, who lost the World Series in both 2019 and 2021 before winning in 2022, and the 1918 White Sox, who won the 1917 World Series and then, of course, intentionally lost in 1919. Including the three clubs just mentioned, 17 of the teams won the pennant either the year before or the year after they lost more games than they won and scored more runs than they allowed.

Four of these teams (2020 HOU, 1994 PHI, 1987 BOS, 1979 LAD) lost the previous year’s World Series, while seven of them (1989 LAD, 1967 BAL, 1965 STL, 1964 LAD, 1961 PIT, 1919 BOS, 1918 CWS) finished with a losing record and a positive run differential the year after winning the World Series. I don’t think we can chalk any of this up to the proverbial World Series or pennant-winning hangover, except maybe the 1987 Red Sox, given the circumstances of Boston’s loss in 1986. Rather, this feels more like regression to the mean than anything else, though it’s still remarkable that four teams in the 1960s finished below .500 with a positive run differential the year after they won the World Series.

Of the nine teams to win the pennant in the year after they had a losing record and a positive run differential, only three of them won the World Series. The New York Giants did it twice, first when they beat Washington in the 1933 World Series, and then again when they swept Cleveland in 1954. The other team to do it is the aforementioned 1965 Dodgers.

Four different franchises had three losing, positive-scoring seasons during a span of five years: the Cubs in the 1940s, the Reds in the 1950s, the Pirates in the 1960s, and the Orioles in the 1990s. Pittsburgh is the only member of the quartet that didn’t have consecutive such seasons.

Let’s conclude by returning to the inspiration for this question. The 2026 Tigers entered play Friday with a record of 64-75 (.460) and a per game run differential of 0.34. They had both the worst record for a team with a positive run differential and the best run differential for a team with a losing record. However, as the previous sentence suggests, Detroit isn’t the only team having a losing, positive-scoring season this year. The Pirates, going for their eighth such season in franchise history, were 69-72 (.489) with a 0.20 per game run differential heading into their weekend series against the Angels. Meanwhile, the Nationals began Friday with a record of 67-75 (.472) and a per game run differential of 0.10.

As of Friday afternoon, our Playoff Odds projected the Tigers to finish the season with between 86 and 87 wins, which would put their winning percentage at either .469 or .463. Only three or four more losses would stand between them and history.

__

Hi FanGraphs Staff,

Thank you!
-Thomas

Michael Baumann: I mean, it’s 20 strikeouts in a game. It’s been done six times: by Roger Clemens (twice), Randy Johnson, Max Scherzer, Kerry Wood, and Tom Cheney, who struck out 21 Orioles in 16 innings in 1962. So that’s… two of the three or four best pitchers of my lifetime (Clemens and Johnson), another inner-circle Hall of Famer (Scherzer), a guy who was on track to be an inner-circle Hall of Famer before he got hurt, and still managed to hang on until his mid-30s as an All-Star closer (Wood). The only guy who doesn’t fit is the bad guy from True Grit.

Still, that’s an average of three Cy Youngs for each of the five pitchers to strike out 20 or more in a game.

Lowering the strikeout threshold to 19 might make the list even more impressive. That gets you two more Randy Johnson games, plus Nolan Ryan (four times), Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton (who picked a runner off during his 19-strikeout game, which always tickled me), David Cone, and Luis Tiant.

Seaver, like Clemens and Johnson, has a case for greatest-of-all-time status, depending on what games you want to play with timeline adjustment. Carlton is a half-step behind him. Nolan Ryan is Nolan Ryan, and Tiant and Cone are two of the best pitchers ever outside of the Hall of Fame. The median career for a pitcher with at least one 19-strikeout game is somewhere between Scherzer and Ryan.

That said, part of the reason I liked the Josua Báez three-homer question is that way more than 10 guys have hit three homers in a game. It’s an impressive enough achievement — first game of the player’s career or not — that it attracts notice, but it’s attainable enough that not only all-time greats do it.

So I want to focus on single-game achievements that occur with similar frequency to a three-homer game: Since 1901, there have been 703 three-homer games by 496 different players in AL/NL play.

There are basically only two single-game accomplishments that people make a big deal about for position players: four home runs and the cycle. So I tried to find a few other single-game milestones that have been achieved anywhere between several dozen and a few hundred times: the cycle, six-hit games, seven times on base (including errors), seven or more RBI, and 13 or more total bases.

I found the median career stats for various categories of interest, though for reasons of methodological expediency, I set a minimum of 500 career plate appearances to be included in said median. For instance, 276 players have hit for the cycle a total of 309 times since 1901, but a few are not included in these stats because they didn’t play long enough. I don’t think it matters that much — this mailbag isn’t peer reviewed or anything — but it’s worth mentioning.

The seven-times-on-base club had the best career WAR and the most career plate appearances, but there are also fewer players in that category than the other four. But despite having larger membership, the two power hitting categories — RBI and total bases — seem to augur equivalent offensive prosperity, if not better.

There’s probably some selection bias here, because you don’t get a chance to drive in seven runs unless you’re hitting in the middle of the order, but it also jives with what I expected. Total bases for hitters are kind of like strikeouts for pitchers; there’s a limit to how many of them you can compile through luck.

All five of these categories ended up with pretty similar median stats to the three-homer club, so maybe it’s the case that any random selection of a few hundred long-term big leaguers will put up a 110 wRC+ and between 20 and 30 WAR on average.

I also checked in on a few single-game pitching milestones: complete-game no-hitters, 14 or more strikeouts in a game, and starts with a game score of 90 or more. As you can see, I have an equivalent career cutoff (200 innings) in these median figures as well.

I got sucked in by the allure of round numbers for the game score category; 835 pitchers have registered a 90 at least once in their careers. That’s more than 21% of all pitchers who have made a start in the past 126 seasons.

Even accounting for differences in population size, the 14-strikeout cohort outperforms the other two. I don’t think that should surprise anyone; if you care enough about baseball to subscribe to FanGraphs and read this mailbag devoted to abstruse trivia like this, you know that no-hitters can be fluky. You can’t fake punchouts. Well, Tom Cheney did; he’s actually 13th from the bottom of the career WAR leaderboard for pitchers with a 14-strikeout game. But otherwise, it’s tough.

Because I have the spreadsheet open, I was curious to see how many players have achieved all of the single-game feats I’d laid out. A total of 69 pitchers have thrown a no-hitter and had starts of both 14 strikeouts and a game score of 90 or better. That’s not surprising; I had fewer categories for pitchers, with more pitchers in each category, and there’s an obvious comorbidity between game score, recording strikeouts, and not allowing hits.

But only one position player has hit for the cycle, recorded six hits in a game, reached base seven times in a game, driven in seven runs in a game, and recorded 13 or more total bases in a game: Jimmie Foxx.

Foxx is not just a Hall of Famer, he’s in the 500-homer club. He’s one of just 20 position players in major league history to record 100 or more career WAR, and he’s 16th all-time in wRC+ among AL/NL players. It doesn’t take an all-time great to hit one of the milestones I checked, but apparently only a hitter like Foxx could do all five.

__

Who was the pitcher with the longest career who pitched his first and last games on the same field? Also, who had the longest career who pitched his first and last games on the same field as the away team? — Nate from Albany

Jon Becker from Chicago: Hey there, Nate. Interesting question, and while it was a pretty easy one to answer, in looking at the two leaderboards here you’re going to notice a pretty clear skew toward careers that started and ended earlier. That’s for a few reasons, I think: fewer teams in the league means fewer ballparks, which means greater odds of ending in the same ballpark you started at; less team-switching back then also makes it likelier you’ll just end your career on the same team in the same ballpark; and ballparks back then lasted longer than they tend to now. Remember, the Braves only called Turner Field home for 20 seasons before moving on, and the Rangers were only at their open-air stadium a couple years longer than that before moving across the street to Globe Life Field.

Now for the lists. Here are the longest careers (by time between first and last game, not games pitched so as not to over-index for relievers) that started and ended at the same park. I also restricted to careers starting 1914 or later, as Retrosheet data is spotty before then:

And the top 10 for pitchers who were on the visiting team in both games:

__

What’s the ideal hot dog/game ratio? Any practical tips to pump those numbers up? — Chase

Dan Szymborski: There are several limitations to the ideal hot dog amount. First off is how many hot dogs you are physically capable of eating over the course of a game, which can vary from person to person. Then, you need consider whether there will be beers, which changes the dynamic. After all, the gastrocolic reflex is a big limiter, the physiological reflex that controls the motility of the lower gastrointestinal tract after eating. I’m operating under the notion that, like going over the price in the Showcase Showdown on The Price Is Right, if you have to poop at a baseball game, then you lose. There are also variations based on physical ailments.

But ignoring that, let’s imagine what an ideal maximizing of the hot dogs would look like. Very importantly, the pairing of a hot dog with a beer is a magical one, so that’s what we shall do. I think a stadium beer is exactly the right size to pair with a stadium hot dog, so this will be a 1:1 ratio.

The 1:1 ratio is also what Matt Martell did earlier this summer during the Hot Dog Jog before a Brooklyn Cyclones game — eat one dog, run one lap around the field, that is. Turns out, the peak number for that is four, though I would argue it should be zero.

Anyway, we don’t want so many beers that we can’t drive after the game, let alone for other negative effects of public drunkeness. So let’s assume that 15 minutes after a game, we want to be below the typical blood alcohol legal limit (0.08). Note that this does not apply in Utah, so you do not want to use these numbers at a Salt Lake Bees or Ogden Raptors game.

I’m assuming 16-ounce beers and a beer with an alcohol content of 5%. Each one of the beers will have 0.8 fluid ounces of alcohol that we have to clear. The average game is 2 hours and 36 minutes, so if we add 15 minutes to get to the car (if we’re driving), then we need to clear the alcohol that goes with the beer by 2 hours and 51 minutes after first pitch.

I’m also assuming that we have to stop eating and drinking after the seventh inning (if you bought a beer/hot dog at the last opportunity before the seventh-inning stretch, you can enjoy it throughout the bottom of the inning). And in this scenario, we are starting to eat and drink at the beginning of the game and evenly spacing out our beers.

To get an estimate of BAC, I used the Widmark Factor. Men and woman have different average blood amounts at the same body weight, so I’ve prepared a chart. Also, no fractional hot dogs allowed — if you start a hot dog or a beer, you better finish it — so I’ve rounded down.

So, for an 180-pound man, the answer is three hot dogs and beers, and for a 140-pound woman, two hot dogs and two beers.

Or eat as many as you want. I’m not the hot dog police. I don’t even know where to apply for that job or what it pays. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to be spending the next 20 years of my life keeping people from gobbling glizzies.

Source

Department: Baseball R&D

JOB SUMMARY: The Texas Rangers are seeking candidates for an Apprenticeship in Baseball Analytics based in Arlington, TX.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS OF POSITION INCLUDE, BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO THE FOLLOWING:

• Query and report on data
• Build and maintain analytical tools, metrics, & models
• Create compelling data visualizations and stories
• Research game changing ideas and concepts
• Present information to team leaders and organizational stakeholders
• All other duties as assigned.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s Degree in mathematics, engineering, computer science, data science, or related field
• Strong knowledge of baseball analytics and associated data & technologies
• Proficiency in Python, SQL, R, Shiny and/or other analytical tools
• Familiarity with concepts such as predictive modelling, cloud computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and Bayesian analysis
• Strong written & verbal communication as well as visualization skills
• A creative mindset, open-mindedness, and desire to work in a learning culture

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required of the job.

If you like wild growth and working with happy, enthusiastic over-achievers, you’ll enjoy your career with us!

To Apply
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Texas Rangers.

Source

This season was supposed to be something different for the Giants. Following last year’s 81-81 finish, president of baseball operations and franchise icon Buster Posey went outside the box to hire manager Tony Vitello straight from the college ranks, and added free agents Luis Arraez and Harrison Bader to upgrade a couple of the lineup’s dead spots. Throw in a full season of mid-2025 acquisition Rafael Devers, and the team had reasonable hope of reaching the playoffs for the first time since 2021, and just the second time in the past 10 seasons. Instead, the 2026 Giants haven’t spent a day over .500, and at 58-83, they own the National League’s second-worst record. Like the Tigers, they’re in danger of making some dubious history, in their case by falling short of their BaseRuns-projected win total by the largest margin of any team since 2002.

As I explained on Thursday, the Tigers are nearly 11 full wins short of their Pythagorean-projected win total, an estimate based upon their totals of runs scored and runs allowed using the formula Winning % = RS^2 /(RS^2 +RA^2). Out of all the teams playing full seasons in the Wild Card era (not the strike-shortened 1995 season or the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but including 2026 for the purposes of comparison), that’s the third-largest shortfall.

Where Pythagorean projections use actual runs scored and allowed to calculate an expected winning percentage, BaseRuns uses estimated runs scored and allowed, derived from familiar statistical components such as hits, walks, hit-by-pitches, stolen bases, and so on. Those run estimates are then plugged into the Pythagenpat formula — a variant of Bill James’ Pythagorean formula where the exponent itself is a function of the scoring environment via the formula X = ((RS + RA)/G)^0.287 — for a second-order estimate of winning percentage. Both the Pythagorean and BaseRuns estimated winning percentages provide useful if imperfect ways of measuring teams’ underlying performance and helping to identify outliers in either direction.

Our historical data for BaseRuns — which you can access through our Projected Standings page — only goes back to 2002, but for that timeframe, the Giants have the fourth-largest margin between their actual and expected win totals. They have some ignominious company alongside a couple of other teams from this season:

The Giants’ season started so poorly that it took them until their third game to score their first run, by which point, Vitello had already made headlines for getting “all fire and brimstone” while addressing his players in a tone that may have impressed 20-year-old kids concerned with keeping their scholarships but not seasoned professionals. Bad play and bad news continued to follow for reasons as varied as their absurdly low walk rate, the slow starts of Devers and Willy Adames, Bader’s alcohol-related scooter crash, in which he severely injured his left foot while already sidelined by plantar fasciitis, and — most damaging from a public relations standpoint — a Pride Night cap controversy. The last of those alienated fans, damaged Posey’s reputation and riled up another franchise legend, retiring broadcaster Mike Krukow. The highlight of the team’s season might be the high marks it received for the prospects acquired when trading Arraez, Heliot Ramos, and Robbie Ray ahead of the August 3 trade deadline.

Picking apart a team’s performance relative to its Pythagorean record generally starts with checking its records in blowouts and one-run games. On Thursday I noted that the Tigers have been very good in the former (23-14 in games decided by five or more runs for a .611 winning percentage, fifth in the majors) but very bad in the latter (13-23 in one-run games for a .361 winning percentage, second-worst in the majors). The Giants don’t have as interesting a contrast, in that they’re an unimpressive 21-26 (.447) in blowouts and a major league-worst 12-25 (.324) in one-run games. That’s left them “only” 4.77 wins short of their Pythagorean projection.

Diving into BaseRuns discrepancies generally means focusing on sequencing. This many singles, doubles, triples, homers, walks, stolen bases, double plays grounded into, and so forth usually averages out to this many runs, but — for example — a team hitting poorly with runners in scoring position and piling up solo homers is likely to undershoot that estimate. Oddly, the Tigers’ actual runs scored and allowed per game (4.39 and 4.05, respectively) are just a hair’s breadth from their BaseRuns estimates (4.37 and 4.04, respectively), but for the Giants, that’s not the case. They’ve scored 4.16 runs per game, 0.22 less than their projected rate and 23rd in the majors overall; meanwhile, they’ve allowed 4.67 runs per game, 0.3 more than projected, and 21st overall. Pinpointing where they’ve gone wrong, at least on the offensive side, is more of a challenge. Here’s a table showing some key situational splits:

Adjusted for their ballpark, the Giants’ offense has been two points of wRC+ below league average overall. They’ve been a point better than the league average with the bases empty and four points better with runners in scoring position, but five points worse than the league average when considering all runners on base. While they’ve been a point better than average in medium-leverage situations, they’ve been three points worse than average in low-leverage sitautions, and seven points worse in high-leverage situations.

While that may not look like it should add up to much of a shortfall, the key here is opportunity. The Giants walked a ridiculously low 5.7% of the time through the end of May, two percentage points lower than any other team this year to that point, and lower than any team in the integration era — in a season when the league-wide rate (8.9%) has been higher than any full season since 2009. The Giants have since improved in that department to the point that their major league-worst rate is only 0.1 points below the 29th-ranked team (the Blue Jays), but that has still cost them not only runners on base, but also the plate appearances that come from keeping the line moving in those advantageous situations. You can see that the table shows the average number of plate appearances each team has taken in a given situation. The Giants have 59 more plate appearances than average with the bases empty, 85 fewer than average with runners in scoring position, and 96 fewer than average with men on base. They have far more low-leverage plate appearances than the average team, and far fewer high-leverage ones. So their almost-average offense isn’t giving itself as many opportunities in important situations, and in some of those, it’s also underperforming substantially.

On a league-wide basis, teams hit for a wRC+ that’s nine points higher with men on base (105) than with the bases empty (96), but for the Giants, the margin is only three points (100 to 97). On an individual basis, three of the five hitters with the most plate appearances with runners on base have a wRC+ that’s at least 21 points lower in that context than with the bases empty, namely Devers, Adames, and Bryce Eldridge:

Meanwhile, four of the top nine players in terms of plate appearances with runners on base, all with a higher wRC+ in that context than with the bases empty, are no longer with the team, namely the since-traded Arraez and Ramos, and the injured Schmitt and Chapman, both of whom are out for the season; Schmitt underwent surgery to repair the torn meniscus in his left knee on July 31, while Chapman underwent core muscle surgery in mid-August. On the subject of shutdowns, Adames, who has struggled this year while battling back woes, may now be done for the year after spraining the ulnar collateral ligament of his left elbow in late August.

A couple other things stand out about the Giants offense, the first of which applies to the table above. This season, 57.8% of all home runs have been hit with the bases empty, but for the Giants, that rate is 62.4%. Devers (68.8%), Adames (66.7%), and Eldridge (80%) — three of the four Giants with double-digit totals — have solo homer rates much higher than average, while the fourth, Schmitt, is right around average (57.1%). All of this has seeped into the situational table, but it bears repeating: The timing of their home runs could be better.

My final point on the offense is that while stolen bases and caught stealing are accounted for in BaseRuns, other aspects of baserunning, such as taking an extra base, are not. As a team, the Giants have a 77% success rate on steals, right at the major league average, but they’ve stolen only 67 bases, the majors’ fifth-lowest total. They’re 6.1 runs below average in terms of their overall baserunning, the third-lowest mark in the majors. At Baseball Reference, we can see that while they’re above-average in the number of times they’ve advanced from first to third on a single, they’re below average when it comes to scoring from first on a double or from second on a single, and overall, their 40% rate of extra bases taken is two points below average.

I think you can see that there are ways the Giants offense has missed the mark. Using the same type of comparison, it’s not hard to see where the Giants’ pitching has gone wrong:

Giants pitchers have held opposing batters to a 99 wRC+ overall. They’ve been one point better than the league average with the bases empty, one point worse than the league average with runners on base… and 11 points worse with runners in scoring position, where they’ve given the opposition 135 extra opportunities relative to the average team. Giants pitchers have been very good in low-leverage situations, but six points worse than average in medium-leverage situations, and 28 points worse than average in high-leverage situations. Good grief.

As for individuals, here’s a similar table to the one for the hitters, but comparing their bases-empty performance with that when runners are in scoring position, since that’s an area where the team has been significantly worse than league average. Since we don’t present situational pitching wRC+ on the site, I’m sticking with wOBA here:

While the subpar performances of the two starters with the most plate appearances with runners in scoring position (Webb and Roupp) are offset by those of the next two (Houser and the since-traded Ray), only three of the other pitchers have a lower wOBA allowed with runners in scoring position than with the bases empty. Five relievers are at least 95 points worse, including Walker and Hentges, two of their top setup men. It’s not great.

The Giants didn’t look like world-beaters coming into the season, but even matching their projected win total of 82 would have constituted a mild improvement, and with Playoff Odds of 31.4%, they had a reasonable chance to take an even bigger step forward. Instead, they’ve been an absolute mess from the outset, and particularly bad timing on both sides of the ball is just one more reason why.

Source

Source

Quick programming note: I’m working on a very special bonus Five Things that would normally run in this slot, but as with most bonus things, it’s taking a bit longer than expected. Look for it next week, along with a regular Five Things. In the meantime, join me in puzzling over what’s gotten into the A’s.

In 2023, the Oakland A’s were putrid. They won only 50 games, got outscored by 339 runs, and generally looked like the worst team in baseball. But over the next two years, sandwiched around a move to Sacramento, they figured things out. In 2024, they improved by 19 games. In 2025, they improved again, to a 76-86 record. Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, Tyler Soderstrom, Brent Rooker, and Jacob Wilson either broke in or broke out in that span. Coming into 2026, the A’s weren’t favorites in the AL West, but they were trendy playoff picks, with various market and model estimates spitting out projections between 75 and 80 wins.

Yeah, about that. The American League is about as bad as it’s ever been this year, and the AL West is particularly poor. Eighty-two wins might be enough to take the division. But the A’s aren’t part of the race. They’re 54-86, a mere game ahead of the Angels for the worst record in baseball. They’ve been outscored by 194 runs, 54 runs clear of the Rockies in second-to-last place. I had to investigate what went down – both because rubbernecking is fun, and because I want to figure out what I should think about the A’s for 2027.

The obvious place to start is the offense. Last season saw four different Athletics eclipse 3.0 WAR on the batting side – Kurtz and Wilson had standout rookie seasons while Langeliers and Soderstrom both broke out to establish new career highs. Throw in Rooker and Lawrence Butler as offensive building blocks, mix in a blazing-fast center fielder (your choice of Denzel Clarke or Henry Bolte), and the bones of an upper echelon offense were clearly there. Even if you count the two center field options as only one position filled, that’s seven spots spoken for. The A’s traded for Jeff McNeil to fill an eighth spot. Their plan was surely to score a boatload of runs – a great plan in the snug confines of Sutter Health Park.

Here’s how that has gone:

Three of the nine have roughly met expectations. Bolte — and I’m perhaps being generous to the A’s by counting him among their core given that we didn’t project him for much playing time before the season — has been the only positive surprise. Meanwhile, five hitters the A’s were counting on have been far worse than expected. And so that’s what went wrong, right?

Nope! I included Bolte, who isn’t a strong spiritual fit in that group, as a teaser for a group of contributors who have kept the Sacramento offense from completely sputtering. Bolte has lifted the floor in center. Zack Gelof has bounced back from two nightmarish years to post a 110 wRC+. Carlos Cortes has been league average offensively, better than we expected. Alika Williams, an in-season acquisition from the Pirates, has chipped in with a 97 wRC+ over 175 plate appearances. The A’s scored 4.52 runs per game last year. They’re scoring 4.36 runs per game this year, hardly a disastrous fall.

If you wanted to, you could nitpick my framing. I covered how the hitters have done at the plate, but not how they’ve done in the field, and the Athletics have struggled to turn batted balls into outs. Per DRS, they’re the fourth-worst defensive team in the majors. Per FRV, they’re second worst. Truthfully, though, the defense was already bad. They were fifth worst in DRS and ninth worst in FRV in 2025. The outfield defense has gotten worse – Soderstrom and Butler are having down defensive years and Bolte, while solid, can’t hold a candle to Clarke in center. But on the infield, the opposite has happened. Wilson was either a little (DRS) or a lot (FRV) better than he was last year before he went down with a season-ending injury. Kurtz looked more comfortable at first base before he suffered a season-ending injury. And oh boy, have season-ending injuries been in style this summer.

Believe it or not, the A’s have actually scored more runs per game since Kurtz hit the IL. Even more surprisingly, Langeliers has been out for the entire stretch, too. Soderstrom and Wilson are both out for the year after hitting the IL halfway through August. Kurtz has definitively been their best hitter this year, and his absence has meant a great deal of McNeil playing first base. Langeliers was having a second straight great season; his replacements have been just fine. Soderstrom and Wilson are valuable cogs. But the runs have kept coming. Baseball is hard to predict sometimes.

On the other hand, the A’s have the second-worst record in baseball since Kurtz’s departure. They’ve gone 9-19, a half-game ahead of the woeful Rockies. They’ve given up nearly six runs per game in that stretch, highlighted by a three-game, 30-run drubbing by the Rays. And that gets us to what’s been ailing the Athletics most this year: They can’t keep the ball in the park, and even when they do, they can’t get opposing hitters out.

This feels like the core problem facing this iteration of the team. Playing in a bandbox in Sacramento, it’s hard to imagine the offense not flowing to some degree. But preventing runs? The A’s knew it would be an issue when they made the move before last year, which is why they brought in Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs. They knew they needed some extra bulk innings after last year’s pitching staff allowed five runs per game and tired down the stretch, so they added veterans Aaron Civale and Mark Leiter Jr. They fast-tracked 2024 draft pick Gage Jump, calling him up after only nine starts in Triple-A. To be fair, we still had the A’s down as having one of the worst staffs in baseball in our positional power rankings, but not the worst staff.

There’s no kind way to put this: The rotation has collapsed. Severino, the presumptive staff ace, made only 12 starts before a shoulder injury ended his season. Springs has been available, but the results have been disastrous. He’s made 25 starts and surrendered 33 home runs, the most in baseball. He’s allowed five or more runs nine different times, and delivered only four quality starts, none since May 17. That’s also the last game where he went six innings or more. Civale pitched so poorly (5.42 ERA, 5.33 FIP) that the A’s designated him for assignment in July; after being traded for a lottery ticket, he’s turned his season around as a reliever with the Cubs.

Those were the veterans who were supposed to anchor the pitching staff. In their absence (or in Springs’ case, despite his presence), the team has cast a net far and wide; 14 pitchers have started for them this year. A few have been pleasant surprises. J.T. Ginn, a sinker-heavy fifth-starter type, is having the best year of his career, with a BABIP-aided 3.71 ERA and a 4.38 FIP. That FIP might sound bad, but it’s more or less average; visiting pitchers have posted a 4.40 FIP in Sacramento this year.

Jump has been even better. Or maybe he’s been much worse – pitching is so hard to decipher sometimes. Through the end of July, Jump was having an excellent debut season – a 4.00 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, a pile of strikeouts and a few signature games. But whether it’s random variance or just hitting a rookie wall, he’s been bad since the calendar flipped to August. He’s made six starts and surrendered 25 runs, all of them earned. He’s walking more than six batters per nine innings. His 7.58 ERA is laughable, but his 5.52 xERA isn’t much better. He’s given up scorched contact to all fields, and generally looked like a guy who’s ready for a winter of conditioning and a new season.

Two other A’s pitchers have chipped in double-digit starts this year. Jacob Lopez, sneaky average in 2025, has been only OK in his second bite at the apple. In somewhat of a trend for A’s starters, he’s walking way too many batters: a 11.2% walk rate, or 4.5 per nine innings. Jack Perkins, a fifth-round pick from 2022 whom we projected as a reliever, has thrown in 12 walk-prone starts of his own, with run estimators ranging between the upper fours and lower sixes.

The A’s were never projected to have a good bullpen this year, and their relievers have been pressed into carrying a large workload because the starters have struggled so much. ERA estimators agree that the A’s have around the fifth-worst bullpen in baseball; their relievers are fifth worst in FIP, sixth worst in xFIP, seventh worst in xERA, and ninth worst in SIERA. But their actual results have been much worse than that. They’ve allowed a 5.56 ERA, worst in the game by half a run. They’re surrendering a ludicrous .320 BABIP, which accounts for a lot of the issue, and have the lowest strand rate in the game. And they’ve been even worse at home.

Teasing out park effects in small samples is very difficult, but here’s one way of explaining how much of a nightmare pitching at home is for this staff. On the road, A’s pitchers have been broadly unremarkable. They’ve managed a 4.25 FIP, which isn’t great, and their 4.58 ERA is even worse. But at home, they’re putrid. They’ve posted a 5.54 FIP, the worst in baseball by more than half a run, and a 6.33 ERA, the worst by more than a run. They’ve given up a gobsmacking 132 homers in 69 home games. Sure, they did play six home games in Las Vegas, and they got tagged for 15 homers in those games, but even excluding those, they’ve been flammable in Sacramento.

There’s probably some random variance to that split. Last year, the pitching was a little worse at home, but not markedly so. But pitching in a bandbox in front of a porous defense would make anyone afraid to attack the strike zone, and the A’s have nibbled to an extreme extent this year. They throw to the heart of the strike zone at one of the lowest rates in baseball, and throw far outside the zone at one of the highest rates. They don’t miss many bats or induce many chases, which means that those out-of-zone pitches aren’t turning into strikeouts as often as they’d hope. No team in baseball gets ahead in the count less frequently.

Therein lies the answer to what’s gone wrong with the A’s this year. There are levels to pitching incompetence. You can be garden-variety bad, putting your team in tough situations. You can be bad but jagged – some good performers, some bad performers. But the A’s are a different kind of bad. They’re “play lots of your games with little hope of winning” bad. They’ve gotten tattooed early 22 times this year, by which I mean losing by three or more runs while having surrendered five or more runs through only four innings. I set those bars somewhat arbitrarily, but they feel like a good barometer for feeling like the game is likely lost.

Somehow, they are not the team that has been blown out early most frequently — that’d be the Rockies, who have managed the task 27 times. But the A’s have been blown out early the second-most times, and they have blown their opponents out early only nine times, tied for third fewest in the league. Likewise, they’re getting comprehensively stomped – down four or more while having given up eight or more runs through seven innings – an eye-watering 19 times. They’ve done it to other teams only eight times; they’re the only team in baseball with such a lopsided ratio between blowout wins and blowout losses.

In other words, these pitchers have been so bad that they’ve played the team out of games. And try as you might to reduce baseball to a contextless sequence of random plate appearance outcomes, that’s not how the game works. Things get weird when you’re down big early. The low-leverage bullpen crew stretches out. Managers sub out players who might need a rest day. Position players pitch, often on both sides. Pitching styles change. Approaches change, too – as much as a player might try to take things one out at a time, it probably gets harder in a game that is probably already over.

From my perspective, that’s the takeaway from this A’s season. Through a combination of injuries, ineffectiveness, and poor upfront planning, the A’s couldn’t put together a big league-caliber pitching staff this year. The guys they ended up with have gotten crushed far too frequently, which means that a truly shocking number of A’s games have stopped being competitive early. The bummer season follows somewhat naturally.

I can’t measure the long-term effect this might have on A’s players, but I think you should assume there’s at least some effect. This is a rough environment to play baseball in. The facilities, while much improved over the last two years, are well below the major league standard. The games are often uncompetitive. The squad that has played most of the summer – down some pitchers due to injury, and losing more players as the team started planning for next year – has gotten flat out demolished. The A’s are 14-40 since the start of July, and they’ve allowed 6.4 runs per game in that stretch, a number that I calculated four times because it hardly seems possible over that long of a time period. It doesn’t even include the Vegas games!

This year is clearly over for the Athletics. But they’ve collapsed so spectacularly that 2027’s outlook feels a little shaky too. Can a team survive in a PCL stadium with a PCL pitching staff, facing major league opposition? This summer would suggest that one cannot. Can the A’s do enough to fortify their rotation and bullpen, whether by trade, signing, or promotion? We’ll have to see, though 2026 doesn’t fill me with hope. But this year’s form just won’t work. You can analyze their woes in a lot of different ways, but at the end of the day, when you get scored on this early and this often, finishing at the bottom of the league feels all but inevitable.

Source

Baseball is a team sport, but sometimes there’s only room for two faces on a poster.

Before every playoff series, the league, its broadcast partners, and anyone else with an interest in promoting the event will circulate something based on the poster for the 1997 John Woo film Face/Off.

Half Cage, half Travolta, all smoldering scene-chewing and cartoonish violence. If that doesn’t get your blood pumping I don’t want to know you. There’s more to each side of the matchup than just the one guy, but in baseball as in film you put the superstar’s mug on the promo material if you want to sell tickets.

Take this Fox promo from last year’s World Series.

On one side, you have Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and George Springer; on the other, Shohei Ohtani and Freddie Freeman. Vladito and Ohtani, respectively, are the biggest stars on each team by miles. Springer and Freeman are both former World Series MVPs. Every baseball fan in the country knows these faces.

And both of last year’s World Series participants — especially the Dodgers — had plenty of bench depth if you wanted to go for a bigger spread. But there are some peculiar effects of living in a world of 12 playoff berths and maybe 2 1/2 good teams in the entire American League. Not every team has this level of stardom to call on.

As I write on the morning of September 3, 17 clubs have at least a 10% chance of making the postseason, according to our Playoff Odds. I want to see who — by dint of fame and 2026 performance — would be in the mix for a spot on the Face/Off poster for each of those clubs.

When searching for World Series posters, I found a mock banner that portrayed Blue Jays-Dodgers as a battle between Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Jack Dreyer. There was also that mild kerfuffle in 2024 when ESPN’s Opening Day lead image included Justin Steele, because every star pitcher was hurt that spring.

Could we come by such an image honestly this postseason? Let’s find out.

The two-time defending champions are obviously pretty set for star power. Not featured on this list: Teoscar Hernández, Will Smith, Roki Sasaki, and Edwin Díaz (not that you’d put him on a poster after the season he’s had). Casual fans are probably more familiar with Enrique Hernández and Blake Treinen than anyone on a third of the teams in the league, just because they’ve been on TV every October. They’re the Millennial Mark Lemke and Mike Stanton, respectively.

The National League’s other perennial contender of the 2020s, the Braves are similarly full of household names. Sale has been a superstar for more than a decade. Olson has plus-plus power, three Gold Gloves, piercing blue eyes, and the game’s longest iron man streak. A few of these guys have been around since the World Series run in 2021. Baldwin was Rookie of the Year last year.

Spencer Strider is one of the sport’s most distinctive star players, but he’s unlikely to participate in any playoff action. You know who is, though? Ronald Acuña Jr., the actual face of the franchise and one of baseball’s most poster-worthy players. You can build a poster around Acuña and/or Sale and still have plenty of star power left over.

Company policy for the Rays — has been for about 15 years now — is they trade you right as you get famous. I thought that would present a challenge, but Caminero is a highly visible rising young star. Yandy Díaz has the biggest biceps in baseball, and he’s been wearing out the infield at the Trop since 2019. They’re not Ohtani and Mookie Betts, but they’re famous enough.

Beyond that, it’d be a stretch to call anyone on the Rays famous, but part of their value proposition as a playoff participant is that you get to learn a new cast of characters whenever they make a run. Rasmussen has earned that spotlight for sure with his play this year; otherwise you could introduce the mainstream audience to Baker, Jonathan Aranda, or Chandler Simpson.

This is the Aaron Judge show, obviously. Beyond him, the Yankees have more poster-worthy options than any AL team. Cole, Bellinger, Fried, and Chisholm are all household names. Schlittler and Rice are two of this year’s biggest rising stars. Paul Goldschmidt is on this team still, and everyone’s heard of him.

The Brewers are somewhat star-averse, almost by design. They, like the Rays, tend to cash in on their homegrown talent once it gets expensive. More than that, Milwaukee’s roster is very egalitarian. There isn’t really one guy who makes it go.

There is, however, one legit current superstar on the Brewers: Misiorowski. He’s not only the current NL Cy Young frontrunner, but he’s also the object of national fascination because he’s 11 feet tall and throws 200 miles per hour. He’d be on any Brewers poster, flanked by some combination of Contreras, Yelich (who’s still the face of the franchise despite a lackluster 2026), Turang, and Chourio.

I added the salary column for each team because it’s a proxy for fame and veteran tenure, but it means little to this team. If anyone reading this is a graphic designer at Fox or MLB: If you put Antonio Senzatela on a promo poster, I will buy you a beer and smooch you on the face.

I got the idea for this post when Marsh ended up on the promo materials for the Field of Dreams game. It struck me as funny, because Marsh seems like he’s pretty far down on the Phillies’ pecking order. At the same time, he was an All-Star starter this year, and (for good or ill, depending on how you feel about his coiffure) one of the game’s most recognizable players.

The Phillies are on course for their fifth straight playoff appearance, and they’ve barely changed the roster in all that time. There are probably baseball fans out there who’d recognize the faces on this roster more easily than they would their own grandparents.

The Cubs’ best player is the outspoken, photogenic, preposterously athletic NL MVP favorite. As long they last in this postseason, I would expect to see PCA featured in every promo image and before every commercial break. And the Cubs might be short on pitching, but they’re not short on big names: Bregman, Swanson, Suzuki. Hoerner and Happ are both plausibly famous enough to lead a promo image for a Wild Card team, even if neither’s modeling services are likely to be required.

I’d argue we’re a little lighter on star power than you’d expect from one of the American League’s glamor franchises. If Crochet returns to full power by October, he’s probably the biggest name on the team and should get top billing. But many of Boston’s best players this year are either up-and-coming talents (Tolle, Rafaela), very good supporting players (Suarez, Contreras, Gray), or brand new to the team (Rutschman).

The second-most famous Red Sox player might actually be Roman Anthony, who’s only played 34 games so far this year. Is that enough to vault him into poster territory? I don’t know. Regardless, this team might not be as star-studded as the Dodgers or Yankees, but putting someone like Rafaela or Tolle on a poster would be more in the vein of highlighting a player on the upswing than a “who the heck is this guy?” situation.

This is the halfway point, and for the first time I think we could be in for a real reach for a poster spot. Castillo and Benintendi are definitely familiar to most fans, but not for anything they’ve done this year with the White Sox. Murakami is probably Chicago’s biggest attraction, because everyone loves a foreign star with plus-plus power and a distinctive offensive game.

I think Vargas has earned some marketing credibility just based on what he’s achieved on the field this year. Montgomery is a former top prospect. But Meidroth, Burke, Peters, Davis Martin — that’s straddling the line between a player you ought to learn about and “well, we needed another face for the poster.”

The Astros aren’t very good this year, and while they’ve been consistent contenders since 2015, they’ve turned over almost the entire roster in that time. After they let Lance McCullers Jr. loose this summer, Altuve is the only Astro remaining from the 2017 World Series team who has never gone to a different organization. (Correa famously left and came back.) Forget 2017; only 10 of the 28 players on the Astros’ active roster have a ring from 2022.

Fortunately, one of those is Alvarez, the AL MVP favorite. Stick him on a poster flanked by Altuve and Correa and call it a day.

I snark on the Guardians’ anonymous lineup a lot, but this year they have lots of fun, exciting young players to sprinkle around Ramírez, the face of the franchise. Messick is about 10 good postseason innings from being every baseball sicko’s favorite pitcher, Bazzana is not only athletic and punchy, but he’s Australian to boot, and DeLauter is going to get a lot of attention because he followed up a postseason debut in 2025 with a solid rookie season. The Guardians aren’t on the Dodgers’ level for star power, but they’ve got more depth than at any point since they traded Francisco Lindor.

The Diamondbacks have one superstar they can highlight in Carroll, plus a couple middle infielders (Perdomo and Ketel Marte) who have been in and around the top 10 in MVP voting over the past few years. Kelly and Gallen were pillars of Arizona’s 2023 pennant run, so there’s some residual Q rating for both, but I don’t think you’d want to draw attention to either’s performance this year.

That leaves the likes of E-Rod, Moreno, Brandon Pfaadt — all good players but nobody who’s going to end up on a magazine cover anytime soon. Which is kind of what you’d expect from a team that’s hanging around the last NL Wild Card spot.

Here’s a fun fact that’ll give you a good idea of how the Padres’ season has gone: Three of their top four pitchers in WAR this year are relievers. San Diego is heavy on big-name players who aren’t having great seasons by their standards — Machado, Bogaerts, Ray, maybe even Merrill and Tatis if you want to be demanding — but you can print Machado and Tatis onto every poster until the Padres go out of business. Stick Miller on there for some extra kick, and you’ve got a set of marquee names that’d draw an audience as well as any trio in the NL.

The Rangers are under .500 and absolutely creaking into the playoff picture. I was convinced this would be the first team with a truly laughable set of poster candidates. Their best player this year, by a huge margin, is a career utilityman who’s having his first above-average big league campaign in the fifth season of his career.

But for the moment at least, Seager and deGrom are healthy. Those are two massive names; Seager in particular has some of the best postseason credentials of any active player, with three playoff series MVP awards, two for the World Series. One of those came just three years ago with these very Rangers. Put him on the poster, and you can throw Duran or Latz up there alongside him and no one will think twice.

What I said earlier about the Blue Jays having bench depth in star power is less true now than it was a year ago. Kevin Gausman, Jeff Hoffman, and Bo Bichette are gone. Max Scherzer and Shane Bieber have been nonfactors. Springer is getting old, Alejandro Kirk and Trey Yesavage haven’t been quite as exciting this year, and Vladito has been, I believe the word is “cheeks,” All-Star selection or no.

I still think a Guerrero-Cease-Kirk core can carry a promo campaign. You might get some awkward questions about how many home runs the franchise first baseman has hit in front of the home crowd, but it’d be weird not to include Guerrero on the poster.

But if you didn’t, we’re like one or two moves away from Varland being the Jays’ cover boy. I don’t know why that’s inherently funnier than other standout relievers like Miller and Baker, but it is for some reason.

I’d leave room here for an editor’s note so Meg can scream about the idea of this Mariners team backing into a playoff spot (apparently there’s still a decent chance of that happening), but she informs me that watching this much Weston Wilson broke her spirit weeks ago.

Part of the reason a Mariners playoff berth seems so farfetched is the fact that most of their big-name players — Raleigh, Rodríguez, Naylor, J.P. Crawford — have been awful this year. Arozarena has both the 2026 performance and name recognition to headline a poster, especially because he’s still best remembered for going berserk for the Rays during the 2020 postseason. You can launder in some of the other big names from there.

But if we were going on merit alone, Canzone would be in the conversation for a spot on the poster. Just as with the Astros and Rangers — that’s what happens when the AL West doesn’t have any good teams.

I think the Orioles are as surprised as anyone that they’re still in the playoff picture. They traded their third- and fourth-most productive position players at the deadline — Taylor Ward and Adley Rutschman, who was also Baltimore’s only All-Star — and their second-highest-paid player was a waiver deadline pickup.

Alonso’s having a good year; Henderson’s having a nightmare of a season by his standards but a decent one by most other people’s. Those two are huge names, so they go on the poster.

After that, it gets dicey. Guys like Bradish and Colton Cowser have plenty of local cachet but very little national name recognition. Do you bank on Rogers as the Game 1 starter against someone like Schlittler, deGrom, or Woo? Is Baz famous at all? How about Samuel Basallo?

I think this is the team with the highest likelihood of throwing a real curveball up on the promotional board. There are other mediocre teams with more veteran name recognition, even if the players in question are past their best.

And while the Brewers, Rays, and White Sox in particular have plenty of newcomers and nobodies, that’s the brand those teams have cultivated. These aren’t just any newcomers and nobodies, they’re newcomers and nobodies with panache.

But selling a playoff matchup is all in the delivery. “Bryce Harper and the Phillies host Pete Crow-Armstrong and the Cubs, followed by Ezequiel Duran and the Rangers versus Dylan Beavers and the Orioles. Only on NBC and Peacock, your exclusive home for the Wild Card series.”

Source

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about duplicate episode titles and the Angels being slightly less bad than previously indicated, Stat Blast about extended team droughts between multi-hit MLB debuts, and discuss the arrival and role of Padres prospect Ethan Salas, a (deep breath) Cubs-produced, TikTok-based, baseball-themed, microdrama rom-com, whether they have any interest in VR baseball broadcasts, and an apparent change in Minor League Baseball’s ball, followed by additional Blasting about a Jordan Walker fact that may or may not be fun, catcher hot-swaps, center fielders on the mound, and all-win/loss days for divisions.

Audio intro: Jimmy Kramer, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to duplicate episode titles
Link to Episode 1240
Link to Episode 1573
Link to Paine on Moreno/Kroenke
Link to Kroenke’s land ownership
Link to Langs post 1
Link to Langs post 2
Link to debutant dingers article
Link to gaps between debuts
Link to Close Encounters scene
Link to Montes debut article
Link to Ichiro rookie hits record
Link to Ichiro video
Link to Montes video
Link to Ben on debutant batters
Link to proj. strength of schedule
Link to M’s rookie batting WAR
Link to BP on Jenkins
Link to BP on Salas
Link to ESPN on Salas
Link to New Yorker on microdramas
Link to Quibi wiki
Link to Variety on Nine Innings to Love
Link to Nine Innings to Love trailer
Link to The Notebook scene
Link to VR broadcasts article
Link to Jake/Jordan broadcast info
Link to Ben’s plot hole video
Link to Cooper on the MiLB ball
Link to Cooper on college homers
Link to Ben on the MiLB-to-MLB gap
Link to Clay on the MiLB-to-MLB gap
Link to FG on MiLB ball construction
Link to Walker alleged fun fact
Link to ITYSL meme
Link to Williams vs. Wood post
Link to catchers data
Link to The Onion on Gillette
Link to wild 1902 game
Link to Garver EW episode
Link to all-loss division days
Link to all-win division days
Link to listener emails database

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Give a Gift Subscription
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com
 Effectively Wild Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Apple Podcasts Feed 
 Spotify Feed
 YouTube Playlist
 Facebook Group
 Bluesky Account
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!

Source

2:02

Jason Martinez: Welcome to the RosterResource chat! This will be our last of the 2026 regular season and then we’ll return in early October. While it’s never too early for us to discuss the offseason, we’ll wait until at least a majority of teams are done for the year before looking too far ahead. Of course, you can always ask me and Jon questions via Twitter, BlueSky, or the rosters at fangraphs dot com email account. So you don’t have to wait until the next chat. Here we go …

2:05

Jon Becker: Normally, high school players are eligible the fifth R5 draft after they’re drafted and not the fourth, you’re right. But the cutoff is actually based on age and not high school vs. college, and Sykora, unlike most high school draftees, was 19 on the June 5 preceding his signing, which means he only gets four years; I believe he was held back a grade at some point or started a year late, something like that. Regardless, they’ll have to add him to the 40 this offseason.

2:09

Jason Martinez: Always a chance they just stick with the hot hand and it sounds like we’ll have at least another week before Judge returns. Keep in mind that Grisham can be one of the worst hitters in the league and then can get really hot all of a sudden. He was so bad at the end of 2022 that the Padres benched him in favor of Jose Azocar. He was unplayable. And then he returned to the lineup and had a decent playoff run with 3 HRs and some big hits. I think it will take a lot to trust Jones down the stretch and in the post-season, especially since they’ll be facing mostly really good pitching. He needs to be very good and show he’s capable in CF.  But, like I said, Grisham has so much experience and can be very good. My guess is they’ll stick with the guy who has a track record.

2:12

Jon Becker: I’m like 80% sure that they’ll both at least debut next year. I think Fischer’s pull-air-happy approach could be easily exploited by MLB pitching but a version of Fischer that succeeds might be the best power they’ve had in the lineup since peak Yelich, and there should be playing time for him at 3B/1B at some point. I have to think Susana’s innings will be very carefully monitored next year but besides health and staying on schedule he doesn’t really have much else to prove in the minors, though it’s worth noting that only Triple-A uses the same baseball as MLB, so TBD on how his stuff looks with the different ball.

2:18

Jason Martinez: I’d have no problem if they decided to be patient and call him up in late April/early May. Then he’d be under team control thru 2033 instead of 2032. But I’m pretty sure they view him the same way as Tatis and Merrill. Not many elite prospects make it to SD before they’re traded. And the two that weren’t traded made the Opening Day roster and got long-term extensions early in their careers. So holding them back in order to keep them an extra year didn’t affect those decisions at all. I’d assume the same will happen with Salas. Calling him up now (instead of Opening Day 2027) became more likely once Sheets and Rengifo went on the IL. The need for another lefty bat, especially one with a good idea of the strike zone, sped up his timeline.

2:19

Jon Becker: The MiLB CBA is separate from the MLB CBA, even though there is of course going to be a lot of switching going on as to who’s represented by each CBA. I believe that by the letter of the law it’s just 40-man players under the MLB CBA, so they’re the ones the owners would/will be locking out. There’ll be an MiLB season for non-40 man players if there are missed MLB games, but I don’t know where the union stands on older players with MLB experience signing minors deals and playing in the minors.

2:24

Jason Martinez: Bernal’s 1-month audition should play a big part in their decision. Crooks was also a top prospect but he hasn’t hit a lick in the majors. Not much of a window with Bernal right behind him but it might make sense if he gets a change of scenery in 2027. He probably still has some decent trade value. Wouldn’t surprise me if Bernal is their primary catcher in 2027 with Pages in the backup role and, unless he’s traded, Herrera could play there occasionally while still getting a majority of his at-bats as the DH. But my guess is that they view Bernal as their guy for the next several seasons (and beyond).

2:26

Jon Becker: If we assume that Chapman, Adames, Schmitt, Devers, and Eldridge are all healthy, that blocks off all the infielders, and Lee has a spot in the OF, either CF or RF. Even if Bader is healthy I would think he’ll have to re-earn trust in the team, so that leaves two OF spots. Gilbert probably has a leg up for one because he’s been up basically all year and performing pretty well, and based on how Hill/Cox are both performing in small samples this year, entirely possible they just end up platooning next year too. But most of the guys they’ve called up are just “ah crap, EVERYONE got hurt” filler.

2:30	Jason Martinez: We’re going to call it quits for today so Jon can work on some RR-related technical issues. We will return from our hiatus on either 10/8 or 10/15 so you’ll have about 5 weeks to get your offseason questions ready. Enjoy the rest of the regular season!

Source

It’s been a dismal and deflating season in Detroit. The Tigers, who entered the year as favorites to win the AL Central after signing both Framber Valdez and Justin Verlander in February, played middling baseball through the first five weeks of the season before hitting the skids in May, at one point losing 16 out of 18 games. Instead of loading up for the stretch run ahead of the August 3 trade deadline, they dealt away both Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize to other contenders. While the team has actually outscored opponents by 47 runs (610 to 563), the Tigers are currently 11 games below .500 at 64-75, and in danger of making some dubious history by falling short of their Pythagorean-projected win total by the largest margin of any Wild Card-era team.

Misery loves company, and the Tigers are not alone in undershooting their target. The Giants, who at the outset of the season looked to have a reasonable chance of claiming a Wild Card berth, are not only 24 games below .500 (58-82) but in danger of falling short of their BaseRuns-projected win total by the largest margin of any team since 2002.

If you’re not familiar with either of these concepts, a Pythagorean projection is one of the most enduring Bill James creations, introduced in his self-published 1980 Baseball Abstract. James showed that simply by knowing a team’s runs scored and runs allowed, one could estimate its winning percentage with a reasonable degree of accuracy via the formula Winning % = RS^2 /(RS^2 +RA^2). The use of the squares, reminiscent of the Pythagorean formula to calculate the length of a right triangle’s hypotenuse, is what gives the stat its name. Further refinements by James and other sabermetricians showed that using a slightly smaller exponent increased the accuracy of the estimate. The Pythagenpat formula, where the exponent itself is a function of the scoring environment via the formula X = ((RS + RA)/G)^0.287, is the one we use for our Projected Standings pages, which now have all major league seasons dating back to 1871 (damn those underachieving Rockford Forest Citys).

Where Pythagorean projections use actual runs scored and allowed to estimate winning percentages, BaseRuns uses estimated runs scored and allowed, derived from familiar statistical components such as hits, walks, hit-by-pitches, stolen bases, and so on; those estimates are then run through the Pythagenpat formula for a second-order estimate of winning percentage. Both formulas provide useful if imperfect ways of measuring teams’ underlying performance and helping to identify outliers in either direction. In that regard, both Detroit and San Francisco stand out. Today I’ll focus on the Tigers, and how they’ve wound up at this historic juncture; I’ll follow up with a separate look at the Giants, though there will be some crossover.

Here’s a look at the largest Pythagorean underachievers for all full seasons of the Wild Card era; I’ve excluded the strike-shortened 1995 season and the pandemic-shortened 2020 season but not this one:

Wow. The Tigers are a close third in the rankings, just “ahead” of last year’s White Sox on a leaderboard that includes some teams that nonetheless made the playoffs (the ones with asterisks), some that would have done so if their actual record resembled their projected one (such as the 2023 Padres and ’25 Rangers), some that ended up with godawful records (such as the 2014 Rockies and ’25 White Sox) instead of merely mediocre ones.

As the great sabermetrician Leo Tolstoy famously observed, “Happy teams are all alike; every unhappy team is unhappy in its own way.” Such is the case for the underperformers above. While I don’t have room to dig into them all, the Tigers are worth a closer look so we can understand their presence here.

The biggest thing that stands out is the contrast between Detroit’s performance in blowouts — games decided by five or more runs — and in one-run games. Following back-to-back drubbings by the Twins on Monday (11-1) and Tuesday (15-2) and then an 11-6 extra-innings win over Minnesota on Wednesday, the Tigers are 23-14 in games decided by five or more runs, outscoring their opponents by 71 runs (238 to 167). Their .622 winning percentage in that context ranks fifth in the majors, behind the Brewers (.732, 30-11), Cubs (.696, 32-14), Dodgers (.659, 29-15), and Yankees (.636, 28-16) — all likely playoff-bound, as are the sixth-ranked Braves (.615, 24-15) and seventh-ranked Red Sox (.591, 26-18). The Tigers stick out like a sore thumb in that company.

They stick out even further when it comes to one-run games, because the Tigers’ .361 winning percentage, via a 13-23 record, is the majors’ second-worst, ahead of only the Giants’ .324 (12-25). After their August 19 loss to the Pirates, a game in which closer Kenley Jansen served up a game-tying solo homer to Rafael Flores and then a game-winning solo homer to Brandon Lowe two batters later, they dropped to 12-22 in one-run games, with seven of those coming in walk-off losses. A headline on MLB.com declared, “Tigers’ troubling trend of 1-run losses starting to pile up,” but in truth, that concern was half a season late. The team went 5-13 in one-run games through the end of May, including a stretch where they lost 10 out of 11 such games from April 24 to May 31. They finished the month 22-38, at which point it was all over but the shouting of teams clamoring for Skubal.

When teams perform poorly in one-run games, the bullpen is quite often the culprit, and that’s definitely true in this case. The bullpen’s 4.03 ERA ranks a middling 14th in the majors, but the team is second in blown saves (29). In the nomadic phase of his career, the 38-year-old Jansen has climbed to third all-time with 493 saves, but he’s blown six saves — one short of his career high — in just 23 chances, including one on Wednesday night; he ranks sixth in the majors in that category. Three of those blown saves were one-run losses on walk-off home runs (by the Reds’ Nathaniel Lowe on April 24, the Braves’ Matt Olson on April 29, and Lowe); a fourth was a two-run loss on a walk-off homer by the Orioles’ Colton Cowser on May 24. For a point of comparison, Jansen entered the season having allowed just seven walk-off homers from 2010 through last season, with just two during his time with the Dodgers (which ended in 2021), and more than one in a season just once (2023). Father Time remains undefeated.

As for Jansen’s teammates, setup man Kyle Finnegan has been charged with nine blown saves, tied with Andrés Muñoz for the major league lead. Drew Anderson, who moved into the rotation after the trades of Skubal and Mize, and the now-injured Will Vest each have five, tied for 15th in the majors. According to Baseball Reference, the team has lost 17 games it led after six innings, the most in the majors; the Giants are third with such 15 losses.

Leverage-based stats tell on the Tigers bullpen, too. The unit’s -4.86 WPA is the majors’ fifth-worst, with Jansen (-2.14) and Vest (-1.82) individually owning the second- and sixth-worst marks, and Anderson (-1.24 for his relief work) the 17th-worst. The bullpen’s -4.98 Clutch score — which tracks the difference between how much better a player does in high-leverage situations than in a context-neutral environment — is the majors’ second lowest, while their .360 wOBA allowed in high-leverage situations is the fourth highest, 54 points above the major league average.

This isn’t to absolve the offense of responsibility, because it has withered in big moments, too. The Tigers’ .285 wOBA in high-leverage situations — including those against opposing starters — is the majors’ fourth lowest, 26 points below average. Likely American League Rookie of the Year Kevin McGonigle has been great, with a .377 wOBA in that context, as has the much-maligned Spencer Torkelson (.364), and Dillon Dingler (.300, via a walk-heavy .360 OBP but just a .256 SLG) has been better than average. On the other hand, Riley Greene (.258) and Gleyber Torres (.242) have withered, and Colt Keith (.217), Zach McKinstry (.206), and Matt Vierling (.188) have been even worse. The team’s -5.53 WPA ranks 23rd in the majors, with Vierling (-2.24) seventh lowest among all hitters, and Javier Báez (-1.72) 19th lowest despite missing three months due to a severe right ankle sprain. The team’s -2.80 Clutch score is the majors’ fourth lowest, and including their starting pitching, their overall combined Clutch score of -8.07 is ahead of only the Angels (-12.22) and Giants (-8.72). When trailing after six innings, they’ve come back to win eight times, which is middle of the pack — a six-way tie for 13th — but they’ve never come from further back than down two runs at that point.

The Tigers made the playoffs as a Wild Card in each of the past two seasons in particularly adventurous fashion, surging late to snatch a berth in 2024, then squandering a 6.5-game AL Central lead with 12 games to play and settling for a Wild Card spot last season. Unfortunately for them, the 2026 squad sealed its fate early with so many close losses, and if this team is going to be remembered at all, it will be for a particularly dismal distinction.

Source

Jake Burger has grown into a solid big league slugger. Now 30 years old and in his fourth full major league season — and his second with the Texas Rangers — the 6-foot, 230-pound first baseman has logged a 107 wRC+ and gone deep 102 times since earning regular playing time in 2023. Hitting primarily out of the four and five holes in the Rangers’ lineup, Burger currently has 23 home runs and a team-best 78 RBIs to go with a .234/.297/.421 line.

His approach is slugger-ish, yet in many ways nuanced. While he primarily goes up to the plate looking to bash, Burger is more than just a turn-and-burn guy. Placing pitchers in buckets and embracing a calm mindset, the erstwhile Missouri State University Bear has a plan every time he settles into the right-handed batter’s box.

Burger sat down for the 126th installment of our Talks Hitting series when the Rangers visited Chicago to take on the White Sox last week.

———

David Laurila: What have you learned about hitting over the years?

Jake Burger: “More than anything, it’s about your mentality in the box. It’s about who can be almost bored, in a sense. If you’re trying to live up to a name, or a situation, you’re going to be less bored than the pitcher. When you can control your emotions a little bit and be almost bored in the box, you’re going to control situations better. You’re going to calm your mind a little bit.”

Laurila: Bored is an interesting way to put it.

Burger: “That might be the wrong word, but for lack of a better one, yeah. If a pitcher is in a big situation and he’s anxious about how his slider is feeling, or whatever it might be, he’s going to be less bored than the hitter. He might walk him or make a mistake over the plate. That’s something that, over time… I actually learned this from Joe Kelly. If you can be calmer and more relaxed than your counterpart, more times than not, you’re going to win that battle.”

Laurila: That’s interesting. Kelly has never struck me as being especially calm.

Burger: “He wears his emotions on his sleeve, and his personality on the mound is intimidating — he wants to come after you — but in his mind, he’s actually calm.”

Laurila: Some years ago in a Talks Hitting interview, Justin Foscue told me that, contrary to what is typically said, good hitting can beat good pitching. Do you feel that’s a valid opinion?

Burger: “I think so. You can have one of the best guys in the world on the mound, but if you’re in the right position, on time, and know what your approach is in that given at-bat… I mean, he still has to throw a strike. If you won’t chase outside of the zone, you can beat him. If you have nine guys in the lineup who are super convicted, knowing who they are as a hitter and what their approach is that night, I think that beats a good pitcher.

“If you look at a lineup that one through nine is grinding out at-bats — you’re a pesky team that is going to foul off pitches and wait for a mistake — that is going to lead to success more often than not. Regardless of the name on the mound.”

Laurila: Are you a grinder, or more just a thumper? And are those two things mutually exclusive?

Burger: “I think they can be cohesive. When I’m confident about what I can do that night — where my move is, what my approach is — I can have an at-bat where I swing 0-0 and hit a homer, but also recognize when I’m not getting that pitch and can keep fouling balls off, working that at-bat.”

Laurila: To what extent can hitters intentionally foul off tough pitches?

Burger: “I think it depends on who the hitter is. I’m basically trying to drive a pitch every single time, but if you’re more of a bat-to-ball kind of guy, you more have the ability to be able to foul off pitches. Some of Brandon Nimmo’s at-bats, it seems like he is purposely fouling pitches off, trying to get that pitch count up.”

Laurila: It has been said that you can’t think in the batter’s box. At the same time, adjustments are often needed pitch to pitch, and that requires thought. How do you approach that paradox?

Burger: “You can think when you step outside of the box, but once you step back in, you kind of need to just let everything go. When I find myself thinking in the box, that’s when I start chasing more and having worse outcomes with bat to ball. But you should be able to know what your approach is, what the situation is, what the at-bat is telling you, what [the opposing team] is telling you throughout a series. So you don’t really need to be thinking a lot. You’re probably better off not doing too much thinking.”

Laurila: How many different pitchers did you face last night? Was it three?

Burger: “It might have been four. Let’s see. I faced Anthony Kay twice, Jordan Hicks once, Bryan Hudson once, and Hagen Smith once.”

Laurila: Did you mostly have the same approach throughout the game, or were there different approaches for each of the guys you faced?

Burger: “I kind of tailor my approach to buckets. It could be a left-handed pitcher who has a weird slot and throws sinkers and sweepers, or it could be a left-handed pitcher who throws four-seamers and curveballs. It could be a right-handed pitcher who throws sinkers and sliders, or one who throws mostly four-seamers. I bucket guys more so than having an approach against individual pitchers. I know what works for me against buckets, and I tailor my approach to those different buckets.”

Laurila: Did any two pitchers you faced last night fall into the same bucket?

Burger: “I think Kay and Smith were a close bucket. The other two, not so much. Hicks is obviously a power sinker — he’s also the only righty I faced — and then Hudson is kind of an outlier with a weird arm slot and high extension. He gets ride from his low slot, and then with the amount of extension he gets it feels like he’s releasing the ball right on top of you. His 92 [mph] feels more like 96.”

Laurila: Who is the most unique pitcher you’ve faced this year?

Burger: “It would have to be Tyler Rogers with Toronto. He’s throwing literally from the ground. I’ve faced him in the past, when he was in San Francisco, and he’s definitely a unique one. The velo isn’t huge, but you’re used to seeing pitchers from over the top and now you’re seeing someone from way down low.”

Laurila: To what extent does that require a different approach?

Burger: “So I used to struggle against sidearm guys. My eyes would always go from the pitcher’s ear to the throwing window, and trying to do that with sidearm guys… it’s obviously a big difference being at, say, a 90 degree angle as opposed to up by the ear. One of my coaches told me the best way to do it — and it feels uncomfortable the first few times you do it — is to stare at the glove. That’s because the glove ends up being where the slot typically comes out of. The glove ends up being close to the window that you want to look in.”

Laurila: Any final thoughts?

Burger: “If anybody reading this is aspiring to be a professional hitter, more than anything, don’t chase your weaknesses so much as you need to chase your strengths. We can’t really re-create the wheel. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and the more you focus on your weaknesses, the less likely it is that your strength is going to come out consistently. When you hone in on your strength, be convicted in your strength, and then bring that approach to the plate to match up with whichever pitcher you’re facing. That’s going to lead to more success than by being mediocre at both. Be what you’re good at. Know what you’re good at and hone it. This game is too hard to chase rabbit holes left and right. Keeping it simple and knowing who you are as a player is the key to having consistent success.”

——

Earlier “Talks Hitting” interviews can found through these links: Jo Adell, Jeff Albert, Greg Allen, Pete Alonso, Nolan Arenado, Aaron Bates, Jacob Berry, Alex Bregman, Bo Bichette, Justice Bigbie, Cavan Biggio, Charlie Blackmon, JJ Bleday, Bobby Bradley, Will Brennan, Jay Bruce, Triston Casas, Matt Chapman, Michael Chavis, Max Clark, Garrett Cooper, Gavin Cross, Jacob Cruz, Nelson Cruz, Paul DeJong, Brenton Del Chiaro, Josh Donaldson, Brendan Donovan, Donnie Ecker, Rick Eckstein, Drew Ferguson, Justin Foscue, Michael Fransoso, Ryan Fuller, Joey Gallo, Paul Goldschmidt, Devlin Granberg, Gino Groover, Matt Hague, Andy Haines, Mitch Haniger, Bryce Harper, Robert Hassell III, Austin Hays, Nico Hoerner, Jackson Holliday, Spencer Horwitz, Rhys Hoskins, Eric Hosmer, Jacob Hurtubise, Tim Hyers, Walker Jenkins, Connor Joe, Jace Jung, Josh Jung, Jimmy Kerr, Heston Kjerstad, Steven Kwan, Shea Langeliers, Trevor Larnach, Doug Latta, Dillon Lawson, Brooks Lee, Royce Lewis, Evan Longoria, Joey Loperfido, Michael Lorenzen, Mark Loretta, Gavin Lux, Dave Magadan, Trey Mancini, Edgar Martinez, Don Mattingly, Marcelo Mayer, Kevin McGonigle, Hunter Mense, Owen Miller, Paul Molitor, Colson Montgomery, Tre’ Morgan, Ryan Mountcastle, Cedric Mullins, Daniel Murphy, Lars Nootbaar, Logan O’Hoppe, Vinnie Pasquantino, Graham Pauley, David Peralta, Luke Raley, Julio Rodríguez, Brent Rooker, Thomas Saggese, Anthony Santander, Drew Saylor, Nolan Schanuel, Marcus Semien, Giancarlo Stanton, Spencer Steer, Trevor Story, Fernando Tatis Jr., James Tibbs III, Spencer Torkelson, Mark Trumbo, Brice Turang, Justin Turner, Trea Turner, Josh VanMeter, Robert Van Scoyoc, Chris Valaika, Zac Veen, Alex Verdugo, Mark Vientos, Matt Vierling, Luke Voit, Anthony Volpe, Joey Votto, Ryan Waldschmidt, Christian Walker, Jared Walsh, Jordan Westburg, Jesse Winker, Bobby Witt Jr. Mike Yastrzemski, Nick Yorke, Kevin Youkilis

Source