Pitching Grips

With a clear mind, a full heart, and an empty stomach, I stepped out of my Crown Heights apartment at 8:40 AM on Sunday. I walked over to the black Toyota RAV4, opened the door, and slid into the backseat next to my friend Anthony and his girlfriend Cristina. Immediately, Anthony gestured to the hot dog costume peeking out of the tote bag between his feet. “Dude, I’m so f—— hyped,” he said with a glizzy-eating grin on his face. “We were born for this.” He then took off his jacket to reveal he was wearing the gray cotton t-shirt that I got him for his birthday. Across the chest in all caps were the words: BAD DAY TO BE A GLIZZY. The Uber driver pulled away from the curb and started down the street. We were on our way to Coney Island for the first annual Hot Dog Jog, a race hosted by the Brooklyn Cyclones as part of Weenie Weekend. Hot Dog Jog participants run four laps around the ballpark, covering about a mile. Sure, that’s a short distance for a run, but this race isn...

Father’s Day is right around the corner, and the last day to order FanGraphs merchandise and have it arrive in time for the holiday is June 12 . We ship everything USPS Priority mail, so it typically takes 2-3 days to arrive, with some remote locations potentially taking longer. Below, I’ve curated a brief list of potential gifts for the dad in your life. 1. The Retro FanGraphs Sweatshirt The first run of these sold out in 24 hours. Now they’re back in stock, and the timing couldn’t be more perfect — your dad was probably devastated that he couldn’t buy one the first time! We partnered with the clothing brand Ellsworth & Ivy to make these retro-themed FanGraphs sweatshirts. They have fully stitched chenille lettering and a stitched logo near the bottom hem. Our marketing team had the foresight to use a dad as the model for this very occasion: 2. The FanGraphs Mug Available in either black or white , this mug remains our most popular bit of merch...

Anna Carrington-Imagn Images Corbin Carroll is the best left-on-left hitter in baseball right now. It’s been a tremendous year for Carroll, however you want to split up the data. He has a 152 wRC+. He has 2.6 WAR. It’s looking like his best-ever season — a perfect follow-up to his best-ever season last year. That Carroll appears to be taking another step forward in 2026 isn’t quite newsworthy. But the way he’s doing it certainly is: Carroll is all of a sudden crushing lefties. He was just average against them the first few years of his career. Last year, he was fairly good in left-on-left matchups, though that improvement seems to stem more from his overall growth at the plate rather than a specific step forward against lefties. This year? Carroll is a top-five hitter in baseball against lefties and the best lefty batter in the mix. If his 219 wRC+ against southpaws were to hold, it would be the third-best left-on-left season since we began tracking in 2002: Left-on-Left Batt...

As the calendar turns to June, the playoff picture is tight in both leagues. There are 11 teams in the NL with records over .500, which should make for an exciting Wild Card race this summer. The AL is nearly as competitive, though for the opposite reason, as more than half of the clubs in the junior circuit have losing records. Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. To avoid overweighting recent results during the season, we weigh each team’s raw Elo rank using our coin flip playoff odds. (Specifically, we regress the playoff odds by 50% and weigh those against the raw Elo ranking, increasing in weight as the season progresses to a maximum of 25%.) The weighted Elo ranks are then displayed as “Power Score” in the tables below. As the best and worst teams sort themselves out between now and October, ...