Pitching Grips

Brad Penner-Imagn Images A question popped into my head as I edited Ryan Blake’s column on the Nationals Friday morning. In the piece, shortly after noting that James Wood ranked third in the majors with a 170 wRC+, Ryan mentioned that Wood’s teammate, CJ Abrams , was sixth with a mark of 168. Upon reading this, I pulled up our leaderboards to see if the Nationals were the only team to have two players in the top 10. Turns out that, yes, they are. I thought about that for all of two seconds before something else caught my eye. Just below Abrams on the list was Mike Trout , who also had a 168 wRC+. This prompted me to wonder: Can Trout return to form? Can he both stay healthy and produce this year? I’m hardly the only one who spent the bulk of the 2020s dreaming on a fully healthy season from Trout, just as I’m not alone in having abandoned that hope as the injuries piled up. But after watching him blast home run after home run last week from the Yankee Stadi...

Welcome to the latest FanGraphs Changelog , where we update you on some of the recent improvements we’ve made to the site as we work to build a better FanGraphs. First, here are some important updates we’ve already announced over the past month, in case you missed them: We added three new tools to the FanGraphs Lab, rolling out the Paired Pitches tool, the Power Rankings Board , and the Baseball Simulator . We also added Home Field Advantage to the Baseball Simulator. Lastly, we added ABS strike zone, arm angle, and spin rate related stats to our player pages and leaderboards. We’ve worked hard to get our tools updated for the new strike zone and the ABS challenge system. In addition to the new plate discipline metrics added to player page season stats and leaderboards, those stats were also added to the game logs and spark graphs cards. To see how successful players have been when they make ABS challenges, we added an ABS Challenges leaderboard . We also made a s...

Last week, we released a baseball simulator in the FanGraphs Lab . This week, we’re adding home field advantage to the simulator. You can toggle HFA on and off using a new menu option: The chosen home field advantage will then be applied to whatever simulation you run. But how do we calculate home field advantage in this simulated environment? Let’s go over it. You’re probably familiar with home field advantage being expressed in terms of winning percentage. From 2000-2010, the home team’s winning percentage hovered around 54%. In the next decade, it declined to around 53%. In recent years, it has fallen to the 52-53% range. Since our simulation works at a plate appearance-level, however, we couldn’t look at game outcomes to measure home field advantage. Instead, we used PA-level data to infer how much playing at home affects the rate of each outcome in our simulator. We took data from 2022-2025, the universal DH era, and used it to fit three different models of home field ad...

Junfu Han-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images Dan Petry faced 644 different batters across the 1979-1991 seasons, and while he certainly doesn’t remember them all, his level of recollection is impressive. Now 67, the former All-Star right-hander proved as much when he became the latest pitcher-turned-broadcast analyst to tackle one my a matchup-focused career quizzes. As did David Cone , Mark Grant , Mark Gubicza , and Jeff Montgomery — those pieces can be found here , here , here , and here — “Peaches” reached into his personal memory bank to take a stab at answering my questions, and to provide entertaining anecdotes while doing so. Our conversation took place at Fenway Park this past weekend. I began by asking him which batter he faced the most times. “It would have to be somebody in the American League East,” replied Petry, who played the bulk of his career with the Detroit Tigers and is now Dan Dickerson’s primary partner in the team’s radio booth. “I’ll say Robin Yount .” I...