Pitching Grips

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, ...

Mike Stanley was C.J. Nitkowsk ’s biggest nemesis. In seven career plate appearances versus the now-Atlanta Braves broadcaster, Stanley homered twice, hammered a double, and walked four times. That added up to a 4.333 OPS. Of the 592 batters Nitkowski faced over 10 big-league seasons, no one was more injurious to his stat sheet. Somewhat surprisingly, the pair of gophers — one at Tiger Stadium in 1996, the other at Fenway Park in 2000 — aren’t what the southpaw most remembers about his matchups with the slugging catcher/first baseman. What stands out is the two-bagger. “I have a story about Mike Stanley,” explained Nitkowski, who made 336 MLB appearances, 213 of them with Detroit, while pitching for eight teams from 1995-2005. “As a kid who grew up in New York and was a Yankees fan, I always knew who he was. He was a Yankee when I was in high school. When I got drafted and went down to Orlando for my first spring training [with the Cincinnati Reds in 1995] — I went early to get out...

Brad Mills-Imagn Images A long time ago, Keibert Ruiz was one of the top catching prospects in baseball. He was so highly regarded that he was a significant piece of the Nationals’ return in the Max Scherzer and Trea Turner trade with the Dodgers in 2021. After a solid first full season in Washington the following year, he signed an eight-year extension worth $50 million in March 2023. Unfortunately, that’s when the bottom fell out. Over the last three years, Ruiz has been the worst qualified position player in baseball, “accumulating” -1.9 WAR. When the Nationals acquired Harry Ford in a trade with the Mariners this offseason, it was fair to wonder if Ruiz’s days as the team’s primary backstop were numbered. He had been a disaster both at the plate and behind it. His 79 wRC+ over the last three years was a hair higher than Patrick Bailey ’s 76 mark, but instead of offsetting that offensive futility with elite defense, Ruiz was the worst defensive catcher in basebal...