We did it everyone! We made it through the long offseason. Regular season baseball is back, and it has already delivered the goods. I attended Mets-Pirates at Citi Field on Opening Day to witness the highly anticipated pitching matchup between reigning NL Cy Young winner Paul Skenes and new New York ace Freddy Peralta. Naturally, Skenes had the worst game of his career thus far, failing to make it through the first inning, and Peralta didn’t pitch well either. The two teams combined for 18 runs in the 8 1/2 innings of play. I wrote about the Skenes start, the two defensive blunders by Oneil Cruz in center field that contributed to Pittsburgh’s first-inning fiasco, and the lineup’s surprisingly strong showing. You can read that here.
Because I was covering that contest, I didn’t get a chance to watch any of the other early games and saw only a portion of the later ones. That means I missed White Sox catcher Edgar Quero successfully challenge three ball calls in the first two innings before finally getting one wrong in the sixth inning. In that same game, which the Brewers won 14-2, Jacob Misiorowski struck out 11 Chicago batters. I also didn’t catch the pitcher’s duel between Orioles lefty Trevor Rogers and Twins righty Joe Ryan; Baltimore won, 2-1, and Adley Rutschman, not to be confused with Badley, went 2-for-4, though Tyler O’Neill’s Opening Day home run streak was snapped at six. In the later afternoon games, the Cardinals scored eight runs in the bottom of the sixth inning to secure a comeback win over the Rays, after allowing Tampa Bay to plate six runs in the top of the frame. JJ Wetherholt, who went 1-for-4 with a home run and two RBI in that game, was one of a number of prospects who shined in their big league debuts. Kevin McGonigle had four hits in the Tigers’ 8-2 win over the Padres, and Justin Crawford went 2-for-4 in the Phillies’ win over the Rangers. I actually got to see Mets right fielder Carson Benge blast his first homer, this after a dead bird had fallen in front of him in right field. It wasn’t technically his first major league game because he debuted in the postseason last year, but Cleveland’s Chase DeLauter bopped two home runs in a 6-4 win over the Mariners.
I ran through all those games up top because that’s the last we’ll be covering the Opening Day action in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about Matt McLain’s strong spring, Aaron Judge’s low squared-up rate, players who might benefit the most from ABS, and Tony Vitello. 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.
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Hi there!
Thanks again for all the great work.
Coming into today, March 12, Matt McLain led all players in spring training in home runs, RBI, hits, runs, batting average, slugging percentage, and OPS. Two-part question:
1) If he hit his 99th-percentile projection, and everyone else was at their 50th, where would he rank in the league?
2) If you assume his 99th-percentile output, what do the Reds playoff odds become?
Thanks, and have a great day! – Matthew
Matt McLain had a ridiculous spring. You submitted your question on March 12, two weeks before Opening Day, and by the end of spring training, McLain still led in four of those categories (batting average, hits, runs, home runs), and was top three in the others. His overall line: .509/.559/.981, 1.540 OPS, 27 hits, 18 runs, seven homers, 16 RBI, and a 287 wRC+, which ranked second behind Jake Bauers’ 311.
I should start by saying that even before his otherworldly Cactus League performance, I was expecting some sort of bounce-back from McLain. He missed the entirety of the 2024 season after undergoing surgery to repair a torn labrum, and as he struggled mightily through last year, it looked like he had not yet returned to full strength, though we didn’t know for sure. He didn’t acknowledge that the procedure may have contributed to his 2025 woes until earlier this month.
“[The shoulder] actually felt 100 percent last year,” said McLain, according to C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic. “Everyone told me that you have to give yourself two years. I didn’t want to believe it, but I kind of believe it now.”
It would make sense that, even though his shoulder felt fine physically, he needed a full year and an offseason to return to form. He needed to rebuild all the strength he had lost after suffering such a significant injury and then going through an intensive rehabilitation process following the surgery. From there, he also had to get each intricate component of his swing back into sync with all the others.
If, indeed, that is what caused his underwhelming 2025 campaign, in which he slashed .220/.300/.343 with 15 homers, a 77 wRC+, and 1.4 WAR over 147 games, then I think it’s quite reasonable to bank on McLain to perform at the level he did as a rookie in 2023. Across 89 games (403 plate appearances) that year, he put up a .290/.357/.507 slash line, smacked 16 home runs, ran a 129 wRC+, and amassed 3.2 WAR. That works out to a 650-PA pace of 25 homers and 5.1 WAR. That’s an All-Star-caliber player.
Of course, you didn’t ask for my back-of-the-newspaper math — I actually crunched the numbers on an old copy of The New York Times I have sitting on my desk — to determine what McLain’s rookie numbers might’ve looked like over a full season. You asked for us to run hypothetical projections for McLain and the Reds. I asked Dan Szymborski for assistance here. He told ZiPS to answer your two-part question as of Wednesday afternoon before the Yankees and Giants played the first game of the season. Here are the results:
| Percentile | BA | OBP | SLG | WAR | Reds 2B Rank/30 | Reds Division % | Reds Playoff % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 99th | .327 | .404 | .590 | 7.7 | 1 | 13.2% | 30.7% |
| 95th | .307 | .386 | .539 | 6.3 | 1 | 10.5% | 25.5% |
| 90th | .289 | .372 | .503 | 5.8 | 1 | 9.6% | 23.7% |
| 80th | .273 | .356 | .479 | 4.9 | 1 | 8.2% | 20.8% |
| 70th | .264 | .347 | .456 | 4.3 | 3 | 7.3% | 18.9% |
| 60th | .256 | .337 | .437 | 4.0 | 3 | 6.9% | 18.0% |
| 50th | .249 | .330 | .425 | 3.5 | 4 | 6.2% | 16.5% |
| 40th | .242 | .324 | .410 | 3.1 | 12 | 5.7% | 15.4% |
| 30th | .232 | .315 | .396 | 2.8 | 14 | 5.3% | 14.5% |
| 20th | .223 | .305 | .371 | 2.2 | 21 | 4.7% | 13.1% |
| 10th | .207 | .292 | .348 | 1.5 | 29 | 4.0% | 11.5% |
It’s worth mentioning that ZiPS is much higher on McLain than Steamer is; right now, based on his median projection, ZiPS has the Reds down as the fourth-best team at second base, while in our positional power rankings, which use a 50/50 combination of ZiPS and Steamer, plus the Depth Charts playing time estimates, the Reds ranked 16th. As you can see above, McLain’s 50th-percentile projection, per ZiPS, pegs him for 3.5 WAR; Steamer’s preseason forecast for him was 1.6 WAR. That’s a massive discrepancy.
Nevertheless, we used ZiPS here because 1) that’s Dan’s projection system and I asked him for the data, and 2) it felt more in the spirit of the question to go with the one that favors McLain.
The most notable takeaway here is that, even if the Reds get a 99th-percentile performance from McLain — .327/.404/.590, 7.7 WAR — they would still have a little less than a one-in-three shot to make the postseason. Those odds certainly aren’t nothing; they’re a little less than double Cincinnati’s 16.5% preseason playoff probability if McLain were to hit his median projection. But it does suggest that the Reds are more than a McLain resurgence away from being a bona fide contender.
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Good afternoon,
I’m not sure who would be the best person to answer — perhaps Ben Clemens? — but I’m very curious about this:
In 2025, Aaron Judge’s Savant page was, of course, deeply red. However, I noticed that his squared-up% was only in the 28th percentile. In 2024, it was in the 44th percentile. That seems odd, given … everything else on his page.
Is it a product of Judge’s having a higher maximum exit velocity? Something specific to him, due to his size or the approach pitchers take? Or a wider range of swing speeds? Or is he truly not squaring up the ball, by this measurement?
Thank you,
Domenic
Ben Clemens: The short answer: It’s a product of Judge’s having incredibly high bat speed. Squared-up rate is a relative property, which is confusing to think about. It doesn’t refer to the speed of the ball off the bat; it refers to how close the swing got to hitting the ball at the maximum theoretical exit velocity available given the bat speed and how fast the ball was moving.
For example, imagine Judge taking a cut at a 95-mph fastball down the middle. The rule is that if a ball is hit at 80% of its maximum exit velocity or higher, it’s considered a squared-up ball. A 95-mph fastball is moving around 87.4 mph when it crosses home plate. Judge’s average swing speed is 77 mph. I’ll spare you the math, but the theoretical maximum, according to formula, is a 115-mph batted ball. That means that any ball Judge hits 92 mph or harder is squared up, and anything below it isn’t. Next, imagine Jacob Wilson swinging at the same pitch. With his 64-mph average bat speed, any ball hit 79 mph or harder would be considered squared up.
Whether you catch the ball flush or not, with no regard for swing speed, is more of a contact skill than anything else. That’s why there’s a strong negative correlation between whiff rate and squared-up rate. And as everyone knows, the best way to run a low whiff rate is to be a slow-swinging contact hitter. Out of the 15 players who squared the ball up most frequently in 2025, only three – Maikel Garcia, Jeremy Peña, and Juan Soto – swung the bat faster than league average.
Here’s how I wrapped my head around this: Every hitter is trying to put the fat part of the bat on the baseball each swing. The more accurate you are at doing so, the more likely you are to square it up. At the same time, the more accurate you are, the less likely you are to come up completely empty. If you think of these statistics as measuring “hitting the ball exactly where I want” and “avoiding missing the ball when I try to hit it,” Judge’s position in the rankings makes a lot of sense. He comes up empty fairly often because he swings so hard. Also, because he swings so hard, he doesn’t get the very best part of the bat on the ball quite as often as hitters who swing much more slowly.
Statcast actually measures another statistic called blast rate that combines two things: fast swings and squared-up contact. When you add that second filter, the Wilsons and Arraezes of the world fall away. The top five, in order: Soto, Shohei Ohtani, Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Judge, and Oneil Cruz. This might be closer to what you’re thinking about. When you hear that someone squared the ball up, you probably think of them absolutely smashing it. Because it’s measured relative to bat speed, that’s not always the case. But if you limit it to fast swings, Judge does hit it pure way more often than others.
Incidentally, that’s why I like using the Squared-Up Explorer feature in the FanGraphs Lab, instead of just looking at a single number. I’m interested in whether a hitter is more likely to square the ball up into the ground or into the air, and I’m also interested in whether their best contact lines up with their most frequent contact. Context is king when it comes to hitting the ball right on the button, because there’s a big difference between socking it at a -7 degree launch angle off of a 65-mph swing and lofting one at 25 degrees on an 80-mph swing. Judge’s low squared-up rate is real – but it’s certainly not disqualifying, and it mostly just says that he sacrifices some contact to swing as hard as he does, thus allowing him to do so much damage.
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My question for this week’s mailbag is about the ABS system and what to expect this season.
Which players’ overall value should we expect to increase the most as a result of this? As a Guardians fan, it seemed to be benefiting Steven Kwan a great deal in spring training.
Thanks!
Kevin S.
Davy Andrews: So I was a little confused here at first. Kwan was 1-for-5 in challenges during spring training, and Statcast had his challenge decisions costing him -2.1 calls. But then Matt told me you submitted this question on March 5, two days after Kwan’s first successful challenge, which came on a 3-0 pitch and resulted in a walk. He was 1-for-2 at the time, so I can see why you cited him. Anyway, I pulled the spring training stats for every player. For catchers, I combined their hitting and catching numbers. As you’ll see below, everybody at the top of the list is a catcher. Catchers are going to be the ones who are helped (or hurt) the most because, generally speaking, they will challenge way more than batters at other positions, and then they’ll also get to add in their own challenges as a batter. The answer, by an astonishingly large margin, is Kwan’s fellow Guardian, Austin Hedges.
I’m looking at Total Calls vs. Expected, a column that you don’t see on the Baseball Savant leaderboard unless you click the Show Expected Breakdown button on the right. As a catcher, Hedges’ challenges earned the Gwards 3.2 more calls than an average catcher. But because he’s such a great framer, people challenged nine of his calls. Somehow, they won only one of those nine challenges! Put it all together, and he burned up opponent challenges at an extremely high rate while also grading out well on his own challenges, both as a catcher and a hitter. Hedges was nearly twice as valuable as any other player.
We’ve seen a lot of talk about how the ABS challenge system might even things out for the good and bad framers, but early results seem to indicate that good framers force their opponents to use more challenges, and that certainly looks like it’s going to be a valuable skill.
| Player | Batting | Catching | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Austin Hedges | 4.7 | 8.5 | 13.2 |
| Keibert Ruiz | 1 | 6.9 | 7.9 |
| Will Banfield | -0.7 | 7.8 | 7.1 |
| Ryan Jeffers | – | 6.8 | 6.8 |
| Brett Sullivan | – | 6.5 | 6.5 |
| P.J. Higgins | – | 5.7 | 5.7 |
| Patrick Bailey | 1.1 | 4.4 | 5.6 |
| Tomás Nido | – | 5.3 | 5.3 |
| Agustín Ramírez | 2.5 | 2.7 | 5.2 |
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As someone who doesn’t follow college baseball, what is Tony Vitello bringing to the San Francisco Giants? Is he noted for some special ability to relate to players? Is he an above-average tactician? Do they like how he looks in orange? — Maurice
Michael Baumann: Matt called this “the perfect mailbag question” for me, and you know what, I think he’s right. Maurice, you’re in luck, because I’ve written not one but two articles about some combination of Vitello’s approach to coaching, his tenure at Tennessee, and his future with the Giants. But I’m happy to summarize my conclusions here, because I — like many people — find Tony V fascinating. In fact, I’ve banked on what you might euphemistically call high public interest in Vitello with my entry in the Effectively Wild predictions game.
To answer your questions in order: Yes, no, yes. Vitello looks great in orange, and the Giants surely must have noticed this. He is not, however, renowned in the college game as a groundbreaking tactical thinker. He’s certainly competent, and I have no doubt in his ability to transition from handling a college roster to a big league roster, but this isn’t the Rams hiring Sean McVay or anything.
Vitello’s greatest strength from where I stand is as a motivator and communicator. He’s very emotional in the dugout, which has gotten him a reputation as a redass and a rah-rah guy that’s only partially deserved. A lot of the skepticism around Vitello that I’ve seen comes from pro baseball people whose touchstone for a college coach is Augie Garrido.
In fact, Vitello has been successful because he’s the antithesis of that approach; he might be loud, but he’s emotionally intelligent, and while he likes big-motor players like Andrew Fischer and Christian Moore, he’s able to work with all kinds of personalities. The former Tennessee players I’ve spoken to about Vitello love him. And I think he’s got enough humility about his own professional inexperience that he’ll be able to get the Giants to buy in, too.
But that’s only worth so much to the Giants. And while that ability to work with players helped Vitello as a recruiter and a developer of talent, he didn’t win at Tennessee because he’s a good hang. He won because Tennessee developed talent at the college level better than any other program in the country. Pitchers would spend nine months in Knoxville and add five miles an hour to their fastball. Hitters would add a grade of power. That, rather than any demonstrations of emotion in the dugout or arguing with umpires, is why the Vols were so good. Everything else was window dressing.
That player development system was obviously not Vitello’s doing alone, and it’s anyone’s guess whether the Giants will be able to replicate that success. If they don’t, it’s hard to see how they can compete in a really tough NL West, because on paper this looks like a .500 team with a load-bearing Luis Arraez in the middle infield, about three years after that stopped being acceptable.
I will say this: The gap in quality between college training and development and professional training and development has never been smaller. More important, the two assistant coaches most responsible for Vitello’s success (pitching coach Frank Anderson and director of sports performance Quentin Eberhardt) followed him to San Francisco. The Vols went 273-83 in Vitello’s last six seasons because they didn’t skip leg day. If not skipping leg day is worth that much in the pros, the Giants will do quite well.
If I had to make a prediction, Vitello will make some rookie mistakes, but in general, he’ll get the Giants to play hard, exciting baseball. And they’ll go 82-80, because they just don’t have the horses. Which is in keeping with the Giants’ general approach to team-building under Buster Posey: They’re thinking outside the box and trying different stuff. Most of the time, they’re going to find out why the box exists, but maybe it’ll work.
* This article was originally published here
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