FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: April 11, 2026

Rafael Suanes-Imagn Images

I went to the Nationals-Cardinals game on Wednesday afternoon at Nats Park to check in on the two rebuilding clubs early in the season. Washington has been in a perpetual rebuild for pretty much the entirety of the 2020s, while St. Louis just tore its roster down to the studs this past offseason. And yet, with Chaim Bloom installed as the new president of baseball operations, a deep farm system, and several young position players starting to come into their own, the Cardinals seem to be closer to their next winning season than the Nationals.

That’s certainly how things played out on Wednesday, when the Cards beat the Nats, 6-1, to take two out of three in the series. St. Louis first baseman Alec Burleson, the team’s second-longest tenured position player, went 3-for-4 and knocked in three runs, and second baseman JJ Wetherholt made several slick plays in the field. Wetherholt, who entered this year as the 12th-ranked prospect in baseball, has reached base in all 11 of his starts this year, and he has at least one hit in 10 of them. (He went 0-for-4 with a walk and a run on Wednesday.) The big story, though, was Jordan Walker, who hammered his fifth home run of the season in the fifth inning. It was the 17th time in franchise history that a player has homered five times within his first 12 games to start the season. After two below-replacement-level seasons, it seemed less likely that Walker would ever make good on his former top prospect pedigree, but now he looks like a completely different player. He seems way more confident and is making much better swing decisions; he’s lifting the ball, while walking more and striking out less. Yes, it’s only been 12 games, but the early returns are promising. He enters Friday night’s game against the Red Sox slashing .295/.367/.682 with a 192 wRC+.

I’ll talk more about the Nationals in my answer to the first question below. We’ll also answer your questions about the World Series teams whose players accumulated the most and least WAR by the end of their careers, the potential injuries that would stop the Dodgers from being World Series favorites, and the most successful three-true-outcomes pitchers of all time. 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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FanGraphs,

You are the best!

I’ve been watching way too many Nationals games this year. We are doing a good job hitting and scoring thus far, but our pitching is the worst I can recall. Other than Cade Cavalli and maybe Brad Lord and Foster Griffin, we just stink. Looking at non-Rockies teams, what is the worst pitching staff of the modern era? I know it’s early, but how close are we to rivaling them?

Thanks,
Nats Fan

Hi, Nats Fan! First off, thank you for your question, your kind words, and your support.

You’re absolutely onto something here. The 2026 Nationals just might have the worst pitching staff ever assembled through their first 12 games. I’m writing this Friday afternoon before the Nats play the Brewers in Milwaukee, so all of the statistics below are as of the end of play Thursday. Nationals pitchers have produced -1.8 WAR across their 107 innings this season. That is the worst WAR figure for any pitching staff through a team’s first 12 games since at least 1974, which is as far back as we have data tracking game-by-game team WAR. If they keep this up, they will be the first pitching staff to finish below replacement level since Allegheny City, a precursor to the Pittsburgh Pirates, produced -2.3 pitching WAR in 1890.

Unfortunately, historically bad pitching is all too familiar for Washington fans. The worst modern pitching staff over a full season is the 2022 Nationals, who were exactly replacement level. That group of pitchers actually got off to a solid start. The 2022 Nats played a doubleheader for their 12th and 13th games, but through their first 13 games of the season, their pitchers had amassed 1.7 WAR, the eighth most in the majors. They had by far the worst pitching staff for the rest of the season, however, combining for -1.4 WAR over their final 149 games.

Do I think this year’s group is going to finish below replacement level? No, probably not. Our Depth Charts project Nats starters to post 7.9 WAR for the rest of the season; their relievers, 0.3. But based on what I saw on Wednesday, and what you’ve seen watching, by your own admission, “way too many Nationals games this year,” I don’t think it’s out of the question that this staff could do it. Miles Mikolas, the veteran of the staff, labored through three innings against his former team. He allowed just two runs, but the Cardinals threatened for more than that, tallying five hits and three walks. There’s a reason manager Blake Butera went to his abysmal bullpen so soon; Mikolas clearly didn’t have it. Through three starts, Mikolas has a ghastly 12.41 ERA and an 8.34 FIP. Lord, one of the pitchers you cited as an exception to the stinking, came on in relief and pitched well enough. The only hit he gave up in three innings was the solo shot to Walker. Things got dicey and dragged after that, though, as Cionel Pérez and Cole Henry surrendered another three runs. The team’s final pitching line: six runs, all earned, eight hits, seven walks, one hit-by-pitch, nine strikeouts, one home run. It was the seventh straight game in which the Nationals gave up six or more runs.

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People like to talk about the World Series teams that had the most eventual Hall of Famers and whether they won or lost, but another perspective is WAR. Which World Series team’s players had the most (or least) cumulative WAR at the time of their World Series? Alternatively, which team’s players eventually accumulated the most (or least) WAR by the end of their respective careers?

TTFN,
Guy Arrigoni

Matt Martell and Jon Becker: We answered the first part of this question in last week’s mailbag, so now we’ll turn to the World Series teams whose players accumulated the most and least WAR by the end of their careers. Let’s start with the 10 pennant-winning teams with the most career WAR:

Most Career WAR on World Series Teams

Year	Team	WS Result	Players Used	Total Career WAR	Average WAR Per Player
2000	New York Yankees	Won WS	46	1038.5	22.6
1996	New York Yankees	Won WS	48	951.5	19.8
2003	New York Yankees	Lost WS	49	950.7	19.4
1997	Cleveland Indians	Lost WS	46	920.0	20.0
1978	Los Angeles Dodgers	Lost WS	38	913.2	24.0
1983	Philadelphia Phillies	Lost WS	44	909.6	20.7
2009	New York Yankees	Won WS	45	905.6	20.1
1995	Cleveland Indians	Lost WS	41	903.4	22.0
2001	New York Yankees	Lost WS	47	877.9	18.7
1996	Atlanta Braves	Lost WS	42	872.9	20.8

It’s not surprising to see the 2000 Yankees at the top of the list, considering the core of that roster included a pair of Hall of Famers, Derek Jeter (73.0 WAR) and Mariano Rivera (39.1), as well as plenty of other players whom many deem to be Hall of Fame worthy, such as Roger Clemens (134.3), Andy Pettitte (67.9), David Cone (56.7), Jorge Posada (40.9), and Bernie Williams (43.9), not to mention All-Stars Paul O’Neill (41.0), Tino Martinez (28.7), and Chuck Knoblauch (39.8). But what puts that club over the top is the group of complementary players who weren’t there for that whole Yankees dynasty but had great careers in their own right. In addition to Jeter and Knoblauch, the 2000 Yankees featured three other former Rookie of the Year winners: Dwight Gooden (60.6), David Justice (40.4), and Jose Canseco (42.1). Oh, and a 24-year-old Alfonso Soriano also appeared in 22 games, adding his 39.0 WAR to the 2002 Yankees’ total.

As with part one of the question, we’re also going to sort by that last column, average career WAR. As mentioned last week, the raw total method is going to skew toward more recent teams since rosters have grown larger and more cycled-through:

Highest Average Career WAR on World Series Teams

Year	Team	WS Result	Players Used	Total Career WAR	Average WAR Per Player
1923	New York Yankees	Won WS	25	760.7	30.4
1939	New York Yankees	Won WS	27	777.8	28.8
1905	New York Giants	Won WS	21	599.1	28.5
1932	New York Yankees	Won WS	32	863.2	27.0
1928	New York Yankees	Won WS	30	811.2	27.0
1930	Philadelphia Athletics	Won WS	30	809.2	27.0
1927	New York Yankees	Won WS	25	667.7	26.7
1962	San Francisco Giants	Lost WS	31	825.6	26.6
1932	Chicago Cubs	Lost WS	31	817.2	26.4
1911	New York Giants	Lost WS	28	728.6	26.0

As expected, sorting by highest average WAR per player brings plenty of earlier teams to the forefront, starting with the 1923 Yankees. They were led, of course, by Babe Ruth (179.4 WAR) and a rotation anchored by Hall of Famers Herb Pennock (47.5) and Waite Hoyt (45.8), plus stalwarts Bob Shawkey (34.2), Sad Sam Jones (42.0), and Carl Mays (43.5). Joining Ruth in their lineup was Bob Meusel (28.7), Wally Schang (41.0), and Wally Pipp (31.6). Lou Gehrig would not displace Pipp as the Yankees’ starting first baseman until June 1, 1925, but a 20-year-old Iron Horse did appear in the first 13 games of his career during the 1923 season, so that year’s Yankees also get all of his 115.9 WAR.

It’s fitting, then, that the second team on this list was Gehrig’s final club. By the beginning of 1939, ALS was breaking down his body; he asked manager Joe McCarthy to keep him out of the lineup on May 2, ending his streak of consecutive games played at 2,130. He never played again, but because he played eight games that season, his career WAR also counts for the 1939 Yankees. That team’s average WAR is also propped up by Hall of Famers Joe DiMaggio (82.6 WAR), Joe Gordon (60.4), Bill Dickey (56.1), Red Ruffing (68.3), and Lefty Gomez (30.0), as well as shortstop Frankie Crosetti (27.8), third baseman Red Rolfe (26.4), and right fielder Charlie Keller (45.7). You might recall we covered Keller’s career, which was on a Hall of Fame trajectory before injuries limited him to part-time duty after his age-29 season, in our January 24 edition of the mailbag.

You’ll also notice that the 1962 Giants are the only post-integration team in the top 10, and many of the players who contributed most to their placement on this list — such as Hall of Famers Willie Mays (149.8 WAR), Willie McCovey (67.4), Orlando Cepeda (50.5), and Juan Marichal (61.7), along with the Alou brothers, Felipe (38.1) and Matty (20.4) — wouldn’t have been allowed to play in the big leagues in an earlier era. The 1962 Giants also had Hall of Very Good pitcher Billy Pierce (52.2) and a first-year right-handed pitcher named Gaylord Perry. Perry made it into just 13 games that season, but his 97.4 career WAR total is the second highest on the team.

Of the 10 teams at the bottom of the list in total WAR, just three won the World Series, all three before integration:

Lowest Career WAR on World Series Teams

Year	Team	WS Result	Players Used	Total Career WAR	Average WAR Per Player
1914	Boston Braves	Won WS	34	347.4	10.2
1944	St. Louis Browns	Lost WS	33	355.1	10.8
1906	Chicago White Sox	Won WS	25	373.7	14.9
2014	Kansas City Royals	Lost WS	48	378.1	7.9
1993	Philadelphia Phillies	Lost WS	40	391.1	9.8
1920	Brooklyn Robins	Lost WS	29	402.0	13.9
1984	San Diego Padres	Lost WS	31	405.7	13.1
1943	New York Yankees	Won WS	26	415.5	16.0
1945	Chicago Cubs	Lost WS	37	429.4	11.6
1905	Philadelphia Athletics	Lost WS	19	434.8	22.9

There’s an early baseball flavor to this list, too, owing to the smaller rosters, but the 2014 Royals stand out. Kansas City had several core contributors who had nice careers on that team, among them Alex Gordon (31.5 WAR), Lorenzo Cain (30.6), and James Shields (32.5), but that roster wasn’t as beefed up as the one from the following year. The 2015 Royals won the championship with a roster that had 85 more WAR, a lot of that coming from deadline acquisitions Johnny Cueto (29.0) and Ben Zobrist (42.7). It’s also worth noting that the hallmark of those two Royals ballclubs was the bullpen, and relievers tend to be fickle, and even the great ones don’t amass as much WAR as the greatest players at other positions.

Another thing to consider: Salvador Perez (18.9 WAR) is still active and could add to the totals for both the 2014 and 2015 Royals. Because we’re using our WAR instead of Baseball Reference’s version, which does not include catcher framing, Perez is contributing a lot less value. Perez is worth 35.1 WAR according to B-Ref, and if we use that figure for him instead, the 2014 Royals jump to 395.0 WAR. That would flip them below the 1993 Phillies, a team we’ll discuss in the next section.

Sorting by the lowest average gives the 2014 Royals a clean sweep of both categories, and that 2015 club pops into the top 10, too:

Lowest Average Career WAR on World Series Teams

Year	Team	WS Result	Players Used	Total Career WAR	Average WAR Per Player
2014	Kansas City Royals	Lost WS	48	378.1	7.9
2007	Colorado Rockies	Lost WS	53	444.8	8.4
1993	Philadelphia Phillies	Lost WS	40	391.1	9.8
2015	Kansas City Royals	Won WS	46	463.1	10.1
1914	Boston Braves	Won WS	34	347.4	10.2
2010	San Francisco Giants	Won WS	42	440.2	10.5
2012	San Francisco Giants	Won WS	45	472.1	10.5
2015	New York Mets	Lost WS	49	517.0	10.6
1944	St. Louis Browns	Lost WS	33	355.1	10.8
2013	St. Louis Cardinals	Lost WS	44	476.7	10.8

Hall of Famer Todd Helton (54.9 WAR), All-Stars Troy Tulowitzki (37.8) and Matt Holliday (49.5), and a cameo from late-career Steve Finley (40.4) helped to keep the 2007 Rockies out of the top spot, but that was a roster filled with pitchers who had short peaks and hitters whose WAR totals were dampened by Coors Field park factors. The only other team with less than 10 career WAR per player, the 1993 Phillies, rostered no Hall of Fame players, with Curt Schilling (78.9) the closest to being enshrined in Cooperstown.

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My baseball-loving son asked me this question, so I’m forwarding it onto the experts: How many players being injured (let’s assume out for the year) would it take for the Dodgers to no longer be the World Series favorites? Specifically, he was wondering if the Dodgers would still be favored if they lost both Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, or would it take losing some larger combination of players like Ohtani, Yamamoto, and Mookie Betts?

Thanks,
Rob White

Dan Szymborski: Hi Rob,

It’s always fun to play the uncaring, cruel deity of baseball, so this question is a blast to answer. As of Friday afternoon, ZiPS has the Dodgers at 22.5% odds to win the World Series, with a big drop-off before getting to the next team, the Yankees, at 12.9%. It helps the Dodgers that they’re projected as the best team and the team with the clearest path to a division title and a bye.

So, as you might surmise, you have to do a lot to no longer make the Dodgers the favorites to win the World Series, though I should note that even being favored still leaves nearly four out of five scenarios in which they won’t win the World Series. Losing Ohtani alone isn’t actually enough to cripple the Dodgers, even with how good he is, because the Ohtani-less Dodgers are still an 88- to 90-win team. That’s enough to be the strongest team in the division by the projections. The Dodgers currently lead the NL West by a couple of games, and while that cushion is not an insurmountable barrier, it still keeps them as heavy favorites to win the division and one of the two teams most likely to secure a bye.

Removing Ohtani and Yamamoto, on the other hand, is enough for the Dodgers to lose their status as World Series favorites. That’s a lot of value to lose, and it brings the Dodgers to down to a projection of about 86-87 wins; they’d still be the best in the division, but their probability to win the West would drop down to 60%. And with Los Angeles no longer a heavy favorite in the division, and actually a slight underdog for a bye, coupled with just being weaker, the team would see its World Series odds drop to 10.1%, with the Yankees up to 16.9%.

Because mission creep is part of life, I also checked to see how I could make the Dodgers no longer the favorites to win the NL West. To do that, I had to knock off both Kyle Tucker and Mookie Betts. Doing so would make them slightly weaker than the non-Rockies NL West teams for the rest of the season, and thus more likely than not to lose their small cushion in the division. For this to happen, they would need a Homer at the Bat level of misfortune.

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Hi Matt and the mailbag team,

Longtime member, first-time question writer here. I am thoroughly entranced by Gavin Williams’ unusual stat line to start the 2026 season. In 17 and 2/3 innings across three starts, he has recorded 25 strikeouts while only allowing five hits. Wow! But he has also allowed 14 walks. Whoa! And two of those five hits have been home runs. This dogged commitment to the truest outcomes made me wonder how often pitchers have seasons with more walks than hits allowed, and ultimately, who is the Rob Deer (or should we say Jim Thome) of the pitching world. I’m seeing Nolan Ryan’s 1977 season with 341 strikeouts, 198 hits, and 204 walks over 299 innings as a pretty wild time, yet he only allowed a measly 12 home runs. Who else strolls this erratic path to TTO pitching greatness?

Thank you for your thorough and entertaining work,
Will Spangler / ismailadieme

Michael Baumann: Thanks for the question, Will. You’ve hit on two essential truths of baseball. First: Gavin Williams is a good pitcher, but he will walk you if you let him. If you ever find yourself alone in the woods with a wild Gavin Williams, just stand still and he might let you pass. Second: The back-in-my-day curmudgeons who pine for Nolan Ryan while bemoaning how TTO-y the game has become are achieving feats of cognitive dissonance you or I could hardly fathom. Sometimes when I’m in a bad mood, I think about reactivating my Facebook account and posting “Nolan Ryan was Carlos Marmol with a good PR team” just to piss people off.

I’d like to thank Matt for giving me your question, because I was able to answer it within two minutes, thanks to Stathead. Full seasons with more walks than hits are exceedingly rare: Only five qualified pitchers in AL/NL history have done it.

As you said, Ryan achieved (if that’s the right word) this feat in 1977. He never won a Cy Young Award, but two of the other four pitchers with a walks-over-hits season did at some point in their careers: Randy Johnson and Bob Turley, who had more walks than hits in both 1954 and 1955. The other two pitchers — Tommy Byrne and Toothpick Sam Jones — were All-Stars in their own right. (Toothpick Sam Jones is, unfortunately, not the career leader in pitcher WAR among pitchers named Sam Jones; that’d be Sad Sam Jones, mentioned earlier in this mailbag. Neither should be confused with 1960s NBA superstar Sam Jones.)

I guess the takeaway here is that if a major league team gives a pitcher a full season of starts even while he’s walking the whole park, said pitcher must be really talented.

Lowering the innings threshold to 100, this is still a pretty rare occurrence: 18 times by 13 pitchers in the past 125 years. Lowering the innings threshold further, we start to get some power relievers in the picture: With a 50-inning minimum, we have 61 pitchers going walks-over-hits a total of 81 times. Marmol (I didn’t know this when I wrote the joke in the first paragraph of this answer) and Aroldis Chapman have done it four times each. Turley, Byrne, and (turns around three times and spits) Mitch Williams got there three times apiece.

I don’t think it will surprise anyone to learn that we’re getting more and more of these seasons recently. For starters, with 30 teams and massive modern bullpens, there are more pitcher seasons to choose from. And strikeout rates are at historic highs, while hits per nine innings are on the low end of historical norms. (Nothing beats the second deadball era of 1968.)

Of the 81 50-inning walks-over-hits seasons, 39 have come since 1995, 24 have come since 2010, and a whopping 11 have come since 2021. But only one total in 2024 and 2025, so maybe the pendulum is swinging the other direction now.

In the interest of giving you your money’s worth for this question, I also considered the larger question of who the TTO king of pitchers is, because that’s not merely a question of walking more guys than a pitcher strikes out.

So I went back, back, back through baseball history, taking every season by a pitcher who qualified for the ERA title. After removing seasons from before batters faced was a stat, along with 2020, because it’s fake, we have a sample of 7,924 individual seasons. Here are the top 10 in terms of TTO%.

The Top TTO Pitcher Seasons in AL/NL History

Season	Name	Team	TTO%	HR%	BB%	SO%	TBF
2019	Gerrit Cole	HOU	49.33%	3.55%	5.88%	39.90%	817
1998	Kerry Wood	CHC	47.50%	2.00%	12.16%	33.33%	699
2023	Spencer Strider	ATL	47.31%	2.88%	7.60%	36.83%	763
2017	Robbie Ray	ARI	46.92%	3.46%	10.68%	32.78%	665
2023	Blake Snell	SDP	46.90%	2.02%	13.34%	31.54%	742
2019	Robbie Ray	ARI	46.72%	4.02%	11.24%	31.46%	747
2001	Randy Johnson	ARI	46.48%	1.91%	7.14%	37.42%	994
1997	Randy Johnson	SEA	45.65%	2.35%	9.06%	34.24%	850
2013	Yu Darvish	TEX	45.54%	3.09%	9.51%	32.94%	841
2018	Gerrit Cole	HOU	44.93%	2.38%	8.01%	34.54%	799

Again, no surprise that recent pitchers dominate this list. Wood, Ryan, and Johnson are the only 20th Century pitchers in the top 30. Modern baseball is, after all, dominated by strikeouts and home runs.

But TTO King feels like it should be a career achievement award. So I took the 1,063 pitchers who have thrown 1,000 or more innings in the AL and NL since 1916 (the first year batters faced appears in our database) and ranked them.

The Top TTO Pitcher Careers in AL/NL History

Name	TTO%	HR%	BB%	SO%	TBF
Blake Snell	43.25%	2.32%	10.87%	30.06%	4791
Robbie Ray	41.91%	3.54%	9.96%	28.41%	6166
Dylan Cease	41.51%	2.78%	10.00%	28.73%	4348
Kerry Wood	40.87%	2.52%	11.36%	26.98%	5863
Randy Johnson	39.74%	2.41%	8.77%	28.56%	17067
Yu Darvish	39.27%	3.16%	7.71%	28.41%	7305
Nolan Ryan	39.12%	1.42%	12.38%	25.31%	22574
Chris Sale	39.08%	2.56%	5.82%	30.70%	8452
Jacob deGrom	38.77%	2.43%	5.69%	30.65%	6082
Oliver Pérez	38.77%	3.06%	11.79%	23.92%	6464

Again, it skews toward the recent.

Snell takes the grand prize, followed by Ray and Cease. I’m sure I will one day give a less surprising answer to a mailbag question, but I don’t know how. Without going through the trouble of a quantitative era adjustment, Ryan’s place high up on the list — again, one of the most predictable findings in the history of sabermetrics — was such a historical aberration I’d feel odd giving the crown to anyone else. With respect to other trendsetting mid-century power pitchers like Sandy Koufax and Sam McDowell, no pitcher in history wasted his fielders’ time quite like Ryan did.

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* This article was originally published here