I generally find discussions of the most underrated player in baseball to be tedious. Whose rating are we using? Relative to what? Does being the most underrated player in the game two years in a row imply something uncomfortable about our own ability to update our priors? Heck, does repeatedly earning the mantel of “most underrated” render you ineligible for the title? How underrated can José Ramírez be when every single FanGraphs reader knows how underrated he is? Anyway, today’s article is a case of “do what I say, not what I do.” Because I’ll just say it: Drew Rasmussen is the most underrated player in baseball.
I know, I know! That whole intro paragraph tells you how silly this formulation is. But I was moved to look more closely at Rasmussen for two reasons. First, there was this tweet from Tom Tango:
Since 2021, among pitchers with 500+ IP, there are 10 pitchers in the top 15 in each of ERA, FIP and Statcast ERA (xERA)
From highest to lowest career WAR:
Kershaw Sale Cole Wheeler Fried Skubal Burnes Woodruff Ohtani Rasmussen
Not a list I expected to find him on. Second, this interview he did with our own David Laurila fascinated me. Rasmussen doesn’t look much like he did when the Brewers traded him to the Rays for Willy Adames back in 2021. This guy has remade his entire arsenal and approach, and he’s become one of the best pitchers in baseball by doing so. Read the rest of this entry »
Adley Rutschman and Liam Hicks were hardly the only catchers dealt to contenders in the hours before last Monday’s trade deadline. Much further below the radar, the Dodgers acquired — re-acquired, actually — not one but two backstops, namely Ben Rortvedt and Hunter Feduccia, and their reasoning soon became clear. Dalton Rushing, who had been scratched from their lineup on August 2 due to “minor arm irritation,” landed on the injured list the next day with what the Dodgers initially termed a mild right elbow sprain. On August 4, the team revealed that the 25-year-old Rushing had suffered a partial tear of his right ulnar collateral ligament.
The injury hit the Dodgers almost exactly two months after they lost starting catcher Will Smith to the IL due to an inflamed disc in his neck. He has yet to return, and while Rushing’s UCL tear may not require surgery, it will likely prevent him from catching again during what has been something of a breakout season — albeit an uneven one.
“I would say it’s very small. I hope I’m wrong,” said manager Dave Roberts last Wednesday, referring to the likelihood of Rushing returning to his catching duties this season. He added that the Dodgers are “certainly trying to keep the bat alive for sure.” Shohei Ohtani’s occupation of the designated hitter slot would likely limit Rushing to pinch-hitting, ideally against righties, a potential luxury that the Dodgers will have to weigh against rostering a healthier and more versatile reserve such as Hyeseong Kim, who can play both middle infield positions and center field while being fast enough to serve as a pinch-runner. The current prognosis is for Rushing to be shut down from throwing for four to six weeks, though he’s expected to start a hitting progression sooner. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: Welcome to another edition of my Tuesday chats. In less than 24 hours, I’ll be en route to Salt Lake City with my family as we gather to celebrate my father’s 85th birthday.
12:03
Jay Jaffe: I’ve got a piece on Dalton Rushing’s UCL tear, his various controversies, and the state of the Dodgers’ catching depth chart in the pipeline. Yesterday, i wrote about Max Scherzer cracking the all-time top 10 in strikeouts as well as feats by Gerrit Cole and Jacob Misiorowski, with JAWS and ZiPS odds updates on both Cole and Saturday’s opposite number, Chris Sale https://blogs.fangraphs.com/max-scherzer-headlines-a-big-weekend-for-s…
drplantwrench: which trade at the deadline do you think is most likely to be brought up in 5-10 years as That One Trade where it backfired and the prospect substantially overshadows the main piece?
Randy Arozarena is leading the Seattle Mariners with 3.2 WAR. He’s on pace for a career-high 4.5 WAR. He’s running a 138 wRC+, his best mark since the summer of 2020, when a steady diet of chicken, rice, and pushups turned him into the kid who only hit homers. He was an All-Star. But some of Arozarena’s underlying numbers are confusing. He’s on pace for 20 home runs, his standard year-end total. If you’ll forgive a digression, Arozarena has ended up with 20 homers in three of his five full seasons, which ties him for third on the all-time 20-homer-season leaderboard, behind only Bobby Abreu (five) and Harold Baines (four). But Arozarena’s bat speed is down by a huge margin, as is his launch angle. How is he going yard just as often while swinging softer and running a career-high groundball rate? Let’s try to figure out what’s going on here.
I always like to start with plate discipline, and that’s certainly a logical jumping off point, because the biggest change in Arozarena’s profile is in the strikeout column. He’s running a 20.7% strikeout rate this season. That’s an enormous six-point drop from last year, and it’s more than three points below his previous low. In fact, if you look at things from a certain angle, that drop is the entire reason that Arozarena is putting up his best season ever. If you ignore walks and strikeouts and just look at balls in play, Arozarena’s wOBAcon and xwOBAcon are nearly identical both to the numbers he put up last year and to his career averages:
Arozarena is getting the same results as ever when he puts the ball in play. Now, I know that he’s getting to those results in a different way, and we’re going to dive into those differences soon, but in that sense, the entirety of his wRC+ boost has come from the fact that he’s striking so much less. So let’s talk about why he’s striking out less. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the weekend, a friend of mine asked if ABS challenge data gets incorporated into WAR. (I have extremely cool friends.) It doesn’t, and I explained that while an individual challenge can absolutely change the course of an inning (or a game, or even a season), a single ball-strike call is of negligible run value out of context. If anything, we should be adding challenges to WPA, not WAR, except WPA only gets calculated on a per-plate-appearance basis, rather than a per-pitch basis.
At any rate, challenges aren’t like catcher framing in the early days. In 2008, the first year for which we have framing data, the difference between the best framer in baseball (Brian McCann) and the worst (Ryan Doumit, the poor guy) was 97.7 runs. At 10 runs per win, well, you can do the math on your own. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a quick hook for Keith Foulke in the WPBL and Stat Blast about the historic outcome of a series between two streaking teams before analyzing an update on Giancarlo Stanton’s status, the effect of era on Jacob Wilson’s errorless streak, the significance of baseball’s resurgence in Hollywood (as evidenced by a Netflix Yankees series, three upcoming baseball movies, and a baseball tangent on Ted Lasso), Mike Krukow and the best team scenario for a beloved broadcaster’s farewell tour, Max Scherzer’s small-sample resurgence, and the latest on Hunter Greene, Paul Skenes, and Gerrit Cole.
Even as teams have settled into their new normal following all the activity surrounding the trade deadline, the standings haven’t become any clearer with two months of the regular season left to play. There are still wide open division races and crowded Wild Card chases. For the teams already looking forward to next year, the stretch run is an opportunity to evaluate their rosters, and maybe play a little spoiler against those vying for the postseason.
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, they’ll filter to the top and bottom of the rankings, while the exercise remains reactive to hot streaks and cold snaps. If you’re looking for a visual representation of the ups and downs of your team throughout the season, look no further than the brand new Power Rankings Board in the FanGraphs Lab.
First up are the full rankings, presented in a sortable table. Below that, I’ve grouped the teams into tiers with comments on a handful of clubs. You’ll notice that the official ordinal rankings don’t always match the tiers — there are times where I take editorial liberties when grouping teams together — but generally, the ordering is consistent. One thing to note: The playoff odds listed in the tables below are our standard Depth Charts odds, not the coin flip odds that are used in the ranking formula. Read the rest of this entry »
Even by the standards of his recent, injury-marred seasons, Max Scherzer’s 2026 campaign has been a rough one. The 42-year-old righty has made two trips to the injured list, and through the end of July had taken just seven starts and allowed more than a run per inning. Even on a Blue Jays team destined to be retooled ahead of the trade deadline, he was clearly in no shape to be any contender’s hired gun. Nonetheless, Scherzer’s last two starts have been bright spots, and on Saturday evening, he notched career strikeout 3,516, officially moving him into the all-time top 10.
Scherzer wasn’t the only pitcher who reached a strikeout milestone this weekend. Aaron Nola, who started for the Phillies opposite Scherzer at Citizens Bank Park, collected his 2,000th career strikeout. Elsewhere, in a matchup that pitted the third- and fourth-ranked pitchers on the active strikeouts leaderboard, namely Chris Sale and Gerrit Cole, the latter notched his 1,000th strikeout since joining the Yankees. Then on Sunday, Jacob Misiorowski became the first pitcher to notch his 200th strikeout of the season.
I’ll get to all of those pitchers, but first Scherzer. After holding Philadelphia scoreless through five innings while scattering three hits and striking out three, he returned for the sixth inning and faced leadoff hitter Kyle Schwarber, who entered the day as the major league leader in strikeouts (172) and who on June 10 in Toronto was the victim of Scherzer’s career strikeout no. 3,500. That outing was the only major league start Scherzer took between April 24 and July 27; first he was sidelined by a combination of forearm tendinitis and left ankle inflammation, and then — after lasting just 3.1 innings against the Phillies while being tagged for five runs — a bout of back spasms. He was in much better shape on Saturday evening, and in his previous two plate appearances against Schwarber had limited the slugger to a groundout and an infield single. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe
Sponsor Us on Patreon
Give a Gift Subscription
Effectively Wild Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
Apple Podcasts Feed
Spotify Feed
YouTube Playlist
Facebook Group
Bluesky Account
Twitter Account
Get Our Merch!
