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What Are The Best Free Agent Fits Of The MLB Offseason?

After MLB’s lukewarm interest in free agency the past few seasons, this winter could bring an even less active marketplace. COVID-19 slashed baseball revenues in 2020, and teams are expected to cut payroll next season, which could hurt the middle class of free agents particularly hard. But even during this recent trend away from high-dollar […]

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How Trevor Bauer Remade His Slider — And Changed Baseball

Travis Sawchik is a FiveThirtyEight staff writer. His new book “The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players,” co-authored with The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh, is available this week. In it, they examine how outsiders (and a few forward-thinking insiders) are employing unconventional ideas along with new data from new […]

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MLB Curves And Sliders Have Gotten Alarmingly Nasty

Major League Baseball seems to be on an unstoppable pathway to more and more strikeouts. After a record share of plate appearances ended in a strikeout last season (22.3 percent), this season is winding up to set another record: If the to-date strikeout rate of 23 percent holds or increases over the season, it would […]

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Baseball’s Top Staffs Have Come Around On The High-Spin Fastball

When baseball welcomed the new Statcast technology to every major league stadium in 2015, the system’s Doppler radar began tracking an underlying pitching skill: spin rate. Teams and players were suddenly armed with new data to study and optimize. They were able to quantify long-held beliefs about pitch characteristics, like “late life” and “rise,” and […]

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