Shocking/fun trivia question that came up while I was writing an article for tomorrow. Only five batters were in the top 25 for batting WAR both last year and so far this year. Bobby Witt is one; can you name the other four?

One of us! One of us!

Hey everyone, I'm feeling under the weather today, so my normal @fangraphs.com Monday chat will move to Wednesday at noon ET. Hope to talk to you then.

I've heard people describe a lot of things as "the worst". My newest entry:

This question seems very easy to answer. Yet many public figures seem to be consistently getting it wrong, and in one consistent direction. Curious!

Team A pays $200 million to its players and receives $40 million in revenue sharing, total outlay $160 million. Team B pays $220 million to its players, and pays $40 million into revenue sharing, total outlay $260 million. How much more did Team B pay its players?

Jeopardy and baseball? How could I say no?

The top story on ESPN.com at the moment is about the strike zone and ABS, and here's their conclusion to 'is the strike zone smaller?' "Seems so, yes. This season, 47.3% of pitches have been in what now constitutes the strike zone..." Boy, if only someone had gone into extreme depth to learn more.

One reason I think we're still at least a little way off from machines taking over the world is that Claude just tried to write Greek symbols into the same script three times in a row and it crashed every time

Getting hard to write about Cristopher Sanchez getting better because he's been getting better for so long now

I rarely post about politics, but if you live in California: vote in the primary. I love this state but it's broken, and this primary will decide a lot. Tom Steyer lines up best with what I want fixed and how. Not telling you who to pick. We might have different values. Do your research. Just vote.

My last two articles: -Five neat throws Nico Hoerner made this year -Markov chain decomposition of walk rate We write for a broad baseball nerd audience at FanGraphs

I looked more closely into the increase in walks this year and tried to measure where it's coming from

Slightly different format today, because my set of notes on five things topics was chock full of fun Nico Hoerner plays

I am going to be popping up on the two ESPN games tonight (TB/BOS & SD/STL) talking about flat bath paths, hard-hit studs with 0 HR, ABS, and all sorts of other fun stuff tune in to see if cats or children appear on live TV and/or if my cool baseball guitar stays bolted to the wall

Misiorowski's average slider velocity of 94.8 mph would've ranked fourth in the majors among fastballs in 2013.

Tomorrow's Five Things is exclusively about plays that one infielder has made with both feet in the outfield this year. Any guesses as to who?

Doing some rewatching of old games as I GIF up Five Things and Jim Deshaies just said of Brandon Pfaadt's last name, "It looks like a license plate." Now I can't unsee it

Jeff Francoeur's diagnosis of Austin Riley's struggles: "Sometimes you just get to thinkin' too much." Strongly agree, my friend.

The Pirates broadcast can't pronounce "Burleson." There are some tough names in baseball, but uh, not that one

The Reds broadcast had a long discussion about how lineup protection has gifted Elly with a pile of hittable pitches, ending in an assertion that lineup protection is incredibly important. They had this discussion while Sugano threw 6 of 8 pitches out of the zone, and Elly walked. Just, lol

"Let's intentionally walk someone to bring up Munetaka Murakami, the man with a 20% walk rate, in a situation where we absolutely can't afford a walk" is really big-brained thinking. Murakami walked on four pitches.

On one of my favorite pop-up relievers

I measured the changing size of the strike zone in the ABS era

Upgrades to the baseball sim: now it has home field advantage integrated

April 6: Juan Soto hits the IL April 7: Mets win April 22: Juan Soto activated April 22: Mets win What happened in between? Who can remember anymore?

My wife had to ask me why I kept giggling from the next room over. It's because I made all these gifs of Nolan McLean making batters look silly:

I'm pretty sure Edgar Quero just had the most valuable challenge of the year, and the best game of challenges all year to boot. Pretty funny given that he came into today in literal last place on the Baseball Savant ABS leaderboard

Sal Stewart getting Big Mad for no reason after striking out to end a 3-0 loss is very relatable

Awesome article. And of course, shameless plug for the FanGraphs Lab, McLean's sinker/sweeper combo looks absolutely hilarious there:

A day late, but if you are in the mood for some mind-bending dominance, you should read about Mason Miller turning opponents into salt

The Cards broadcast just described a pitch as a "Steven Matz-like offering" and I had to think for a quite a while before I realized it was complimentary

We do still publish community research! blogs.fangraphs.com/the-communit...

Has anyone tried turning Aaron Nola off, and then turning him back on again? Because you can't locate here to Luis Arraez:

I'm not sure what exactly went down here, but I like to think the Sox dugout is just playing a complicated version of three-card monte all game long:

We're gonna need a bigger strike zone plot...

This is cool as hell and you should check it out. It also pairs really well with a feature we have on our BPro pitcher pages: The Tunnels tab, which estimates how much each pitch in a guy's arsenal looks like each of their other pitches from the batter's POV blogs.fangraphs.com/new-fangraph...

We made a new data viz so you can see how your favorite pitcher's pitches work together. Or your least favorite pitcher, or any pitcher at all, I guess.

We're soft launching a new FanGraphs Lab tool, "Paired Pitches." If you're enough of a baseball degen to follow me on social media, you're our target audience. I'd love to hear what you think: www.fangraphs.com/lab/paired-pitches

I'm a big fan of this one: I used our playoff odds methodology to figure out which teams have the biggest holes to upgrade, and which teams will get the most bang for their buck given their particular situation, i.e. how much a marginal improvement increases their playoff odds

Trivia question. Which pitch in the major leagues, when located at the top of the zone, has the shallowest (least negative/flattest) vertical approach angle?

The Pirates are crushing it in every phase of the game today. Up 5-3, Griffin looks great, the broadcast has been playing inspired music, and the stadium PA just played "What's Going On?" when the umps had a confusing meeting. Perfect execution across the board.

This Ryan O'Hearn (lack of) reaction is killing me:

Scouting report from Konnor Griffin's dad: "I trust him as much as anybody in the world at shortstop." Well, yeah, I'd be worried if you didn't, sir.

The Pirates broadcast using "Golden" as bumper music on the day their Gen Z superstar debuts is incredible work

Seven outs into the Pirates/Orioles game, each team has used one challenge unsuccessfully. They were both made by hitters, both early in the count. Someone get these teams a FanGraphs membership!

Dan's article is great and got me thinking about how much early-season trades can change a team's outlook. Take a look at how much each AL East club would benefit from upgrading their weakest offensive position to a league average (per our Depth Charts) situation:

I posted this three multi-run homers ago

Guys, I'm starting to worry that Miles Mikolas might not have it

Not called "Mike Trout Is Walkin', Here!" because I quickly searched "I'm Walkin' Here FanGraphs" and realized I wasn't the first writer to think of that joke