Michael Baumann

2 weeks ago | blogs.fangraphs.com | Michael Baumann

Early enough in the season, you’ll find some weird stats. This is a well-established fact of baseball in April. There’s even a song about it. As I write this on Tuesday afternoon, Kyle Tucker leads the league in position player WAR, with Aaron Judge third and Corbin Carroll fifth; if the leaderboard looked like that at the end of September, it’d probably be a mild surprise — a highly, highly lucrative one for Tucker — but nobody would write a book about how weird the 2025 season was or anything.

2 weeks ago | blogs.fangraphs.com | Michael Baumann

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. broke off contract talks with the Blue Jays on February 17. It didn’t seem like there was any animus between the two sides at the time, but the four-time All-Star didn’t want to distract himself during his walk year by negotiating all season long. The deadline was arbitrary, but nonetheless immovable. The Blue Jays tested Guerrero’s resolve with a renewed offer on Opening Day, but he held firm. Then he changed his mind.

2 weeks ago | biorxiv.org | Verena Bitto |Xiaofeng Jiang |Michael Baumann |Jakob Nikolas Kather

AbstractComputational pathology-based models are becoming increasingly popular for extracting biomarkers from images of cancer tissue. However, their validity is often only demonstrated on a single unseen validation cohort, limiting insights into their generalizability and posing challenges for explainability. In this study, we developed models to predict overall survival using haematoxylin and eosin (H&E) slides from FFPE samples in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).

2 weeks ago | blogs.fangraphs.com | Michael Baumann

Heston Kjerstad turned 26 in February, and he only has 158 major league plate appearances. That’s more than you or I had at that age, but it’s not a lot relative to expectations. This was a highly polished SEC corner bat who went second overall five years ago, though for reasons I’ll get into, Kjerstad wasn’t your garden variety no. 2 pick.

3 weeks ago | blogs.fangraphs.com | Michael Baumann

During the offseason, I examined Jackson Merrill’s excellent rookie season and concluded that his next big developmental step would have to involve getting on base more. A week into his sophomore season, we don’t know if Merrill is going to walk more. But if he does, he’ll have plenty of walkin’ around money. Yeah, I feel good about that little bit of wordplay. Let’s move on.