This MLB season's BIG award winners (probably)
The Mayday Catch Up - Oct. 3, 2025
ANNOUNCEMENTS
The next Mayday! will be at our regularly scheduled time on Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 3:00 p.m. ET/12:00 p.m. PT.
Stay tuned later today on Trevor May Baseball for a special, pre-recorded Wild Card recap/Division Series preview edition of Mayday!
We have a second YouTube channel for even more videos focusing more on baseball culture and the side of the internet where baseball lovers spend their time. Go subscribe to More Mayday now!
New merch is live! Want to throw cheese? Well, you only need to LET IT EAT!
NEW STUFF
🎧 LISTEN 🎧
Mayday! the Podcast
The ABS era is here!
Breaking down how ABS will be utilized in 2026
New strategies with ABS
Will ABS actually make a difference?
The Marlins are calling pitches from the dugout
How the Marlins are making this work
Pros and cons
Fewer decisions being made by players across baseball
Listen to all the new episodes here!
📺 WATCH 📺
We went through the MVP, ROY, CY Young and filled out our ballot as a community... but did we nail it? Let’s find out… (19 mins)
The ABS system is officially here! How did it happen and what does it all mean? Let’s discuss… (8 mins)
The Marlins are calling pitches from the dugout. Is this a good idea? Let’s discuss… (12 mins)
📝READ📝
Napheesa Collier and Cathy Engelbert show how ugly CBA negotiations could get
Despite being in the thick of the postseason, one storyline is still casting a shadow over Major League Baseball–the negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement. The current CBA is set to expire on Dec. 1, 2026. If the league does not come to an agreement with the MLB Player’s Association before then, the 2027 season could be put in jeopardy.
My producer, David Korn, wrote about how Napheesa Collier’s comments about commissioner Cathy Engelbert ahead of the WNBA CBA negotiations could foreshadow what will happen in baseball.
STAT OF THE WEEK - Expected Fielding Independent Pitching (xFIP)
xFIP finds a pitcher’s FIP, but it uses projected home-run rate instead of actual home runs allowed. The home run rate is determined by that season’s league average HR/FB rate. (via MLB)
The Formula: Where “FIP constant” puts FIP on the same plane as league-average ERA: ((Fly balls / league average rate of HR per fly ball x 13) + (3 x (BB + HBP)) - (2 x K)) / IP + FIP constant.
Like its cousin, FIP, xFIP can be used to portend future performance (as opposed to simply evaluating past results). However, xFIP and FIP differ in how they penalize pitchers for home run allowance. xFIP is predicated on the notion that pitchers have more control over how many fly balls they allow than how many of those fly balls leave the park. As a result, xFIP substitutes a pitcher’s homer tally with an estimation of how many long balls that pitcher should have permitted given the number of fly balls he induced.
To determine the latter part of the equation, xFIP assumes a pitcher should have allowed a league average HR/FB rate, which was 15.3 percent in 2019. This assumption is drawn because HR/FB rate can fluctuate a lot from year to year, with pitchers often regressing back toward the league average rate.
More Shows to Check Out
Foul Territory: Live on YouTube - Every day at 2:00 p.m. ET/11:00 a.m. PT
Sunday Sliders with Trevor and Dani Wexelman on MLB Network Radio, SiriusXM channel 89 and on the SiriusXM app - Sundays at 1:00 p.m. ET/10:00 am PT
Next Live Mayday! - Wednesday, Oct. 8 @ 3:00 p.m. ET/12:00 p.m. PT
Watch on: Twitch | YouTube (Hour One on Foul Territory) | YouTube (Hour Two)