Fever Report No. 025 · 2026-09-14
The Pest and the Drift
The crowd wants Alex Call gone. The engine just eased off him. Here's what the math is actually doing.
The drift
The crowd has made up its mind about Alex Call. Over the weekend, a fan called him a marginal hitter who adds nothing. Another asked what he even does for the team. A third wanted him designated for assignment. The chatter says he's one of the worst hitters still getting lineup time, and the volume is medium — not a mob, but a consensus.
This window, the engine moved the other way.
Call dropped three spots on our mlb_fade board, from No. 5 to No. 8. On the Fade board, falling is good news. His luck gap — the distance between his results on contact and what his contact quality supports — eased from 0.0653 to 0.0602. His stat line still outruns his bat, but by less than it did. The engine is saying the bill is shrinking.
The crowd sees a .105 average over his last ten games and reads collapse. The engine reads regression doing what regression does: bringing a soft-contact hitter's line back to what the bat can carry. That is the drift — and the drift is the engine agreeing with anyone who still sees something here.
The person
Call was born in Burnsville, Minnesota, and went to high school across the river in River Falls, Wisconsin. At Ball State he was the 2016 MAC Player of the Year. The White Sox took him 86th overall and paid him $719,100. He was traded to Cleveland for Yonder Alonso, claimed by Washington, and shipped to the Dodgers in July 2025 — his fourth organization in eight years.
The stat line says he's a .242 career hitter with 22 home runs in 397 games. The story underneath is that he nearly didn't make it at all.
In 2019, Double-A, Call struck out nearly 30% of the time. The 2020 minor-league season got canceled, and he used the silence to rebuild. He bought a portable pitching machine, then a VR headset, and worked in cages from Arizona to Wisconsin — fixing swing holes, tightening plate discipline, turning himself into one of the tougher outs in the minors. He debuted at 27.
He calls himself a pest. Dave Roberts calls him dependable — strong preparation, energy, a guy who fills in when the stars are down. One home run in 82 games this season. A pest who knows exactly what he is.
And every time the Dodgers visit Minnesota, Call goes home to River Falls and runs a free youth clinic with his old high school coach Ryan Bishop. Kids 10 to 13. Pro alumni running drills. Game tickets. Then he drives to the park and reaches base four times against the Twins, because that is what a pest does in front of the people who watched him grow up.
The signal
Call's 95th-percentile exit velocity is 99.49 mph across 122 balls in play this season. That is soft contact papered over by patience and legs — enough walks, enough hustle, enough holes found to hang on. The board reads him PAID: his line has outrun his contact.
But the drift is the story. Three spots down the board. The luck gap moving from 0.0653 to 0.0602 means his results are settling toward what his bat produces. The .105 stretch that has the crowd calling for his job is, from the engine's view, the gap closing — not widening. Weak contact stopped finding holes, and the math adjusted.
The engine is telling you the case against him got weaker this window, even as the crowd got louder.
The market
His 2025 Topps Heritage High Number PSA10 sits at $37.36, down 0.2% this week. His 2023 Topps Finest Autograph rookie PSA10 is $27.00, flat. Twenty sales on the Heritage, seventy on the auto. Nobody is buying because nobody is watching — the fans who want him gone aren't in the cardboard aisle, and an engine easing a fade case doesn't make headlines.
Paid link — as an eBay Partner, FVR earns from qualifying purchases. Not financial advice. We take positions only after publication — never before. Misses stay on the record.
On the record
This piece says the engine's fade case on Alex Call is easing — his luck gap has narrowed, his results are coming back toward his contact quality, and the drift is the engine agreeing with anyone bullish on him.
What would prove us wrong: Call's luck gap widens back above 0.0653 at the next board refresh, meaning his results are outrunning his contact by more than before and the engine was wrong to ease off.
When we'll know: the next drift window.
Biographical details per Wikipedia, Ball State University Athletics, MLB.com, Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, the River Falls Journal, and the Hudson Star-Observer. All performance data: MLB StatsAPI via the FVR engine.