FanGraphs Baseball

If grade schoolers have to come home with a report card, why shouldn’t big league managers? We at FanGraphs tend to veer towards egalitarianism, and if little Liam or Daenerys can be sent to bed without Roblox or whatever it is the kids like these days, then why can’t Big Stephen or Dodger Dave? That’s why every time a postseason manager is eliminated from contention, we run down their playoff performance and see who gets a Grape Job! sticker.

Ben Clemens already assessed the work of Will Venable and Aaron Boone, while Jon Becker broke down the October runs of Walt Weiss and Craig Stammen, as well as the losing managers from the Wild Card round. Today, it’s Dave Roberts’ turn.

Crafting these report cards can be an odd exercise. Major league managers simply don’t have as large an effect on a team’s on-field performance as, say, an NFL team’s head coach. Baseball is a game of player execution, and a manager’s job mostly comes down to making sure that the best players are on the lineup card and that everyone refrains from killing each other in August. But that doesn’t mean that managers have no effect on their team’s fortunes. Baseball is, by its very nature, a very coin-flippy, volatile game, where the fates of both teams hang on a knife’s edge. Small decisions can have a big impact. Last year, I gave Pat Murphy somewhere between an A- and a B+ overall. Let’s see how Roberts fares! Read the rest of this entry »

The American League Championship Series between the Rays and Guardians was a study in contrasts when it came to starting pitching, particularly as the series extended. Tampa Bay’s starters lasted five or more innings in all but one of the six games, with Drew Rasmussen and Freddy Peralta combining for three starts of at least six innings; the former went seven innings and the latter 5 1/3 in the the final two games. Cleveland’s starters reached the five-inning mark just twice and never went deeper than that; over the final three games, the team’s starters — ace Parker Messick and reliever Shawn Armstrong, who was deputized to open Games 4 and 6 — totaled just four innings. Given that imbalance, it was hardly a surprise that the Rays rallied from a 2-1 deficit to win those three and take the series.

The World Series might present a similar contrast. The Rays and the Yankees are the only teams whose starters have averaged at least five innings per turn during this postseason, and Tampa Bay knocked off New York in a Division Series sweep earlier this month. Meanwhile, the Brewers are one of five teams whose starters have averaged less than four innings per turn; only twice did a Milwaukee starter even last five innings, with Logan Henderson reaching that mark in Game 2 of the NLDS against the Padres and Robert Gasser doing so in Game 3 of the NLCS against the Dodgers. Jacob Misiorowski — the likely NL Cy Young winner, who even before the playoffs had already exceeded his total workload from last year by more than 30 innings — burned through 88 pitches to complete four innings in his NLDS start and 94 to go 4 1/3 in his NLCS start. For the Brewers and Rays, those divergent approaches have worked. Tampa Bay went a combined 7-2 in the ALDS and ALCS; Milwaukee, 7-1 in the NLDS and NLCS.

After a season in which he ranked third in the AL in FIP (2.81) and WAR (5.0) and fourth in ERA (2.67), Rasmussen began his postseason by no-hitting the Yankees for 7 2/3 innings in the Division Series opener. In three starts totaling 21 innings, he’s delivered a 1.29 ERA and a 2.58 FIP. Peralta, who struggled during his four months as a Met before righting himself somewhat as a Ray following a deadline deal, has put up a 1.13 ERA and a 3.72 FIP in 16 innings as a starter, on top of which he added two-thirds of an inning out of the bullpen in ALCS Game 4; that cherry on top of his two strong starts helped him win series MVP honors. While their third and fourth starters, Nick Martinez and Griffin Jax, haven’t been as effective, the Rays’ postseason rotation ERA is good enough to crack the top 10 dating back to the start of division play in 1969:

Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow night, the Milwaukee Brewers and the Tampa Bay Rays will kick off the 2026 World Series. They’ll both deploy unhittable aces to open the series, and they’ll both back them with a squad made up of speedsters, platoonable hitters, a young superstar, and relievers as far as the eye can see. To a first approximation, these teams might as well be a mirror image of each other. They’re small-budget operations that rely heavily on pitching, speed, and defense. They put the ball in play. They wreak havoc on the basepaths. They play indoors – at least some of the time, in Milwaukee’s case. But while the Rays and Brewers are superficially similar, key differences will have a lot to say about how this series turns out. So let’s take a look at where the equivalence ends, and how each team will try to use that to their advantage.

Pair of Aces

The Brewers and Rays each have an obvious leader in their respective rotations. Jacob Misiorowski and Drew Rasmussen are two of the best pitchers in baseball, and they’re both having career years. Misiorowski is a shoo-in for the National League Cy Young, and while Rasmussen probably won’t win the American League version, he just put up his sixth (!) straight season with a sub-3.00 ERA, posted over a career-high 172 innings. He’s found another gear in the playoffs — three starts, 21 innings pitched, and just three runs allowed. The Miz hasn’t looked quite so steady – two starts, 8 1/3 innings, three runs – but his 1.80 ERA and 2.17 FIP in the regular season were downright ludicrous. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, we imagine you have all heard about BLEPH. A few weeks ago, The Onion published an article that quoted FanGraphs contributor Derek Gardner extensively. In that article, Derek purported to be speaking on behalf of the entire analytics community in advocating for a new statistic called BLEPH. “We don’t care what it measures or how it’s calculated,” he said. “We just need something called B.L.E.P.H., and we need it now.” This is not the full truth, and we feel compelled to set the record straight.

First, we want to make it clear that Derek Gardner no longer works for FanGraphs. He was terminated for cause. Second, we take our stats seriously. We would never manufacture a new statistic just for the sake of creating a fun acronym. Because baseball analysis is already drowning in alphabet soup, we have a strict policy against creating new junk stats and acronyms unless we’re convinced that they’ll meaningfully expand the boundaries of sabermetric knowledge. We call it the Baseball Utility Terminology Threshold for Stopping Lighthearted Acronym Proliferation (BUTTSLAP).

That high standard never wavers. It’s what pushed us to publish groundbreaking research about when baseball players do the most sex, to create a metric that will help Jack Reacher avoid getting murdered, and to invent legitimate, informative statistics like OOPSY, MeatWaste, ShadowBalls, Whomps per Whiff, Tromps per Whomp, Hard-Hit Rate Hit Rate (HHRHR), Crap the Bed Rate (CTB%), and EKSTRYM+.

This rigor is, in part, the reason that BLEPH became a national story in the first place. Before we get into the specifics, though, we should explain why we’re making all this public. In recent years, we’ve been inspired to learn that when we’re honest about our vision for the site and the challenges it faces, it can inspire a sense of camaraderie in our readers. All the same, that openness hasn’t normally extended to firings. Read the rest of this entry »

The way people talk about Jacob Misiorowski bothers me a little. Yeah, he’s taller than almost any other starting pitcher and throws harder than literally any starting pitcher in history. He led all major league pitchers in WAR this year, and if he wins the NL Cy Young Award next month — as he’s almost universally expected to do — it will be a deserved victory.

But Miz didn’t lap the field or post paradigm-altering results. I can’t make a defensible case for Chris Sale or Cristopher Sánchez to win the Cy Young over Misiorowski, but I suspect the eventual vote total will not reflect how close the statistical margin was between Miz and his rivals.

In other words, this is an outstanding pitcher — maybe the best in the world at the moment, perhaps even a future Hall of Famer — but he’s not 1999 Pedro Martínez, or Victor Wembanyama with a curveball. This is a fairly inexperienced 24-year-old with real flaws in his game.

He can be got at. Read the rest of this entry »

The World Series — our annual signifier of another season smoked to its filter — is always a culmination of the sport’s beauty. Teams get rewarded for playing a winning brand of baseball all throughout October, managers are vindicated in all of the micro-decisions that got them there, and front offices can comfortably rest their heads at night knowing their systems and philosophies weren’t totally off base.

But more visible than all that — and the thing that gives the sport its humanity among so many numbers, figures, and entropy beyond the players’ control — is the heartwarming sight of a veteran finally getting a chance for his Ray Bourque moment. For the Tampa Bay Rays, who stand just four wins away from the franchise’s first title, that man is quite literally impossible to overlook. The circumference of his arms threatens a solar eclipse every time he raises them. His physical composition is probably best described in terms used to measure quartzite. He is Yandy Díaz, the 35-year-old igneous rock at the top of the Tampa Bay lineup, who, despite having all the hulking characteristics of a home run-mashing slugger, is also the best pure hitter in this World Series.

Díaz, who has hit safely in all but one of the Rays’ nine postseason games, is above average at nearly every element of hitting. He rarely swings and misses, which leads to very few strikeouts. In turn, he squares the ball at an 85th-percentile clip, and can do that while peppering it to right field. When he puts the ball in play, 29.9% of the time it’s going to the opposite field, a skill he shares with teammates Chandler Simpson and Jonathan Aranda, who are also among the five most frequent opposite-field hitters in the American League. Díaz is not going to take many walks — 8.2 BB%, good for the 37th percentile — but hitting .293 still helps him post a .359 on-base percentage, placing him in the top 20 of qualified AL batters. Read the rest of this entry »

Luke Holman has been one of the top pitchers in the hitter-friendly Arizona Fall League. Across three starts with the Peoria Desert Dogs, the 23-year-old right-hander in the Cincinnati Reds organization has surrendered just one run over nine innings. Moreover, he has fanned 15 batters and allowed just four hits and a lone walk. He was especially sharp on Monday. Facing a Scottsdale Scorpions lineup that included high-profile prospects Zyhir Hope, Bryce Rainer, and Nathan Flewelling, Holman breezed through four scoreless frames on 52 pitches.

Eric Longenhagen referenced the recent outing when I asked him for a snapshot of what he has seen from the Reading, Pennsylvania native, whom the Reds drafted 71st overall in 2024 out of Louisiana State University.

“He looks good,” our lead prospect analyst told me. “Glove-side command of 92-94, plus curveball in the 78-82 mph range. Attacks lefties in on their hands with fastballs and mid-80s cutter/sliders, then drops curveballs below the zone. He stretched out to four innings in his most recent start. Looks like a potential no. 4/5 to me. I want to see how he attacks second/third time through when asked to go six innings, and how his arm strength trends as he gets traction in a full-season routine.”

The erstwhile LSU Tiger, whose rotation-mates at the SEC powerhouse included Kade Anderson and Gage Jump, hasn’t had much of an opportunity to establish a routine. Holman began his professional career with a pair of effective outings in April 2025, only to have his elbow give out; Tommy John surgery cost him the remainder of the campaign. He also missed almost the entirety of this past season due to injury. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday, I published the first half of my ballot for this year’s Fielding Bible Awards, which will be announced at 3 PM ET tomorrow. Today, I’m going to cover my votes for the three outfield positions and pitcher, as well as the best multi-positional defenders, defensive player of the year, and defensive team of the year. Update: the winners have been announced. Winners are denoted by asterisks below.

If you’re curious about the methodology I used to help guide my voting, you can read about it in Monday’s article, but here’s a quick refresher: I used a weighted blend of DRS, FRV, and DRP (the three flagship public defensive metrics), with the weights based on how well each metric did on reliability and consistency. That gave me an initial rough order at each position. From there, I used my own insights gleaned from both statistical and video deep dives on individual players, as well as the copious amounts of baseball I watched this year, to assemble my final rankings. I deferred to the defensive metrics when the gaps were big, but for close calls, I leaned heavily on my own judgment.

That’s a fair number of words, and there will be a lot more as I go through each of these positions, so let’s get right to it, starting with left field.

Left Field
1. Cody Bellinger*
2. Chandler Simpson
3. Jackson Chourio
4. Ian Happ
5. Wyatt Langford

Last year, Bellinger played all over the outfield. This year, he mostly played in left, and he was pretty spectacular. He’s one of the best outfield defenders in the sport, and now that he’s playing full-time at a relatively weak position, he stood out from the pack here. He does it all: great anticipation and route-running, good speed, and a terrific throwing arm. With Steven Kwan now in center, Bellinger is the class of the position, and I didn’t seriously consider anyone else for my first place vote. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley tease their next playoff livestream and discuss “Chalktober,” the end of the ALCS, Chandler Simpson’s (and Ben’s) calves, Ben’s quickly defused feud with FanGraphs, and hirings/non-firings. Then (1:00:53) they bring back fan-favorite (and host-favorite) guest Adrian Chiles—BBC host, Guardian columnist, and Effectively Wild UK correspondent—to talk about his beloved Rays’ run to the World Series, how he’s followed their exploits despite a several-hour time difference, his musings about the excitement/misery of playoff baseball, and more.

Audio intro: Grant Brisbee, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Dave Armstrong and Mike Murray, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to “chalk” definition
Link to Palpatine clip
Link to Seinfeld clip
Link to Yandy clip
Link to Smith quote
Link to Langs on Caminero
Link to other Caminero fact
Link to Vogt on Bibee
Link to Yandy non-challenge
Link to Rays postseason history
Link to Petriello appearance
Link to Family Guy clip
Link to horse gait wiki
Link to Clemens on ALCS G6
Link to Andrews on Simpson
Link to Meg on Lind
Link to Vogt/Arnerich article
Link to MLBTR on Boone
Link to MLBTR on Banner
Link to MLBTR on Smith
Link to Hogg on Bauers
Link to FG zombie graphic
Link to FG ghost graphic
Link to Adrian’s first EW spot
Link to Adrian on the Rays
Link to Adrian on Wikipedia
Link to @TBRaysUK
Link to “place hitter” definition
Link to “hit ’em where they ain’t”
Link to Adrian on golf
Link to Adrian’s Guardian archive
Link to Adrian’s The Tablet archive
Link to Adrian’s BBC archive

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Runs are hard to come by during the postseason, in part because of the outsized impact of cooler weather and overpowering relief pitching. So far this fall, no pitcher has done a better job of keeping runs off the board than Aaron Ashby. Working in a multi-inning role that recalls a bygone era of bullpen firemen, the 28-year-old lefty has delivered 12 1/3 scoreless innings for the Brewers thus far while playing a central role in both their Division Series win over the Padres and their Championship Series victory over the Dodgers — so much so that he assembled a reasonable NLCS MVP case, though the award went to Jake Bauers instead.

Ashby has pitched in six of Milwaukee’s eight playoff games, coincidentally Games 1, 2, and 4 of both aforementioned series. He’s thrown more innings than any other Brewer this postseason; by comparison, starters Robert Gasser and Logan Henderson have each totaled nine, and Jacob Misiorowski eight. Four of Ashby’s six outings have been hitless, and all but one has lasted at least 1 2/3 innings, a luxury afforded by the October schedule’s extra days off and his own efficiency and stamina.

“The way this guy loves to play, loves to throw every day. He keeps on wanting the ball,” said pitching coordinator Jim Henderson of Ashby in the wake of the NLCS clincher. “He’s trained himself for it. Every single day he plays catch, he gives it a full effort. He doesn’t save bullets. He creates them.” Read the rest of this entry »