FanGraphs Baseball

If you’re anything like us here at FanGraphs HQ, you also spent days agonizing over our annual list of the top 50 free agents on the market this winter. Arguing whether Carson Kelly or Tyler Stephenson should be ranked higher is our unalienable right as sovereign citizens, and it’s also a whole lot of harmless fun. But you may have also noticed, unlike the 2022 ultra-free-agent class that included Corey Seager, Carlos Correa, and Trevor Story, the pickings are quite slim at shortstop this year. Mauricio Dubón and J.P. Crawford — useful, but not building-block players — are the best the position has to offer.

As such, any team with a shortstop-sized hole on its roster would be wiser to peruse the trade market, where two young players with immense talent but without long-term contracts could aptly fill in: Gunnar Henderson of the Orioles and Elly De La Cruz of the Reds.

Let’s begin Henderson. The onetime wunderkind has had an alarming decline in production since putting up 7.9 WAR and a 154 wRC+ as a 23-year-old in 2024. That season — which also came with a .281 batting average, 21 stolen bases, and a fourth-place MVP finish — serves as a reminder of what he is capable of. But a quick check of both his traditional stats and the peripherals shows that he has not been the same hitter since. Part of that, as Henderson revealed after this season, Baltimore’s second straight below .500, has been the result of shoulder and wrist injuries. Diving for a ball in 2025 caused a shoulder impingement that Henderson said negatively influenced his bat plane, and he spent half of 2026 playing with a barking wrist. Davy Andrews covered Henderson’s ailments in depth at the beginning of October, and a fully healed Henderson could certainly bounce back in 2027, but as he tried to grit his way through the last two campaigns, his performance has not been commensurate with that of a superstar player. In the two seasons since his peak, the home run totals have sagged from 37 to 17 and 24, respectively, and his collective slugging percentage is over 100 points lower, going from .529 in 2024 to a lethargic .420 across ’25 and ’26. However you slice the advanced numbers, too, they’re unappetizing. By wRC+, wOBA, xwOBA, xSLG — and perhaps most indicative of physical troubles, average exit velocity, hard-hit rate, and barrel rate — Henderson has taken a noticeable step back. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series covering the 2027 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Umpires/Executives ballot, which includes candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. You’ll find an introduction to the ballot here. The eight candidates will be voted on in San Diego on December 6, and anyone receiving at least 75% of the vote from the 16 committee members will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 25, 2027 along with any candidates elected by the BBWAA.

In the rules for Era Committee voting published on the Hall of Fame’s website, the provision regarding eligible candidates reads in part, “Those whose careers entailed involvement in multiple categories will be considered for their overall contribution to the game of Baseball; however, the specific category in which these individuals shall be considered will be determined by the role in which they were most prominent.” In theory, this makes sense, but in practice, the various Era Committees have produced rather inconsistent results when it comes to weighing candidates with contributions in multiple areas.

For example, the elections of Gil Hodges and Jim Kaat as players on the 2022 Golden Days ballot suggest an additive effect of their additional contributions — the former as a manager, the latter as a broadcaster — atop long, good-to-great playing careers that didn’t quite measure up as Hall-worthy in the eyes of BBWAA voters or previous committees (to say nothing of JAWS). Yet managers haven’t been treated similarly in the recent past, with Davey Johnson and Lou Piniella each falling short twice and seeming to get less credit for solid playing careers atop stronger (but hardly unassailable) qualifications as skippers. Those careers didn’t put them ahead of similarly qualified managers with no major league playing experience, such as Jim Leyland, who was elected on a 2024 ballot that contained both Johnson and Piniella. Meanwhile, Felipe Alou, whose career WAR is greater than those of Johnson and Piniella combined but whose managerial record is limited by years spent with the impoverished Expos, has never been on an Era Committee ballot. This quickly gets messy. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to our 2026 pitching superlatives series. We discussed velocity in part one, movement in part two, and location in part three. Today we’re talking about results. That means which pitches created the most whiffs or balls in play, which pitches produced certain kinds of batted balls, and which pitches made batters look the silliest.

We have to start with the best result a pitcher can get, and that’s a swinging strike. The top of the list features tons of pitches you’d expect: breaking balls from Mason Miller, Adrian Morejon, and Chase Burns. Aaron Ashby’s slider and curveball are both in the top six! But the Whiffiest Pitch in baseball belonged to Luis Medina of the Athletics, whose changeup ran a 59.8% whiff rate. Should we watch every single whiff Medina’s changeup earned this year? Yes, I agree. It’s the only responsible thing to do.

If you’re not familiar with Medina’s game, that’s understandable. He spent the 2023 and 2024 seasons as a starter, ran an ERA above 5.00 in each of them, and missed 2025 due to Tommy John surgery. But he transitioned to the bullpen this year, and he threw 73 innings over 60 appearances, running a 3.08 ERA and a 29.3% strikeout rate. He also had lots of problems. He posted a 12.3% walk rate, a 90-mph average exit velocity, didn’t earn any chases, and didn’t do a great job of keeping the ball on the ground. Basically, whiffs were the only thing keeping Medina afloat. But he seems ripe for an overhaul. He’s got a starter’s repertoire, with a four-seamer, sinker, slider, change, and curve. He led with the four-seamer even though it got shelled. If he shelved it in favor of the sinker and some more sliders and that unhittable changeup, he could be a real weapon. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’m quite certain you’re aware if you’re reading this article on FanGraphs.com, the Milwaukee Brewers just won their first World Series championship in franchise history. They didn’t limp their way to the alcohol showers either, winning 103 games during the regular season before an 11-2 playoff run that never felt as if they were in serious jeopardy. When you’ve already snatched up the full scholarship to an elite school, it probably doesn’t matter whether you got an A or a B in your senior year electives. But as Mr. Barr reminded me when he gave me a D in English in my final quarter of high school, something which I managed to conceal from my mom for 20 years, there are still report cards to fill out.

Grading the manager of a team that dominated in the playoffs is always a bit tricky to pull off. After all, whether moves were good ideas or poor ones, they mostly worked out, or the Brewers wouldn’t have dominated so consistently. But we evaluate the process here, not just the results, and hopefully I have just the right combination of objectivity and natural unlikability to grade Brewers manager Pat Murphy fairly. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley welcome two old friends back to the show to discuss their teams’ recent Fall Classic matchup: former Effectively Wild co-host/FanGraphs writer (and current Rays Senior Analyst, Baseball Process & Strategy) Jeff Sullivan, and former FanGraphs writer (and current Brewers Senior Director—Player Information and Personnel) August Fagerstrom, the latter of whom just became the first FanGraphs alum to earn a World Series ring, at the former’s expense. They talk about playoff anxiety, the feeling of winning (and losing) the World Series, scouting each others’ teams and the similarities between the Brewers and Rays, tailoring team tactics to personnel vs. the other way around, how responsible they feel for their clubs’ successes, the differences between internal and external projections, ABS strategy, front-office turnover and continuity, internal team podcasts, and more.

Audio intro: Beatwriter, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Jeff’s FG author archive
Link to August’s FG author archive
Link to Episode 901
Link to EW guests sheet
Link to Vogelbach’s song
Link to Ben on Brewers/Rays similarities
Link to Ball on the Brewers/Rays
Link to MLBTR on Castro
Link to MLB.com on Roffe
Link to Kleine report
Link to Brewers index cards
Link to Dave/Jeff/Williamson story

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Give a Gift Subscription
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com
 Effectively Wild Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 Apple Podcasts Feed 
 Spotify Feed
 YouTube Playlist
 Facebook Group
 Bluesky Account
 Twitter Account
 Get Our Merch!

For my final Postseason Manager Report Card of the 2026 season, I’m here to evaluate Kevin Cash, Rays manager and World Series loser. While Tampa Bay fell short of its first World Series championship in franchise history and ended the year with something of a whimper, Cash did a commendable job steering his club during its a deep postseason run.

As both Ben Clemens and I have mentioned before each of our previous manager report cards this postseason, I care about process and not results here. It’s easy to say, “That was a great move because it worked,” or “That was a bad move because it failed,” but managers obviously can’t know the results of their decisions as they’re making them. I’ve tried my best to transport myself back to the moment of each decision — taking into account the pitches, innings, and plate appearances that led up to it — while ignoring the outcome.

Lastly, before we get into the grades, I’ll also reiterate that while these are ostensibly manager report cards, there’s a much larger group of people behind the skipper that helps to inform his decisions. Before the game, that includes discussions with the front office, which provides the reams of data that every manager has at his disposal during play. During the game, he’s getting feedback from his coaching staff and players on their levels of health and readiness. It really does take a village to get through a baseball game, and realistically, the praise and scorn doesn’t belong to the manager alone. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series covering the 2027 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee Managers/Umpires/Executives ballot, which includes candidates in those categories who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present. You’ll find an introduction to the ballot here. The eight candidates will be voted on in San Diego on December 6, and anyone receiving at least 75% of the vote from the 16 committee members will be inducted in Cooperstown on July 25, 2027 along with any candidates elected by the BBWAA.

Lou Piniella spent even more years managing in the majors (23, between 1986 and 2010) than he did playing the outfield (18, between 1964 and ’84). To both roles, “Sweet Lou” brought a flair for the dramatic and a fiery intensity — his dust-kicking, hat-stomping, base-throwing tirades became the stuff of legend — as well as tremendous baseball acumen. Like fellow 2019 Today’s Game and 2024 Contemporary Baseball candidate Davey Johnson, he won championships in both phases of his career, but his failure even to reach the World Series a second time as a manager cast a long shadow on every successive stop. Unlike Johnson, he came close to election on both of those ballots, missing by just one vote each time. However, that doesn’t mean it will be easy for him to get to 75% this time. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to day three of our pitching superlatives series. In part one we talked about velocity, and in part 2 we talked about movement. Today we’re talking about location, and I have to tell you, location is a weird topic in today’s game. First, the strike zone shrank. The strike zone has actually been shrinking for a while now, but due to the implementation of the ABS challenge system, it also shrank more quickly just this year.

Second, over the past several years, pitchers have gotten so good that teams spend a lot of time trying to convince them to just trust their stuff and rip it right down the middle. You might recall that the Angels went so far as to have their pitchers stand in as batters against the Traject Ark’s version of their own stuff, just to remind them of how nasty they were. In some ways, you could argue that command has never mattered less than it does right now. That doesn’t mean that location doesn’t matter at all. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, but here’s the diagram that shows Statcast’s Attack Zones.

In 2026, if you threw a pitch right down the middle (in Zone 5, you were 69% more likely to give up a home run than if you threw it elsewhere in the strike zone. That’s why 23% of home runs were hit on middle-middle pitches even though just 7% of pitches were middle-middle. Location may matter less, but people will still tell you that home runs are thrown, not hit, and they’re right. Read the rest of this entry »

First and foremost, I’ll remember the 2026 postseason as a triumph for the Milwaukee Brewers. They romped through October with both the best offense and the best pitching staff in the field, outscoring their opponents by a whopping two runs per game. The best team in baseball did best-team-in-baseball things, in other words. But I’ll also remember the 2026 postseason for its stifling lack of offense, and for the pitchers who caused that brownout. The playoffs are always a low-scoring environment, with every baserunner and out contested. But this year, hitters were particularly helpless. Teams scored just 3.56 runs per game in postseason play, a strikingly tiny number.

And this wasn’t the result of one or two teams running out of gas in October. If you use the regular season’s .314 overall wOBA as a barometer, only the Brewers managed average or better offense in the playoffs:

I threw a smorgasbord of offensive statistics in that table so that you could see all the different ways that teams struggled. The obvious takeaway? The postseason hardly looked like the regular season:

It wasn’t due to a surge in strikeouts, or a decline in walks. Rather, it was that when offenses put the ball in play, they got very little for it. Balls rarely landed for hits, and hitters’ power vanished. The combination of great pitching and great defense was just too much for the put-it-in-play ethos of many of this fall’s teams. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to part two of our pitching superlatives series. I’ll be here all week covering the pitches that stick out the most. Yesterday, I discussed the pitches that stood out the most due to their velocity. Today, we’re talking about movement, but before we get into it, I need to issue a correction.

Yesterday, I credited James McCann with throwing the slowest individual pitch of 2026, but it has been pointed out to me that McCann only threw the slowest tracked pitch of 2026. Twenty-one times, a position player threw a pitch so funky that Statcast threw up its electronic shoulders and assigned it a velocity of “–”. Often, it did so because the pitch was so slow that the cameras didn’t know what to make of it, or perhaps (just a theory) because the slowness of the pitch forced the pitcher to throw such a high-arcing rainbow that it was out of the path where Statcast expects to find pitches. I mean, what are you supposed to do with this pitch?

Either way, it’s possible that McCann’s pitch was, at worst, the 22nd-slowest pitch of the season. However, McCann still threw a plurality of those 21 untracked position player pitches, which means that he’s still most likely the person who threw the slowest pitch of the entire season. It just might not be the one we highlighted yesterday. Could it be this preposterous offering? We’ll never know. Read the rest of this entry »