At the end of perhaps the most thrilling back-and-forth Game 7 in World Series history, with one out in the bottom of the 11th inning and the tying run on third base, Alejandro Kirk hit a chopper to shortstop. Mookie Betts raced over to second base to force out Addison Barger, and while running through the bag, fired a perfect strike into the outstretched glove of Freddie Freeman. The Dodgers’ second game-ending double play in as many nights didn’t just clinch the 2025 World Series, it made them the first team to win back-to-back championships since the 1999–2000 Yankees.

Dating back to their days in Brooklyn, the Dodgers have won nine championships, but this is the first time they’ve done so in consecutive seasons. Twice before, they had returned to the World Series as reigning champions only to lose, first to the Yankees in 1956 and then to the Orioles in ’66. Neither of those attempts to repeat involved surviving multiple playoff rounds before that. This time, the 93-win Dodgers went 13-4 in the postseason, first sweeping the 83-win Reds in the Wild Card Series and then defeating three of the four teams that finished with more wins: the 96-win Phillies (3-1 in the Division Series), 97-win Brewers (4-0 in the League Championship Series), and finally the 94-win Blue Jays (who themselves dispatched the 94-win Yankees in the Division Series). Despite being outpitched, outhit, and outscored in the World Series, the Dodgers outlasted the AL champions, with two of their four wins coming in extra innings, the last of those by deploying three of their four series starters in relief and by pulling off three of the 12 most impactful plays ever in terms of Championship Win Probability Added, namely Miguel Rojas’ game-tying home run in the top of the ninth (12th, +34.9% cWPA), Will Smith’s go-ahead solo shot in the top of the 11th inning (fifth, 41% cWPA), and Betts’ double play (fourth, +46.2% cWPA).

Once upon a time, winning back-to-back titles wasn’t uncommon. From 1903 through 2000 — a span of 96 World Series (none in 1904 or ’94) — 10 teams won two in a row, two won three in a row, one won four in a row, and one won five in a row. That’s 14 teams who won at least two World Series in a row (not double-counting any of them), and 21 times in which the World Series winner was the same as the year before. Here’s a breakdown, divided into (roughly) 20-year increments that fortunately don’t split up any back-to-back championships:

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the start of another offseason. As is customary, now that the World Series has concluded, FanGraphs is releasing our ranking of the top 50 free agents available on the market this winter. A number of writers have helmed this list over the years: first Dave Cameron, then Kiley McDaniel, Craig Edwards, and most recently me. This is now my fifth year curating these rankings, and as always, my real superpower is collaboration. The FanGraphs staff contributed mightily at every step along the way.

Below, I’ve provided contract estimates and rankings of the offseason’s top free agents, along with market-focused commentary for the top 25 players. That could be a sketch of likely suitors, a discussion of how qualifying offers might affect a player’s thinking, or even just statistical analysis dressed up as market analysis for Halloween – I’m a baseball nerd at heart, what can I say? A collection of FanGraphs writers – Davy Andrews (DA), Michael Baumann (MB), James Fegan (JF), Jay Jaffe (JJ), David Laurila (DL), Eric Longenhagen (EL), Kiri Oler (KO), Esteban Rivera (ER), and Dan Szymborski (DS) – have supplied player-focused breakdowns for the entire top 50, designed to provide some context for each player at this particular point in their career. Huge thanks go to Meg Rowley for acting as a sounding board throughout the process, Eric Longenhagen for his extensive contributions to my evaluation of the international players, Jason Martinez and Jon Becker for their market knowledge, and Sean Dolinar and David Appelman for technical assistance.

The players are ranked in the order in which I prefer them. That’s often the same as ranking them in contract order, but not always. In some cases, I prefer a player I expect will get less money over one who stands to make more. I’ll generally make note of that in the accompanying comment, but just to reiterate, this list isn’t exclusively sorted by descending average annual value or anything like that. Read the rest of this entry »

This postseason, FanGraphs is continuing its tradition of writing report cards for the on-field decisions made by playoff managers. Excluding the managers who lost in the best-of-three Wild Card Series, we cover every round of the playoffs for all eight managers. It’s detailed enough that I’ve begun enlisting some help. So far this year, I have graded the efforts of A.J. Hinch, Aaron Boone, Craig Counsell, Rob Thomson, and Dan Wilson. Dan Szymborski scrutinized Pat Murphy’s performance. Yesterday and today, I’m taking a look at John Schneider. The Blue Jays played enough games that we decided to split his report into two. Michael Baumann will follow with a review of Dave Roberts. It takes a village to get the kind of in-depth coverage we aspire to provide you.

Our goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but guys like Trey Yesavage and Addison Barger were also excellent this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. George Springer is important because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process.

I’m always looking for new analytical wrinkles in critiquing managerial decisions. For instance, I’ve increasingly come to view pitching decisions as a trade-off between protecting your best relievers from overexposure and minimizing your starters’ weakest matchups, which means that I’m grading managers on multiple axes in every game. I think there’s almost no pitching decision that’s a true no-brainer these days; there are just too many competing priorities to make anything totally obvious. That means I’m going to be less certain in my evaluation of pitching than of hitting, but I’ll try to make my confidence level clear in each case. I tackled the offensive portion of Schneider’s managing yesterday, so now it’s time for the pitching part of his report card. Let’s get to it, shall we? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Meg banter about the slightly shorter-than-usual duration of the offseason, how big the WBC will be, and a few managerial hirings. After that (41:53), they talk to FanGraphs lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen about Munetaka Murakami and this offseason’s most promising free agents from international leagues, what we’ve learned about Roki Sasaki and the factors that predict MLB success for NPB/KBO players, and MLB’s winter moratorium on amateur scouting.

Audio intro: Philip Bergman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme”
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Link to manager hirings/firings
Link to most managers for one GM
Link to Rockies update 1
Link to Rockies update 2
Link to Ben on ex-player GMs
Link to Eric on IFA
Link to Ben on Murakami/Sasaki
Link to scouting moratorium news
Link to EW on the moratorium
Link to Secret Santa sign-up
Link to Plot Hole or Not Hole

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At the conclusion of the ALDS, I wrote an article about Aaron Judge’s postseason. Across seven games and 31 plate appearances, the Brobdingnagian slugger ran a 253 wRC+ with a slash line of .500/.581/.692. If you set a minimum of 30 plate appearances, then that 253 wRC+ ranks 14th among all postseason performances. That last sentence contains a good bit of statistical misdirection; that 30-PA cutoff eliminates most of the players in postseason history, but it’s still low enough to let an outlier like Judge shine. Still, my goal was to highlight how brilliant Judge had been while also trying to create a framework for putting postseason numbers in context. The tiny sample sizes make that really hard to do, and that was part of the point. But Judge wasn’t the only player who excelled this postseason. In that same Divisional Series, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. got 20 plate appearances and batted .529 with a 324 wRC+. Ernie Clement put up the exact same 324 mark with a .643 batting average over 16 plate appearances. I didn’t mention them in the article because of those smaller sample sizes, but I planned to keep my eye on them. They didn’t disappoint.

Guerrero batted .385 with three home runs in the ALCS, running a 250 wRC+. As you may have heard, he had a pretty good World Series, too. He batted .333 with two homers and a 192 wRC+. Put it all together, and Guerrero slashed .397/.494/.795 with eight homers, 18 runs scored, and 15 RBI in the playoffs. He got intentionally walked six times. Should we watch all eight of those homers? Of course we should. There is no excuse too slight to watch all eight of those homers.

Over the entire postseason, Guerrero posted a wRC+ of 241, leaving him just 14 points behind Judge. Going back to our minimum of 30 plate appearances, that’s the 25th-highest mark of all time. But Guerrero didn’t just leave Judge’s 31 plate appearances in the dust, he set an all-time record with 89. His sample was nearly three times bigger, and he was still just 14 points behind!

As we established, over those extra 69 plate appearances in the ALCS and World Series, Guerrero continued his excellent play, so it’s time for an update. Let me show you the graph I made a few weeks ago to show you how much of an outlier Judge was. The red circle is Judge. The green dot is Barry Bonds’ absurd 259 wRC+ performance from the Giants’ 2002 World Series run. I’ve added an orange dot to highlight where Guerrero was at that point.

“This certainly makes Judge look a bit less spectacular,” I wrote at the time. “He’s up toward the top of the heap for a player around 30 plate appearances, but he’s not standing out from the pack the way Bonds did. According to this chart, the most impressive performance in postseason history is undoubtedly Randy Arozarena’s magical, homer-filled 2020 run with the Rays, all the way to the right.” At that point, Guerrero was higher than Judge in raw wRC+, but he was at roughly the same place on the trendline. He was right near the top, but at the 20-PA mark rather than the 30-PA mark, which made it a bit less impressive. Well three sublime weeks later, we can now update this graph. Judge, Bonds, and Arozarena are no longer highlighted. The only dot I’ve highlighted is Guerrero’s and it’s not hard to see why. He stands alone. There’s a brand new dot in town.

What we’re essentially illustrating with this graph is weighted runs created – removing the plus from weighted runs created plus. The higher and further to the right you are, the more runs you’ve created. We’re turning this back into a counting stat in order to look at the players who have put up the most offensive value in a single postseason, and Guerrero just set the record. Here’s the top 10:

If you want to argue about the best single-season playoff hitting performance of all time, you have plenty of metrics to choose from. Without a PA minimum, the highest postseason wRC+ of all time belongs to Jim Mason, who homered in his one postseason plate appearance with the Yankees in the 1976 World Series. Because the league had a paltry .681 OPS that year, his home run was weighted more heavily than the three other players who homered in their only postseason plate appearance. He has a career postseason wRC+ of 1,432, quite a bit better than his regular season mark of 53.

If you set a minimum of 15 plate appearances in order to include players from the time when the World Series constituted the entirety of the postseason, then you’ve got Lou Gehrig’s 419 wRC+ when the Yankees swept the Cardinals in 1928. Gehrig went 6-for-11 with a double, four home runs, six walks! He made just five outs in four games and ran a slash line of .545/.706/1.727.

If you’re interested in win probability added, then the Cardinals get their revenge in the form of David Freese’s absurd 2011 run. His 1.91 WPA puts him on top. He was impossible to retire, and because he was batting behind the triumvirate of Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday, and Lance Berkman, who combined for an on-base percentage of .444, he was always coming to the plate with runners on base in high-leverage situations.

But if you’re just talking about sustained excellence, then the answer is clear. The crown once belonged to Bonds, then Arozarena. It now belongs to Guerrero.

I’m still coming down from the high of what I think we can all agree was a terrific World Series. It’ll go down as one of the best of the 21st century; it had star power, shocking twists, unlikely heroes, the whole nine yards. The guys who plotted out the ludicrously dramatic football depicted in Friday Night Lights are probably like, “Guys, cool it, you’re pouring it on too thick.”

The last game and a half especially, I was genuinely stressed out over the outcome, which is not something that usually happens when I have neither a partisan dog in the fight nor the obligation to write off the game. Read the rest of this entry »

This postseason, FanGraphs is continuing its tradition of writing report cards for the on-field decisions made by playoff managers. Excluding the managers who lost in the best-of-three Wild Card Series, we cover every round of the playoffs for all eight managers. It’s detailed enough that I’ve begun enlisting some help. So far this year, I have graded the efforts of A.J. Hinch, Aaron Boone, Craig Counsell, Rob Thomson, and Dan Wilson. Dan Szymborski scrutinized Pat Murphy’s performance. Today and tomorrow, I’m taking a look at John Schneider. The Blue Jays played enough games that we decided to split his report into two. Michael Baumann will follow with a review of Dave Roberts. It takes a village to get the kind of in-depth coverage we aspire to provide you.

Our goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but guys like Trey Yesavage and Addison Barger were also excellent this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. George Springer is important because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process.

I’m always looking for new analytical wrinkles in critiquing managerial decisions. For instance, I’ve increasingly come to view pitching decisions as a trade-off between protecting your best relievers from overexposure and minimizing your starters’ weakest matchups, which means that I’m grading managers on multiple axes in every game. I think there’s almost no pitching decision that’s a true no-brainer these days; there are just too many competing priorities to make anything totally obvious. That means I’m going to be less certain in my evaluation of pitching than of hitting, but I’ll try to make my confidence level clear in each case. Let’s get to it – well, at least, the hitting half of it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Meg banter about all the highlights of World Series Game 7, with a side of World Series Game 6, break down the appeal of the now-completed postseason, and discuss what teams might take away from the success of 2025’s pennant winners.

Audio intro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Sean .P, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ben’s post-G7 story
Link to cWPA data
Link to Dan S. on the Dodgers
Link to Neil Paine on the Dodgers
Link to Passan on Yamamoto/Rojas
Link to Tango on IKF
Link to Andrews on the bench-clearing
Link to Ohtani’s G6 double
Link to postgame Mattingly moment
Link to 2015 Theo quote

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“I mean, we get that there’s extra time kind of baked in there when he’s either on the plate – when he’s either at the plate – JORDAN!”

That’s how it started. If you’ve ever wondered how a standard manager-umpire interaction goes down, well, now you know. It starts with the manager screaming the umpire’s name at the top of his lungs and waving an arm. In the bottom of the fourth inning, as John Schneider attempted to manage the Blue Jays to victory in Game 7 of the World Series while enduring an in-game interview, Justin Wrobleski started Andrés Giménez off with a fastball high and tight. It both looked and sounded like the ball might have clipped Giménez’s elbow, so midway through a measured critique of home plate umpire Jordan Baker for pausing the game while Shohei Ohtani switched from hitter mode to pitcher mode, Schneider signaled to Baker that he wanted to pause the game for a moment to check the video.

The video room told the Blue Jays not to challenge. The ball had missed Giménez. A ball and a strike later, Wrobleski lost control of yet another fastball, and Schneider once again asked Baker to pause the game. Visibly upset, the manager crossed his arms and stuck out his chin while he waited on word from the replay room. This pitch was more high than inside, and despite Giménez’s best efforts, it had once again missed him. He had tried the classic move of earning a hit-by-pitch by letting his elbow drift out over the plate in the process of turning back toward the catcher and (ostensibly) away from the pitch. Then, realizing that he’d still be a few inches shy of the ball, he just stuck his arm out artlessly. Well, it was only artless in the respect that he’d dispensed with subterfuge. The ball was slightly above his arm, so he tried to close the distance by raising first his shoulder, then his elbow, then his wrist, and finally his fingers. He was popping and locking, artfully, and when that didn’t get him high enough, he hopped a few inches into the air. Had he made contact with the ball that way, Baker would have been forced to keep him at the plate, just as James Hoye did when Aledmys Díaz leaned into an inside pitch in Game 1 of the 2022 World Series. Giménez looked into the dugout with a frown, and Schneider followed suit. Read the rest of this entry »

The champagne and tears have barely dried in the wake of this year’s instant-classic World Series, but election season is already upon us. On Monday, the National Baseball Hall of Fame officially unveiled the 2026 Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot, an eight-man slate covering players who made their greatest impact on the game from 1980 to the present and whose eligibility on the BBWAA ballot has lapsed. For the second year in a row, the Hall stole its own thunder, as an article in the Winter 2025 volume of its bimonthly Memories and Dreams magazine revealed the identities of the eight candidates prior to the official announcement. The mix includes some — but not all — of the controversial characters who have slipped off the writers’ ballot in recent years, including Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, as well as a couple surprises. This cycle also marks the first application of a new rule that could shape future elections.

Assembled by the Historical Overview Committee, an 11-person group of senior BBWAA members, the ballot includes Bonds, Clemens, and fellow holdovers Don Mattingly and Dale Murphy, as well as newcomers Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Gary Sheffield, and Fernando Valenzuela. As with any Hall election, this one requires 75% from the voters to gain entry. In this case, the panel — whose members won’t be revealed until much closer to election time — will consist of Hall of Famers, executives, and media members/historians, each of whom may tab up to three candidates when they meet on Sunday, December 7, at the Winter Meetings in Orlando. Anyone elected will be inducted alongside those elected by the BBWAA (whose own ballot will be released on November 17) on July 26, 2026 in Cooperstown. In the weeks before that, I’ll cover each candidate’s case in depth here at FanGraphs.

This is the fourth ballot since the Hall of Fame reconfigured its Era Committee system into a triennial format in April 2022, after a bumper crop of six honorees was elected by the Early Baseball and Golden Days Era Committees the previous December. The current format splits the pool of potential candidates into two timeframes: those who made their greatest impact on the game before 1980 (Classic Baseball Era), including Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues Black players, and those who made their greatest impact from 1980 to the present day (Contemporary Baseball Era). The Contemporary group is further split into two ballots, one for players whose eligibility on BBWAA ballots has lapsed (Fred McGriff was elected in December 2022), and one for managers, executives, and umpires (Jim Leyland was elected in December 2023). Non-players from the Classic timeframe are lumped in with players, which doesn’t guarantee representation on the final ballot. Read the rest of this entry »