FanGraphs Baseball

Jake Bloss is looking to rebound after two years of frustration. A Top 100 prospect beginning with our midseason update in 2024 — he ranked 82nd with a 50 FV — the 25-year-old right-hander made his major league debut with the Houston Astros that June before being traded to the Toronto Blue Jays. He subsequently landed on the shelf after tearing his UCL six minor league starts into the 2025 season, and he is still battling his way back to full form. Returning to the mound this summer, Bloss registered a 6.18 ERA and a 6.01 FIP over 39 1/3 minor league frames. Much for those reasons, he ranked just ninth on our newly-released Blue Jays top prospects list. Moreover, his FV has been downgraded to a 40+.

In his recent report on Bloss, Brendan Gawlowski noted that, “I still like him and, health willing, see a path to the mid-rotation projection he had last year. Between the injury and uneven performance, though, he slides into this FV tier for now.”

The road to Toronto currently has Bloss in Arizona, where his outings with the Mesa Solar Sox have been something of a mixed bag. As chance would have it, I attended arguably the best of them on a drizzly October 31 afternoon at Scottsdale Stadium. Pitching against a Scorpions lineup that included highly-regarded prospects such as Nathan Flewelling and Zyhir Hope, Bloss fanned four batters and allowed just a pair of baserunners over three innings. Notably, his fastball velocity sat 96-97 mph throughout. Read the rest of this entry »

With another season in the books, it looks like it’s going to be a long winter. The good news is that for certain flavors of sicko, this is when the real action happens. Welcome to We Tried Season. In case you’ve forgotten, We Tried is the catch-all term for when a player signs with one team and another team subsequently makes it known that they also tried to sign that player, or at least had some interest in him. It’s a way of mollifying the fans who desperately want their team to get better. “No, we didn’t sign the player you wanted us to sign,” says the team, “but we are committed to getting better. Just not as committed as the team that actually signed him. Please don’t be mad at us.”

Imagine that it’s Christmas morning. Your son wakes up and sprints down to the tree to find his presents. You’re already up, sitting in an armchair with your slippers on and a steaming cup of tea. “Hey little guy,” you say with a smile. “You can stop looking. Santa didn’t bring you any presents this year. But don’t you worry! He strongly considered getting you that Lego set you wanted, before ultimately deciding that it wasn’t the best allocation of his limited resources.” Wouldn’t that make your son feel better?

That’s the essence of the We Tried, and here at FanGraphs, we’ve spent the past two offseasons and trade deadlines documenting them all, both in writing and in needlessly complicated spreadsheets. We haven’t seen an official We Tried so far this offseason, but reports of which teams are interested in which players are starting to fly, and we’ve already come very close. After right-hander Ryan Weiss signed a one-year deal with the Padres, Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported that Weiss “had interest around the league and a chance to return to the KBO.” Maybe we’ll find out which other teams were interested in Weiss, but for the meantime, we can be generous and credit the entire country of South Korea with the first We Tried of the offseason. Congratulations Korea, and thank you for gochujang. It is amazing. 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.

By the time he was 20 years old, Dusty Baker had been drafted by the Braves, fished with Satchel Paige, attended the Monterey Pop Festival, smoked marijuana with Jimi Hendrix, enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserves, and collected his first two major league hits. More than half a century later, after a 19-year playing career and 24-plus seasons as a manager, he secured his 2,000th win as a skipper and led the Astros to a championship, becoming the oldest manger to win a World Series (age 73) in the process. In between those two points, he was mentored by Henry Aaron while the slugger chased and surpassed Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, inadvertently helped invent the high five, won a World Series as a player, endured several excruciating near-misses as a manager, and became friends with future president Barack Obama. The lives and careers of baseball figures don’t get much more fascinating. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Andrew Friedman’s comments about the Brewers, non-baseball historical comps for Pat Murphy’s unprecedented third consecutive Manager of the Year Award, and what it would take for him to extend the streak to four. Then (27:17) Meg breaks down her NL Rookie of the Year ballot, followed by additional discussion of why the Cubs won’t sign Tarik Skubal, Scott Boras puns, Ty France’s roof ball, a few stray signings/hirings, and NPB ghost wins.

Audio intro: PJ Harding, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Josh Busman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Friedman thread
Link to FG preseason staff predictions
Link to Dan S. on ZiPS
Link to Dan on Brewers ZiPS
Link to Murphy win
Link to Murphy wiki
Link to NL MotY voting
Link to Helen Mirren wiki
Link to The Debut wiki
Link to Mikhail Kutuzov wiki
Link to Gebhard von Blücher wiki
Link to Arthur Currie wiki
Link to Sharpe novels wiki
Link to Aubrey–Maturin novels wiki
Link to superfecta wiki
Link to NL RotY voting
Link to McGwire Simpsons clip
Link to Stewart monthly splits
Link to Wetherholt monthly splits
Link to Benge monthly splits
Link to Benge arm article
Link to rookie WPA leaders
Link to EW Episode 2531
Link to best ML rookie wRC+
Link to rookie non-pitcher wRC+
Link to Sahadev on Skubal
Link to MLBTR on Skubal bidding
Link to MLBTR on Brown surgery
Link to Boras phone ring
Link to Boras on Skubal
Link to more Boras on Skubal
Link to Boras on Jeffers
Link to Boras on Arozarena
Link to Boras on Scherzer
Link to Boras on EW
Link to Boras sign clip
Link to more Boras sign
Link to MLBTR on Ausmus
Link to Ausmus anticipation tweet
Link to MLBTR on Pagán
Link to Baumann on Pagán
Link to Heyman on Kimbrel
Link to Nathan on France
Link to ghost wins article
Link to Breslow title change

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In the days before the 2021-22 lockout, there was an unprecedented leaguewide free agent spending bacchanal that set high expectations for this November. On Tuesday night, the Detroit Tigers showed up to the party and picked the first canapé off the tray, signing reliever Emilio Pagán to a one-year, $11 million contract.

Pagán is the first of our top 50 free agents to come off the board, and we’re starting from the bottom of the list: Ben Clemens had him ranked right at no. 50 and predicted a two-year, $16 million contract for the 35-year-old from South Carolina. Our crowdsourced predictions were the same, to within half a million dollars. Read the rest of this entry »

There was a spark in the hot stove yesterday when Emilio Pagán signed with the Tigers, but it’s still pretty early in the offseason and not too much has happened. On Monday, I examined how the early 2027 projections viewed the bottom 15 teams in baseball. Today, I’ll take a look at the clubs projected to finish with a .500-or-better record in 2027.

The rankings below present each team as they are currently constructed, based on our Depth Charts playing time projections. This should give us a pretty good idea of which teams would be ready to compete if the 2027 season started today, and which ones have a lot of work ahead of them this offseason.

Our power rankings use a modified Elo rating system. If you’re familiar with chess rankings, you’ll know that Elo is an elegant ranking format that measures teams’ relative strength and is very reactive to recent performance. For these offseason rankings, I’ve pulled the Depth Charts projections and calculated an implied Elo ranking for each team. Our projections are entirely powered by the 2027 Steamer projections right now; the ZiPS projections will be added later on in the offseason. The delta column in the full rankings below shows the change in ranking from the final regular season run of the power rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

Julio Rodríguez only made one five-star catch this year. Well, that’s not entirely true. Rodríguez is indeed credited with making only one five-star play this year, but as you can see, it wasn’t a catch.

With one out and runners on the corners, Detroit’s Dillon Dingler lifted a popup into shallow center field. Either because he knew he wouldn’t get there in time or he knew that the runner on first would have to wait to see whether the ball was caught, Rodríguez pulled up, fielded the ball on the hop, and fired to second for a force out.

I happen to love this kind of play. I love it when the outfielder gets to turn into an infielder for a moment, trying to pick a good hop, snapping the ball up and making a quick transfer, and trying their best to whip the ball to second with the short stroke of a second baseman in time to catch the runner. I’ve had my eye on these outfield force outs ever since Rodríguez made a similar play in 2024.

I noticed that particular play because I was surfing around the defense section of Rodríguez’s Statcast page, and I couldn’t help clicking on that one lonesome dot that indicated he’d made a play that wasn’t just difficult, but quite possibly impossible.

It turned out that catching it in the air was impossible, but in the right situation with the right baserunner, recording the out could still be done. I had intended, over the winter, to write a roundup of that season’s outfield force outs. “Fun video article,” I wrote in my list of article ideas, “outfielders making force plays.” But as is so often the case, other, more pressing matters kept coming up. Now here we are two years later, and the roundup’s time has finally come, though you could argue that it’s coming too late. The 2026 season saw 17 outfield force outs. Not counting 2020, that’s tied for the lowest total in the pitch tracking era. In fact, the numbers seem to be trending downward very slightly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then, something takes place in a major league baseball game that causes my inbox to light up. That’s what happened on October 4, when then-Padres first baseman Ty France hit a towering fly ball down the left field line during Game 1 of the NLDS at American Family Field. The ballpark has a retractable roof, which was closed at the time. As a result, the ball hit a roof cable in fair territory, slowing its progress to the point where it was caught on the warning track by Brewers left fielder Jackson Chourio. Since the ball struck the cable in fair territory, it was in play according to the American Family Field ground rules, so the caught ball was ruled an out. Nobody disputes those facts.

But here’s the question everyone seemed to be asking me: Had the ball not hit the cable, would it have cleared the left field fence in fair territory for a home run? Note that the fence is 342 feet from home plate and eight feet high. Note also that the ball was hit down the line. So the question of whether it would have been a home run reduces to two separate questions regarding the location of the ball once it reached 342 feet from home plate:

• Was the height of the ball greater than eight feet?
• Was the ball to the field side of the foul line?

Normally, given the exit velocity and launch angle, determining whether France’s ball would have been a home run would be easy. I would simply use my Trajectory Calculator with default values for the unknown parameters to calculate the full trajectory. Those default parameters are based on analysis of Statcast batted ball data from past major league seasons. However, this particular batted ball was somewhat unusual in that, while the exit velocity was a respectable 105.3 mph, the launch angle, 48.7 degrees, was considerably steeper than is typical for a major league home run. Had the ball been hit at close to the optimum launch angle of about 30 degrees, it would have carried over 400 feet, making the answer to our first question a resounding “yes.” But that is not what happened. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 23rd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the first team up is the Milwaukee Brewers.

Batters

There’s nothing in projectionating as humbling as projecting the Milwaukee Brewers, the team that has apparently spent the last six years perfecting the ability to outperform forecasts. Even with my attempts to be as aggressive as possible with constructing depth charts, and ZiPS coming in as the most optimistic projection system on the Brew Crew, it still managed to underestimate the Brewers by more than a dozen wins in 2026. I do take solace in the fact that it doesn’t seem like any of the other 29 teams in baseball, including the Rays, have figured out how to do this with such regularity, and the brainpower of a 50-person analytics staff easily outpowers mine.

On the Milwaukee offense, nobody stands outs as an MVP candidate, but by the same token, there are a lot of really good players, and only one or two actual holes in the starting lineup. In last season’s ZiPS rundown, I said the Brewers looked a lot like one of those peak 2010s Cardinals teams in their depth and balance, and nothing that happened in 2026 disabused me of that notion.

Most of the lineup returns in 2027, with the obvious exceptions of any possible trades, and only Jake Bauers and Gary Sánchez hitting free agency. Bauers may very well be back on a one-year qualifying offer — I’d counsel him to do so if I were his agent — and while Sánchez was certainly a nice-to-have, the Brewers declined their side of the mutual option and seem likely to either pick up another cheap veteran or just roll with Jeferson Quero. There’s some real value for working Quero in at the major league level (assuming his shoulder is OK) with William Contreras scheduled to reach free agency after 2027. It’s also quite possible that Bo Naylor ends up in this spot; he was pretty awful in 2026, but Naylor’s also the type of underperforming veteran-ish player that the Brewers seem to do very well with.

Brice Turang and Jackson Chourio are obvious All-Star candidates, and a good season from Garrett Mitchell or Cooper Pratt puts them into that conversation. ZiPS likes Luis Lara’s breakout potential, and thinks he’s better than he was in his debut. ZiPS doesn’t like Jesús Made as immediately as Steamer does, but still seems him having a 40-WAR type of career. On the lesser prospect stuff, ZiPS sees the Brewers as having very good farm depth, and while none of Luke Adams, Andrew Fischer, Jett Williams, or Josh Adamczewski get big projections, they all project to have situational value and should be good emergency options.

ZiPS sees first base as the biggest offseason need for the lineup. DH, too, but I doubt Christian Yelich is going anywhere. Andrew Vaughn had a .306/.390/.444 line in 2026, but ZiPS also thinks his BABIP was about 60 points above what his Statcast data suggested it would be, and he doesn’t have a history of overperforming what ZiPS thinks about his BABIP.

Pitchers

Having Jacob Misiorowski at the top of the rotation is a great way to start off your pitching staff, and he certainly goes into 2027 as a leading Cy Young candidate (and the likely 2026 winner). I still have this horror-movie image of him throwing a fastball 104 mph while his arm travels 95 mph and lands in front of the catcher in a grisly scene, but that hasn’t happened yet. I’m sorry, pitchers scare me more than any Halloween-themed movie.

ZiPS sees the rest of the rotation as good, but rather unexciting. Logan Henderson, Robert Gasser, and Kyle Harrison all project as league-average or better starters, with their relatively low WARs coming down to rather low innings totals. ZiPS is aware of Quinn Priester’s thoracic outlet issues, so it gives him a pretty big hit in the projections, but if he’s not comfortably back, Shane Drohan, Tyson Hardin, and Coleman Crow all have projections that are better than most teams’ sixth starters. This does feel like a rotation that would benefit from someone to eat some innings in the middle of the rotation, like Kevin Gausman. Maybe the Brewers can fix Zac Gallen.

The projections see some depth work to do in the bullpen. Like Steamer, ZiPS really likes the top three of Trevor Megill, Aaron Ashby, and Abner Uribe, and it is moderately a fan of DL Hall and Chad Patrick. The Brewers may be able to populate the rest of the bullpen with some of the starter candidates that don’t make the rotation, such as Drohan or Crow, but a value add or two in the bullpen in free agency would be welcomed.

There’s a lot of winter to go, as in all of it, but ZiPS has no problem seeing the Brewers as the NL Central favorites right now. It still prefers the Cubs’ lineup, but the Cubs have a lot of pitching stuff to figure out, and in quick preliminary runs with current rosters, ZiPS generally has the Brewers somewhere around 90 wins and as a moderate NL Central favorite. Which means they’ll win 109 games or something in 2027.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Charts playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2027 due to injury, and players who were released in 2026. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a post-industrial, Gregorian-chant, bubblegum-Reggaeton band that only performs at rural zoning board meetings, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.18.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on Bluesky. This last is, however, not an actual requirement.