Author Archive: Ben Clemens

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 »

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 »

After a dominant run through the American League East this year, the Tampa Bay Rays have punched their ticket to the World Series. Down 2-1 in the ALCS, they reeled off two straight wins in Cleveland over the weekend to take a 3-2 lead back home. And with a chance to put the series away, following a wild weekend of rain, rescheduling, and bullpen games as far as the eye could see, the Rays rose to the occasion, jumping all over the Guardians early and tacking on late to cruise to a 7-3 Game 6 win on Monday night. It was a comprehensive victory for the top seed in the American League, and it showed off their ability to do whatever is needed to win, whether it’s one-upping the opposition at their own game or putting a contest to bed with late-inning power.

Cleveland is a club that needs to make the most out of every opportunity to outscore its opponents. The team’s much-ballyhooed “Guards Ball” style depends a lot on a dominant pitching staff and a little on turning balls in play into baserunners, pressure, and eventually runs. But time and again on Monday, the Rays were the Guardians’ match when it came to the small plays that can flip the game – and they showed off an extra gear when push came to shove. Time and time again, they turned the Guardians away in big moments and extended the lead when they got their own chances.

One sequence was emblematic of the night: In the top of the fourth inning, the Guardians staged an all-too-rare rally against Freddy Peralta. Jo Adell led off the inning with a roped line drive double. Nathaniel Lowe battled back from 0-2 to draw a walk. After a fly out, Patrick Bailey came up and chopped a grounder over Peralta’s head. It was the kind of ball that could rattle around and lead to chaos. But Taylor Walls was having absolutely none of it. He rampaged across second, waved Richie Palacios out of the way, and snared the ball at a full sprint, headed directly toward Lowe, who panicked and slammed on the brakes, but to no avail. Walls ran him down, brushed a tag as Lowe fell out of the basepath, and fired to first to complete a double play. What might have been a big inning instead ended without a run scoring. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

For the third consecutive year, I voted for the Fielding Bible Awards, Sports Info Solutions’ annual recognition of the best defenders in major league baseball. They’re a Gold Glove equivalent for the majors as a whole, created by SIS and John Dewan in 2006. A panel of video scouts and baseball experts vote for five players at each spot; there are also awards for the best multi-position defender, the defensive player of the year, and the defensive team of the year. The awards will be released this Thursday, October 22, and this article will be updated to note the winners once they’re announced. Update: the winners have been announced, and are denoted by asterisks below.

Voting for any award is a prestigious honor, and voting on this panel has great personal import to me. Over the years, the panelists have included basically every writer who got me into baseball statistics when I was younger. Bill James, Peter Gammons, the founder of Strat-o-Matic – you get the idea. It’s a group I’m honored to be a part of, and I take my voting responsibilities very seriously. To that end, I spent some time this year updating my previous voting methods. Let me walk you through it.

Earlier this year, MLB Senior Data Architect Tom Tango did some work on blending multiple defensive systems together. I had actually landed on a similar method after discussing my inaugural ballot with Tom two years ago, but there’s never a bad time for a refresh. I started with Tom’s approach, added in Baseball Prospectus’ DRP as an additional number, and created blends for each position group based on how well each metric tracked itself year-to-year, as well as how well it predicted other metrics from one year to the next. Of note, I moved around my infield weights a bit, increasing the importance of DRS; it has narrowly been the best metric in the post-shift-ban world, a change in defensive rules meaningful enough for me to strongly prefer sampling from it for my initial rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re searching for a metaphor for how differently the 2026 NLCS has gone than last year’s version, look no further than Blake Snell. In 2025, the two-time Cy Young winner humbled Milwaukee in the series opener, allowing one hit over eight strong innings, a prelude to the drubbing the Dodgers put on the Brewers in a sweep. This year, Snell got the start in Game 3, attempting to keep his team in the series after two Milwaukee victories, but the Brewers proved far more formidable this time around. Last year’s series was all about dominant Los Angeles pitching. The current edition has been about back-and-forth games and a resilient Milwaukee offense, and Wednesday’s contest — which the Brewers ultimately won 6-2 to pull within one win of their first World Series appearance since 1982 — delivered on both counts.

In last year’s NLCS start, Snell faced the minimum, erasing the only Brewers baserunner with a double play. This time, his brush with perfection lasted all of one pitch. Snell eased a fastball down the middle to Jackson Chourio to start things off, and Chourio tattooed it, a line drive missile that screamed out to right field, landing in the Dodger Stadium seats before many of the fans did. (This being Los Angeles just after 5 PM local time, only about a quarter of the spectators had arrived.) Snell recovered to retire the next three batters in order, but the tone was set: This iteration of the Brewers wasn’t going to go meekly into the L.A. night.

Snell has been spectacular when available since joining the Dodgers, and he had it all working in the early innings of Game 3. His curveball fizzed with menace, he located his changeup near perfectly, and playoff adrenaline had him up a few ticks on his fastball, which turned an already-good pitch into a monster. He used the curveball to clip the bottom of the zone and the fastball to bully the top of it, a combination that Milwaukee hitters had few answers for over his first six innings of work.

Snell’s counterpart, Robert Gasser, didn’t have the same dominant stuff, but he too gave the opposing lineup fits. He managed as many strikeouts in his five innings of work as Snell recorded in the first inning. He let the leadoff runner reach in three of those five innings. The Dodgers racked up a pile of loud contact; when Gasser departed, seven of the eight hardest-hit balls of the game had come against him. Read the rest of this entry »

Every October, FanGraphs grades each playoff manager. We focus on their in-game decisions, because a lot of the most important parts of the job – things like keeping players ready to go and making sure relievers understand their role so they know when they might be deployed – aren’t always visible to us from the outside looking in. A lot of what managers do never reaches the public eye, so these report cards instead key in on the remainder of their decisions, the ones that come when the lights are bright and the game is on the line.

We attempt to evaluate those decisions based on process, not results. A pitching change isn’t necessarily bad because the reliever who comes in gets shelled, or good because he gets out of a jam. That’s not to say it can’t be a bad decision – if you bring in your closer up eight, or let your worst reliever face Yordan Alvarez with the game on the line, you made the wrong call. But we’re interested in the before, in what we could expect to happen when a manager makes a pitching change or calls on a pinch-hitter. It isn’t good to completely ignore results, but it’s also bad to fixate on them, and it’s my hope that our report cards strike the right balance.

Earlier this month, Jon Becker wrote up the four managers who lost in the Wild Card round. This week, we’re adding the Division Series losers to the mix. Jon and I have already covered Craig Stammen and Aaron Boone. Next up: Will Venable and the White Sox. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Every October, FanGraphs grades each playoff manager. We focus on their in-game decisions, because a lot of the most important parts of the job – things like keeping players ready to go and making sure relievers understand their roles so they know when they might be deployed – aren’t always visible to us from the outside looking in. A lot of what managers do never reaches the public eye. These report cards focus on the remainder of their decisions, the ones that come when the lights are bright and the game is on the line.

We attempt to evaluate those decisions based on process, not results. A pitching change isn’t necessarily bad because the reliever who comes in gets shelled, or good because he gets out of a jam. That’s not to say it can’t be a bad decision – if you bring in a mop-up man in a high-leverage spot, or let your righty specialist face Ben Rice, you made the wrong call. But we’re interested in the before, in what we could expect to happen when a manager makes a pitching change or calls on a pinch-hitter. It isn’t good to completely ignore results, but it’s also bad to fixate on them, and it’s my hope that our report cards strike the right balance.

Earlier this month, Jon Becker wrote up the four managers who lost in the Wild Card round. This week, we’re adding the Division Series losers to the mix. First up: Aaron Boone and the Yankees. Read the rest of this entry »

You want your ace on the mound when all the marbles are in the fire. When the stakes are high, the big cheese needs to have his hands on the wheel. Are those real metaphors? No, but I bet you knew what I was talking about in each case, because the playoffs are a perfect time to discuss the importance of star pitchers. But do you want to deploy them as early in the series as possible? Or do you want them for the decisive game? Does it even matter?

In our game chats and article comments — across the internet really — it’s hard to find a consensus. When I wrote about Chris Sale earlier this week, there were comments to the effect of “It’s a bummer he pitched out of the ‘pen in the Wild Card, now he won’t get to pitch in NLDS Game 5,” as well as “Don’t save Sale for Game 7 of the NLCS, there might not be a Game 7!” Those are exact opposite opinions, and yet they both make a lot of sense when I hear them. But they can’t both be right, so let’s do some math. Even though there’s no real adage to prove or disprove here, this feels like a job for Mathemadage.

Here’s the question, as I see it: For a given set of pitchers making postseason starts, which way would you like those starts arranged in a seven-game series? In other words, if you have an ace, a second banana, and some bullpen games, would you prefer to have your ace for Games 1 and 5 or Games 3 and 7? There are good intuitive reasons to prefer either. Games 1 and 5 happen in almost every seven-game series; Game 7 is a much less frequent occurrence. More innings for my best guy, please! But the stakes can also never be higher than they are in a decisive game. In a big spot? Why wouldn’t I want my best guy in? Read the rest of this entry »