Welcome to the offseason. As is customary, FanGraphs’ annual top 50 free agent rankings come following the World Series. In recent years, we’ve rotated through the writers principally responsible for the list – first Dave Cameron, then Kiley McDaniel, Craig Edwards, and, more recently, me. I’m back this year and I’ve brought help: the FanGraphs staff contributed mightily to this piece.

Below, I’ve provided contract estimates and rankings of the winter’s top free agents, along with market-focused breakdowns for the top 25 players. That could be a quick discussion of where a player might sign, what a team might look for, or even statistical analysis masquerading as market analysis – what can I say, I like analyzing players. Meanwhile, a combination of Davy Andrews, Michael Baumann, Jay Jaffe, David Laurila, Eric Longenhagen, Leo Morgenstern, Kiri Oler, Esteban Rivera, Michael Rosen, and Dan Szymborski supplied player-focused breakdowns, which are designed to provide some context for each player at this moment in his career. Special thanks to David Appelman, Jon Becker, Sean Dolinar, Jason Martinez, and Meg Rowley for their help behind the scenes.

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 »

“What if they made the whole pitching staff out of high-leverage relievers?” That line of thinking has infiltrated baseball over the past 15 years, and you can see why. The Dodgers built their team around it, and used it to perfection in the first three games of the World Series. When the Yankees weren’t dealing with three solid starters attacking the lineup in short bursts, they were facing an endless array of pitchers who sit in the upper 90s with venomous breaking balls. No wonder the Yankees only scored seven total runs across those three games.

In Game 4, the Dodgers asked another question: What if you made the whole pitching staff out of swingmen? Dave Roberts and the front office always planned on a bullpen game; they’ve been doing those all October. But this one was a wholly different animal than the efforts against the Padres and Mets, and the Yankees took advantage.

Want an example of how it was different? Ben Casparius drew the start, and Roberts gave him two innings, no questions asked. He was shaky as can be. Three walks, a 105-mph double off the top of the wall in dead center, and a few hard-hit balls besides; he spent the entirety of his two innings of work on the ropes, faced 10 batters, and was lucky to escape having only allowed one run. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m trying out a new format for our managerial report cards this postseason. In the past, I went through every game from every manager, whether they played 22 games en route to winning the World Series or got swept out of the Wild Card round. To be honest, I hated writing those brief blurbs. No one is all that interested in the manager who ran out the same lineup twice, or saw his starters get trounced and used his best relievers anyway because the series is so short. This year, I’m sticking to the highlights, and grading only the managers who survived until at least their League Championship series. I already covered Stephen Vogt and the Guardians. Today, I’m looking at Carlos Mendoza and the Mets.

My 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 Mark Vientos and Jackson Chourio were also great this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Francisco Lindor 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. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of reasons to watch this World Series. There’s the history, the star power, the drama. We’ve had Ice Cube concerts and walk-off grand slams, controversial pitching decisions and defensive gems. I’m going to tell you a secret, though: None of those things has been my favorite part so far. The two preeminent strike zone controllers in the entire sport are facing off, and a showdown between Juan Soto and Mookie Betts is always worth watching.

Game 2 was a wonderful encapsulation of just what I’m talking about. Soto came up first, and he engaged Yoshinobu Yamamoto right away. Soto has a plan in every at-bat. It’s quite often the same plan: find a fastball, preferably high or inside, and hit it for a home run. He got started right away with a rip at a first-pitch fastball:

Advantage Yamamoto – but not that much of an advantage. Soto took two straight curveballs low – it’s really hard to fool him. Then Yamamoto came back with another fastball and Soto tried to hit it to Pasadena:

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What a game. This series has been so hyped that a scoreless tie through four innings felt like a letdown. But then the party got started. In the end, we got everything we wanted: stars, steals, defensive gems and gaffes, and even a walk-off home run to evoke Kirk Gibson. But my beat is writing about managerial decisions, so let’s get a quick 1,100 or so words in on that before it’s time for Game 2. Specifically, I’m interested in the bottom half of the 10th inning in Game 1 of the World Series, and the decisions that led to Freddie Freeman’s colossal walk-off grand slam and lifted the Dodgers to a 6-3 win over the Yankees.

Using Nestor

Hated it. The pitch for why it’s a bad decision is pretty easy, right? Nestor Cortes hadn’t pitched in a month, a trusted lefty reliever was also warm, and the scariest possible guy was due up. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where this was the lowest-risk move. There’s not much I can say about the pitch-level data, because he threw only two pitches, but there are myriad reasons to opt for a reliever over a starter in that situation.

A lot of Cortes’s brilliance is in his variety. He throws a ton of different pitches. He has a funky windup – several funky windups, in fact. He changes speeds and locations. That’s how a guy who sits 91-92 mph with his fastball keeps succeeding in the big leagues. But many of those advantages are blunted when you don’t have feel for the game.
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Rihanna said it best. Or maybe it was Russell Crowe. This is the main event. The top seed in the American League meets the top seed in the National League. The presumptive AL MVP is leading his team against the presumptive NL winner. Those guys, coincidentally, are the two biggest free agents in history – Shohei Ohtani broke the bank this past offseason, only a year after Aaron Judge signed a historic deal of his own. Juan Soto might eclipse them both this winter. And while those three are the biggest stars in the game right now, they have three previous MVP winners – Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Giancarlo Stanton – as sidekicks. Oh yeah, and the two highest-paid pitchers in history are the aces of their respective teams. Heck, I’ve allowed this paragraph to run to a ridiculous length, and I’m only now mentioning 2024 Home Run Derby winner Teoscar Hernández.

By any objective measure, this World Series matchup is absolutely loaded with star power. But the current players are only half the story. This is the 12th Yankees-Dodgers matchup in World Series history – the Dodgers have played in 22 of these things, and they’ve faced one team more than half the time. This isn’t quite Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Fall Classic anymore, where the two preeminent teams are a subway ride apart, but the next best thing is a rivalry between the two biggest cities in the country.

Want an example of how good the players in this series are? Here are the top five hitters in baseball by wRC+ this year:

Jay Jaffe dove into how rare it is to see the best player in each league in the World Series – turns out, it’s quite rare! Fifty-homer sluggers have also never faced each other in the Series before now, and that leaves out the fact that Ohtani stole 50 bags too. Soto is an absurdly over-qualified second banana. Betts isn’t on this list, and he was in the MVP running before missing time with injury. The star power on display is simply staggering, as Davy Andrews noted Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I published the first half of my votes for this year’s Fielding Bible awards, which have now been released. This morning, I’m going to cover my ballots for the three outfield positions, pitchers, multi-positional defenders, and defensive player of the year. If you’re curious about the methodology I used, you can read all about it in yesterday’s article, but here’s a bite-sized refresher:

I used a weighted blend of DRS, FRV, DRP, and UZR (the four flagship public defensive metrics), with the weights based on how well each metric did at each position when it comes to reliability and consistency. I used different weightings based on recent effectiveness at a few position groupings: first base, non-first-base infield, catcher, and outfield. That gave me an initial rough order. From there, I used my own expertise, both in terms of deeper statistical dives on individual players and the copious amounts of baseball I watched this year, to assemble my final rankings. I deferred to advanced metrics when the gaps were huge – Patrick Bailey is the best defensive catcher by a mile, for example – but for close calls, I leaned heavily on my own judgment.

That’s the broad strokes of how I built a method for analysis, which is hopefully at least somewhat interesting. More interesting than that? The actual players who played the defense and got the awards. So let’s get right to my last six ballots. The award winners are noted with an asterisk after their name in the balloting section

Left Field
1. Colton Cowser
2. Riley Greene*
3. Lourdes Gurriel Jr.
4. Steven Kwan
5. Jackson Chourio
6. Alex Verdugo
7. Wyatt Langford
8. Ian Happ
9. Brandon Marsh
10. Taylor Ward

I thought that Cowser and Greene were the two easy choices for this award. They both played elite defense, with every metric above average and a few elite markers. (Greene was the best left fielder by DRS, Cowser by FRV.) They both exemplify what I’m looking for in a left fielder – namely, someone good enough that their team keeps playing them in center. In fact, if either were much better defensively, they might not qualify for this award; you have to play the plurality of your innings at a position to qualify, and they both played hundreds of innings in center.
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It was a great honor when Mark Simon of Sports Info Solutions asked me to vote for this year’s Fielding Bible Awards. If you haven’t heard of them before, they’re an alternative to Gold Gloves that were devised by SIS and John Dewan in 2006. A panel of experts votes for 10 players across the majors at each position, as well as a multi-position award and a defensive player of the year. The awards will be released tomorrow, October 24, at 2 p.m. ET. Update: they’ve now been handed out.

Imagine my surprise when I got asked to be one of those experts. I consider myself a strong analyst, but this is the big time: Peter Gammons is a frequent voter, and it’s downright terrifying to be compared to him. So if I was going to do this, I had to do it right. I did what anyone would do in my position: I had a long conversation with MLB Chief Data Architect Tom Tango about how to evaluate defensive systems.

Yeah, it’s good to have friends in high places, what can I say? One of the most pressing questions I had when I sat down to compile my ballot was how much attention to pay to the various defensive grading systems out there. There’s DRS and FRV, the two flagship options. There’s Baseball Prospectus’s DRP and the legacy system UZR. They all purport to measure defensive value, and they all do so with slightly different methodology. They don’t always agree. To give you an example, Taylor Walls is either 12 runs above average (DRS), two runs below (FRV), or somewhere in between (6.6 DRP, 3.8 UZR).
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I’m trying out a new format for our managerial report cards this postseason. In the past, I went through every game from every manager, whether they played 22 games en route to winning the World Series or got swept out of the Wild Card round. To be honest, I hated writing those brief blurbs. No one is all that interested in the manager who ran out the same lineup twice, or saw his starters get trounced and used his best relievers anyway because the series is so short. This year, I’m sticking to the highlights, and grading only the managers who survived until at least their League Championship series. Today, let’s talk about the first of that quartet to be eliminated: Stephen Vogt of the Cleveland Guardians.

My 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 David Fry and Kerry Carpenter were also great this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Juan Soto 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. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Managing in the playoffs is all about balancing immediate payoffs and long-term sustainability. Not ultra long-term, mind you, but managing a bullpen for a seven-game series is trickier than simply pressing the same buttons every day until you win or lose. ALCS Game 4 featured three momentous bullpen decisions. The managers chose differently; they both paid the price. In the end, the Yankees got the better of the Guardians in a 14-pitcher, three-and-a-half-hour, 14-run shootout. But a few early decisions absolutely shaped the way the game went, and so they take center stage here tonight.

No Rest for Cade Smith

Cade Smith was one of the best relievers in baseball this year. If he didn’t play on the same team as Emmanuel Clase, we’d call him a lockdown closer. Instead, he’s a dominant fireman, capable of coming in whenever Stephen Vogt needs him to ice the opposition. And Vogt has needed him a lot. He pitched in all five games of the ALDS. He got the first game of this series off, but then he faced the meat of the Yankees lineup in Game 2 and Game 3.

He’s been pitching nearly every day, which hurts. He’s facing the same batters over and over, which hurts. But what are you going to do, not use your best option against a team that has two MVP-level bats stacked together in an otherwise navigable lineup? Juan Soto had already homered and the Yankees were up 3-2 when the top of the order came up in the sixth inning. On came Smith, for the third time in four days. Read the rest of this entry »