Dan Szymborski: “Give me an introduction message for a Dan Szymborski FanGraphs chat that sounds like it’s from a deranged person with limited connection with reality and an obsession with history who also really really like FanGraphs”
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Dan Szymborski: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your WAR calculations! I rise today in this digital amphitheater not as Caesar, not as Napoleon, but as a humble pilgrim trudging across the blood-soaked battlefields of history in pursuit of a single shining truth: FanGraphs is the Rosetta Stone of civilization. When Rome collapsed, did the barbarians have wOBA? No. When Napoleon marched on Moscow, did he consult ZiPS projections? He did not — and look what happened! Yet here we stand in the Year of Our Lord 2025, blessed to witness the holy gospel of OBP+, xFIP, and Dan Szymborski’s inscrutable oracles. I have not slept in three nights, my parakeet now knows what BABIP is, and I carved the FanGraphs logo into the oak desk of my landlord while screaming about FIP- minus. Brothers, sisters, eternal strugglers against the darkness of ignorance, we gather not to talk of weather or bread, but of spin rates and aging curves, of regression to the mean and the cruel march of time itself! History collapses into the present momen
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Guest: I’ve always assumed that hitters with large platoon splits would age more poorly than those with more balanced splits, but recently realized that my evidence was entirely anecdotal. Is there significant statistical evidence that supports this? Thanks.
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Dan Szymborski: I have not found this. It’s possible simply that they’re more exploitable, that the general declines makes them more obviously platoonable than a similarly talented player with small splits
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Dan Szymborski: Like the 350/500 guy an ages to be a 330/450 guy and still hits 310/430 and 340/460
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Dan Szymborski: But maybe the PLATOONY 350/500 guys is suddenly now a 280/350 and 390/550 guy where he once awas a 300/400 and 420/600 guy
As much as I love coverage of Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, or Cal Raleigh, talking about the absolute best players in the league can be a bit too rich, like trying to eat an entire plate of fudge in a single sitting. Since so many baseball arguments revolve around who is going to win an award or who is the best at something, I feel there’s a bit of a weird tendency for the next tier of players — those who are having great seasons but are likely to fall short of winning a major award, even if they end up as finalists — to get surprisingly little coverage relative to the big dogs (or dumpers). So, in the interest of improving the coverage-to-awesomeness ratio for baseball’s next-best guys, here are the most interesting players on the edges the awards conversation. I’ll also throw in some updated long-term projections because, as Chekhov’s projection system states, if ZiPS is on the mantle in the first act, it should be run at some point. Stats are through Wednesday’s games unless otherwise noted. Read the rest of this entry »
Major League Baseball’s injured list is the sport’s unofficial 31st team, one that never makes the playoffs but always plays spoiler. In the last week, 22 players were placed on the IL. The biggest name was Will Smith, who late last week landed on the IL with a bone bruise on his hand, courtesy of a rather rude foul tip off the bat of Nick Gonzales.
The Dodgers aren’t known for having a great deal of injury luck, but as injuries go, Smith’s appears to be far less consequential than it could have been. Smith’s tests revealed no fracture, minimizing the amount of time he’s expected to miss. The 30-year-old catcher is having the best offensive season of his career, with a .296/.404/.497 slash line and a 153 wRC+, all except slugging percentage representing career bests. He has played in fewer games than usual, but that’s largely due to the team’s roster construction; he started 39 games at designated hitter in 2022-2023, but Shohei Ohtani’s presence now makes it far more difficult to sneak him into the lineup here when he has a day off of catching. The injury would be a big deal… if it were a big deal, but Smith could return as early as this upcoming weekend. It could have been even sooner, but Smith’s start last Tuesday after missing five games meant that the retroactive IL date was later than September 3, when the Gonzales foul tip occurred.
Smith and the Dodgers seem to have gotten lucky, but the Astros and Yordan Alvarez may not see the same fortune. Less than a month after returning from a broken hand that had cost him more than half of the 2025 season, Alvarez turned his ankle while touching home plate in an awkward fashion that is only appropriate on your Stretch Armstrong doll. He has not yet been placed on the IL, and the exact consequences are still to be determined, but it’s all but official that he is going to miss some time. We’ll know more after his MRI on Tuesday. A serious injury to Alvarez could imperil the Astros in their tight playoff race and beyond if they make it to October.
Alvarez has already spent 115 days on the IL this season, and the Astros have certainly felt his absence, but how do their losses this season compare to those of other teams this season? More broadly, which team has lost the most production to the injured list? If you ask the fans of an underperforming team, the near-unanimous answer will be “us,” but I think we can do better than that! Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Szymborski: mesdames et messieurs, bienvenue, nobles FanGraphiers et vénérables sabermétriciens!
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Alex: Drake Baldwin has had a wonderful rookie season. What would you expect from the rest of his career? Brian McCann had a career year at 22 and never exceeded the numbers he posted that season; Big Dumper hit a stratospheric other level. Where do you see Baldwin going from here?
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Dan Szymborski: As I always tell everyone: catchers are weird
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Dan Szymborski: Sometimes they peak weirdly, sometimes they stop developing, sometimes they just blow up late somehow
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Dan Szymborski: I’m not sure we know which weird way Baldwin will age, so just assume something fairly normal and prepared for Mets level tracknessy (tradgety + wackiness)
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Idiotic Failson: Grisham and Bellinger are both going to be free agents. Do you think the Yankees resign one, both, or neither?
First impressions can prove to be fleeting in baseball, but it’s still better to make a good one than a poor one. And as first impressions go, Boston Red Sox rookie Connelly Early’s was absolutely dynamite. Throwing five innings in his debut, Early whiffed 11 A’s batters, with a single walk as a minor demerit, and exited the game with a 5-0 lead that was never threatened.
So how did he do it? Sometimes rookie pitchers simplify their repertoire somewhat while they’re getting adjusted to the majors, but Early threw five different pitches at least 10 times, and got at least three swings and misses on each of them, totaling 19 for the game. His most hittable pitch on Tuesday, his changeup, still had a respectable 70% contact rate, about league average for changeups (70.5%). And with the exception of his sinker, which he only offered up against lefties, he didn’t aggressively limit his toolset based on the platoon advantage, either. (For more on Early’s stuff, I can’t do better or find a more fitting piece for you to read than David Laurila’s May profile of the southpaw.) Read the rest of this entry »
It’s hard to believe, but in two months, the celebratory World Series Champagne will have dried, the beer will be gone, and free agents will hit the open markets. After the season, players and teams have only five days to make their final option decisions, a choice that can have an enormous impact on future earnings or offseason team plans. I’m not here to predict all of those options in a 40,000-word article, as you, loyal FanGrapheteer, might nod off in boredom while Meg and Matt plot my no-doubt painful demise. But we can do a subset of them, the opt-outs and player options, as many of these are the biggest decisions that will need to be made in November. Plus, it’s an excuse to run out some early projections, which is always fun.
Unless I missed one, there are 15 opt-out clauses or player-only options.
Alex Bregman, 3B, Boston Red Sox
It took until mid-February for Alex Bregman to find a new team last year, and his arrival in Boston set off an unexpected chain of events that ended with Rafael Devers getting traded to San Francisco. Bregman has a particularly interesting choice to make in that he has only two years remaining on his deal, but a pretty spicy $80 million coming to him for those two seasons if he stays. Naturally, Bregman wants a little more security that what his Red Sox deal calls for, but that might not be attainable to him at his current rate of $40 million per year. He turns 32 in March, so he won’t be able to command a lucrative long-term deal like the one that Kyle Tucker, who is still in his 20s, is expected to sign this winter. Read the rest of this entry »
The Red Sox got to work on their 2026 bullpen over the holiday weekend, signing closer Aroldis Chapman to a contract extension that keeps him in Boston for at least one more season. Chapman’s one-year, $13.3 million deal comes in the form of a $12 million salary for next season, a $1 million signing bonus, and a $300,000 buyout if a $13 million mutual option for 2027 is not exercised. That option becomes guaranteed if he pitches 40 innings in 2026 and passes a physical exam after the season.
After appearing to be in decline for at least a few years and falling out of the conversation of baseball’s top closers — and at times losing the closer’s role altogether — Chapman is dominating in his first season with the Red Sox. Entering play Tuesday, he has a 1.00 ERA and a 1.78 FIP over 54 innings with 77 strikeouts and 14 walks. No, you didn’t misread that last part: Chapman has issued only 14 free passes this season across 54 innings, which works out to a rate of 7.1% and 2.33 BB/9 — by far the lowest marks of his career. Even at his absolute best, Chapman would walk three or four batters per nine innings, a reasonable trade-off for the rest of his skillset. However, as he aged, that control degraded, and from 2021 through 2024, he walked 15% of the batters he faced. So, for him to suddenly put up the best control season of his career, at age 37, is an impressive feat.
ESPN’s Buster Olney talked a bit about how Chapman’s approach changed in the spring, but the basic explanation for what we’re seeing is he has stopped throwing his fastball down the middle. Instead, on the advice of Boston catcher Connor Wong and with the assistance of PitchCom, Chapman is now actually trying to spot his heater. While this is the type of anecdote that sometimes sounds like folklore, the data do suggest that Chapman is suddenly locating his fastball with dramatically more competence than in the past. According to Stuff+, Chapman’s Location+ of 179 for his fastball is the fifth-best number ever tallied (min. 40 innings), compared to the 94 he ran over his past four seasons. His sinker, once a sideshow in his repertoire, has become its focal point in the way the slider once was. This isn’t a sinker thrown to induce a groundball but to be an out pitch, a 100-mph sinker high and outside against righties, high and hard on the hands of lefties. Only one player in Statcast history has ever finished with a better whiff rate on his sinker than Chapman’s 38.9% this season: Josh Hader in 2019 (40.7%) and 2021 (40.5%). Read the rest of this entry »
To put it delicately, Giancarlo Stanton’s stint with the New York Yankees hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. To put it less so, Stanton has amassed fewer WAR in eight years in New York than Aaron Judge did in 2024 alone. When the Yankees acquired Stanton in late 2017, the expectation was that he’d be the foundation of the team’s lineup for the next decade as he finished assembling his Hall of Fame case. However, since a solid if mildly underwhelming debut season in the Bronx, Stanton has suffered through a parade of injuries that has left him with only a single 120-game season, and his deity-level exit velocities have rapidly become his main offensive skill. Five hundred home runs, which once would have seemed like a disappointing final milestone for Stanton, increasingly looked liked the happy result.
Stanton’s health has remained a problem, as he missed a large chunk of this season with a severe case of tennis elbow in both elbows. But the results he’s gotten when he has been available have been of classic Marlins vintage: a .313/.388/.663 line with 17 home runs and 1.9 WAR in 51 games, with the WAR total his best tally since 2021. With Judge first out with a flexor strain and then missing his usual power since his return, having Stanton bust out to this degree has kept the Yankees’ current spate of problems from becoming even greater.
So, how has he done it? Rather than revolutionize his game, Stanton is playing like the most Stantonified version of himself. His average exit velocity and hard-hit percentage are at their highest levels ever, and his out-of-zone swing percentage is the lowest it has been in years. The attack angle on his swing has ticked up a couple of degrees, enough to give him an ideal attack angle 65% of the time, up from 60% in 2024 and 57% in 2023. We don’t have bat tracking data further back, but we do know that Stanton has a career-high rate of flyballs and a career-low rate of grounders. Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Szymborski: And thus the chat began. Suspiciously, it began on time as well.
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Philly Fan: How much of a hit did Phillies’ WS prospects take with Wheeler’s injury?
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Dan Szymborski: I didn’t do an article on the topic, but I did run the numbers and at the time, they dropped from 11.7 to 9.8 in ZiPS purely for the Wheeler injury
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Ben: If/when expansion happens, which cities are you hoping get team? Which ones would you bet on getting a team?
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Dan Szymborski: I hope Nashville gets one. That’s purely for selfish reasons – gives me yet another park five hours or less away!
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Dan Szymborski: And I like excuses to visit Nashville. The state of hot chicken in SW Ohio, at least in the Dayton area, is truly sad.
The Texas Rangers placed second baseman Marcus Semien on the injured list with a broken left foot over the weekend, retroactive to Thursday’s games. The result of a foul ball hitting the top of his foot, Semien was initially diagnosed with a contusion, but after getting multiple additional opinions, that diagnosis was revised to a fracture of the third metatarsal and a Lisfranc sprain. Semien, who turns 35 next month and whose last injury that merited an IL stint was a wrist contusion back in 2017, is having one of his weaker offensive seasons, with a .230/.305/.364 triple slash line, but thanks to his still-solid glove, he’s still amassed 2.1 WAR. The injury likely ends Semien’s regular season, and given where Texas is in the standings, probably his 2025.
I can’t think of many good times to break your foot. Just speaking for myself, I might consider a broken foot preferable to, say, going to a wedding I really don’t want to attend. But Semien is a professional athlete, not an introverted middle-aged baseball analyst who writes from home surrounded by computers and cats, and his team is on the brink. Texas is coming off a sweep of the Cleveland Guardians, but those three wins only got the team back to the .500 mark, with a 9-13 record for August. Read the rest of this entry »
Dan Szymborski: “Give me an introduction message for a Dan Szymborski FanGraphs chat that sounds like it’s from a deranged person with limited connection with reality and an obsession with history who also really really like FanGraphs”
