I have no idea what Dan Wilson was doing. With the Mariners clinging to a 3-1 lead in the seventh inning of Game 7 of the ALCS, their manager elected to bring in Eduard Bazardo, who’d just thrown two innings the night before, with two on and the top of the Blue Jays order coming up instead of going to his closer, Andrés Muñoz. It took two pitches for the decision to backfire. George Springer turned on the 1-0 pitch from Bazardo, a 96-mph thigh-high sinker over the inner third of the plate, and clobbered it over the left-center field wall. The three-run blast secured the Blue Jays their first American League pennant in 32 years. They’ll face the defending-champion Dodgers in the World Series, which begins on Friday at Rogers Centre.

I’m not going to get into all the chaos from last night’s decisive game here. For more on that, you should check out Eric Longenhagen’s recap. We’ve been covering both the Blue Jays and the Dodgers all postseason, and we’ll continue to do so during the World Series, so be sure to keep coming to FanGraphs throughout the Fall Classic.

A quick programming note before we continue: Our next mailbag will come out after the end of the World Series, whenever that may be. Also, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — About 45 minutes after the “best team” that Aaron Boone has ever managed was eliminated from the playoffs, several of its members sat in the clubhouse drinking a few small beers. The mood was wistful, the somber finality of it all floating through the very same air that less than a week earlier had reeked of celebratory champagne.

They had just lost the American League Division Series to the Blue Jays in four games, and for the most part, it wasn’t all that close. Despite an all-time great postseason performance from Aaron Judge following yet another all-time great regular season from him, New York was thoroughly outplayed by Toronto. Boasting the most annoying opposing lineup in baseball, the Jays peppered pitchers with their all-fields approach and their refusal to swing and miss. Theirs was a Boomer’s more-than-platonic ideal of an offense – they had the lowest strikeout rate (17.8%) and the highest batting average (.265) in the majors this season — but it wasn’t a true throwback. The Blue Jays weren’t dependent on the long ball, but they were more than capable of hitting home runs, as we all saw during the ALDS. As a team, Toronto slashed .338/.373/.601 for a 168 wRC+ across the four games. Yankees pitchers struck out 23.7% of the hitters they faced during the regular season but just 14.9% of the Blue Jays who batted in the series.

“They beat us this series,” Boone said. “Simple as that.”

Yet even as the Yankees accepted their fate, that they had played their last baseball game of the season, they were still trying to understand how it all went wrong. Hadn’t they addressed their shortcomings from a year ago, when they lost to the Dodgers in the World Series? They lengthened their lineup, improved their baserunning, and enhanced their rotation during the offseason, and then ahead of the trade deadline, they made more moves designed to shore up their defense and bolster their bullpen. Some of those deals didn’t pan out, but many of them did. Read the rest of this entry »

And just like that, the postseason field is down to four teams. Tonight, the Blue Jays host the Mariners for Game 1 of the ALCS; tomorrow, the NLCS between the Brewers and Dodgers gets underway in Milwaukee. Two of those four clubs advanced to the CS in ridiculous fashion. First, on Thursday, Los Angeles walked off the Phillies in Game 4 of the NLDS when, with the bases loaded and two outs, Orion Kerkering panicked after recovering a deflected comebacker and airmailed his throw home instead of tossing to first for the sure out. In his recap of the game, Ben Clemens dubbed the play “Orion’s Melt.” Then, on Friday night, the Mariners and Tigers played 15 innings of baseball before Jorge Polanco ripped a walk-off single into right field.

As always, we’re writing about everything going on during the postseason. You can find Davy Andrews’ recap of Milwaukee’s Game 5 win over the Cubs from last night here. Later today, Dan Szymborski is previewing the ALCS, then Jay Jaffe will have Game 1 covered for you tonight.

Before we get to this week’s mailbag, I’d like to remind you all of a quick programming note. We’re still doing our weekly mailbag during the postseason, but like today, we might move around the specific day it runs depending on the playoff schedule. Our plan is to do one before every postseason round. Also, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

The playoffs are off to a thrilling start, with three of the four Wild Card Series lasting the full three games and seven of the 11 games being decided by no more than three runs. We saw excellent defense in Chicago, an offensive outburst in Los Angeles, and a handful of great starting pitching performances.

The best part is we’re just getting started. Today, all four Division Series begin, which means we have another marathon day of baseball ahead of us. First up, we’ve got a pair of divisional foes squaring off, with the Brewers and Cubs set for 2:08 p.m. ET in Milwaukee, followed by the Blue Jays and Yankees at 4:08 p.m. ET in Toronto. In the third game of the day, Shohei Ohtani makes his postseason pitching debut against the Phillies; before he takes the mound, though, he’ll step into the Citizens Bank Park left-handed batter’s box as the Dodgers’ leadoff man at 6:38 p.m. ET. And then to cap it off, the Mariners host the Tigers at 8:38 p.m. ET. As always, we’ll be covering all the action here at FanGraphs.

Before we get to this week’s mailbag, I have one quick programming note to remind everyone of. We’ll still be doing our weekly mailbag during the postseason, but we might move around the specific day it runs depending on the playoff schedule. Our plan is to do one before every postseason round, as we are today. Also, I’d like to remind all of you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.

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How would you assess the current state of the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry? Are these two teams going to be on a collision course for the next several years like they were in the early 2000s? Or is that more of a TV network pipe dream? — Connor G.

Alex Cora was asked a similar question during his pregame press conference at Yankee Stadium ahead of Game 1 of the Wild Card Series between the two teams.

“I think it is intense in October. During the regular season, there’s others that are more intense. The one in the West Coast is stupid, you know, the Padres and the Dodgers. That’s intense from the get-go,” Cora said. “It’s not that we’re not intense during the regular season, but it has toned down throughout the years.”

He’s right. Anyone who has watched the way the Dodgers and Padres have gone at it lately knows that it’s the closest thing baseball has to the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry of the early 2000s. When it comes to the on-field emotions between the two teams, the Yankees have had more beef with the Rays and Blue Jays, and then obviously with the Astros, than they have with the Red Sox in recent years. Some of that certainly has to do with the on-and-off success that Boston has had over the last decade, because the Yankees and Red Sox have only been in competition with one another for either the AL East crown or the AL pennant a few times.

But a larger part of why the rivalry has cooled off some is rooted in how the two organizations view themselves. Jay Jaffe and I were talking about this during batting practice this week while we were covering the series. Basically, because the Red Sox have won four World Series in the last 20 years (three more than the Yankees in that span), Boston no longer brings an inferiority complex to the park when it plays New York. As much as we here at FanGraphs are all about witchcraft and superstition, we can all agree that there was no literal Curse of the Bambino. However, there is a real emotional and psychological toll that comes from watching a competitor of yours win it all year after year after year while you get so close but can’t quite do it. It’s embarrassing and degrading, and over time, you develop a sense of defiance. You fight back instead of letting yourself get picked on. This attitude is one of the core symptoms of Little Brother Syndrome. The Padres arguably have it now vis-à-vis the Dodgers, and at times, the Rays and Blue Jays bring it to their matchups with the Yankees. But the Red Sox seem to have outgrown it.

That doesn’t mean the fans don’t get more passionate about Yankees-Red Sox games than they do for other matchups, because they absolutely do. With the exception of last year’s World Series, the atmosphere at the Stadium this week was different than it was for the other playoff series I’ve covered there over the last handful of years. The people in the stands understood the stakes, and it didn’t take much effort for them to conjure up their old emotions from when the rivalry was at its peak.

Which brings us to your question about whether this year’s series is going to be the first of many meaningful matchups between the two teams, and if so, whether that would that be enough to reignite the rivalry. I think these two teams are going to be competing with each other for the rest of the decade. With the exception of 2023, when everything went wrong and they missed the playoffs, the Yankees have demonstrated an organizational competence that makes me confident that they’ll be a perennial postseason team, while the Red Sox are just now opening their window of contention. Aaron Boone acknowledged as much late Thursday night on the Yankee Stadium infield, after his team popped champagne and turned their clubhouse into a lazy river of booze. “They’re a great team that’s getting better and better,” he said. “They’re going to be a scary club next year with where they’re going and what they’ve built the last couple of years.”

That level of competition could go a long away toward bringing the rivalry back. I think that could especially be the case if Massachusetts natives Cam Schlittler and Ben Rice become core players of these Yankees. Rice grew up a Yankees fan despite living in Red Sox territory, while Schlittler was a Sox fan and comes from a family of Sox fans. Boston fans could end of being more ruthless if they feel like they’ve been betrayed by two of their own. That’s what Schlittler experienced before his Game 3 start, and he said it fueled his historic performance.

And yet, even as I forecast a brighter future for this rivalry, I don’t think it’ll ever go back to what it was in the early 2000s. Those matchups featured so many massive personalities — Roger Clemens and Pedro Martínez, Alex Rodriguez and Manny Ramirez, Gary Sheffield and David Ortiz, David Wells and Curt Schilling — that when you combined them with the tribalism of the fanbases, the high stakes of the competition, and some Little Brother Syndrome defiance, it created a molotov cocktail of emotions that could explode at any moment. We will never again see anything like Pedro snatching a charging Don Zimmer by the head and flinging him to the ground, and that’s a good thing. I don’t ever want something like that to happen again.

Fortunately, there is a healthy midpoint between the narcoleptic just-another-game mentality and elder abuse, and after what we saw in the Yankees-Red Sox AL Wild Card Series this week and based on what we expect from these two teams in the near future, the rivalry appears to be on the rise.

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Hey team! First time, long time. Love the mailbag. Question as a long-suffering Reds fan.

Is this some cosmic cycle that’s currently benefitting the people of Cleveland like it did St. Louis 10 years ago, and that will eventually get around to me? Or is there something intrinsically special about these teams? Or am I just being punished for being born in the wrong Midwestern town? — Ari

Michael Baumann: So I want to push back a little bit on the idea that these Midwestern teams are unnaturally successful, because they don’t actually do much once they’re in the playoffs.

The Guardians have made it to the ALCS three times in the 21st Century. In 2007 and 2016, they had the best starting pitcher in the AL both years, multiple elite relievers, and dynamic, switch-hitting superstar position players. Nothing magical there; they were just legitimately good teams. Last year, they snagged a bye by default, thanks to a weak division and an indifferent Astros team. They then beat a team from the same division in the ALDS and the first actual good team they ran into caved their faces in.

The Brewers have won a round in only one of their past six playoff appearances. The Cardinals, the most magical team of the bunch, haven’t won a round since 2019. Their unlikely run to the championship in 2006 and penchant for winning dramatically in 2011 gave them an air of the supernatural, but they also got swept in the World Series as a 105-win team in 2004 and no-showed the NLCS in 2019.

As for how these teams keep getting to the playoffs so frequently, well, what your examples have in common is a weak division and a penchant for doing pitcher development well and on the cheap.

Beyond that, I think there’s a tendency to ascribe a quality of clutchness to teams that don’t have impressive lineups but perform well in the postseason. Given how much teams can shorten their rotations and manage their high-leverage bullpens, great pitchers can give you more bang for your buck in the playoffs than in the regular season. There are limits to this phenomenon (for example: I know how bad the Brewers have been in the playoffs because I keep picking them every year and they keep making me look like an idiot), but it’s worked for Cleveland, and Kansas City, and most notably in the recent past for the Even Year B.S. Giants.

It helps, of course, if you have a future Hall of Famer in the lineup. In short, if Cardinals Devil Magic is real (or was, because it sure isn’t happening now), the Great Satan’s name is Albert Pujols.

But the real answer to your question is here: About 50,000 years ago, prehistoric humans began to understand that while their environment followed certain natural rules and patterns, individual events could be unpredictable, as if they were being influenced by invisible spirits. Thus began shamanism, an attempt to communicate with and influence these spirits, and from there all forms of religion and spirituality.

Existence is probabilistic. How unlikely is it that atoms bumped together to form amino acids and proteins, and that they came together in just the right combination to create life? And even given that unfathomable fluke, how could single-celled organisms evolve into complex humans who can throw curveballs? I admit it seems pretty far-fetched that all of this could happen by chance. But working in a sandbox as big as the universe, on a time frame as long as tens of billions of years, unlikely things are bound to happen somewhere, sooner or later.

Sports, being as it is a religion, involves observing our natural world and its chaotic and capricious path, and trying to retrofit some explanation to make it all make sense. The idea that everything is meaningless (“a chasing after the wind,” to quote the holy book of a non-baseball-related faith) leaves us empty. So we stare into the abyss and try to find God. Or worse, the St. Louis Cardinals.

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Hi mailbag!

Cheers!
Brian

Dan Szymborski: The playoffs are a time of chaos — and small sample sizes — so there’s plenty of opportunity for goats to be come heroes and vice versa. I think my favorite example of this in recent years is that of José Abreu. He was pretty terrible his first season in Houston (the second year didn’t go any better!) and was largely seen as a drag on their postseason roster. Then he got into the playoffs, and while the Astros ended up losing the 2023 ALCS to the Rangers, Abreu hit four homers in 11 games, good for a .945 OPS that October. His career after that, which lasted all of six weeks, only had two more homers left in it. I’m not sure the Giancarlo Stanton contract is viewed as negatively, but he’s clearly fallen short of overall expectations in New York. Still, he’s had some really big postseasons with the Yankees.

On the pitching side, you brought up Zito, and he’s the pitcher whose name comes instantly to mind for me. His contract is widely seen as one of the most disappointing pacts of the last decade-plus, but he did net the Giants two huge starts: a 7 2/3 inning shutout against the Cardinals in the 2012 NLCS, and a one-run start a week later in the World Series. It’s still recognized as one of the worst contracts the Giants ever signed, but Zito did earn a bit of redemption given that the Giants won the championship.

That’s who most stands out to me now, but who knows, we might be adding Javier Báez to this list soon!
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Dearest FanGraphs Crew,

Thanks and keep up the good work. — sds

Ben Clemens: Before we try to walk through the theoretical implications, let’s just start out with a downer: No one wants this. What player would want this? What team would want this? From the player perspective, playing baseball is already a full-time job, and being a manager requires a ton of work too. Figuring out how to run a bullpen takes work. Managing player personalities and egos isn’t trivial. Working with coaches and analysts to sort out gameplans is important! You have to figure out player rotations, keep everyone happy, and spend a ton of time talking to the media to make sure that you are communicating team decisions well. These days, managers surely also have to spend a ton of time talking to the front office making sure they’re happy. The two and a half hours of game time where you get pride of place in the dugout and make pitching changes and pinch-hitting decisions is the payoff, but players are pretty busy during the game already, and I can’t imagine a lot of guys think to themselves, “You know what? I’m just not busy enough during games.”

Fine, though. Let’s put all of that aside and say that a star hits free agency, considers all of the stuff I just said, and decides that they want to be a player-manager anyway. If I were a team, I’d try as hard as I possibly could to dissuade them from making this decision. Sure, we can’t quantify the total impact that a manager has on his team’s chances of winning, but no one thinks that there’s no value to it. The Rays are always penny-pinching, but they don’t hire someone from a temp agency to manage the team. That’s because the job is difficult and doing it well has value.

Basically, I’d offer meaningfully less on this deal if the player insisted that they were contractually required to be the manager the whole time and that no one else could fulfill any managerial duties. I’d offer more if we came to an agreement that they would just do the “glamorous” parts – meetings on the mound, postgame press conferences, standing on the top step of the dugout and looking worried – while letting me backfill the behind-the-scenes parts of the job with other staff. If this star really just wants the glory of managing, well, first I’d tell them that there’s a lot less glory in managing than there is in playing. But second, I guess I’d let them. If all they wanted to do was make in-game decisions, I wouldn’t even “charge” them much for it, assuming we talked through their pinch-hitting philosophy beforehand and it wasn’t “backup catchers only.” But my deal stops there. If a player insisted upon doing all of a manager’s tasks and also wouldn’t allow anyone else to do those jobs, I’d offer them meaningfully less money and basically tell them to go elsewhere.

Being a manager is a difficult job. In addition, “we can’t totally measure manager value” is really different from “manager value doesn’t exist.” Teams would absolutely balk at a player wanting to do all of the stuff a manager does, because there aren’t that many hours in the day, and failing to do those things really would be a problem. On the other hand, players almost certainly wouldn’t ask for this, because they see their own managers at work — they know what comes with the job.

NEW YORK – One day before taking the mound at Yankee Stadium for the most important game of his life, Garrett Crochet sat in the visitor’s dugout with Alex Cora. A few members of the front office were out in the bullpen, and Cora told his ace that it’d be fun to give them a call.

“Tomorrow you are going to make one call to the bullpen,” Crochet said. “Maybe two,” the manager responded.

But the 26-year-old lefty was adamant. One pitching change, with Aroldis Chapman closing things out, was all it would take for the Red Sox to beat the Yankees in Game 1 of the best-of-three AL Wild Card Series.

So, naturally, that’s exactly what happened. Crochet dominated the best offense in baseball across 7 2/3 innings. He allowed one run, four hits, no walks, and struck out 11 before he was finally pulled after 117 pitches, the most he’d ever thrown in the majors. Cora called on Chapman, who secured a four-out save and a 3-1 Boston win. Read the rest of this entry »

There is still a lot to play for as we enter the final weekend of the regular season. How exciting! As I sit down to write this mailbag on Friday afternoon, two division races and three Wild Cards are still in play between the two leagues. In the American League, four teams are fighting for three spots, while three National League clubs are competing for the final spot in the senior circuit.

Of course, we’ll be watching more than just the standings over the next few days. Will Cal Raleigh get to 62 or 63 home runs this season? If he does, will it be enough for him to win the AL MVP award over Aaron Judge? Personally, I will be watching to see if Corbin Carroll hits three more triples. He enters Friday’s game with 17 on the season, and he already has more than 30 doubles, 30 home runs, and 30 stolen bases. My preseason bold prediction was that Carroll would become the fifth 20/20/20/20 player ever, and the first since Jimmy Rollins and Curtis Granderson both did it in 2007. Carroll probably won’t get there, but he’s close enough that I’ll be paying attention.

Before we get to this week’s mailbag, I have one quick programming note to mention. We’ll still be doing our weekly mailbag during the postseason, but we might move around the specific day it runs depending on the playoff schedule. Our plan is to do one before every postseason round, beginning with the Division Series. And as always, I’d like to remind all of you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

I promise, I didn’t plan to write about the 2019 Diamondbacks in back-to-back editions of this column. That year was Ketel Marte’s breakout season, and also the year they traded Zack Greinke to the Astros at the trade deadline, but otherwise, they were a mostly forgettable team. Not bad by any means — Arizona finished 85-77, second in the NL West — but nowhere near notable enough to be remembered in consecutive weeks of the same column six years later.

And yet, isn’t that the beauty of this mailbag? This is the space for you to ask any and all baseball questions that pop into your head, no matter how silly or irrelevant they may be. And as far as we’re concerned here, the 2019 Diamondbacks might just be one of baseball’s more relevant irrelevant teams. I mentioned them last week because they were the team that Gerardo Parra was pitching against on August 3 when he became the third player ever to allow five or more runs without recording an out in his only career pitching appearance.

But before we get to the 2019 Diamondbacks in this week’s installment of the mailbag, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

When Gerardo Parra took the mound for the Nationals on August 3, 2019, with his team trailing 11-4 in the eighth inning in Arizona, he had no way of knowing the dubious history he was about to make in the only pitching appearance of his 12-year career. He walked the first three batters he faced, allowed an RBI single to Alex Avila, and then walked Diamondbacks reliever Zack Godley to bring home another run. That was enough for manager Davey Martinez, who opted to replace Parra on the bump with second baseman Brian Dozer to face the lefty-hitting Jarrod Dyson. To set up his desired defensive alignment without making a substitution, Martinez moved third baseman Anthony Rendon to the keystone and sent the left-handed Parra to the hot corner — a position he’d never played before. Dyson doubled home two runs, both charged to Parra. As switch-hitter Ketel Marte stepped into the right-handed batter’s box to face Dozer’s floaters, Martinez flipped Rendon and Parra, who then made his first and only career appearance at second. Marte flied out to right before Eduardo Escobar, a switch-hitter also batting right-handed, launched a three-run homer, with the first of those runs also landing on Parra’s ledger.

Of course, three months later, the Nationals would win their first and only World Series championship, with Parra conducting rousing renditions of “Baby Shark” every time he batted in Washington, but on that particular early-August night, things got ugly. With his final line of zero innings, five runs (all earned), four walks, and one hit, Parra became one of only three players to allow five or more runs without recording an out in their only career pitching appearance.

I bring this up because the first question in this week’s mailbag is about the worst major league pitcher ever. Parra is not the answer because he was not really a pitcher, but his outing was a fun bit of trivia I came across in my research, so I had no choice but to share it with you. Before we get to the actual worst-pitcher-ever candidates, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello everyone, and welcome to the first mailbag of September. We have just over three weeks to go in the regular season, and despite what our Playoff Odds say, I am still holding out hope for at least one or two exciting postseason races.

Entering play Friday night, 11 teams (six in the NL and five in the AL) had a better than 90% chance to reach the playoffs; at 74.2%, the Mariners were the only club in possession of a playoff spot that was on less solid ground. Three other teams could still spoil Seattle’s fun: the Rangers (12.5%), the Royals (10.6%), and the Rays (10.2%). Of the Senior Circuit teams that aren’t in a playoff position, the Giants (4.3%) had the best shot of snagging a Wild Card berth. However, for any of you cheering for chaos, the Reds (2.3%) host the Mets, the current six seed, for three games this weekend; Cincinnati began the series five games behind New York.

We won’t be answering any questions about the playoff race today, but we do touch on a couple of players on contending teams. Before we get to them, though, a few quick things: First, thanks to Meg Rowley for putting together last week’s mailbag while I was on vacation, which I spent in Toronto watching baseball! My dad and I had never been to Rogers Centre before, so we decided to check another ballpark off our list. Also, FanGraphs is hiring a full-time prospect writer. For more information, check out the job posting here. Finally, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the funniest things to come out of this mailbag column so far occurred two weeks ago, when I wrote about the most replacement-level players of all time. I began that week’s mailbag by talking about questions that require both quantitative data and subjective analysis to answer, and I used the question “Who is the greatest baseball player of all time?” as an example. I made it quite clear that I wasn’t going to give my opinion on the subject; instead, I explained how people might consider the question and formulate their arguments, and in doing so, I mentioned a few of the best players ever. Nothing to it.

Except, of course, I should’ve known that you wonderful baseball sickos couldn’t resist hashing out that debate in the comments. A good number of you latched on to the part about how someone might give Barry Bonds the edge over Babe Ruth because “Bonds wouldn’t have been allowed to play during Ruth’s career.” Readers also made points about expansion and cited U.S. census numbers to compare the population sizes of major league baseball and the country. I truly did not expect any of that.

So maybe I should be prepared for anything with the question I answered to begin this week’s mailbag, which also deals with all-time great players and lineups. It’s quantitative for sure, but context is also necessary to understand why things turned out the way they did. It’s a fun one, so let’s get to it. Before we do, though, I’ll remind you all that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »