Two weeks ago, I wrote about Marlins righthander Max Meyer, an electrifying arm whose debut campaign two years ago was cut short by Tommy John surgery. I had been a big fan of Meyer’s game dating back to his days at the University of Minnesota, but in the pros he’d stumbled into a situation that’s fascinated me for years: the Marlins’ starting rotation.

The Marlins are a weird organization, battling from the bottom up against a tightfisted owner. They’ve seen off numerous well-regarded figures in both front office and field management — Michael Hill, Don Mattingly, and most recently Kim Ng — and from a cultural perspective they’ve vacillated between Florida’s two great cultural signifiers: the blue blazer and the pink flamingo.

But by God, they’ve tried stuff. And sometimes, they’ve been successful. Over the past five seasons, they have more playoff appearances and more postseason series wins than the Mets, Giants, Cubs, or Mariners. Most of all, they’ve been good at developing pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

It was closer than a lot of us thought it’d be, but Blake Snell has found a job before the Second Coming. The reigning Cy Young winner, left unemployed past St. Patrick’s Day by the merciless vicissitudes of the market, has come to terms with the San Francisco Giants on a two-year, $62 million contract with an opt-out after the 2024 season. Snell’s compensation includes a $17 million signing bonus, payable in January 2026, and a $15 million base salary in 2024.

The contract itself is something of an anticlimax for a player who supposedly turned down a similar AAV over six years because he wanted the same annual compensation over nine. And it’s not the one-year megabucks prove-it contract I speculated about six weeks ago. It’s probably not even worth the eyes emoji he posted to Instagram last Sunday.

Snell’s agent, Scott Boras, ran out the usual playbook — leave it late, hold the line, appeal directly to ownership. Boras has gotten more players nine-figure contracts than most agents have in their email contacts, and this is how he does it. And at the risk of being a huge bummer about Snell getting a top-10 AAV ever for a pitcher, the plan seems to have backfired. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers were already coming out of this offseason with more unanswered questions than a contending team would typically like. They’ve lost their top two starting pitchers to trade or injury, they’ve changed managers, and their big offseason free agent signing hasn’t played a meaningful game since the 2022 postseason.

And the questions continue to pile up. Devin Williams, one of the best closers in baseball and arguably Milwaukee’s best player, is going to be out for the next three months. The good news is it’s not an arm or shoulder injury that would lead to long-term problems or a multi-year absence. But it’s a pretty gnarly-sounding injury nonetheless: Not one but two stress fractures in his back.

Williams pitched through back soreness since at least last September — and with two fractures in a vertebra at the bottom of his ribcage, “soreness” is probably an understatement. Williams won’t need surgery, but he’ll be totally shut down for the next six weeks. The long ramp-up to game fitness will take at least another six weeks, which puts the target date for his return sometime in late June. Read the rest of this entry »

The FanGraphs split tool is so powerful that its functions have to be… (rubs hands together)… (waits for applause)… split into multiple spotlight posts. I’ll admit right away that the feature I’m about to highlight is a little bit out there. I don’t use it every day, or even every week. But it allowed me to research what ended up being my favorite data-driven article that I’ve written in my time at this company.

The post in question, from last January, is titled “Yandy Díaz, Artificial Turf, and Earl [Expletive] Weaver.” As you can guess from the headline, it was born from a desire to talk about my favorite manager in baseball history, and his rhetorical gift for dense and florid obscenity. In order to get there, I had to dig around looking for hitters like Díaz: big, strong guys who hit the ball hard enough to put it over the fence, but who suffered from high groundball rates.

After some clicking and sorting, I was tickled to discover that there were a lot of Rays and Blue Jays at the top of the leaderboard. The Rays and Blue Jays — in addition to playing in the same division and having rhyming names — both play on artificial turf. Only five teams in the league do. Could they be targeting groundball hitters on purpose, on the pretense that fake grass is friendlier to such hitters than the real stuff? (I didn’t know it at the time, but the Marlins and Diamondbacks would make surprise runs to the playoffs in 2023 after finishing first and fourth in groundball rate. Both teams play on turf.)

Actually investigating that premise — that groundball hitters fare better on turf — required refining the whole set of offensive data down by batted ball type. Then again by stadium. There’s no split tool for grass vs. turf, nor for the two different brands of artificial turf. So that involved filtering for the stats at the five ballparks in question and consolidating them. Surely no tool can slice the apple that thin.

Poppycock. The splits tool did it with ease. By changing the filter from MLB to team-by-team, I then could split these groundball stats out into each individual team’s home ballpark. You could even change the date parameters to expand the sample to two seasons instead of one, or look at away teams’ stats in those environments.

And from there, the possibilities are… maybe not literally endless, but close enough you’d never be able to tell. These stats are available on a player-by-player basis, either as a leaguewide leaderboard or narrowed to one or a few specific hitters of interest via the Custom Players function.

Now, all of the parks with artificial turf are indoors, which makes splits by weather irrelevant. But that’s available too. Not too long before I wrote the groundballs-on-turf article, I was in the auxiliary press box in Philadelphia, watching Seranthony Domínguez trying and failing to grip his changeup in driving rain and freezing cold conditions in Game 5 of the NLCS. Surely it must be difficult to pitch in the cold and the wet.

Good news: We can tell exactly how difficult by filtering for temperature and precipitation.

Temperature is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg: The splits tool also supports searches by custom range for elevation, wind speed, barometric pressure, and air density. I didn’t even know “air density” was something you could measure. Either way, there’s no need to use the time of year as a proxy for atmospheric conditions. The dog days of summer aren’t the same in Atlanta as they are in Boston, after all, so the splits tool allows you to be more precise.

These splits are useful both for rigorous empirical study — determining the effects of ballpark construction or weather on offensive environment — and for trivia — “leading the league in RBI when the temperature is over 80 degrees and the wind is blowing at least 10 mph,” or something equally esoteric and frivolous. That’s both sides of the coin for the numerically literate sports fan.

On the very first day of my freshman year of college, my Journalism 101 professor quoted a line from All the President’s Men: “Follow the money.” Over four years as an undergrad, I’d hear that maxim more times than I could count. Enough that after more than 10 years in the business, it’s been incorporated into my subconscious so thoroughly that I can hear my old professors and mentors (and sometimes Hal Holbrook) repeating it without needing them to be physically present.

Obviously, we at FanGraphs would like nothing better than for some of your money to be spent on a Membership. Your support funds valuable tools like the RosterResource payroll pages, my favorite way to follow that famous principle of journalism. Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers are in a fascinating situation, not so much treading water as trying to swim in two different directions at the same time. They’ve lost their celebrated manager and traded their Cy Young-winning ace, but they’ve brought in Rhys Hoskins on a lucrative (for them) free agent contract while deciding not to trade their other major free-agent-to-be, Willy Adames.

One of the first posts I wrote for FanGraphs, some 18 months ago, concerned Adames’ future with the Brewers. Or, more likely given his potential to ring the bell for a nine-figure contract in free agency, his future elsewhere. Let’s check in on that potential, and see what we should expect from Adames in 2024 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like March comes earlier every year. Certainly Jordan Montgomery and Blake Snell must feel that way, seeing as how they’re sitting around unemployed while college basketball tournaments are already underway. All of a sudden, starting rotation spots are harder to come by than tenure-track professorships in the humanities. And they’re not the only ones. Michael Lorenzen is also sitting around getting way too good at playing along with The Price is Right. He might not have been at the head of the free agent class, but by God he was an All-Star and threw a no-hitter just last year!

All of these guys will find work somewhere, somehow, and at some vast salary figure. Probably not nine years and $270 million, but it’ll be a lot of money.

This free agent saga has gone on for so long that there really isn’t much more to say about players who had been picked apart and analyzed exhaustively by the Winter Meetings last December, and have remained on the vine for another three months since. Except this: Are they at risk of becoming overripe? Read the rest of this entry »

The Miami Marlins made a surprising run to the postseason in 2023, but it’ll be hard to repeat. First of all, the Marlins punched above their weight last year, which is saying something, because an adult marlin can weigh the better part of a ton. Also, they don’t have arms, or hands, or fists, which makes punching anything above anything quite a challenge.

More to the point, Miami went 84-78, which is tied for the fourth-fewest wins ever for a playoff team in a 162-game season. The Marlins also had a Pythagorean record of just 75-87; they finished 20th in the league in wRC+ and 16th in ERA-. Getting back to the playoffs in 2024 is a realistic goal, but in order to achieve it the Marlins will probably have to be better this year than they were last.

Where will that improvement come from? Not external acquisitions, which have amounted mostly to trading for Jonah Bride and Nick Gordon, hoping to extract whatever juice is left in Trey Mancini’s bat, and signing Tim Anderson — a move that looks suspiciously like a repeat of the Jean Segura experiment from a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »

AJ Smith-Shawver started on Monday, and it went rather well: 10 batters faced, 48 pitches, 32 strikes, 2 2/3 innings pitched, five strikeouts, one hit, one walk, no runs allowed. The Braves lost, but the damage came after Smith-Shawver left the game, and at any rate, spring training results have less of an impact on regular season success than what sign the GM was born under. Justin Toscano, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s beat writer, tweeted after the start that Smith-Shawver was “in a better place, physically and mentally, for whatever comes this season. You can see the improvement.”

That’s exciting news. The 21-year-old poked his head into the majors for the first time in mid-2023; he threw 25 1/3 regular-season innings with the big club, plus 2 2/3 more of mopup work in the NLDS. Still rookie-eligible, he made our Top 100 list as the top-rated prospect in Atlanta’s system.

But Plan A for the Braves doesn’t necessarily involve Smith-Shawver. Atlanta starts its rotation with Spencer Strider, one of the best pitchers in baseball. After that: Max Fried, Charlie Morton, Chris Sale, and Reynaldo López. Plus, they have quite a bit of prospect and Quad-A depth: Huascar Ynoa, Bryce Elder, Dylan Dodd. Ian Anderson (remember him?) is due back from Tommy John sometime later this year, and 2023 first-round pick Hurston Waldrep, with his unholy splitter, is being fast-tracked to the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

Even with an extra day of February, we’re entering the month of March with several key free agents un-signed. Our no. 5, no. 6, and no. 7-ranked free agents — Blake Snell, Jordan Montgomery, and Matt Chapman — are all headed for a gap year. So are various other useful veterans, like Brandon Belt, J.D. Martinez, and Michael Lorenzen.

It’s not ideal. The teams want to have their rosters set, the players don’t want to miss camp if they can avoid it. It’s not great from a content creation/publicity perspective for either the league or the media. Myself included; when we called dibs on writing up the various big free agent signings last fall, I picked Snell and Monty, and I’ve been jumping out of my skin at every Slack notification I’ve gotten since. I haven’t slept in four months!

And the bigwigs at MLB are getting tetchy about it. Two weeks ago, commissioner Rob Manfred told reporters that the league had proposed a free agent signing period to the union in the last round of CBA talks, with the goal of creating “two weeks of flurried activity” that would dominate SportsCenter and settle everyone’s offseason quickly. Manfred’s argument is that concentrating the action would grab baseball much-needed publicity. Publicity leads to attention, and attention to money. Everyone wins. Yesterday, ESPN’s Alden Gonzalez released a reported feature on the idea, including the blindingly obvious reasons why the union left Manfred on read.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a trial balloon! Read the rest of this entry »