Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 1/5/26

Ben Clemens: Hey everyone, and welcome to my first chat of 2026

Ben Clemens: Not that a lot of baseball is happening right this minute, but a lot of baseball news has happened in the last month

Ben Clemens: Also I promised a cookie chat to a reader, so we’re gonna talk cookies. Let’s get started

Look At This Sotograph: Tell this Bay Area rain to take a hike, Ben

Ben Clemens: a)phenomenal username

Ben Clemens: b)it’s wild. I’m up in the Sierras (heading back home after this chat, actually) and it rained nonstop from Saturday to this morning

Jim: Where can the A’s get a starter to improve their rotation? Does Colby Thomas for Brady Singer make sense for both sides?

Ben Clemens: Mmmm, I’d have to do more digging than I did just now, but I’m guessing no? like, I don’t look at Colby Thomas and think he’s a huge missing piece contributor for the Reds

Ben Clemens: So like, could this be it? Sure. does this make sense? I haven’t done nearly enough of a deep dive on Thomas. My guess is that he’s probably just a 5th outfielder and so no, it doesn’t, but I’d want WAY more data than just a quick eyeballing during chatting

Oaktown Blues: bold prediction: At some point this offseason, Heyman will breathlessly tweet “Suarez to the sox” and no one will know which Suarez or which Sox he means (this was funnier when all the Suarezes were still available)

Ben Clemens: that sounds wonderful

Ben Clemens: oh, this is really fun by the way:

Sonny: What’s one FA move you feel is so obviously a fit you’re surprised it hasn’t happened already (other than Realmuto)?

Sonny: Bregman has to feel a bit nervous now right? I was surprised he opted out of his deal and potentially wrongly assumed he knew there was a better contract/team waiting for him this winter. Where do you see him signing?

Sonny: If Bregman signs elsewhere and Casas continues to be exactly who he has been do you think Craig Breslow looks deep within himself to understand how he traded his best hitter and accepts some blame or does he double down on his ‘no no it’s the children who are wrong’ routine?

Ben Clemens: I think these three questions go together really well and they’re even by the same person

Ben Clemens: I think that Bregman to the Sox is an obvious fit, in fact

Ben Clemens: I’m surprised it hasn’t happened and think that the Sox have definitely telegraphed wanting to do that with their behavior the rest of the winter

Ben Clemens: but um, yeah, the Sox just continue to be an interesting unfinished team, with unbalanced needs and surpluses, very delightful to opine on as an analyst

Insert Witty Name Here: Let’s start the first baseball chat of the year with…tennis!  Aussie Open up first, any reason to think it’s not Alcaraz/Sinner for everything?

Ben Clemens: Not really, no. I guess if you’re looking for reasons to find underdogs, Alcaraz changing coaches at least makes it plausible that he’ll be lost and open the door for someone else

Ben Clemens: But I just checked the gambling odds and those two are the only ones inside 10:1. I’m more interested in the women’s, to be honest: five players inside 10:1 and Mirra Andreeva is really interestingly volatile

Bob: One of many I’m sure – so what happened with the Japanese contract predictions and what does it mean for whomever comes over next year?

Vee: In regards to Free Agent Rankings, what lesson(s) have you learned so far this offseason?

Ben Clemens: I mean, I’m not 100% sure but I know that two of these three guys are the ones I overrode my model most on, and the one that wasn’t (Okamoto) was one where I came pretty close

Ben Clemens: I think it says that I need to be a little more trusting of projections for Japanese players. Alternately, I think it’s reasonable to say that the way the posting system works is starting to push teams to shorter deals, and players are okay with that because they then get another bite at the free agency apple. Teams seem to be less interested in the current Dodgers plan (give the guy an opt out in a big deal) and more into the old Dodgers Maeda plan (complicated contract with opt outs and stuff)

Appa Yip Yip: As a greedy fan, who do you think fits the Jays better at this point – Bichette or Tucker?

Ben Clemens: Probably Tucker, though for the price perhaps Bichette. Both play a position where they’ll be meaningful upgrades. But Bichette + Okamoto would mean that Ernie Clement is under-utilized, whereas Tucker+Okamoto would mean Addison Barger is, and that’s fine, I expect them to need Barger at DH decently often. Good problem to have, though

Oaktown Blues: Appreciated your write-up of the Soderstrom extension. I left a comment to this effect, but I’m wondering if you think Soderstrom might be not just a scratch defender in left, but actually good? He had +5 OAA/+10 DRS in LF without any professional experience at the position

Ben Clemens: Who knows

Ben Clemens: those metrics are super noisy, trying to do them in Sutter Health is I’m sure confusing too without much of a baseline, and the variance from one year to the next is massive, past track record really does matter

Ben Clemens: Could he be a good defender? Definitely

Ben Clemens: but I’m applying some Bayesian thinking here: a reasonable prior is that a catcher with 50th percentile sprint speed won’t be a great left fielder, and 860 innings of advanced defensive metrics is not a stronger signal than that

Ben Clemens: the odds that he’s actually a good fielder have clearly shot up. But I still don’t think they’re 50%

Steve E: Hey, BC, I’m looking at the projections for 2026 already and was wondering why Ryne Nelson of Arizona is basically an afterthought in SP rankings. He was about as good as any pitcher in the NL over the second half. I know the K rates are below average, but what’s the rest of the reasoning there? Thanks!

Ben Clemens: I don’t actually do the projections, but I looked through them, and basically they just think Nelson will continue to be a meh ERA meh K’s guy

Ben Clemens: and like…. that’s what he’s been!

Ben Clemens: so, I think it makes sense

DRS vs OAA: I often see these mentioned as equal or similar stats but isn’t OAA mostly range while DRS measures defense more comprehensively?

Ben Clemens: ehhhhh, I use FRV instead of OAA generally (fielding run value)

Ben Clemens: which incorporates arm. Statcast added this option a while ago, it’s on our leaderboards too

Ben Clemens: but since they did OAA first, which is range only, people still quote that a lot

Ben Clemens: I agree that you should measure arm

Ben Clemens: I disagree that DRS is a better ‘holistic’ defensive measurer. I do a lot of back-checking of defensive metrics when I vote for Fielding Bible awards every year and I have found that DRS is so-so in the outfield, its best position relative to the other models is first base. FRV does very well in the outfield in aggregate

Scott: Hi Ben, I had a brief back and forth in the comments about your Ohtani answer in the mailbag a few weeks ago. My main issue was that neither method you used to calculate wRAA is the actual way that Fangraphs calculates wRAA, and if you do use the standard method and impute the player’s mean non-IBB result across the IBB PAs, you get 8.3 runs above average (at least according to a leaderboard I pulled for Oct 27th). That very well may be the highest single game wRAA in history, and I’d be curious to know if it is.

Now, I don’t want to make too much of those particulars – obviously it’s incorrect to count an intentional walk as half a homerun, model be damned. But that absurd result did make me revisit the question of whether there isn’t a better way to treat IBBs. Shouldn’t we just figure out if the game state distribution means IBBs are on average 30% or 50% or 70% as valuable as an unintentional walk and give them their own coefficient in wOBA?

Ben Clemens: Oh, I have no idea how we calculate game-level wRAA. It sounds like we do it a bad way. That way is obviously wrong

Ben Clemens: But…. no, we’re not gonna try to calculate a roving, varying, game state distribution value for IBB’s and change it year to year

Ben Clemens: they’re incredibly contextual and the context is far more importnat for them than for your average outcome

Ben Clemens: our method works really well at the seasonal level, and game-by-game wRAA is kind of a silly thing anyway. I think we’ll almost certainly keep it as is, with the possible excpetion of redoing the game-by-game version to apply a seasonal wOBA rather than a game-level wOBA. I assume that we just do it that way for ease of calculation, so that calculating the stats for, say, Shohei Ohtani on 8/8/25 doesn’t rely on anything other than stats from 8/8/25

Vic: What is FSG doing with $$ they saved my trading Devers for nothing?   FSG promised to invest, yet they are only team not to sign a FA ( Rockies don’t count) !!

Ben Clemens: I mean, they’d tell you they are extending core players like Crochet (sure, done before the deal, but still probably counts) and Anthony, plus saving money for Bregman

Ben Clemens: but like, yeah, they cleared payroll on purpose. If they don’t take advantage of it, that’s trange

Ben Clemens: strange

Thomas: Ben, I got J Kenji Lopez Alt’s The Food Lab, and The Wok for Christmas. Any favourite recipes I should start with, preferably vegetarian?

Ben Clemens: I really like the brocolli roasting methods in the food lab

Ben Clemens: and I’ve been making a ton of stir fried veggie bowls using the technique section of the wok cookbook

Ben Clemens: honestly I don’t use his stuff much for recipes, way m ore for technique

Nate: Opinion on molasses cookies? They’re a holiday staple in our household

Ben Clemens: I love molasses cookies

Ben Clemens: this year we made dark and stormy cookies, an NYTimes/grossy pelosi recipe, and they were a huge hit

Ben Clemens: I ended up baking 3 batches in total and mailing them to people, leaving them at my mom’s, taking them to my mother-in-law’s, etc.

The person who asks the lunch quesion: cookbooks and cookies and yet….

Ben Clemens: haha yes, that’s because I don’t know what I’m having for lunch yet

Ben Clemens: maybe leftovers from last night’s turkey bolognese

GraphFan: Dodgers reportedly inquired on Freddy Peralta. Would they run a 7 man rotation? How would they fit Peralta with Shohei, Yoshi, Snell, Glasnow, Sasaki, Sheehan? Would Emmet be in the return package?

Ben Clemens: either Emmet in the return package or they’re separately going to deal Glasnow or something

Ben Clemens: but yeah doesn’t make sense if they don’t then follow it up with something

Appa Top Yop: You sign a starting pitcher to a six year deal. You can lock in one of two results: 6 years of 4.00 era/fip (he’s a unicorn the numbers match exactly every year statisticians lose their minds over it) or 3 years of 3.00 era/fip and 3 years of 5.00 era/fip but you don’t know when you’re getting which. IP is the same. Which do you pick?

Ben Clemens: I thought about this a lot

Ben Clemens: and it’s really fun, maybe this is an effectively wild question

Ben Clemens: one complicating factor is that I’d try to game this

Ben Clemens: like… obviously if my guy as a 5.33 ERA in August, I don’t think I rolled the 3.00 ERA year

Ben Clemens: so I bench him

Ben Clemens: also the last year is great. I know what he’s gonna do. So in expectation, he’s better than a 4.00 ERA average player, b/c he’s either 4.00 ERA over 6 years (3.00 ERA season as his sixth) or a 3.8 ERA pitcher for five years, and I just bench him for year 6

Naoko: In the talk of defensive metrics being noisy, how much do you think is inaccurate measurement versus players performing differently? Everyone acknowledges that a player hitting 100 wRC+ one year and 140 the next year doesn’t mean the stat is flawed, but it seems people use this argument against defensive stats.

Ben Clemens: I think it leans far more towards the second, honestly, and I agree with you that people are too quick to get mad at defensive stats for not capturing pure fair value perfect defense in a year

Ben Clemens: I mean, the chances you get are themselves very noisy

Ben Clemens: the times you get them are noisy. players perform all over teh place on a given day

Ben Clemens: I think I should probably keep saying this more often when I talk about defensive stats to drive it home

bosoxforlife: Please tell me that the Red Sox are going to make a move to help alleviate the outfield logjam. I cannot take any more of watching a 5 Star CF play 2nd base.

Ben Clemens: They’ll do SOMETHING

Ben Clemens: I don’t know what but it’s been too long without any outfield progress, they need to find some kind of trade

Mo Jiggles: Speaking of FRV, has anyone delved into establishing equivalent values for FRV and wRC+ with respect to WAR? For example, 10 points of wRC+ above 100 provides as much value as x amount of FRV.

Ben Clemens: Well, it’s all in runs, so this is easy enough to do. The tricky part is that we report weighted runs created for each player, but wRC+ gets turned into a rate statistic

Ben Clemens: so like, 10 points of wRC+ is worth different run values over different playing time. But +10 FRV is 10 runs

Ben Clemens: regardless of PT

Ben Clemens: as a rule of thumb, I looked at Steamer/600 projections, Andy Pages has 6.8 non-baserunning runs worth of offensive value at a 110 wRC+, Daulton Varsho has 0.3 non-baserunning runs of value at a 100 wRC+. So, 6-7 runs for 10 points of wRC+

Guest: Eflin and Mahle got the same contract.  Is that a weak result for Mahle or a strong result for Eflin?

Ben Clemens: On the margin I guess the former, but I had them fairly close in my free agency rankings to be honest

Ben Clemens: Eflin was one of the last guys off, Mahle one of the last guys on

Ben Clemens: I think they’re at least in the same bucket

Sacratlanta: Any key parallels you see between the Braves’ and A’s’ extension sprees? I can’t decide if the A’s feels riskier now than when the Braves did it or if my bias is that Atlanta’s effort was  ultimately flawed.

Ben Clemens: The parallels are that the team is handing out a ton of early-ish extensions to key players, often before they hit arb, even if they’re not obviously perennial All Stars

Ben Clemens: The Braves would feel riskier if they didn’t get an Acuna level guy in there, imo

Ben Clemens: like, the MH2 contract has aged poorly compared to what we all thought at the time. The Strider deal will end up being good becuase it’s already delivered so much value, but eh, pitchers break

Ben Clemens: Murphy deal, similar to MH2, it’s a win but not a huge one

Ben Clemens: I’d argue that the Braves outcome ex Acuna and Albies (I’m excluding him b/c that deal was just silly, you can’t count on signing another of those) was below average, and yet it hasn’t really crushed them or anything

Ben Clemens: I really do think it’s good team building

quonk: How are defensive metrics from before the advanced stat era calculated? There are plenty of discrepancies between different metrics for current players, how are we confident in Derek Jeter’s dWAR, let alone Honus Wagner’s?

Ben Clemens: We use something called total zone. I’m not intimately familiar with the ins and outs because I’m the modern baseball guy, not the historical baseball guy, but essentially it cares about how many outs you were responsible for making (and it handles errors somehow too) relative to the average player at your position

Ben Clemens: and it accoutns for innings and maybe fields and such

Ben Clemens: but yeah, lots of volatility for sure. we measure offense better than defense, and more so as we go back in time

bookbook: Is starting Colt Emerson on a hopeful WS contender unprecedented? (I don’t mean THE Colt Emerson–because of course that’s unprecedented–I mean a comparable 21-year-old rookie with very limited upper minors experience.)

Ben Clemens: definitely not

Ben Clemens: I was thinking Kristian Campbell, but maybe Jackson Chourio is a better recent example

Injury statistics: Do you think people will quantify how well a team keeps its players healthy or is there too much noise to be reliable?

Ben Clemens: I think there’s too much noise

Big Buxton: Do you think it’s fair accompli that there’s a substantial lockout next offseason? Players and teams both seem to be operating under that assumption and the great uncertainty that would come with that. The media seems to be assuming that as well.

Ben Clemens: No, I don’t. I think that it’s obviously in the realm of possibility, but if you told me you were confident that it was either 30% likely or 70% likely, I’d wonder how you were so confident. There are still a ton of unknowns. I think it’s more likely than it was six months ago, and that the Dodgers winning definitely pushed it in that direction, but no way is it a lock

David Wright Brothers: NYM fans keep asking if David Stearns has a specific plan, but is it more likely that he has several plans and just moves on certain things if the right price point materializes? Like, I didn’t see them getting Polanco, but that opportunity presented itself.

Ben Clemens: sure, ‘a plan’ that has only specific players is a crappy plna

Ben Clemens: plans should have contingencies and whatnot

Ben Clemens: I think that Stearns has a strategy. I think that it is probably flexible on purpose. If you have a strategy for building a baseball team that isn’t flexible, man that’s probably VERY hard to execute

David Wright Brothers: Fans often say they want a FA signing period with a deadline. How would this work structurally? I get that a player might be able to only sign a one-year deal for the upcoming season after the deadline, but what would owners have to give? A high payroll floor? Thanks, Ben!

Ben Clemens: I think it’d be more like the NBA way, is my guess. It’s not so much a deadline as a quiet period

Ben Clemens: a deadline is really tricky, but some enforced off days seems much easier

Ben Clemens: you could imagine them moving the winter meetings to the beginning of January and then having a transaction freeze for December

Scott: Thanks for the reply, Ben, and I’m sure you’re sick of questions about IBBs getting special treatment in wOBA. But I’m curious to know why you’re so confident that the season average method works really well. Certainly the range of imputed values is much narrower for longer timeframes, and therefore the effects are smaller and outliers are less extreme. But the impacts being small isn’t the same thing as a method working well. How are you validating that an Aaron Judge IBB was worth about twice Elly De La Cruz IBB in 2025? Why is it fair to credit Oneil Cruz with a wRC+ of 86 for his 4 IBBs in 2025? It seems to me that an IBB has a theoretical minimum value at wRC+ = 100 and a theoretical maximum value at the value of an unintentional walk. I get that this doesn’t matter that much, but that’s just because IBBs are rare and not that valuable. You could justify doing something weird with ROEs or HPBs the same way.

Ben Clemens: I’m not valuing them that way. I’m just saying ‘that player didn’t get a chance to bat. bummer. well, we have another estimate of what they do when they bat – what they did when they batted. let’s use that’

Ben Clemens: seems like pretty sound reasoning

Ben Clemens: obviously, the average aaron judge PA was more valuable than the average Elly PA. Good! And for the record, wRC+ isn’t additive that way. Judge had a .463 wOBA, Elly .333, so it’s more like 1/3 more valuable

Sonny: This round of posting windows should convince the MLBPA to fight like hell to reject a FA deadline

Ben Clemens: Yeah. An end date just seems both contentious and hard to enforce

Ben Clemens: whereas a dead period is probably in everyone’s interest and might increase fan engagement

Guest: Speaking of Ernie Clement, this is why teams go “dumpster diving” every offseason. Idk I get irrationally annoyed when fans complain about “dumpster diving” not every move is a blockbuster and every team wants to try and strike gold. Ernie is at like 6 fWAR as a blue jay lmao.

Ben Clemens: well, a) yes

Ben Clemens: totally

Ben Clemens: b)I think that what’s frustrating to fans is teams who ONLY do that

Ben Clemens: like yeah, the Jays acquired Ernie Clement in the ’22/’23 offseason, but they also acquired Daulton Varsho, Chris Bassitt, Kevin Kiermaier, Chad Green

Ben Clemens: if they’d just acquired Clement, then sure, he would have been a good outcome, but the offseason would have been less good

Ben Clemens: like, no one’s gonna be mad if the Pirates go sign this year’s equivalents of Adam Frazier and Caleb Ferguson

Ben Clemens: and Ferguson was a ‘dumpster dive’ who worked out, he was good and returned value at the deadline

Ben Clemens: but fans were annoyed that they did only that. and this year, they’re doing other stuff

Ben Clemens: speaking of which

bosoxforlife: Brandon Lowe and Ryan O’Hearn are significant upgrades to the Pirates lineup. I could see them contending in the NL Central especially if the Password is able to contribute.

Ben Clemens: Totally!

Ben Clemens: the NLC is really weird this year

Ben Clemens: I am not ready to predict the brewers falling off, b/c I’m not a dummy

Ben Clemens: but surely they’re always at least a little volatile. The Cubs aren’t exactly building to a fever pitch the way we all thought they might. THe Cards are pretty squarely arrow down. The Reds… yeah I mean, they might be good, but volatile as well

Ben Clemens: I think this is the most the Pirates have tried to put a currently good team on the field in like a decade

GBS42: Ben, I hope you and your loved ones enjoyed the holidays. Thanks for several years of excellent baseball (+ food & board games) content, and I look forward to a 2026 filled with more of the same. Also, Ticket to Ride: Rails & Sails can be stressful! (Four of us played it this weekend, and I felt a bit drained afterwards.)

Ben Clemens: same to you – this was a wonderful holiday season

Ben Clemens: That sounds fun, I’ve never played that one. I got my wife an interactive puzzle for Christmas and we’ve been doing that

Ben Clemens: it was pretty cool! The company is called odd pieces, they basically make puzzles where the scene has changed between teh box and the puzzle, so that you can’t just perfectly pattern match. Really fun

Cheaters in the Hall: Isn’t it unfair to not put roid users  in but put the commissioner who benefited from the increased revenue and attention those users brought?

Ben Clemens: I mean, I sure think so

Thank you for the chat!: Are teams valuing players to similarly now? Seems like elite gets paid, then the next tier is like 4-5 years at 30mm, then its just 1-2 year deals for whatever.

Ben Clemens: I think that you are right

Ben Clemens: I think that that’s a major reason my models have been, generally, improving over time

Ben Clemens: it’s partially that I’m getting better but partially also that team thinking is homogenizing around some accepted rules of valuation

Ben Clemens: it’s not PERFECTLY like that, there are still some teams I struggle with and teams are always trying to find new structures for whatever reason, but generally speaking yes, valuation has become much more similar across the league

Big Buxton: On Dumpster Diving: As a Twins fan, the number of “fringe of the roster” moves with a lack of move to acquire really any credible major leaguers (with apologies to Josh Bell) gets at the feeling Ben is talking about I think. It’s just really hard to get pumped up about DFA’ing Ryan Fitzgerald for Orlando Arcia with the state of the rest of the roster, it just feels like deck chairs on the Titanic

Ben Clemens: Yeah, good way of putting it

Ben Clemens: like… Arcia isn’t the problem. But he’s an easy point of frustration if nothing else happened all offseason

Ben Clemens: good teams succeed in signing guys for cheap and having them outperform expectations. It’s irrational to get mad at any team, even a cheap team, for having them try that. The pain is just that when it’s ALL you do, those guys are the face of inaction

wrights_back: Not a question, but a statement – as a Mets fan who watched a few games last year, Alonso, Nimmo, Vientos and Soto all failed the eye test in the field quite easily.    One way to improve a team is to field one who fields (pun intended).     

This is probably one reason the Brewers always ‘outperform’ sabremetric predictions.

Ben Clemens: Oh 100%. I can’t remember exatly when, but I’ve written about this a lot of times in the past in discussing hte Brewers

Ben Clemens: we very clearly over-regress fielding in our projections. Dan has talked about this before, that ZiPS is getting more aggressive at defensive projections, but generally speaking models regress them heavily

Ben Clemens: the Brewers are a classic average hit average pitch team who then runs the bases and fields really well

Ben Clemens: they have their good batting years and their bad batting yeras, but consistently we’re too conservative on BsR and Def

Guest: the rise in “Rynes” in baseball over the last 20 years is 100% due to Ryne Sandberg, right? (I mean people naming kids after him, not that he sired all these lads)

Ben Clemens: oh definitely

Ben Clemens: Jeter Downs, but on a much larger scale

Insert Witty Name Here: sorry I keep hitting enter too quickly! For defensive value, what exactly are the stats measuring? If I were an analyst, I think the important things wouldn’t be what happened, but rather physical tools. We have the tech to measure that stuff in granular detail. Wouldn’t you prefer knowing who has better sprint speed, reaction time, and throwing velo/accuracy rather than making an 80% probable play?

Ben Clemens: So, this is a really interesting question about statistics in general.

Ben Clemens: Do you want wRC+, or a stat that breaks down the physical tools in great detail without trying to aggregate them holistically? Or even worse, do you want to try to create an all-in-one true talent stat? That, for my money, is basically impossible

Ben Clemens: I think that there are two different things going on and that honestly, this is a big point of contention about WAR in general

Ben Clemens: there’s ‘what happened?”

Ben Clemens: for that, I think you want the 80% probable play thing. You care about what happened, and how likely it was that that thing happened, and therefore how mcuh that specific player’s contribution mattered

Ben Clemens: for predictive stuff, well, you would care about different things. It’s like how barrel rate is a better predictor of future wRC+ than wRC+ (I haven’t updated this recently, but stuff like htat)

Ben Clemens: well, sure it is. But I still care how the guy actually hit

Ben Clemens: I think that one of the reasons dudes like Bill James and Tom Tango fight all day about WAR is that they don’t agree on what it is

Ben Clemens: there’s a descriptive WAR and a predictive WAR, none of us are agreed on what we’re looking at, and that creates a lot of disagreements about statistical value

DEF: If you’re enjoying the Odd Pieces puzzles, you should check out the Ravensberger Escape Puzzles, where the puzzle doesn’t match the box, and there’s an Escape Room-like puzzle to solve as well.

Ben Clemens: Ooh we’ve done some of these too

Ben Clemens: also good

Ben Clemens: for whatever reason, I”ve only gotten smaller escape room puzzles from them, this was a nice 1000 piecer. but our local game store has those sometimes too and I do like buying htem

Decoy San: Dumb question: Could Sheehan and Hope get Duran out of Boston? Should the Dodgers try that?

Ben Clemens: hmmmm…. I mean, again I’d have to do more work on this, but I assume that would be fine

Ben Clemens: like, that the Sox would probably be willing to deal there

Ben Clemens: I don’t know that I like Duran enough to do that if I’m LA, I’m really into Hope

Scott: But, Ben, that reasoning for IBBs actually isn’t sound. That player did get a “chance to bat” in that the opposing team had to decide to intentionally put him on base. If it were entirely driven by gamestate then every player would be IBB’d in the same situations with the same likelihood; and that’s obviously not true. And then downstream of the current method you get all these wonky outcomes that are clearly wrong (if admittedly not very impactful) – Ohtani’s IBB being counted (in a novelty exercise) as doubles, Oniel Cruz being penalized (vs average) for an outcome that at worst was league average in the situation. I just don’t understand why it doesn’t bother you. Honestly, just calling it half an unintentional walk would probably be a lot closer that the current method.

(Fair enough on wRC+ not being additive. That was a lazy shorthand on my part.)

Ben Clemens: okay, responding here for one last one, but then I’m done for the day. I think we just disagree philosophically. I think our method is good. You do not. That’s life. I truly think it is correct.

Nate: I’ve noticed in recent years there are 6, 7, 8 hitters that have accumulated more fWAR than the top pitcher. This goes back to 2022 and then before that time period, it’s never really more than 1 or 2. Is this just a short term anomaly type thing or is there something larger about the sport going on?

Ben Clemens: this is structural, and has to do with the way we calculate WAR

Ben Clemens: we assign 600 WAR to hitters and 400 to pitchers every year. THat’s just fixed. There are 1000 wins above replacement to hand out by definition

Ben Clemens: So if the pitching playing time is getting split between more guys, well…

Ben Clemens: basically as innings pitched decline and more pitchers shoulder the aggregate MLB workload, but batter workloads don’t really diminish at the same rate, this direction of movement in top WAR totals is inevitable

Phil: I agree that the Sox should sign Bregman, and I am sure that Breslow is above emotional reactions, but if I were a GM or whatever he is, I would be frustrated at him and Boras for dragging this out until the last minute, with the same player and same team, two years in a row (this is assuming reports that the Sox made an “aggressive offer” are true).

Ben Clemens: I think that major league decision makers are absolutely not above emotional reactions, and didn’t Breslow release a scout who badmouthed him on a hot mic just last year?

Ben Clemens: but I mean, sure, and I totally do think htis matters

Ben Clemens: when Boras misplays his hand, teams are annoyed with him, and they should be imo

DEF: Does catcher framing WAR come out of the 400 for pitchers?

Ben Clemens: I havent’ actually pulled the stats apart to know for sure, but here’s my 90% confidence take

Ben Clemens: no, because it’s relative to average and so zeroed out

Hazmat Corntail: Ultimately, who’s the better import, Murakami or Okamoto?

Ben Clemens: if you’re asking me who will have a better aggregate MLB career, gimme Murakami

Ben Clemens: I think that people are overplaying his swing and miss issues, though of course no one REALLY knows how he’ll adapt. But I think he’ll end up bopping in Chicago and then signing a big deal

Ben Clemens: I’d take Okamoto if I wanted a guy who will be better in ’26

Nate: Wow I had no idea that WAR was split up like that. I’m not sure why (and it’s probably because I have no statistical background), but that feels flawed? I guess at a bare minimum, it means you can’t *actually* compare pitcher WAR to position player WAR then?

Ben Clemens: i mean…. kinda, yeah. it’s really tough. given that everything is relative to replacement, and gievn that we’re doing a lot of approximating, it’s really hard to compare across in that way, totally agreed

Ben Clemens: the big issue is with replacement level. Like, we can totally calculate how many runs relative to average each player’s contributions are worth

Ben Clemens: because we know average, and we know what they did

Ben Clemens: but replacement is trickier and leads to some hand waving for sure

Phil: Bopping in Chicago, the hot new hit for 1952 from Murakami and the Swingin’ Sox.

Ben Clemens:

Ben Clemens: love it

Pat: & doesn’t the pitcher WAR # being divvied up due to lower innings also mean less SP’s should be in the HOF from this era? Lots of talk about SP standards, but, if SP’s are only pitching 2200-2500 innings, aren’t they inherently less valuable than their forerunners who pitched 3000-4000, sometimes 5000 innings? To be as valuable, they would have to much more dominant.

Ben Clemens: relative to what?

Ben Clemens: like, no one should be in the hall but Cy Young hten

Ben Clemens: I think that the hall of fame generally means relative to your peers

Ben Clemens: but also, I thin I’m in the minority

Ben Clemens: Jay is working on something called S-JAWS off and on that adjusts pitching WAR for the fact that innings workloads have been declining

Ben Clemens: or at least, I see it in his articles sometimes

Ben Clemens: but if you look, the proportion of pitchers making the hall really is declining, and that’s because of this exact thing

Nate: Right (and sorry to beat a dead horse on this). But I was thinking about a run environment where every pitcher is throwing 200 innings and the game scores are all 1-0. Since WAR is fixed at 600/400, some batters would still be awarded 6-8 WAR even though relative to the current run env, they are bad. At least I think that’s what it means if I have it correct

Ben Clemens: yeah exactly. some batters still should get WAR in that low scoring environment, b/c they’re still producing wins. And a pitcher with a 2.00 ERA is awful in this environment

Ben Clemens: like what the hell is he even doing? No one can even SCORE more than a run a game

Ben Clemens: so we have to fix everything to the era and the average

Guest: I’m a life-long Sox fan and I view this as a big “arrow-up” time.  I like the value of analytics, but sometimes people need to go.

Tommyfastball: Continuing on Sox “arrow-up” comment…my sense is that most Red Sox fans view the teams management over the last year+ as strong, and we’re happy.  The portrayal on this site as everyone thinks the Sox leaders are penny-pinching idiots is frustrating.

Ben Clemens: i absolutely love these two added together

re: NPB guys: Plenty of teams have made underwhelming signings or watched rivals get better, but is the biggest loser of the MLB offseason the NPB as a whole? That posting money is pretty important in the context of running those teams and it seems like the MLB is taking intentional measures to avoid paying as much of it (this includes Imanaga’s whole thing).

Big Buxton: On the topic of Japanese players: Weird market this year for signing players from Japan. Is this a sign of a systemic reevaluation of how guys will translate coming over? Or just a weird blip with a small sample size of players that the media world and teams viewed differently? Or maybe just a symptom of the looming CBA changes?

Ben Clemens: I think both of these questions are interesting, and particularly so whne taken together

Ben Clemens: I assume that NPB is very upset with these developments

Ben Clemens: it’s a serious amount of monetary shortfall. they may need to look at a new posting system

Ben Clemens: but similarly, I think that this particular batch of players is the kind that would be particularly prone to lowballs

Ben Clemens: I mentioned this on Effectively Wild last week, but I had a MUCH lower estimate for Imai when I did my initial projections

Ben Clemens: And then I did my normal process of voraciously reading everything on the internet about imports

Ben Clemens: and moved my estimtae up considerably as a result

Ben Clemens: similar deal with Murakami

Ben Clemens: if you look through my free agent rankings, I had Imai getting 100 million ranked #20, and the next non-Murakami guy with a 9 figure projection was #11

Ben Clemens: so I initially had him meaningfully lower before letting myself get talked up. and murakami was similar at a higher tier. I basically think that the recent returns on foreign players (not just Yamamoto, but the contracts that guys like Jung Hoo Lee, Masataka Yoshida, even Seiya Suzuki got) had people thinking the dollars would automatically be big

Ben Clemens: I mean, I missed badly on the JHL and Yoshida contracts and in retrospect the teams who extended those deals surely wish they didn’t

Ben Clemens: I think that this year, between the posting pressure (look at Imanaga’s whole deal, the posting stuff clearly makes teams behave differently) and the fact that these guys just didn’t project that great, there was more risk than I appreciated of “low-ball” (read not super aggressive) offers

Ben Clemens: okay, a few more questions and then it’s lunchtime

bosoxforlife: As a fan of the game for a long time one of the things that has struck me is to see some hitter from the 50’s put up a line like .328/ 28/ 111 and get 1.1 WAR which in today’s game would garner a 7.6  WAR.

Ben Clemens: I concur

Insert Witty Name Here: You hype at all for the WBC this year? I thought the last one was really fun, just hoping no one pulls an Edwin Diaz in the celebrations again.

Ben Clemens: super hyped, had a ton of fun going last year

Ben Clemens: last time*

Phil: You’re judged against Cy Young in terms of the general definition of a Hall of Famer. You’re judged against your peers for the purpose of determining what specifically a HOFer looks like at any given point in time. At least, to me!

Ben Clemens: I concur as well

Phil: As a Somervillean (Mass., not NJ), I think overall opinions on Breslow and Henry are mixed, but I do think we were less mad about Devers than the national writers think. Conflating Devers and Betts, as was done by some writers, was overstating the case.

Ben Clemens: yeah. I agree with this. I really like Devers but c’mon, my wife is always mad at me for how great I think Mookie is and I’m not a Sox or Dodgers fan

Ben Clemens: obviously he’s a whole different tier

Dr. Curvegood: Is there a credible argument that any team not in the top 6-7 payrolls is spending plenty?

Ben Clemens: yeah, but not many of them

Devers: Is a salary cap inevitable?

Ben Clemens: no, but I think a cap/floor system is likely in the long run

David Wright Brothers: Do you get the sense that the TBR will change their modus operandi at all with new ownership?

Ben Clemens: no

Prospects: Are Dodgers prospects overrated because they haven’t had the Urias, Seager, Belinger type success lately or are they more impressive considering LA usually drafts last from winning records and tax penalties?

Ben Clemens: the latter, imo

Ben Clemens: also they trade a lot of their prospects, respect

Ben Clemens: okay, have a wonderful day everyone, let’s do this again next week.