Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 3/2/26

Ben Clemens: Hey everybody, welcome to the chat. I’ve got a busy writing schedule this week so I’d like to keep this to a tight 60 minutes. I’ll try to answer a lot in that hour, though. So let’s get started right away.

The person who asks the lunch question: what’s for lunch?

Ben Clemens: I’ll probably duck out to the restaurant on my block for a rotisserie chicken sandwich. Just got back from a nice set of skiing vacations so there’s not much food at home, and like I said, I’m kinda busy today

sam: Who ends up being the white sox most valuable player this year? I’m going with Teel, slightly worried about Montgomery’s contact rate and possible regression.

Ben Clemens: I mean, maybe I’m crazy but I think this should be Murakami by a lot

Ben Clemens: Like you, I’m worried by Montgomery’s contact rate, and I think that there’s plenty of ways that he can have a bad season and still be a great long-term player. Just plenty of space for the natural development process to involve a dip while the arrow still points upward

Ben Clemens: I think that Murakami’s contact rates obviously raise the same questions, but for whatever reason I just feel more comfortable with that

Ben Clemens: or, with his ability to solve them

Ben Clemens: I don’t have a great mathematical reason for why, it’s just kind of a gut feel

Tony: Hey Ben! I have been working my way through your back catalogue to really understand more of your team building philosophies! Loved the articles on the Mets and Red Sox. Would you say that the Coherence, Option/Liquid, Championship Probability mostly informs how you think about rosters/transactions? Anymore thoughts on this and do you mind pointing out any other articles you would consider required reading!

Ben Clemens: Hey Tony, thanks for calling it a back catalog, that sounds really cool.

Ben Clemens: Um, generally speaking that is a good distillation of how I think about things. Breaking it out into categories and naming them was a big step forward for me, because I feel like I was falling into some logical traps around misweighting the categories before

Ben Clemens: but really, the coherence and optionality/liquidity ones are really important in team-building and I think that even if you don’t say it explicitly, when you think about ‘how’s the front office doing?’ those are the natural things to consider

splendid: Why do authors at Fangraphs so often compare Juan Soto to Ted Williams? The two of them have played 22 seasons with more than 400 PAs. By wRC+ Williams has 13 of the top 14 seasons (including the top 8). Soto has 6 of the bottom 8 (including the bottom 4). Soto is great but there are levels to this, and surely there is a more reasonable comp.

Ben Clemens: I’d say the main reason is that ZiPS kept spitting out Ted Williams comps

Ben Clemens: and also like…. you got a better baseball comparison for a walks-and-homers guy who has pristine bat control and is trying to launch it?

Ben Clemens: you can think ‘he’s like ted williams, only not as good because ted williams’ stats will obviously never be matched’ if that makes it better for you

GBS42: Hey, Ben, I hope you had a great weekend! Live baseball is back! Sadly, the Cardinals are likely to be in rough shape in the standings for a while. When do you see them competing for a playoff spot again? How about for the division title?

Ben Clemens: I think that the answer to those two questions is probably the same. And I think it’s like…. 2028?

Ben Clemens: Let me put it this way: it’s hard to imagine a median projection for the Cards that puts them in the playoff mix butdoesn’t have at least a puncher’s chance of also winning the divisin

Ben Clemens: the Brewers and Cubs are good, no doubt, but these aren’t the Dodgers. It’s not like there are 15 wins of daylight between a wild card and the division title here

Oaktown Blues: It’s pretty crazy that Nick Kurtz was drafted 4th, then put up a 170 wRC+ after playing like 30 minor league games, yet if you did a redraft today, he still might go 4th. Hell of a draft

Ben Clemens: You got me thinking about this for a while and I don’t think I could get Kurtz lower than third. I’d probably take him second

Ben Clemens: like Griffin would go first, I get it

Ben Clemens: but Kurtz just had one of the best rookie seasons of the 21st century. Am I really taking JJ Wetherholt, Chase Burns, or Trey Yesavage over that?

Ben Clemens: I’d be tempted to take Kurtz over Griffin even

Mas Datos, Por Favor: In FG Labs, could we get a feature for player cards that show Current Value and various prospect tool grades? We break prospects down to FV and grades, but for a visual comparison to see what a 55 Value player looks like would be nice.

Ben Clemens: it’s an interesting idea – I’ll bat it around in my brain for a bit and think of how it might look

Ben Clemens: I am cooking up a few new Lab ideas already, and I believe we have a few other ones in the pipeline, but this sounds kinda fun

Ben Clemens: there are some improvements to player cards on the way, incidentally, courtesy of Sean and Keaton, that I bet you’ll be very excited about. Stay tuned!

Crabcakes: Does tennis have development labs the way baseball does these days?  Like, we’re gonna track every part of your body and racket to help you maximize power on your serve or spin on your backhand?  Seems like an obvious fit to me

Ben Clemens: I’m not nearly as in the weeds when it comes to tennis as I am with baseball. Also, I don’t think it quite works the same way with labs, because everyone’s an independent contractor and you’d probably just have your own ‘data guy’ because you don’t want other top competitors stealing your edge

Ben Clemens: that said absolutely there’s a ton of biometric analysis and people are rebuilding their serves with computers helping out

Baseball Learner: Are you going to write an off-season review for the Blue Jays? Some additions, some subtractions. Do you see them as potentially better than last year?

Ben Clemens: I’m probably going to. I have a curse of having too many ideas and not enough time. That’s how you end up juggling two new lab tools, after spending a month building lab tools, while it’s almost positional power ranking time

Ben Clemens: But I do think they’re potentially better than last year and i do think their offseason was really interesting

Ben Clemens: They’re on my list. The O’s and Giants are on my list. Tell me others, too

Oaktown Blues: My thought was most teams would take Burns/Yesavage over Kurtz because he’s relegated to 1B and good pitching is so expensive

Ben Clemens: Yeah, maybe? I mean, I wouldn’t. I believe in TINSTAAPP too much, and Kurtz was just too good

Jesse: I know most stats in spring training don’t matter, but a player setting a new max EV seems notable. What else should we be taking away from the spring training data?

Ben Clemens: There’s some good evidence that bat speed in spring training does a better job of predicting regular season bat speed than previous-year bat speed

Ben Clemens: now, how does that map to in-season performance? it remains unclear. but physical things have good correlation – bat speed, ptich velocity, etc.

Bill Dewallet: I think taking Kurtz over Griffin is the correct choice imo. The players who have put up a rookie season roughly that good as a hitter are literally just Judge, Pujols, him, and Jose Abreu. Like there is a legit chance Grffin has to be Trout/Witt to be better than Kurtz.

Ben Clemens: Yeah. I think that’s where I’d end up. I totally understand that I may be in the minority relative to major league evaluators, who have a very high grade on Griffin

Ben Clemens: I just love players who have proven it at the highest level, what can i say?

dylan: any more book recs in the vein of the culture series (started & loving thanks to your mention of the player of games a few weeks ago)?

Ben Clemens: I’ll do a quick little recent book reads thing because I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I like both giving recs and hearing what readers like. For the record, though, I don’t know of a lot of other series like The Culture, maybe Asimov stuff? Maybe Ancillary Justice/Sword/Mercy?

Ben Clemens: Latest general fiction: Heart the Lover by Lily King
Not really my preferred genre, leaned a little more romance-y than I usually like, but she’s an incredible writer and I’m just such a writing nerd that I loved this book anyway. I thought it was too short if anything – I wanted more of the rabbit holes to be explored, even though I think it was more of a gesture-painting of a book than something that’s richly detailed in every corner. Big fan, gonna try some more King books as this was my first one

Ben Clemens: Latest sci fi/fantasy: There is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
Definitely my preferred genre, and the conceptual framework on this one is great. It’s a really fun concept, the twists actually feel like part of the cohesive hole instead of just Shyamalan’ing you in the back of hte head every time, and the SCP style world is very fun to me. That said, the writing is uneven at times, and I think it’s better as a concept than as a book. The concept is REALLY good though

Ben Clemens: Latest nonfiction: Breath by James Nestor
Really fascinating, made me rethink breathing and meditation, highly recommended

Ben Clemens: Latest re-read: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett
Sherlock Holmes in a fascinating fantasy world. This one is one of my favorite books of recent years. I like a lot of Bennett’s books and had read both of his previous series, but this one is even more to my liking. I think the writing is very good, the cahracters are very well developed, and the mysteries are just phenomenal, which is where some Holmes-homage books fall apart.

Shandy Koufax: For culture like stuff, foundation trilogy by Asimov is bang on

Ben Clemens: Yeah, good call

bosoxforlife: If you saw Griffin in his game against the Red Sox you might change your mind. He looked like a combination of ARod and Ozzie.

Ben Clemens: Like, totally. The potential! It’s so high. Nik Kurtz played in 120 major league games and slugged .620 last year.

Oaktown Blues: I’ve thought about reading Breath but I’m worried it will make me aware that I’m breathing wrong and then I’ll have to deal with that

Ben Clemens: Oh, it definitely will

Ben Clemens: and then you’ll second guess yourself for weeks

Ben Clemens: so you know, be warned!

Shandy Koufax: When you started writing how did you balance the desire to get it right vs. get it out there.
it Seems easy to fall into the trap of “I need more work before this is ready”

Ben Clemens: well, we have to publish, so that helps

Kyle: What’s the panic meter at with Strider fastball sitting 92-94 first spring training outing?

Ben Clemens: first start? not too high

Ben Clemens: some guys just need to limber up

Ben Clemens: but check again on March 15 and let’s keep an eye

bosoxforlife: The Japanese stars who came over, Okamoto and Murakami, signed for amounts far less than what was anticipated. In today’s inflated market, do you see them as bargains? Especially Okamoto at $15M/yr for 4 could be a great deal.

Ben Clemens: I definitely think that all three might be very good bargains. I am in the middle of finishing up a retrospective of offseason free agency contracts right now, and “NPB players all signed for bargains, maybe it’s a posting system thing” is one of my big takeaways

Ben Clemens: That’s a structural thing to look into for future years, because if you look at the major prognosticators, and here I’m counting myself, we consistently did very poorly on Murakami, Imai, and Okamoto

Shandy Koufax: My question about writing was definitely poorly phrased.
I meant when you first started on VEB and the like, before it was your full time job.

Ben Clemens: Oh, I missed ‘started’. Mmmmm…. even then, I jsut had a schedule. Two articles a week, Tuesday and Saturday. And for those, I had to write them the night before, because it was a part-time unpaid job and I was doing a real life very difficult job. So I’d come up with a concept at say 7pm, and at 10pm, well, it was getting submitted

red sox: there was a quote a few weeks stating duran would platoon some against same sided pitching. do you believe this or is this just coachspeak? is there even a viable platoon partner to do this with?

Phil: Given Jarren Duran’s looking good in spring, do you have an update on how you expect the Sox outfield situation to be managed, or is that like three weeks premature?

Ben Clemens: Yeah, this is how I feel about it: way too soon to tell. I think that one of the big edges I have on a lot of people in similar roles is that I just cannot keep track of all the coach speak and small sample stuff in spring training

Ben Clemens: I just let spring trianing wash over me as an experience

Ben Clemens: people like Jason and Jon are absolutely in the weeds, they know everything like this very well and keep track of all of it obsessively

Ben Clemens: I had to look up Duran’s stats. I think that benefits me, honestly. This stuff is noisy! there’s only so much time to analyze baseball. Dispositionally, I just need to be doing the big analysis stuff to feel like I’m learning, so I try to tune out the noise

Ben Clemens: now, come the regular season, I’ll switch gears because you can start getting bigger samples and learning mroe stuff about in-game performance. But spring training? I can’t help thnking of it as practice

Josh: What is it specifically that you think projection systems consistently miss on teams like the Brewers, and is it fixable?

Ben Clemens: I’m also currently working on an article about how our playoff odds turn projections into team strength estimates. I think that the Brewers’ baserunning is overrated as a thing that projection systems are missing, for the record. I think that as a team-building strategy, it’s underrated, but their XBR (statcast baserunning) was worth maybe a win and a half relative to league average last year, that’s not enough for the kinds of big errors we’re talking about.

Ben Clemens: I think that defense is a tougher thing. It’s very reasonable to me that our projections are too conservative defensively, as in regressing things to the mean more than they should be, because our measurements are still too imprecise and thus noisy

Ben Clemens: The Brewers have beat their FIP by 0.3 from 2020-2025. In 2026, we think they’ll beat it by 0.09. I think we’re probably regressing that too much

Ben Clemens: Is it fixable? Yes, but I need to think a lot more about how. And I think it’s at the projection level, not the us assembling projections into odds level

Ben Clemens: Dan probably has some good thoughts on this

Alex: What is your favorite type of home run? I like the Adrian Beltre one-knee homers.

Ben Clemens: that’s a good one. I love the really high ball home runs where you’re like ‘wait how in the world did that swing turn into a homer’

Ben Clemens: where it almost looks like me swinging at a whiffle ball pitch from my nephew

Insert Witty Name Here: Do you think Adley Rutschman can be a post hype sleeper?  Any idea how he didn’t develop as expected other than “catchers, man…”

Ben Clemens: I do think he can, but man, I also worry that I have a specific blindspot with Rutschman. I have been too high on him in trade value series in general. Obviously, some biases are unavoidable, but I had him in the top 35 last year. That was wrong, in retrospect.

Ben Clemens: so we’ll be doing some soul searching there, basically

Mike Trout Mask Replica: Ben- I’m starting to think the Tigers break camp with Kevin McGonigle as their starting SS, am I crazy? Thank you for the chat!

Ben Clemens: not crazy at all

Ben Clemens: I don’t know exactly what the likelihood is, but I think they’re in ap osition where they need to try to tap into some upside variance, and trying out McGonigle is a great example of that

Hot dog inflation: Fans always talk about salary caps but what about a ticket price cap? Hot dog & drink cap? If costco and sams club can do $1.50 hot dog drink combos(better quality than mlb hot dogs too) then mlb can do it. Basically can we start a “hot dog prices are too damn high” club?

Ben Clemens: why would teams do this? and why would the players propose it? I think it’s a nice pitch that will definitely never happen. You’re not pay8ing for the meat in the hot dog – you’re paying for the fact that you get to eat it while you watch a major league baseball game.

bosoxforlife: There is just no way that the Red Sox present roster works! Duran has to play, Anthony has to play and they say they are going to give Abreu a chance to face lefties more. That leaves out the best defensive CF in the game, who just happens to be having a terrific start to ST. Yoshida simply cannot be on the team unless he is going to turn into Smokey Burgess who, in 1966-67, appeared in 156 games, all as a PH.

Ben Clemens: I think that Yoshida is going to end up as the odd man out, and they’ll just eat the money eventually

Ben Clemens: I’m with you that they just can’t find a way to play him. They have four better outfielders. There are only three outfield spots

low slot (machine): sean manaea had a rough season last year in addition to the general declining efficacy of sweepers, but also had some promising number like k-bb, stuff, sierra etc. what is your outlook on such an interesting profile

Ben Clemens: I have him on my Ottoneu team, if that answers your question. I think realistically the error bars are enormous. THe ‘Manaea learned to throw like Chris Sale’ narrative was always kinda silly, but likewise, this guy’s been a decent major league starter before, it’s not crazy to think that he just was never right last year and will have it back this year

Ben Clemens: I like the shape of the risk as a team, I’ll just say: some chance he’s cooked, but I think there’s a reasonable chance that he is a mid-3’s ERA dude again, more so than the market is pricing

I AM RANDAL: LOOKS LIKE I’VE GOT A LIST OF RESTAURANTS TO TRY https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=Tilapia&find_loc=New+York%2C+NY

Ben Clemens: still my favorite VEB article of all time

Jeremiah: Do you think Jakob Marsee can be a top 5-10 CF this season?

Ben Clemens: I do. Some of that is that the bar is pretty low, though. Like, my top 5 is Julio, PCA, Merrill, maybe Chourio, maybe Langford or Rafaela depending on if you count langford as a CF

Ben Clemens: but I think there’s a big dropoff after the top 4. Maybe you throw Buxton in there depdning on how you feel about his health

Ben Clemens: my point is that the NEXT tier is pretty wide. Looking at Depth CHarts, we have Oneil Cruz 10th at 2.8 WAR proj, and Marsee at 17th at 2.2. Brenton Doyle is in 19th with 2.2. The difference between back half of the top 10 and average is just not that high at the moment

RE: Soto Comp: “he’s like ted williams, only not as good because ted williams’ stats will obviously never be matched” – If Williams’ stats will never be matched, why even bother with him as a comp?

Frank Thomas, much more reasonable comp

Ben Clemens: not a bad one at all. The reason people don’t use it is the lefty/righty thing

Ben Clemens: I credit you for it, though. It’s a good one. Lefty/righty is overrated as a historical comp thing. We care about their aggregate production, not where they stood

bosoxforlife: What is your impression of the ABS Challenge system? It definitely adds a fascinating moment of drama but I would have liked just one more opportunity to be wrong so it would be used more often early in games. it does not effect the pace of play.

Ben Clemens: I’m happy with it, though I think the visual presentation will continue to evolve. The extremely tiny misses with the distance written out sometimes seem silly. I think I prefer the tennis style where they don’t quantify the size of the miss, merely show a graphic

Guest: T/F – (gotta pick one) The fact that Soto and Naylor combined for 68 SB vs 6 CS with some of the worst sprint speed in the league means guys like Jackson Merrill and Joey Ortiz who are fast but don’t get steals just don’t really care (put in the work to be good).

Ben Clemens: Oh, false

Ben Clemens: Now, are there some people who just don’t want to put in the work? definitely

Ben Clemens: but I bet you that it’s hard to be as good at Juan Soto at a mental processing skill

Ben Clemens: I think that some people just don’t have the ‘time up the pitcher’ skill down well enough and that it’s jsut too hard to improve for some

fish: another marlins outfield question, but what’s your take on stowers? 25 hr in 400 pa seems like it will come back to earth, the projection systems certainly think so, but at the same time barrel rate is one of the stickier hitting metrics and he rocked a 19% last year. what are you seeing here?

Ben Clemens: The projections think he’s gonna keep thumping, we have him down for 26 doubles and 27 homers in a tough park for homers

Ben Clemens: 40th highest ISO projection in baseball, right behind Fernando Tatis and James wood

Ben Clemens: the guy has a career 30% strikeout rate. WE think he’s gonna strike out too much

Baseball Learner: You missed Trent Grisham as a top center fielder. You don’t buy him repeating last year’s performance?

Ben Clemens: he’s in that mix between 7th and 20th

Ben Clemens: I didn’t happen to isolate him by name. I think he’s in the Marsee camp. Not in my personal top 5 but if he finishes 5th or 17th, I’d be equally unsurprised

bosoxforlife: I have been thinking a lot about Naylor and Soto stealing, almost at will, last year and wonder if stealing is going to increase dramatically this year. It almost seems like it is a free base if these plow horses can do it so easily.

Ben Clemens: I think we’re going to find out one way or another this year

Ben Clemens: Like, I predict far more ‘big dude looks like a cow on ice skates while getting thrown out by five feet’ moments, and also more free steals

Dunkies: What impact will the new 48oz DUNKIN BUCKETS have on the Red Sox, or their fans, The Home Whites (per Meg and Ben on EW)?

Ben Clemens: comment presented without reply

EccentricATLFan: Fun with 2025 Rafael Montero through PitchingBot Visualizer: You’d think that the guy who had one of the worst walk rates in the majors would be terrible in the WasteMiss% and Squandered% categories…except it turns out that he was slightly better than average in those departments if you look across all counts, as well as grading out well in command.  That being said, when you hone in on two-strike counts that weren’t a full count, while command still graded fine, he graded out worse than average in WasteMiss% and Squandered%. which definitely wouldn’t have helped him get his strikeouts.  Just interesting food for thought that came from noodling around on the new toys!

Ben Clemens: fascinating. I haven’t looked at Montero yet but maybe I should. He gets great command marks in every pitch modeling system I can find. Also, he has a bottom-five zone rate

Ben Clemens: so it’s like he’s throwing it off the plate on purpose

Ben Clemens: anyway, more on this alter maybe? It’s too complicated for me to work through live here because man, what weird numbers

369: Why is there so much resistance to a salary cap/floor system? Wouldn’t guaranteeing that the players get a certain percentage of revenue be a reasonable thing?

Ben Clemens: I think it’s because the systems that have been floated so far are just caps

Ben Clemens: and also, players are pretty distrustful of the owners about revenue given all the weird revenue sharing agreements and ownership stakes in RSN’s

Ben Clemens: it’s a weird time to link your pay to an official designation of ‘league revenue’, basically

Ben Clemens: when the league is very quickly remaking the rules of that

Ben Clemens: on the other hand, I think that a cap/floor system, IN GENERAL, is claerly good

Ben Clemens: I think it would come with changes that let players reach free agency faster, because i don’t think the money can be reasonably distributed otherwise

Ben Clemens: it’s one of these things that would be good if the system were designed from scratch. But I don’t really trust anyone involved to design that system, and the tone of the ownership description is definitely ‘take money out of the players’ hands’ because it’s not focused even a little on how embarrassing it is that the Pirates don’t try

Ben Clemens: it’s entirely about how the Dodgers spend too much. Get Rob Manfred railing on how fans don’t liek when their owners are cheap and we’ll talk

jojonel1: hi ben when i look up a pitcher and next to his name it says ST what does ST mean ?

Ben Clemens: spring training. it denotes that he’s on the ML roster for spring training

Don Van Vliet: No question, just admiring whomever is commenting as “Mike Trout Mask Replica”

Baseball Learner: Do you think Mike trout can really be a good CF again? Sounds like he wants to try

Ben Clemens: sadly I do not. That said, Trout has proved me wrong before

369: How hard is it to throw 2 innings instead of 1? I can’t help but think that having a bunch of multi inning guys instead of a 5th starter and single inning bullpen fluff might be better.

Ben Clemens: It’s hard. Getting cold between innings is a bigger issue than the pitch count

Ben Clemens: on/off/on stress on your arm can be weird. on/off/on adrenaline can be weird. I think that’s the big holdup, not the raw effort

Guardian of the Ephemeral: Did the White Sox figure something out over the past few years with pitcher dev? They’ve suddenly got a little pipeline going…

Ben Clemens: feels that way for sure

Ben Clemens: let’s keep tracking, but yeah

Ben Clemens: alright, i gotta run. Talk to you again next week, same time, same place. And the WBC will be going on!