This season has the potential to be an odd one for catchers. None of us knows exactly how the ABS challenge system will affect the way they go about their job, but all of us will be paying close attention. We’re a couple years into the one-knee-down revolution, and while the conventional wisdom was that it would help keep them fresher and allow them to play more innings, the top 30 catchers in terms of innings caught actually caught fewer innings in 2025 than they did in 2024.

The top of the list is fun. We’ve got 60-homer Cal Raleigh in his own stratosphere, William Contreras in his shadow, and Patrick Bailey one-tooling his way to the top tier. We have deep teams like the Blue Jays and Yankees, Rookie of the Year Drake Baldwin, rookie Gold Glover Dillon Dingler, and veteran Will Smith, who became an entirely different hitter at age 30. And nobody knows what to expect from Adley Rutschman.

The rest of the rankings come with plenty of questions too. Can J.T. Realmuto and Salvador Perez keep holding on? How many homers will Shea Langeliers hit? How many bases will Agustín Ramírez steal? Even the teams at the bottom of the list have some hope. Harry Ford could finally solve the Nationals’ catching woes. Carlos Narváez and Kyle Teel put up great rookie campaigns for their respective Sox. Joey Bart is… interesting at the plate for the Pirates. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 2026 positional power rankings! As is tradition, over the next week and a half, we’ll be ranking every team by position as we inch closer to Opening Day next Thursday. As I note every year, this is something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly, after all — a fact for which we are very grateful — and are well-versed in the various signings, trades, and injuries that have occurred over the offseason. You know that Kyle Tucker is now a Dodger, that the Blue Jays signed Dylan Cease, that the Cardinals traded away most of their veterans, and that the injury bug has bit much of the Braves rotation. And yet, you’re still keen to know more about the game and what it might look like between now and October. The positional power rankings are our answer to that impulse.

This post serves as an explainer for our approach to the rankings. If you’re new to the exercise, I hope it helps to clarify how they are compiled and what you might expect from them. If you’re a FanGraphs stalwart, much of this will be familiar, but I hope it’s a useful reminder of what we’re up to. If you have a bit of time, you’ll find the introduction to last year’s series here. You can use the navigation widget at the top of that post to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2025, a spring that saw a number of players who had signed record-setting free agent deals report to their new teams.

Unlike a lot of sites’ season previews, we don’t arrange ours by team or division. That is a perfectly good way to organize a season preview, but we see a few advantages to the way we do it. First, ranking teams by position allows us to cover a team’s roster from top to bottom. Stars, everyday contributors, and role players alike receive some amount of examination, and those players (and the teams they play for) are placed in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can more easily see how teams stack up against each other, get a sense of the overall strength of a position across baseball, and spot the places where a well-constructed platoon may end up having a bigger impact than an everyday regular who is good rather than great. We think all of that context helps to create a richer understanding of the state of the game and a clearer picture of the season ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

Several times during the last half decade, Major League Baseball has piloted rule changes in the minor leagues, some that have already been implemented at the highest level and others that remain purely experimental. Over the weekend, I learned about a league memo circulating among baseball operations departments regarding various experimental rule changes that will be tested during the upcoming minor league season; I then acquired the document from a club source.

This memo, which has not been previously reported, was sent to general managers, assistant general managers, farm directors, and player development personnel with the request that it be relayed to managers and coaches throughout the organization. I have excerpts from the memo below, as well as some thoughts spawned by its contents. Some of the rule changes being piloted in 2026 are aimed at augmenting the game’s aesthetic, others at further increasing the pace of play. Some of them seem like they’re for player development purposes only and not likely to be a future big league feature. Read the rest of this entry »

Content warning: This piece contains historical photographs of a racist effigy being hung from a school building. They may be upsetting to readers.

The Rangers host the Royals for a two-game series starting on March 23. It’s their final tuneup before Opening Day, and the first time Rangers fans will enter Globe Life Field this year. Those who filter into the ballpark through the TXE Energy North entrance will encounter a 12-foot-tall bronze statue of a Texas Ranger – not a ballplayer, but a lawman – in the left field concourse, his extended left hand instructing them to calm down, his right hand hovering next to his pistol. The Ranger stands atop a red stone base engraved with the agency’s logo and the words:

TEXAS RANGER OF 1960
“ONE RIOT – ONE RANGER”

The team has been unusually quiet about the statue, offering little context about its provenance or significance. An unveiling ceremony was held the morning of Monday, March 2, but reporters weren’t informed about it until the night before, and they weren’t invited to ask questions. Majority owner Ray Davis’ remarks were brief and vague. Posts on the team’s social media accounts showed only a picture of the statue beneath the text, “New addition to the concourse.” A press release revealed some details about the statue, the name of the sculptor and where it once stood, but it said nothing about how the statue ended up at the ballpark.

This is the story of how the statue arrived at Globe Life Field, but it’s not the story of why the team decided that it belongs there. Only the team can tell that story, and it is not interested in doing so. Last week, in response to an emailed list of questions, a club spokesman referred FanGraphs to the team’s initial press release.

“One Work That Will Really Live Down Through the Ages”

Though often referred to as “One Riot, One Ranger,” the name of the statue is “Texas Ranger of Today,” and it was created by prominent San Antonio sculptor Waldine Amanda Tauch. It was commissioned in 1959 by the Dallas Historical Monuments Commission and paid for with a $25,000 donation (made anonymously at the time) from restaurateur Earle Wyatt. Tauch’s design beat out those of three other artists. “He will be a two-gun man — with one hand on his gun — who is entering the scene of a fight,” she told reporters. “He will be a man that everyone respects and trustfully looks upon as law and order.” Tauch had ambitions for the statue, saying, “I would like to leave some one work that will really live down through the ages.” Oddly, the Ranger is posed nearly identically to Tauch’s 1969 sculpture of General Douglas MacArthur. On April 30, 1961, the statue was dedicated at Dallas Love Field Airport. Apart from temporary stints at Union Station and the Frontiers of Flight Museum, it stayed at Love Field until 2020, when professor Doug Swanson published a book called Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.

The book was an attempt to tell the story of the Rangers, separating truth from myth without shying away from the darkest chapters of the organization’s history, such as the atrocities committed during the Mexican revolution. According to the Bullock Texas State History Museum’s account of the Porvenir Massacre, “Texas Rangers were sent to patrol the border, but rather than enforcing the law impartially, they participated in and often instigated the killing of hundreds of ethnic Mexicans between 1914 and 1919.”

The phrase “One Riot, One Ranger,” has become an unofficial motto for the Texas Rangers Division. There are differing accounts of its origin. The most famous references an incident from 1896, when Captain Bill McDonald was charged with breaking up an illegal prizefight. Local officials were dismayed that only one Ranger arrived to deal with the unrest. Replied the Ranger, “You only have one riot, don’t you?” In a phone interview, Swanson tried to explain how the Rangers acquired their larger-than-life reputation. “In part, it’s because they helped make Texas what Texas is,” he said. “They helped settle Texas, for lack of a better word. They were the people who fought the Native Americans; they were people who fought outlaws. They fought in the Mexican-American War, all of that. They had this long history. At the same time, they’ve been really good at promoting themselves as these superhuman lawmen who do nothing except engage in justice and honorable behavior and fight on the side of right – which they have in many cases, but which they haven’t in many cases.”

A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Swanson spent 34 years at the Dallas Morning News. He was also “a huge Rangers fan” who got engaged at Arlington Stadium during a Rangers-Yankees game. In 2016, after stints at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of North Texas, he began teaching journalism at the University of Pittsburgh. “You know, the Pirates may have a team this year,” he said. “That should be your story.”

Cult of Glory wasn’t the first book to document the Rangers’ past atrocities, but it arrived at a moment of national reckoning over police brutality, particularly as it affected communities of color. It was published on June 9, 2020, 15 days after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man; the killing was captured on video and prompted protests of police violence across the country. On June 4, D Magazine ran an excerpt from the book that began with a section on the statue. It identified the model for the statue as former Texas Ranger Captain E.J. Banks, known as Jay, and it ran under the headline, “The Horrible Truth of Love Field’s Ranger Statue.” The statue was removed later that day. “Protests at an airport present too much risk,” said then-aviation director Mark Duebner. The statue went into storage at Hensley Field, a former Naval Air Station, and news outlets ran pictures of the Ranger lying horizontally on a dolly – his calming left hand now pointed straight up toward the ceiling – as workers in hard hats wheeled him out of the airport.

“He Could Hit Harder Than Any Man I Ever Saw”

Born in 1912, Banks spent nine years as a highway patrolman and served in the Coast Guard during World War II. He joined the Rangers in 1947 and became a legend for his toughness during a time of gang wars. Said one of his subordinates, “I don’t want to make a folk hero of the man, but he was formidable. He was big and powerful. He could hit harder than any other man I ever saw.” Banks’ most celebrated accomplishment was a 1957 car chase and shootout in which he killed notorious murderer Gene Paul Norris and accomplice Carl Humphrey, reportedly shooting Norris 23 times.

Banks gained national fame in 1956, when the country was mired in a battle over segregation. Two years after Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, state police and federal troops forcibly integrated schools across the South. In Texas, Governor Allan Shivers twice sent in the Rangers to make sure the schools stayed segregated. He’d campaigned on segregation, and even after more than 100 school districts had integrated, he continued to fight it. Striking a tone that’s all too familiar today, he blamed the turmoil on “paid agitators.”

On Friday, August 31, after a federal court refused to stay the decision to integrate the Mansfield Independent School District, a mob of 400 people descended upon Mansfield High School to prevent Black students from registering. They blocked the doors. They hung effigies. They brought hunting dogs. They smashed the cameras of out-of-town reporters. A lawyer representing three Black students tried to register them by telegram, but superintendent R.L. Huffman refused to accept the proxy registration. “Now you guys know I’m with you,” he assured the mob, before making sure they hadn’t overlooked two doors around the back.

Shivers sent his own telegram to the Mansfield trustees, instructing them to transfer to another district any students “who might be the cause of difficulties.” To enforce this directive, he dispatched Banks and fellow Ranger Lewis Rigler. The telegram also served as a photo opportunity. On the front page of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a highway patrolman hands the telegram to the president of the Mansfield school board. Between them stands Banks.

On September 4, Reverend D.W. Clark of St. Timothy’s Church in Fort Worth admonished the demonstrators, telling them to love their neighbors. The incensed crowd surrounded him, screaming. A widely circulated AP report described Banks’ extrication of Clark in heroic terms: “Banks came through the crowd very quietly, took the priest gently by the arm, and said, ‘I think we’d better go.’ He led the priest off the school grounds.” The article was often accompanied by a photo of a smiling Banks leaning against a tree, surrounded by adoring high school girls. A photo taken from another angle, which didn’t make it into newspapers, shows that the cheerful gathering took place on the front lawn of the school, in the shadow of an effigy hanging from the entrance to the school. Another picture showed Banks and the girls laughing as he playfully handcuffed two of them together.

The next week, Banks and three other Rangers were sent to Texarkana College, a community college. On September 10, a mob estimated at 300 people assembled to physically block Black students from entering. People started arriving at 7:00 AM. They brought signs: “No NAACP Goons” and “Go North, N*****.” Two Black students arrived, 17-year-old Steve Poster and 18-year-old Jessalyn Gray. The crowd screamed epithets as the teenagers tried to find a way in. They separated Poster and Gray, kicking him and throwing gravel at her. The two left, but a few minutes later, they returned and asked the Rangers to escort them into the college. Banks refused, and relayed to reporters what he said to the teenagers: “Our orders are to maintain order and keep down violence. We are to take no part in the integration dispute and we are not going to escort anyone in or out of the college.” Wrote Swanson, “The local White Citizens Council was so happy with the Rangers’ actions they treated Banks to a chicken dinner.”

Photographs played an important role in how the narrative unfolded across the country. They also raised Banks’ profile. That September, Life magazine ran a series of articles on the skirmishes across the South. The September 17 and September 24 issues contained photos from Mansfield and Texarkana. One showed an effigy that had been hanging over Main Street in Mansfield. It was covered in blood-red paint and accompanied by two signs. The first read, “THIS NEGRO TRIED TO ENTER WHITE SCHOOL.” The second read, “THIS WOULD BE A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE.”

The defining picture of the incidents also came from Mansfield. In the foreground, in the left of the frame, Banks leans calmly against a tree, his thumb tucked into the waistband of his holster. Banks is in perfect profile, facing to the right and drawing the viewer’s attention to the center of the picture. The dramatic brick façade of the school commands the background. In the center, the high, gabled main entrance juts out from the surrounding wall. The door to the school, set in a sweeping arch, is patrolled by nine high school boys, their hands on their hips. Some 30 feet above them, at the peak of the gable, an effigy with a noose around its neck hangs from a light standard.

The picture appeared in Time magazine. “Banks became for a while the face of uniformed, armed, and officially sanctioned white resistance to court-ordered civil rights,” wrote Swanson. Less than two weeks later, Banks was promoted from sergeant to captain. His rising celebrity earned him appearances on the “Today” show, “Name That Tune,” and “What’s My Line?” Wrote the Dallas Morning News, “Whenever they needed a big, handsome guy to trot before the public, whether on network TV or at a beauty pageant, they called on Banks.” In some respects, Banks makes a fitting avatar for the Rangers. He killed men and committed acts both heroic and despicable. He earned a reputation for toughness, and he excelled at parlaying it into widespread fame.

“I Always Thought Models Were Kind of Sissy”

Ray Davis wasn’t the only speaker at the unveiling last week. Russell S. Molina, a businessman and board member of the Texas Ranger Association Foundation (TRAF), said, “This statue represents all Texas Rangers, not any single individual.” Asked in a phone interview whether his remarks were intended to imply that the statue was not modeled on Banks, Molina was more direct. “It is not,” he said. When informed that the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame & Museum lists Banks as the model for the statue, he conceded that Banks was “one model of many models… But that is not a model of him. That is not about a singular individual.” This contention feels disingenuous. The statue’s history is inextricably tied to its model, and the relationship between the two is well documented.

“The artist used one ranger who posed for her,” read a 1960 profile of Tauch in the San Antonio Light. Because the statue was intended to be a composite of all Rangers, “She promised authorities that she would not reveal his name.” An article in the Brady Herald, supplied to FanGraphs by Molina, told the same story of a single model: “Dr. Tauch used a model in doing the work but he will remain anonymous so the statue will be a tribute to all ‘Texas Rangers of Today.’” It was Banks who revealed that he was the model for the statue. “I don’t mind admitting I enjoy remembering the statue,” he told the Longview Daily News in 1976. “It did me some good posing for it. Until I did, I always thought models were kind of sissy.”

The article was adapted for syndication by the Associated Press and ran in at least 10 different newspapers. Tauch acknowledged her instructions to avoid making the likeness any one Ranger, but said she only made “a few minor changes,” and that the statue looked so like Banks that many called it simply “the Jay Banks statue.” In another interview, she said Banks was “exactly my idea of what a Ranger ought to look like.” According to the 2010 book Time of the Rangers, Banks lent Tauch his hat, boots, pistols, and holsters, which explains why the statue’s holsters bear a similar design to the ornately tooled leaf pattern of Banks’ actual holsters. They were sold at auction in 2012, accompanied by a notarized letter of provenance that read, “these are the holsters that he was wearing when he posed for the statue.”

Just as relevant, Banks has existed in the public consciousness as the model for the statue for 50 years now. Long before Swanson’s book, he was identified as such by the Public Art Archive, many dozens of articles in newspapers and magazines, TV broadcasts, and books about Ranger history. A 1982 biography, authorized by Banks, was titled Legend in Bronze. He posed for pictures in front of the statue. It wasn’t just the first line of his obituary; it was the headline. And, of course, in 2020, the statue was taken down specifically because of its connection to him. At this point, it isn’t possible to tell the full story of the statue without including Banks and his role in defending segregation.

For Failure To Perform His Duty

When asked whether, hypothetically, his opinion of the statue would change if he knew definitively that it was modeled on Banks, Molina responded with a question: “Do you think one picture should define a man’s legacy?” He cited Banks’ relationship with Earl Ray Peterson, who went on to become the first Black chief of the Rangers, as proof of his character. Said Molina, “He was there at Mansfield doing a job that the governor told him very specifically what to do, and he was very successful at that.” It’s a familiar argument. “As modern Rangers still must, mid-20th-century Rangers followed orders,” wrote Mike Cox for True West Magazine. “They didn’t unilaterally set state policy. Wrong as what happened in Mansfield was, Banks and other Rangers would have been out of a job had they not done what Gov. Allan Shivers sent them to do.”

Banks soon found out how true this was. In March 1960, before the statue was even finished, he was fired from the Rangers. When Banks claimed he’d resigned rather than been fired, Colonel Homer Garrison Jr. held a news conference to explain that for “practically a year,” he had repeatedly ordered Banks to raid illegal gambling establishments in Tarrant County. “For failure to carry out department orders,” Garrison said, “Captain Banks has been relieved of his command and dismissed.”

Following his dismissal, Banks was hired as chief of police in Big Spring, Texas. In June 1971, the city fired him after complaints that included refusal to cooperate with other law enforcement agencies that sought to investigate theft within his department, refusal to fire incompetent officers, and discrimination in enforcing ordinances on the sale of beer and pornography. Twice, Banks’ refusal to follow orders cost him his job. In Mansfield and Texarkana, he did what he was told. He later wrote that the mobs “were just ‘salt of the earth’ citizens. They were concerned because they were convinced that someone was trying to interfere with their way of life.”

Another photograph from Mansfield – one that didn’t make it into the newspapers – tells the story in an entirely different way. The lighting is no longer crisp. The composition is purposefully amateurish. Where the photograph that has threatened to define Banks was ambiguous and poignant, this one is so on the nose that it borders on caricature. In it, Banks is no longer leaning against the tree out on the front lawn. He’s right on the steps of the high school, posing next to Rigler. The photograph is taken from below, and it cuts the men off at the waist. That’s done intentionally, so the top of the frame will capture the effigy directly above their heads. The two Rangers wear big smiles for the camera.

This is the context behind the statue. This is the reason why, at a time of heightened scrutiny of law enforcement, it was removed from Love Field the moment that context was brought back into public consciousness. Swanson had no idea his work would result in the removal of the statue. He wasn’t necessarily in favor of the decision. “I thought at the time,” he said, “and I still think it would have been better if they could add some context to it, to explain what the statue represented, both good and bad, and explore some of the history related to it. And maybe a few people would stop and read it and maybe understand a little bit more about it. That’s the point I was trying to make.”

At the time, Dr. Sonia Hernández, the George T. & Gladys H. Abell Professor of Liberal Arts II at Texas A&M’s history department, was more hopeful about the removal of the statue. In a phone interview earlier this month (during which she clarified that she was speaking only for herself, and not on behalf of Texas A&M), she explained, “Removing a statue doesn’t necessarily lead to justice or a more equitable society. However, it is a recognition, especially on the part of authorities or the state… We are paying attention and we need to be mindful of the kinds of stories that we value.”

Hernández hesitated to put all the focus on Banks. “It’s a Ranger and it’s the larger context. You get at the Rangers through one individual, through an agent. And I go back to the larger culture of impunity.” To some, recognition of the statue’s significance felt like a culmination of years of research and scholarship to acknowledge the full truth about the Rangers, starting with the Canales Hearings in 1919 and Américo Paredes’s 1958 book, With His Pistol in His Hand.

“I Mean, Who Wants Bad Publicity?”

Molina explained that he himself spearheaded the effort to return the statue to public display. “I wanted to make sure that the truth got told and that the statue was put back up,” he said. He started negotiating with the city in 2021 or 2022. In February 2023, he arranged for the Office of Cultural Affairs to loan the statue to TRAF, which would be responsible for finding it a new home. Administrative Action 235385, which made the loan official, says the contract expires on December 30, 2027.

The original agreement was to place the statue at a brand new museum and Hall of Fame devoted to the law enforcement agency, said Molina, but that project has been delayed. “I’ve always thought Texas Ranger baseball was the ideal place, and it just so happened that I had a conversation with a friend of mine who knew somebody there.” He estimated that it took six to nine months to go from that initial conversation to the unveiling earlier this month.

The only public mention of the new destination came at a Public Art Committee meeting on February 3. The move had already been decided. “He – ‘One Riot, One Ranger’ – will be moved to the museum-like setting at the Texas Ranger ballpark,” said the Committee’s Lynn Rushton-Reed. “He will be part of that museum that tells the story of the Rangers and how the Rangers baseball team got their name, so back in a museum-like setting.”

Last week, the Arlington branch of the NAACP issued a statement expressing “deep disappointment” in the team’s decision to host the statue just 14 miles from Mansfield. After the Public Art Committee meeting, the NAACP had “reached out to representatives of the Texas Rangers organization to express our concerns about honoring a historical figure connected to events that undermined civil rights and educational progress in our region. Despite those concerns being raised, the organization ultimately chose to move forward with the statue’s installation.”

United States Congressman Marc Veasey, whose district includes parts of Arlington less than two miles from Globe Life Field, has also come out against the statue. In a letter to Rob Manfred, Ray Davis, and team co-chairman Bob Simpson, Veasey wrote, “It sends a chilling message about which parts of history are being elevated and which sacrifices are being forgotten. Ballparks should be places where families gather, where children fall in love with the game, and where fans of every race, faith, and background feel welcome. Honoring a figure tied to resisting school integration — and doing so with imagery that evokes racist violence — sends exactly the wrong message about who belongs in that space.”

As a historian, Hernández is well-equipped to put the reemergence of the statue in context. “I was disappointed,” she said, “and perhaps not entirely shocked, given the developments in the last couple of years – widespread assaults on anything that is accurate, critical history, American history – and what’s been happening across institutions of higher education.” Still, she couldn’t help but express some surprise at the team’s decision, saying, “I mean, who wants bad publicity? Nobody wants bad publicity.” Swanson echoed her thoughts: “It’s a curious choice, this statue, I guess is what I would say in the end. I don’t know why they would want to associate themselves with a statue that has such a problematic history.”

“I Don’t Know How They Would Handle That”

In conversation, Molina stressed the need to look at the big picture. “The full context is really what is critical,” he said. “Because you’ve got to know what was happening the day before, the week before, the month before, a year before. And then, more importantly, what happened the day after, the week after, the month after, and years after.” When asked whether the Rangers planned on providing any additional context to the statue at the ballpark, Molina replied, “Well, that’s a good question. Not to my knowledge. I don’t think Texas Ranger baseball has any plans on that. But I may be speaking out of turn. I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t know.”

Swanson and Hernández both echoed the need for context. “I wish there was more information,” said Swanson. “I wish there was more context. I wish we could embrace the history of it, both good and bad.” Hernández gave the historian’s perspective on the danger of presenting the past through a “noncritical” lens: “Up through the late 20th century and into the 21st century, there’s been evidence-based scholarship on the dark chapters associated with this elite law enforcement unit…. There’s certainly great things about Texas. I am a Texan. But I think it’s also important to tell it like it is. And when you obscure or gloss over the not-so-great things about any historical figure, any historical site, any historical development, you’re doing a disservice to the greater American public.” The NAACP’s statement ended by “calling on the Texas Rangers organization and ballpark leadership to engage in constructive dialogue with community stakeholders regarding how history is represented.”

Despite the agreement that the statue should be part of a larger conversation, few seem to think it’s possible to provide the appropriate context for the statue at Globe Life Field. “I don’t know where you would do it,” said Molina. Said Hernández, “It is really difficult to complicate that history at that place. People are coming and going, especially children, young people, visitors. It’s going to be difficult to do that in a place like that… Can you separate history from heritage and have those deep, impactful conversations where people dialogue? Can you do that at a stadium or at an airport? I don’t think so.” Swanson put it more bluntly: “I mean, are they going to put up a plaque over by the beer stand that tells the rest of the story? I don’t know how they would handle that.”

“It’s not about being politically correct,” said Hernández. “It’s not about supporting one group over another. It’s the kind of nation that we can have, built on trust and honesty and respect for one another. And that’s a really basic way to put it, but I think it’s really important. You ask yourself, ‘By doing this one thing or by supporting this one thing, am I living up to that standard? Is this the kind of world that we want to promote?’ Really thinking about the next generation, especially at a ballpark where you take your kids.”

For now, at least, the point is moot. The ballclub has given no indication it will provide any additional context about the statue to the more than two million fans who attend home games each year. At D Magazine, sports editor Mike Piellucci described the unusually collapsed timeline of the unveiling. The team announced the 10:00 AM ceremony in an email sent at 6:01 PM the night before, saying only that it concerned “a new permanent non-baseball addition to the left field concourse,” and that reporters would be expected to leave by 10:30. No one would have time to do research or prepare questions. No one would get to ask questions anyway. Wrote Piellucci, “The organization concealed what it was unveiling because it knew what the reaction would be.”

Fans will necessarily view this most recent development within the larger context of the club’s other actions. The Rangers are the only major league team without a Pride night. The Rangers are one of just two teams that don’t provide paid maternity leave to employees. They have now installed this statue while taking great pains to avoid any discussion of its significance. Reasonable observers might deduce that the through line connecting these decisions is a disregard for marginalized groups.

“We recognize that the history of the Texas Rangers, like that of our state and nation, includes moments that must be confronted honestly,” said Molina at the unveiling. But no one can force the ballclub to explain why a statue so objectionable that it spent six years in storage is now an appropriate addition to Globe Life Field. Through its actions, the team has made it clear that it would prefer to sidestep the conversation entirely, and that it believes it can do so. When fans arrive on March 23, they will be armed only with what they already know and believe about the statue and the organization it represents. No doubt, many will see the statue the way the artist intended, as “a man that everyone respects and trustfully looks upon as law and order.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this piece erroneously identified Robert Wilonsky as Dallas’ aviation director at the time of the statue’s removal from Love Field. It has been updated to reflect that Mark Duebner held that role.

Chase Lee is now a Blue Jay after enjoying a mostly successful 2025 rookie season as a Tiger. The 27-year-old, sidewinding right-hander made 32 relief appearances with Detroit, logging a 4.10 ERA, a 24.3% strikeout rate, and a 6.1% walk rate over 37-and-a-third innings. He allowed 32 hits, seven of which left the yard, and was on the winning end of four of five decisions. Toronto acquired him in exchange for 24-year-old farmhand Johan Simon in mid-December

He was originally in the Rangers system. Texas took Lee in the sixth round of the 2021 draft out of the University of Alabama, only to move him to Motown at the 2024 trade deadline as part of the Andrew Chafin deal. Lee then headed into last season with Eric Longenhagen calling him a “a sinker/slider sidearmer who has posted strikeout rates up around 30% his entire minor league career… a high-probability up/down look reliever.” That proved accurate. Lee rode the Detroit-Toledo shuttle multiple times, making 23 appearances as a Mud Hen.

Talking to him Jays camp on Friday, I learned that the well-educated hurler places a high value on the information he gets from hitters.

“That’s where pitchers get a lot of their information,” the Alabama graduate told me. “When I’m working on new pitches, new shapes, new locations — whatever it may be — I normally go to the hitting coaches. It’s like, ‘Hey, if your team were to face me, what would the plan be?’ I take that, then it’s, ‘OK, how can I mess up that plan?’

“I did this the other day,” the former walk-on to the Crimson Tide baseball team added. “I talked to Cody Atkinson, who is one of our hitting coaches here. I knew Cody in [the Texas Rangers organization]. I asked him to write me a 30-second report on what he would tell hitters to do if we were on different teams and I was coming into a game. He said he would tell them to look in a certain location, for these two pitches. If I were to instead throw a fastball up, or a fastball in, that would ruin the entire plan.” Read the rest of this entry »

Opening Day is in under two weeks, which means the offseason is just about over. Also wrapping up is this year’s Offseason Matrices document. With offseason business all but settled (sorry, Lucas Giolito), let’s summarize using my favorite thing: tables and tables of data.

It’s no surprise to see the two World Series teams spend big, with Dylan Cease’s seven-year, $210 million contract with the Blue Jays and Kyle Tucker’s four-year, $240 million contract with the Dodgers the two largest deals of the offseason. Of the 11 teams that spent at least $100 million, only the Braves did so without signing a player to a $50 million contract; reliever Robert Suarez’s three-year, $45 million deal was their priciest.

The two East divisions combined to spend more than the other four divisions, accounting for 50.8% of league-wide outlay. In addition to its place at the bottom of this list, the AL West was the only division that didn’t sign a player for $100 million or more. Josh Naylor’s $92.5 million deal with the Mariners was the largest handed out by that quintet of clubs.

Once again, Scott Boras’ clients eclipsed $1 billion in contracts signed, cracking 10 figures for the second straight offseason and fourth out of the last five. His agency could still get Michael Kopech a big league deal before the season starts, too.

As always, there were free agents who got the short end of the stick and had to settle for minor league contracts despite decent showings last year. Leading the pack was Mike Tauchman, the only player worth 1.0 WAR or better who signed a minor league deal. He’s not currently on the Mets’ projected roster, but he’s having a great camp as he makes a strong push for a spot. It’s also worth noting that any XX(B) free agent — free agents with at least six years of major league service time who ended the season on an big league roster or IL — who signed a minor league deal has the right to opt out before Opening Day and try to latch on elsewhere. Non XX(B) free agents like Tauchman often have opt-out clauses, too, so there are plenty of vets auditioning for a spot on another team if not their current one.

In addition to the players listed above who finished with at least 1.0 WAR last year, five players from our Top 100 Prospects were moved: no. 37 Brandon Sproat and no. 75 Jett Williams from the Mets to the Brewers; no. 62 Owen Caissie from the Cubs to the Marlins; no. 74 Harry Ford from the Mariners to the Nationals; and no. 94 Jurrangelo Cijntje from the Mariners to the Cardinals.

As always, thanks for following along with the Matrix and all of this offseason’s Reloaded updates!

I’ve now spent nearly a quarter of a century working with baseball projections, and in that time, I’ve always been struck by the certainty with which so many people view them. People are far more certain than they should be that great teams will be great, star players will be stars, and so on. However, one of the things that comes from working with projections for a big chunk of your life is that you develop a painful awareness of how much of the future cannot be known until it actually happens.

As in most seasons, we enter without a general conception of which teams will be the best. We may pretend everyone starts off with a clean slate, but absolutely nobody expects the Rockies to be better than the Dodgers. But even if that particular scenario is extremely unlikely, every one of the top teams has a scenario in which things fall apart. These clubs have a vested interest in protecting against that potential downside, as much as possible, so I thought it would be interesting to look at the doomsday scenario for some of the best teams in baseball.

To get an idea, I did a full seasonal simulation of the ZiPS projected standings, and instead of looking at the standings overall, I looked at the bottom 20% of outcomes to see what we could glean from the results. According to ZiPS, every team except the Dodgers misses the playoffs when it performs no better than its 20th-percentile win total.

Philadelphia Phillies: Rotation Depth

This almost seems counterintuitive given just how good the rotation projections are for the Phillies, but the projections are not enthusiastic about their depth here. And what makes that especially worrisome is that with so much uncertainty around the health of Zack Wheeler and the performance of Aaron Nola, Philadelphia is probably going to need that depth more than it did last year. This time around, the Phillies are missing Ranger Suarez, who signed with the Red Sox during the offseason. Andrew Painter was healthy in 2025, but one cannot ignore that he was rather middling against Triple-A hitting. The outfield looks like a problem, as well, but it generally has been, and ZiPS is a fan of Justin Crawford.

If Philadelphia adds one of the innings-eaters still available in free agency, ZiPS sees the team’s outlook improve, much more than I expected. Just having someone like Lucas Giolito, Tyler Anderson, or even Patrick Corbin around did a lot to alleviate the rotational downside. It may come down to which of these pitchers is open to a swing role or a minor league deal with an opt-out date. And yes, I do think it feels weird to suggest Corbin as an upgrade for a team in 2026.

New York Mets: Right Field

The Mets certainly don’t dominate in either the rotation or bullpen projections, but ZiPS is fairly confident that both of these units will hold up over the course of the season. Despite a solid projection for Carson Benge in right field, the range of outcomes is quite high, and in the simulations where Benge struggles, ZiPS has trouble competently filling in right field. Tyrone Taylor is an underwhelming option, and ZiPS thinks Brett Baty would have a tough time defensively in the outfield. With no particularly interesting outfielders available in free agency, the best solution might simply be making sure Jacob Reimer gets some time in the outfield. New York’s roster just isn’t really set up to get him time at third base, where he probably is most valuable. But he also represents the most tantalizing 2026 upside of any player the Mets have in the minors, so they ought to try and be open to promoting him aggressively, and getting a little weird with it, if need be.

New York Yankees: Injuries

The Yankees’ outcomes are weird, in that their bad seasons were mostly ones in which Aaron Judge, for whatever reason, ended up with fewer than 300 plate appearances, and only occasionally something else. Getting limited innings from Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodón was already baked into the cake, and ZiPS thinks there are enough fourth-starter types to patch up any rotation holes that might pop up. The problem is, just how do you replace Judge? I’m not sure there’s a scenario where the Yankees can do much to mitigate any risk there, for the simple reality that in a tightly projected division, suddenly losing six wins is likely to drop them out of the AL East divisional race. At the very least, the Yankees should hold off on shopping Spencer Jones for help elsewhere, but it wouldn’t fix a Judge loss.

Baltimore Orioles: Rotation Quality

Baltimore has potential aces in both Trevor Rogers and Kyle Bradish, but that word potential is an unpleasant adjective. Adding Pete Alonso and Taylor Ward really stabilizes the offense, which was a concern last year, but the rotation is an issue. The Orioles finished with a bottom five rotation in the ZiPS simulations more often than all other AL East teams combined. There’s nothing on the farm that helps this, and I think that with the Orioles increasingly pushing their chips in, they ought to be aggressive at taking the opportunity to loot struggling teams of their top pitching, even if the prospect hit would be tremendous. I think there are even scenarios, though not many, in which it might make sense for the O’s to trade either Adley Rutschman, assuming he has a bounce-back season, or Samuel Basallo.

Boston Red Sox: First Base

The good news is that ZiPS sees the Red Sox as the most stable of AL contenders, with the lowest percentage of sub-.500 seasons of any AL team. The rotation isn’t the best in baseball, but it may be the most bulletproof one, and that isn’t even counting on getting lots of innings from pitchers like Payton Tolle and Connelly Early, who would be Plan As in most rotations in baseball. In fact, when the Red Sox had their worst performance, it was almost entirely the offense that fell short, and not necessarily from the position you might expect.

Most people have focused on third base because of the loss of Alex Bregman, but Caleb Durbin is actually a decent option. Plus, if Durbin struggles, Marcelo Mayer could very likely provide what the former isn’t. Where there is real downside risk is at first base. I liked the Willson Contreras acquisition, too, and he’s probably going to be at least solidly average in 2026, but he’s also going to be 34 in May. It’s an age where you look at the long left tails of the outcome distribution for non-elite first basemen, and there’s always a real risk of a very sudden plummet off a cliff. Triston Casas hasn’t played in a game since last May — and won’t even play in any spring training games this year — and he has a real mixed history.

What to do? That’s a lot trickier. Boston obviously isn’t going to replace Contreras before he has that downside year. But this team should be ready for that possibility, and if the surplus of pitching turns out to be real, the Sox will have a position of depth from which to trade.

Chicago Cubs: Rotation Quality

The outlook improved with the addition of Edward Cabrera, but ZiPS still has the Cubs with the weakest rotation of the 10 teams listed here. In the ZiPS simulations, the rotation was largely the source of the Cubs’ worst seasons. There aren’t really any exciting starters left out there in free agency, but I think I’d do what I suspect the Cubs are already thinking of doing: giving Ben Brown’s upside as a starting pitcher more serious consideration. He allowed too many home runs and had a high BABIP on a really good defensive team, but it’s guys like that who tend to come out of nowhere quickly (see Corbin Burnes in 2019). Brown has swing-and-miss stuff, and I think given the potential, I’d rather see him starting at Triple-A than pitching in relief in the majors.

Houston Astros: Outfield Corners

Not counting 2020, for obvious reasons, the 686 runs the Astros scored in 2025 represented their fewest since 2014. A full, healthy season of Yordan Alvarez would be incredibly helpful, but the team’s also not likely to wring another 135 wRC+ out of Jeremy Peña. Not helping matters is that Joey Loperfido and Cam Smith project as one of the weakest corner outfield tandems in the majors in 2026. Smith surprised many, including me, in the early months last year, but an OPS that fell shy of .500 in the second half is highly concerning. There’s a chance that the Astros get little from their outfield corners, which is a problem for a team with a middling offense that just lost ace Framber Valdez in free agency. In some 30% of simulations, the Astros got a sub-90 wRC+ out of their corner outfielders, and in those runs, they had a .475 winning percentage. If there’s a team that should aggressively go after either Jarren Duran or Wilyer Abreu, it’s Houston.

Toronto Blue Jays: Rotation Depth

Even with the loss of Anthony Santander to shoulder surgery, ZiPS still sees the Blue Jays’ rotation as their biggest pain point. There are simply a lot of question marks once you get past Dylan Cease and Kevin Gausman, something I mentioned a bit in Toronto’s ZiPS rundown in January. In a lot of the sims, the team got next to nothing out of any of Cody Ponce, José Berríos, Shane Bieber, and Max Scherzer, whether because of injury, decline, or general performance issues. If Sandy Alcantara looks anywhere near his old self with the Marlins in the early months, I think the Jays ought to be one of his suitors. At the very least, Alcantara would do well with an infield that has Andrés Giménez and Ernie Clement.

Seattle Mariners: Outfield Corners

As with the Astros, ZiPS sees Seattle’s corner outfield spots as having the most downside. Unlike the Astros, ZiPS doesn’t view it as truly a doomsday scenario. After the Red Sox and Dodgers, ZiPS considers the Mariners to be the contender with the least downside. Randy Arozarena’s projection distribution is pretty interesting, with the bottom falling out of him once you get under the 15th-percentile projection or so; while his 20th-percentile OPS+ is a non-disastrous 94, it drops to 70 for the 10th-percentile level. As for Victor Robles, he’s been all over the place in his career, and the Plan Bs in the organization are unimpressive. I think Seattle’s strong enough that it doesn’t necessarily have the same need to be aggressive as Houston does, but this is still a potential point of weakness that could pose an issue.

Los Angeles Dodgers: Black Swans

It’s really hard to kill the Dodgers. I argued after the 2024-2025 offseason, a very busy one, that the Dodgers weren’t really improving their average outcome so much as drastically raising their floor. I stand by it; they’ve added Kyle Tucker and Edwin Díaz while losing nobody who was crucial to the 2025 team. That doesn’t mean they’re going to be projected to win 105 games or anything, but it does mean that in most of their worst projected outcomes, they’re still a playoff contender. Their 10th-percentile projection, for example, is 86 wins. Their 2% chance of finishing below .500 is the smallest percentage I’ve ever projected, a record that now goes back more than 20 years. Doomsday for the Dodgers may require an actual doomsday scenario like societal collapse, nuclear war, or a vacuum metastability event. Since I do not know how to prevent any of those, there’s nothing more I can add.

We’ve made two major updates to the FanGraphs Lab. Below, you’ll see an overview of the new capabilities. You can also see a list of all of the Lab upgrades and bug fixes, minor and major, here. Sean has been busy elsewhere, too, which you can read about here.

Squared-Up Explorer
The initial iteration of the Squared-Up Explorer used a pre-calculated dataset to handle the extensive transformations that take a raw set of batted ball data and turn it into an interpolated chart. We used that method to get the tool in front of people as quickly as we could, but the long-term goal was always to connect to the main FanGraphs database to allow more years of data, finer slicing, and increased flexibility across the board.

Sean and David Appelman built the necessary tools to handle the data processing in the background, before it ever hits Squared-Up Explorer. That expanded the capabilities of the tool significantly. Sean and Ben then rebuilt the user interface with the new capabilities in mind. Want to see how Kyle Schwarber hit for so much more power in 2025 than he did in 2024? You can compare his swing:

Want to dig into Cal Raleigh’s tendencies from each side of the plate? We’ve got you covered:

Want to look into Michael Harris II’s wild first-half/ second-half splits? It’s as simple as deciding which date ranges you care about. It turns out that your batted ball results will improve if you just square up everything more frequently, and get more balls in the air while you’re at it:

With the new data architecture in place, you can select by batter handedness, pitcher handedness, pitch type, and even time span. Mookie Betts against lefty four-seamers early in the year? Sure thing. Ozzie Albies batting righty against sinkers? You can do that too. You can even compare someone to another player or themselves over a different time period, against a different pitch type, or any permutation of these options.

Slicing up aggregated data into tiny sample sizes like this is definitely going to result in some weird charts. For example, here’s what Aaron Judge did against curveballs in 2025:

With so few observations, extreme values are bound to happen, like the multiple launch angles where Judge squared up every curveball he put into play. When you split things this minutely, be aware that the resulting charts are descriptive but volatile. There aren’t that many batted balls of separation between 2025 and 2024 here, and yet the charts and interpolated lines look quite different:

We mention that merely as a word of caution as you interpret results, not to say that you can’t use the Explorer this way. Batters really do have different swing profiles against different pitch shapes, and it’s fun to investigate that visually. Just take the results with a grain of salt, the same way you would with any small-sample baseball dataset. We’ve added a line to the summary statistic table showing the number of batted balls that make up each graph so that you can see for yourself. For example, Judge’s two years of data cover 17 and 18 curveballs, respectively.

We’ve also added a few other upgrades to complement the newly available data. Hovering over a frequency bubble now displays launch angle, squared-up rate, and relative frequency. The interpolation behavior has been updated to change dynamically with the chart orientation. We’ve also added detail to the legends and descriptors to make it easier to see which split you’re viewing. Try it out – we think you’ll like the upgrades.

Hot Streak Tool Update
We received a huge number of feature requests to upgrade our Hot Streak tool, and Sean bundled many of them into a single large update.

Opponent Information
Each game now displays the opposing team, opposing team’s starting pitcher, and that pitcher’s handedness. In addition, the opposing team’s name is a link to that team’s Hot Streak page:

More Stats
We’ve added wOBA, xwOBA, xSLG, and xBA to the statistics that are available to chart. We’ve also added the ability to display two statistics stacked on top of each other in the same table. Want to see power and contact together? Now you can:

More Context
Even when you’re displaying two statistics at once, valuable data could still be missing. Our solution? A tooltip with a detailed line score for each player and game:

More Sortability
Want to see the most recent games first? You can now choose between oldest-to-newest and newest-to-oldest.

That’s the latest and greatest in the FanGraphs Lab. We hope you’ll enjoy trying out these enhancements. And if these tools aren’t quite your speed, stay tuned. We’ll be addressing team strength and pitch pairings in our next release, and we have a few other ideas percolating.

The Angels haven’t changed. It’s Mike Trout who is worse.

The Angels are bad. It’s the truest thing about them. Their hitting is bad, their pitching is bad, their fielding is bad, and everything else is bad, too. This isn’t breaking news. They’ve finished below .500 each year since 2015, the only team not to make the postseason in that time. But expectations have reached a new low as we enter 2026:

I was initially skeptical of these figures, or at least the direction of them. How could the Angels possibly be going backwards? They don’t seem to be rebuilding, and their depth chart looks the same as ever: a few truly good players, a few players who would be good if they were playing a different position (or perhaps in a different organization), a few players who were drafted far too recently, a few aging veterans who were nearly All-Stars at one point, and Trout. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Reds sent Hunter Greene for imaging on his throwing elbow. Never a good sign for the no. 1 starter on a team that made the playoffs last season. In those situations, we on the outside are usually conditioned to fear the worst, or at least Tommy John surgery, recovery from which — while all but routine these days — takes more than a year.

Only in that context could Tuesday’s news be taken as positive: Greene will have surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. (In fact, as you read this, he may have already undergone the procedure.) The recovery time is expected to be on the order of three to four months, but losing an ace until the trade deadline is much better than losing him until 2027.

This is a banner year for bone chips and loose bodies. The Braves alone have two starters — Hurston Waldrep and Spencer Schwellenbach — on the IL after receiving similar treatment. Actually, since we’re talking about bone chips, this feels like a good excuse to talk about Dazzy Vance. Read the rest of this entry »