By its very definition, the World Baseball Classic is a global baseball tournament; it’s right there in the name after all. It also feels obvious: Japan won the WBC for the third time, led by the best player on the earth, with a lineup and rotation and bullpen full of NPB All-Stars, and did so by beating Team USA and its All-MLB roster. The United States is the sport’s birthplace and the home of its premier professional league, but the game long ago left its borders, and through the WBC, we’ve gotten to see just how strange and great and flat-out joyful it can be around the world.

If you’ve watched the WBC before, you’ve known this, or at least gotten glimpses of it. If this WBC was your entry point into baseball beyond our shores, then you saw it damn near every day — not just through Japan overcoming its competition but through Mexico almost upsetting them on the way to that title, or through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and Venezuela playing with their motors revved all the way up, or through just how many times the United States, with Mookie Betts and Mike Trout and Nolan Arenado (I could literally just list the entire ridiculous lineup), was pushed up against a wall and forced to fight its way free. That they did is a testament not just to the absurd collection of talent assembled on that roster but also to how good the rest of the world now is, and while it’s too early to declare the results of this year’s tournament to be a sea change, it’s also no overreaction to note that the WBC is a genuine competition with multiple viable contenders and not just a slower version of The Dream Team stomping wildly overmatched countries by double digits.

That fact can get lost given the understandably and disproportionately heavy focus that the United States and MLB receive in the history of the sport. Baseball in other countries is framed primarily as “Here’s when Americans introduced the game,” and foreign players are usually assessed on a basis of “When will they come to MLB, and how good will they be?” (We here at FanGraphs are as guilty of the latter as anyone else.) The rest of the world, in the minds of most American fans, exists as a feeder for MLB, and by default, the rest of the world will always be a step behind, producing greatness but never overtaking the United States as the center of the baseball universe.

By virtue of the money it makes and the level of competition, MLB is the peak of the mountain, and no number of WBC wins by Japan or any other country will change that. Tuesday night didn’t provide a sneak peak at our new NPB overlords. But forget about that hierarchy and its demand that the only game that matters is the one that takes place from April to October on one continent, or the blinkered myopia that unless a team is hoisting a World Series trophy at the end, then it was all for nothing. There’s more to baseball than the narrow confines of MLB, and the sport itself will only grow and improve the more America’s place atop the pyramid is challenged — the more that places like Japan and Cuba and Mexico but also Great Britain and Colombia and Taiwan produce star players at any level.

More than anything, that was the message of the WBC: baseball is global, and baseball is better by being global. No culture, society or art has ever been better for being closed off, or for shunning the wider world. Baseball is no different. Diversity breeds innovation, and innovation keeps the game from getting stale. We should celebrate the version of baseball in which America isn’t the unquestioned champion, in which other countries get to see themselves finding the kind of success that this country tends to monopolize when it comes to organized sports. Spread the joy and receive plenty in return; open the world and delight in who walks in the door. Be happy when the competition gets better and stronger and pushes us to do the same.

The 2023 WBC was roaring Dominican and Puerto Rican fans in Miami, sellout crowds in Taipei and Tokyo, unexpected star turns from Czech and Nicaraguan and British players. It was a sign of how far the game has spread and how deep it lies in the DNA of so many disparate places, with no common culture or connectors other than a bat, a ball, and four bases. It was a celebration of all the different ways that fans enjoy the game, and if you ever doubt that, think about the brass bands and ringing chants in the stands backing Japan or the Latin American fans turning LoanDepot Park into a week-long block party or the videos of people around the world, watching in bars or at home in the darkest hours of the night or at dawn or in the middle of the afternoon, tuning into an exhibition in which the only prize was national pride. It was proof that baseball is more than MLB.

You saw that made plain on Tuesday night, when Shohei Ohtani struck out Trout in a moment so laden with symbolism that you could probably build a book around it, or at least a short 30 for 30 episode. (Fittingly and deservingly, it was Ohtani who was named the tournament MVP.) It’s too soon to tell if that at-bat is one of those hinge points in history, around which baseball empires fall and new ones rise and the course of the sport’s existence is inexorably and irretrievably altered. But that moment doesn’t have to be so lofty or ponderous. It can simply be a reflection of a truth that the WBC made crystal clear: Baseball belongs to the world.

Earlier today, Davy Andrews gave an accounting of the league’s third basemen. Now we turn our attention to the shortstops.

So, so deep. That’s true of the Mariana Trench, which extends some 36,000 feet below sea level, and also of the shortstop position in the major leagues. If you think of an average player as one who accrues roughly 2 WAR per 600 plate appearances, 29 teams are above average at shortstop. That’s because everyone puts their best athletes there for as long as they can, which results in an embarrassment of positional riches. You have to delve down to 25th on this list to get to a team whose aggregate projection is less than 3.0 WAR. No other position’s list of three-WARriors extends past 20th. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Jay Jaffe and Leo Morgenstern examined the state of first and second base. Today, we wrap up the infield positions, starting with a look at third base.

Third base has featured some truly top-tier stars in their prime for a while now. Nolan Arenado, Manny Machado, and José Ramírez are all either 30 or 31 (Arenado turns 32 next month), and all are coming off seasons so spectacular that no projection system worth its ones and zeros would predict a repeat performance. Alex Bregman turns 29 in just a couple of days, and the projections see him notching another five wins in 2023. All of this to say, enjoy peak third base while you can, because aging curves bend but they rarely break. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Jay Jaffe covered the league’s first basemen. Now, Leo Morgenstern examines the state of the keystone.

Second base is going to be a fascinating position to watch this season. Under the new rules limiting defensive shifts, teams must have “at least two infielders completely on either side of second base,” and those players “may not switch sides” within an inning. Consequently, second basemen will no longer have help from a shifted shortstop or third baseman, making defensive range all the more important at the keystone. On the other side of the ball, second basemen could have their best offensive season in years. While excellent bat-to-ball skills aren’t a requirement to play the position, the two often go hand in hand. Second basemen are consistently the best contact hitters (and some of the worst power hitters) in the sport. This means their performance is more dependent on BABIP, so with the distinct possibility that league-wide BABIP will rise this season, second basemen could stand to benefit quite a bit.

And it’s not just about the new rules! Second base is projected to have the most even distribution of talent, from the Rangers at the top to the Nationals at the bottom. It’s the only defensive position where no team is projected for more than 5 WAR, and yet 28 teams are projected for at least two wins. The bottom-ranked Nationals are still projected for 1.8 WAR – the highest among last-place teams at any position. Read the rest of this entry »

Nico Hoerner is a mix of old school and new school when it comes to hitting. He’s also a mix of contact and emerging gap-to-gap power. Drafted 24th overall by the Chicago Cubs out of Stanford University in 2018, the 25-year-old second baseman is coming off a season where he slashed .281/.327/.410 with 10 home runs and a 106 wRC+. Possessing potential that easily exceeds his to-date performance, he projects as a cornerstone in the Cubs’ lineup for years to come.

Hoerner discussed his continuing evolution as a hitter, including how he balances an appreciation of metrics and a keep-it-simple approach, following a recent spring training game in Mesa, Arizona.

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David Laurila: How have you evolved as a hitter since coming to pro ball? Are you mostly the same guy?

Nico Hoerner: “For the most part, I don’t think guys really change that much. The guys that improve a lot are often doubling down on their strengths. They’re learning what they do best and are more consistent with that. I’ve definitely made improvements — there are things that have changed over the years — but I think my foundation is pretty similar.”

Laurila: I recall reading that you made a swing adjustment shortly after you signed, the goal being to hit more balls in the air. Is that accurate?

Hoerner: “I’ve never wanted to hit a ground ball in my life, to be honest with you. A lot of it comes from the pitches you swing at, how your body is moving, and learning your own strengths.”


Laurila: That said, was there an actual adjustment?

Hoerner: “Yeah. I think what you swing at is going to be the biggest factor in the balls that you put in play. I’m looking to hit the ball hard, hit high line drives as much as I can, and swing at pitches in the middle of the plate. Over time, with more at-bats, more experience, that really comes about.” Read the rest of this entry »

I found myself speechless on Friday afternoon. I was partaking in one of my favorite yearly rituals, watching the first round of the NCAA tournament at a sports bar. Something about the atmosphere calls to me — masses of strangers on the edges of their barstools, captivated by the energy of do-or-die games between wildly mismatched teams. As it happened, the bar I picked was a Purdue bar, and the mood slowly soured as the Boilermakers struggled with and ultimately fell to tiny Fairleigh Dickinson, one of the greatest upsets in the history of the tournament.

That game got me thinking about why I love the World Baseball Classic so much. It’s a newfound love of mine. The last time the WBC was held, in 2017, I paid exactly as much attention to it as my work required; given that my job was to try to make money trading interest rates, that worked out to exactly zero. I vaguely knew that the United States won, but even as a baseball fan, it didn’t really grab me. I liked the Cardinals, not Team USA, and it felt like a weird time of year for competitive baseball.

Having watched most of this year’s games, I’m sad I wasn’t watching before. The WBC is like nothing else in professional baseball, a chaotic and exciting mashup of national identity and high tension, often between teams that have no business being on the same field as each other.

Major league baseball is, by design, a slog. No individual game matters all that much because there are so many of them. If you’re a player, you can’t get too high or too low, even if you really want to. The Pirates and the Dodgers are a big mismatch, but even if the Pirates beat the odds and win a game, that game almost doesn’t matter. They’ll play again the next day, and then the next day, and then grind through a whole year’s worth of games. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s rankings, while Dan Szymborski examined the state of the league’s catchers. Today, we turn our attention to first and second basemen.

First base was “The Goldy and Freddie Show” in 2022. Paul Goldschmidt and Freddie Freeman both topped 7.0 WAR, becoming the only first basemen to reach that plateau since 2015, when Goldschmidt and Joey Votto both did so; since 2009, Chris Davis (2013) is the position’s only other player to reach such heights. Goldschimdt hit for a 177 wRC+, the highest mark by a first baseman since Votto in 2012, and became the first first baseman since Votto in ’10 to win an MVP award in a full-length season (Freeman and Abreu took home the honors in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign).

What goes up must come down, though, and so just as 2021 found the majors’ first basemen combining for their highest wRC+ (114) and WAR (70.2) since ’17, last year they collectively fell off. They still posted the highest wRC+ of any position (111), but their combined WAR dropped to 51.1, a decline of about 0.6 WAR per team. Christian Walker was the only first baseman within three wins of Goldy and Freddie’s 7.1 WAR, and just eight players who spent a plurality of their time at the position topped 3.0 WAR, down from 10 in ’21. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s positional power rankings. As a quick refresher, all 30 teams are ranked based on the projected WAR from our Depth Charts. Our staff then endeavors to provide you with some illuminating commentary to put those rankings in context. We begin this year’s series at catcher.

As usual, we begin our annual positional power rankings examining the position that’s the most clouded in mystery, the one where our best baseball praxis still leaves us with the most unanswered questions. Catchers remain unique in their significant and meaningful interaction with pitchers and the art of pitching. We’ve come a long way in evaluating much of the job of catching, with pitch framing statistics the most recent and one of the most valuable developments (at least until the inevitable day when balls and strikes have their locations called by a brigade of cameras and computers), but there are still things we can’t yet quantify. Still, that skills might be hard to capture with numbers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re nonexistent, just that they’re difficult to measure. Even if baseball didn’t collect a single statistic, teams would still need to consider how and why and whether player X helps them win games more than player Y, while fans would still argue over who is better than who. Our framework for evaluating catchers may be imperfect, but there’s still a lot we can say about those who don the tools of ignorance, and we get a little better at it every year. Read the rest of this entry »

The last domino in our top 50 free agent rankings finally fell Sunday morning, with Jon Heyman breaking the news of Jurickson Profar’s one-year, $7.75 million pact with the Rockies. The ex-Padres outfielder can earn an additional $1 million through incentives.

While I perpetually struggle to wrap my head around Rockies transactions, from Profar’s side, it’s clear why he took this deal. Given reports of a high asking price, he likely overestimated the strength of his market, and as the winter wore on, he probably realized that his best chance at besting the $7.5 million option he turned down to stay in San Diego was to wait things out until March and hope a spot opened up after the usual rash of spring training injuries. That plan has come to fruition, with a guarantee just north of the money he declined.

What’s more, the one-year deal gives Profar the chance to improve upon a career-high 2.5 WAR last season in the hopes of snagging his asking price in his next trip to free agency. Teams know how to adjust for park factor, but it’s still hard to think of a better place to go on a one-year contract than Coors Field. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 2023 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. This is always 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 goings on of the offseason. You know that Carlos Correa was a Giant before becoming a Met before winding up a Twin again, just as you’re aware that Carlos Rodón now pitches for the Yankees and Sean Murphy now catches for the Braves. 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, I hope it is a useful reminder of what we’re up to. If you have a bit of time, here is the introduction to last year’s series. You can use the navigation widget at the top of that post to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2022, a spring that saw a burst of trades and signings as the sport emerged from the lockout.

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 the game, and spot places where a well-constructed platoon may end up having a bigger impact than an everyday regular who is merely good. We think all of that context helps to create a richer understanding of the state of things and a clearer picture of the season ahead. Read the rest of this entry »