As Members of our site, you probably know by now that FanGraphs goes dark on most national holidays, as we were the past two days. We believe our staff deserves to enjoy holidays without having to worry about working, and our readers tend to have plans that don’t involve reading about baseball or staring at statistics on a screen. The exception is when news breaks that would prompt our readers to stop what they’re doing and rush to the site for analysis, such as a major transaction involving a star player. So for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon, as chatter picked up that Dylan Cease was nearing a deal with the Blue Jays, Meg and I both prepared for the possibility that we might need to work a bit on Thanksgiving, especially because the team in question plays in a country that doesn’t observe the holiday on the same day Americans do. Fortunately — ahem, thankfully — Cease agreed to a seven-year, $210 million contract with Toronto in time for Michael Baumann to write up the news and for us to edit and publish it Wednesday night.

The Cease signing was the latest move in what has already been a fairly active offseason. The Cardinals traded starting pitcher Sonny Gray to the Red Sox on Tuesday, two days after the Mets and Rangers made a one-for-one swap of former All-Stars. I learned of the Brandon Nimmo-for-Marcus Semien exchange around 2 AM Central European Standard Time on Monday, after I made the chaotic decision to wake up and watch the Rams-Buccaneers game before what turned out to be a roughly 24-hour travel day from Italy to New York. Following my initial surprise, I couldn’t help but wonder if Nimmo’s former teammate Matt Harvey would once again pitch for Team Italy in the upcoming World Baseball Classic.

We won’t be covering any of these moves in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about the best unmade baseball movie, JJ Wetherholt, the marginal value of team runs scored and individual offensive production, and more. Before we do, though, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

The stove was already hot the week before Thanksgiving. But on Wednesday evening, the Toronto Blue Jays threw some logs on the fire and aimed a leaf blower at the damn thing, and now the proverbial stove is hot enough to melt soda cans into aluminum ingots.

Dylan Cease has signed with the reigning AL champions, and for what they offered him — $210 million over seven years — you’d be packing your bags for Canada, too. Looks like someone can shell out for the fancy cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving. Read the rest of this entry »

During an introductory press conference for outfielder Brandon Nimmo this week, Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young somehow expressed both confidence and uncertainty about his newest acquisition. Nimmo, he said, would handle right field for the Rangers in 2026, though he didn’t sound too sure about it.

“We’re not 100 percent committed to [Nimmo in right],” Young told reporters on Monday. “I think it’s likely where he’ll play, but [those are] conversations that we’ll have with Brandon, with [manager] Skip [Schumaker] and with Wyatt [Langford], and really making sure that we understand all aspects of this and where they’re most comfortable. I do think we have three very good, talented, very talented outfielders. At the outset, I think it’s likely Brandon plays right, but I think that’s a further conversation.”

There are a number of considerations here. Nimmo, at this phase of his career, is almost certainly best in left field. His knees are jacked up; his arm is noodle-adjacent. Evan Carter nominally profiles as a center fielder, but injuries have kept him off the field for much of the last two seasons; it’s possible a corner could be the best way to ensure his availability. Langford’s known right field experience is limited to a single game for the 2022 Peninsula Pilots of the collegiate summer Coastal Plain League.

In my view, there’s only one way to sort this mess out: Commit to playing Langford in center. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

When the Phillies returned to contention following a slide into irrelevance in the wake of their 1993 National League pennant, shortstop Jimmy Rollins, first baseman Ryan Howard, and lefty Cole Hamels gained most of the attention. Howard all but ran Jim Thome out of town after the latter was injured in 2005, then mashed a major league-high 58 homers in ’06 en route to NL MVP honors. Rollins, the emotional center of the team, carried himself with a swagger, declared the Phillies “the team to beat” at the outset of 2007, then won the MVP award when the team followed through with a division title. Hamels debuted in 2006 and became their ace while making his first All-Star team the next season. In the middle of all that, as part of the nucleus that would help the Phillies win five straight NL East titles from 2007–11, with a championship in ’08 and another pennant in ’09, Chase Utley was as good or better than any of them, though the second baseman hardly called attention to himself.

Indeed, Utley seemed to shun the spotlight, playing the game with a quiet intensity that bordered on asceticism. He sped around the bases after hitting home runs, then reluctantly accepted high-fives in the dugout. “I am having fun,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Andy Martino in 2009. “When I’m on the baseball field, that’s where I love to be. I’m not joking around and smiling. That competition, that heat-of-the-battle intensity, that’s how I have fun.” Read the rest of this entry »

You just had to take in a ballgame. The sky was blue. The birds were chirping. On a day like today, even you couldn’t resist the siren song of the ballpark. You headed into the city and bought yourself a ticket, but now you’re in trouble. The zombie apocalypse began sometime after the third inning. The epicenter was right nearby, and the undead were drawn to the stadium in droves by the irresistible aroma of thousands of delicious humans. Maybe the churros too. It’s entirely possible that even the undead love the smell of churros. Whatever the reason, they (the zombies, not the churros) are flooding through the concourse and out into the stands. They’re climbing over the façade from every direction. You’re trapped.

You spent years telling anyone who would listen that the world was coming to an end. You told your family to prepare themselves the way you had been preparing yourself. You gave that speech every Thanksgiving, right up until you stopped getting invited to Thanksgiving. You built your bunker. You stocked it with food and batteries and flashlights and Twinkies. For reasons that you can’t quite recall, you’ve even got several cases of diapers down there. Most importantly, you stocked it with weaponry. You procured all kinds of weapons: big ones, small ones, stabby ones, shooty ones, explodey ones, poisony ones. You built a shrine to all the different ways a human being can inflict damage on any and all kinds of matter, and then you left it all behind, just hours before the apocalypse.

Here you are in your seat, and the zombies have got you surrounded. They want your sweet, sweet brains. The good news is that even without your arsenal, you’re ready to fight. You’ve been preparing for this moment your whole life. You reach back under your seat for the novelty helmet you discarded back in the third inning, scrape out as much nacho cheese as you can, and settle it onto your head. It may not be much good against a major league fastball, but as long as you can find some way to keep it in place, it should be strong enough to resist the teeth of the undead. Read the rest of this entry »

All relief pitchers are failed starters. In the future, everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes. All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice… the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Therefore: In the future, all relief pitchers will be starting pitchers for 15 minutes, twice: First as failure, then as tragedy.

This jumble of aphorisms is what plopped out of my head when I read a bit of surprising news: The Detroit Tigers are interested in Ryan Helsley — reasonable enough, since he’s been a good high-leverage reliever for several years — as a starting pitcher.

Whoa. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Milwaukee Brewers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

When our 2025 Colorado Rockies Top Prospect list was published last January, a 24-year-old pitcher coming off of an underwhelming season ranked 14th with a 45+ FV. Over 54 innings with the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats, Juan Mejia had logged a 5.00 ERA and an equally-unhealthy 12.3% walk rate. Eric Longenhagen nonetheless remained enamored of his potential. Offering a “relatively bullish projection,” our lead prospect analyst wrote that the righty “is too freaky to slide,” because he possessed “one of the more explosive and athletic deliveries in the minors” as well as a mid-to-high-90s fastball and an “overtly nasty” slider.

Longenhagen’s faith was realized in the youngster’s rookie season. Not only did Mejia make 55 appearances, he put up a 3.96 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, and a 26.1% strikeout rate over 61-and-a-third innings. Among Rockies relievers, only Jimmy Herget took the mound more frequently and tossed more frames.

When I spoke to Mejia at Fenway Park this past summer — Colorado PR staffer Edwin Perez served as an interpreter — I learned that he has a connection with Red Sox right-hander Brayan Bello. Both were signed out of the Dominican Republic in 2017, and they were together, along with other starry-eyed hopefuls, when Mejia first caught the eye of a Rockies scout.

“When I was 16, I was doing a tryout,” recalled Mejia, who hails from Baní, roughly an hour south of Santo Domingo. “I don’t remember how many teams were there, but there were a lot of them. That’s where I met Brayan Bello, who a lot of scouts were there to see. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to the mailbag! Matt Martell is taking some well-deserved
vacation, so I’m piloting things in his stead. This week saw the hot stove flicker to life. The Mariners re-signed Josh Naylor to a five-year, $92.5 million deal, which inspired Davy Andrews to relaunch the We Tried tracker. The Orioles and the Angels got together on a surprising challenge trade, swapping Grayson Rodriguez and Taylor Ward, while the Braves brought back Raisel Iglesias on a one-year, $16 million contract, then traded utility infielders with the Astros, acquiring Mauricio Dubón in exchange for Nick Allen.

It was also a week that saw a variety of roster-related deadlines come and go. Teams had until Tuesday to protect eligible prospects from the Rule 5 draft by adding them to their 40-man roster, while Friday brought the non-tender deadline. Tuesday also saw four players accept a qualifying offer. Brandon Woodruff, Trent Grisham, Gleyber Torres, and Shota Imanaga will return to their prior teams on one-year contracts worth $22.025 million, removing them from the free pool. As Michael Baumann noted in his piece on the subject, that breaks the previous record of three players set in 2015; 144 qualifying offers were extended to pending free agents in the first 14 years of the system, with only 14 accepted.

We’ll cover every major signing and trade in the weeks ahead, but this week’s mailbag isn’t focused on transactions. Instead, we’ll contemplate a player who underperformed in 2025, the relative volatility of relievers and starters, and a controversial Hall of Fame case. Before we do, though, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

The Women’s Pro Baseball League held its inaugural draft on Thursday night. For many of the players who heard their names called, getting to play professional baseball is a dream they’ve carried since childhood, one they knew might never come true. Play won’t get underway until next August, but with the WPBL draft now in the history books, the dreams of 120 women are meaningfully closer to being realized.

Thursday night’s draft was the culmination of a busy few months for the new league. Since I last wrote about the WPBL in January, the league has announced key logistical information, such as the number of teams that will play during its first season, where those teams will play, and how much the teams will pay the players, and has also provided an update on the WPBL’s media and broadcast strategy. But despite all the new intel on how the league will be run, a few key components are still unknown. So before recapping the draft and the open tryout that determined the pool of draft-eligible players, let’s get up to date on what we do and don’t know about the WPBL so far.

If this is the first you’re hearing of the WPBL, here’s a quick primer. It’s a professional baseball league for women, the first of its kind since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL), which ran from 1943 to 1954. The WPBL was co-founded in October of 2024 by Justine Siegal — who is best known for founding Baseball For All, “[A] girls baseball nonprofit that builds gender equity by creating opportunities for girls to play, coach, and lead in the sport” — and Keith Stein, a businessman, lawyer, and member of the ownership group for a semiprofessional men’s baseball team in Toronto. Read the rest of this entry »