If you spend some time poking around the nooks and crannies of FanGraphs, you’ll eventually encounter one weird thing. Go to our Depth Charts Team WAR Totals page, and you’ll see all 30 teams arranged by the amount of WAR we project them to accrue this season. Go to our Projected Standings page, and you’ll see the winning percentage we expect for each team. Sometimes, those two pages seem to be displaying the exact same information. Sometimes, they don’t quite line up.

Take right now, for instance. We project the Padres for 40.8 WAR, the Giants for 38.7 WAR, and the Diamondbacks for 38.2 WAR. Look at the projected standings, however, and we have the Padres down for a .490 winning percentage, the Giants at .504, and the Diamondbacks at .501. That doesn’t feel right. Shouldn’t the team with the most projected WAR also project for the best record? Well, buckle up, because to explain how this works, we’re going to have to do some math.

We’ll break this one down into two parts. First, what does a team WAR projection mean? Most basically, it’s the sum of each player on that team’s WAR projection, but we’ll have to get more specific than that. Our projection systems can spit out a WAR, but that’s not their real output. They project actual on-field baseball results. Manny Machado’s Depth Charts projection is for 644 plate appearances, 28 doubles, 26 homers, 127 strikeouts, and so on. The WAR part of it gets calculated after the fact. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, Team USA played its first tuneup game before the World Baseball Classic, thrashing the Giants 15-1 in a scheduled 10-inning exhibition. This came on the heels of Monday’s announcement lining up the American rotation for pool play in the WBC.

The WBC is a bit unusual for an international best-on-best sporting tournament in that it takes place during the preseason, rather than during a dedicated break (as in Olympic ice hockey or the 2022 FIFA World Cup) or the offseason. Therefore, the best active managers and coaches for each country are unavailable to coach in the tournament, as they would be in hockey and soccer.

For the first four tournaments, USA Baseball got around this by hiring either unemployed or recently retired managers — Buck Martinez, Davey Johnson, Joe Torre, and Jim Leyland. Highly successful and well-respected managers, in the latter three cases. For 2023, they went with Mark DeRosa. Read the rest of this entry »

A key part of developing as a baseball analyst is knowing one’s own scouting blind spots. So here’s one of mine: I will go absolutely berserk for any prospect who shows even a hint of life against older competition in international play. I can’t help myself.

Brett Lawrie makes the Canadian Olympic team just out of high school in 2008, and plays regularly in the tournament. (This tournament featured lights-out pitching by 21-year-old Hyun Jin Ryu and 20-year-old Stephen Strasburg, the latter the only college player on Team USA.) Lawrie then plays for Canada again in the 2009 WBC, before making his professional debut.

Also on Team Canada in 2009: 20-year-old Single-A right-hander Phillippe Aumont comes into a jam with the bases loaded and nobody out against Team USA, and blows up David Wright, Kevin Youkilis, and Curtis Granderson in succession. Read the rest of this entry »

When pitchers and catchers report, joy abounds. Who doesn’t love grainy cellphone video of a pitcher mounting the slab in the early days of February? But as far as I’m concerned, baseball doesn’t truly start until the first pitch plot surfaces on social media. Not much in spring training matters, but pitch data does. One or two pitches is all it takes to establish the birth of a new pitch or velocity peak. Results — ERA, strikeouts — take a while to stabilize, and in any case, they mean little in the “just trying things out” context of spring ball. But the pitch data — that’s real, man. Nobody throws a new pitch on accident. (For the most part.)

And so, like the well-adjusted baseblogger I am, I’ve spent the first week of spring games knee-deep in the data. Would you believe that as of the final day of February, there have been precisely 4,500 unique pitcher/pitch type combinations? That’s a lot of potential trends to suss out. You, reader, surely don’t want to wade through all of that, so let me present you with a handful of things that have caught my attention in the pitch plot portion of spring training. They fall into three categories: under-the-radar prospects with at least one bonkers pitch, established starters soft-launching new shapes, and relievers with limited big league time popping like potential leverage guys.

Under-the-Radar Prospects

Ryan Lambert, Mets

Okay, this one was slightly more under the radar before Lambert went viral for his “30 raw eggs a day” shenanigans. From that story, you surely learned that he throws a fastball with considerable velocity. But what Anthony DiComo’s excellent report elided was the shape of that fastball. In his lone spring outing, Lambert showed off a 98-mph heater with 21.5 inches of induced vertical break. Outside of Lambert’s arm, that pitch doesn’t exist. Only three pitchers topped even 20 inches of induced vertical break on their heater in 2025 — Alex Vesia, Triston McKenzie, and Yaramil Hiraldo (more on Hiraldo later) — and none of them broke 95 on the radar gun. Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere in my list of article ideas, I have a theoretical question tucked away. What’s the longest distance you could hit a baseball? Not what’s the longest distance a really strong player could hit a ball, but what’s the longest distance that it’s possible to hit a baseball? I haven’t gotten around to it because I’d need to interview a physicist or a materials scientist or both, but I’m excited about this question. Say you’re an infinitely strong batter with an infinitely fast swing. The distance you can hit the ball isn’t infinite. At some point, you’ll hit the ball hard enough that your bat will shatter, reducing the efficiency of the energy transfer. Or maybe the ball will be the weak link, and you’ll hit it so hard that it will deform into a less aerodynamic shape or explode into a thousand pieces. There’s a limit somewhere.

I will write this article one day (so please don’t steal it), and it will be fun to discover the answer through math and logic, but theory isn’t the only way to solve a problem. Last Thursday, Jac Caglianone tried to find the answer through pure experimentation, which is to say that in the top of the fifth inning against the Diamondbacks, the Royals right fielder turned on a Yilber Díaz fastball and ripped it into the right-center gap at 120.2 mph. The missile made Caglianone just the eighth player to gain entry into the 120 MPH Club in the 11-year history of Statcast.

It’s the hardest-hit ball of Caglianone’s career (officially, anyway; we’ll return to that later). It’s also the hardest-hit ball of spring training, and it’s far from the only fireworks display he’s put on in the past week. With a 116.5-mph double on Saturday and a 115.2-mph homer on Tuesday, Caglianone now owns three of the 10 hardest-hit balls of spring training. More importantly, it’s the 30th-hardest ball ever recorded by Statcast at any level. Thankfully, Statcast is now in every spring training ballpark, or we never would have grasped just how special Caglianone has been this spring. Read the rest of this entry »

Xander Bogaerts is on the verge of multiple milestones. Barring injury, the 33-year-old San Diego Padres shortstop will reach and surpass 400 doubles, 200 home runs, and 1,000 runs scored this season. He also has a shot at 2,000 hits, needing 178 more to arrive at that mark. And then there is the defensive side of the equation. Defying most expectations, Bogaerts is on the doorstep of having started 1,500 games at his middle-of-the-infield position.

As you may recall, Bogaerts’s bat was his calling card when he ranked as the top prospect in the Boston Red Sox system. Few doubted his ability to hit, but the likelihood that he would remain a shortstop was another story. Echoing the opinion of many throughout the industry, our December 2011 writeup of the then-19-year-old Oranjestad, Aruba native included the following:

“Defensively he plays a solid shortstop but he’s expected to slow down and shift over to third base before he reaches the majors.”

I’ve addressed that possibility with Bogaerts multiple times over the years, initially for a print-publication story I wrote when he was in Double-A. Quoting a scout, I titled the piece, “Looks Like a Shortstop to Me.”

All these years later, Bogaerts recalls the conjecture surrounding his future in the field. When I caught up to him at Padres camp last weekend, it was the first thing he mentioned when I posed this question: Had you been told at age 20 that your career would follow the path it has, would anything have surprised you? Read the rest of this entry »

Happy last day of February, everyone. By this time next week, the World Baseball Classic will have begun, allowing us to experience the best of what our global game has to offer. Earlier this month, Kiri Oler previewed the WBC with four team-by-team breakdown pieces, one for each pool, and we’ll have more coverage next week leading into the tournament. Also, I’ll be in Miami covering Pool D, which features Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, Israel, and Nicaragua, so if you have any questions related to the first-round action at loanDepot park, you know how to reach me.

Of course, the World Baseball Classic isn’t the only baseball we have to look forward to in March. We are less than four weeks away from Opening Day! This year marks the earliest traditional Opening Day in MLB history, with 14 games scheduled for Thursday, March 26. The night before, the Giants will host the Yankees for the first game of the season. That standalone primetime matchup will air on Netflix of all places, because we all needed another streaming service subscription.

Anyway, in this week’s mailbag, we’ll be answering your questions about the NL Central, the value of a foul ball, a hypothetical Hall of Fame election in which every player regained eligibility for one year, and the most and least valuable baseball last names. 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 »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. 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 »

Juan Soto wants a Most Valuable Player award. Plenty of players give voice to outsized ambitions during spring training, but at this point in Soto’s career, the goal seems downright reasonable. The future Hall of Famer already has a World Series ring, a batting title, a stolen base crown, a Home Run Derby trophy, and bunch of All-Star nods and Silver Sluggers. Seeing as he’s unlikely to get a Gold Glove (barring some sort of trophy swap situation with Francisco Lindor), an MVP certainly seems like the next box to check. But as great as Soto has been since the moment he debuted for the Nationals in 2018, he doesn’t have a well-rounded game, and I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that his weaknesses might keep him from ever winning an MVP. Now that it’s his stated goal, let’s take a closer look at his chances.

Soto is one of the best and most consistent players in the game. According to JAWS, he’s already the 36th-best right fielder of all time, and he’s still three years too young to be the president (in the Dominican Republic; he’s eight years too young in the USA). Since his first full season in 2019, he’s missed an average of just seven games per season and he’s never put up a wRC+ below 143. In any given season, if you had to pick the player most likely to rack up at least 5.0 WAR, Soto would be your guy. But his game is also incomplete. He’s the second coming of Ted Williams, in ways both good and bad. He’s got the other-worldly plate discipline and the power, but he’s also got the putrid outfield defense.

Soto is well aware of his deficiencies. “I feel like everybody tries to do better than what they did before,” he told Anthony DiComo of MLB.com. “I would definitely love to be better around the bases and better around the outfield. Even hitting, I try to keep my hitting increased. Thank God I’ve been doing well the past couple seasons. I’ve been putting numbers up there, career highs and stuff like that. So I just want to keep doing the same thing. I try to be better year after year.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big believer in the value of WAR as a statistic. Like any summary stat, WAR is notably imperfect, with its nods to pragmatism, compromises made on philosophical grounds, and the necessary inclusion of many components that are just damn difficult to quantify even if we have a basis to think they’re important. Still, like all good models, even if WAR isn’t right, it can be useful. It gives us a broad estimate of a player’s overall contribution to winning baseball games, and almost certainly provides a far better conception of which individual actions lead to wins than generally existed, say, 50 years ago. But when we’re talking about whether a player is a Hall of Famer, a more malleable concept than what wins the most games, is WAR the right measure to look at? When I think about this question, four people instantly come to mind: Jacob deGrom, Miguel Cabrera, Jack Morris, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Since FanGraphs is a website dedicated to baseball, we’ll start by talking about Mozart. Even people who don’t really listen to classical music, and thus couldn’t tell Gustav Mahler from Rick Mahler, would almost certainly count Mozart among the greatest composers of all time. Why? Well, the first part is obvious: because of his body of work as a whole. But what aspects of that work make him great? I’d submit that it’s the quality of his best compositions, rather than the massive volume of work he produced, that pushes him ahead of his peers.

Mozart is a legend because of his greatest works, such as his last three symphonies, his late 1780s/early 1790s run of operas, and the latter half of his piano concertos — and I could go on! But he also wrote a lot of stuff that just isn’t that good. He was a musical prodigy, but almost all of his early work is interesting because he was very young when he wrote it, not because of its own merits. Composers have always had to pay the bills, and Mozart wrote a huge amount of what was more or less intended to be pleasant background music, no more compelling than the peppy ukulele and xylophone music that seemed to be in every Kickstarter video in 2017. If the hundreds of examples of such work were to simply blink out of existence because someone got a hold of the Infinity Gauntlet, it would change nothing about Mozart’s greatness. Those compositions had value to Mozart in that they enabled him to write the good stuff that is worth remembering, but he’s great because of his peak. Read the rest of this entry »