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 »
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 »
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 »
David Ross was 38 years old and still strapping on the tools of ignorance when he was featured here at FanGraphs in February 2016. The title of the piece was David Ross: Future Big League Manager, and as many in the industry had suggested it would, that supposition soon came to fruition. The longtime catcher is currently embarking on what will be his fourth season at the helm of the Chicago Cubs. I recently asked Ross how he approaches the job philosophically now that he’s firmly in the trenches.
“My style — the way I approach being a manager — is leadership and direction, but I’m also still a player at heart,” Ross told me. “I understand what these guys are going through, competing for jobs and different roles. Communicating through that as a former player, someone who experienced it, I can relate to them. I try to keep a player’s mindset as part of my decision-making.”
Jed Hoyer was the club’s General Manager when the Cubs hired Ross following the 2019 season. I asked the now President of Baseball Operations about the process that informed that decision. Read the rest of this entry »
Michael Fulmer was that good, winning AL Rookie of the Year and making the All-Star team in 2017, before injuries — shoulder bursitis, a torn meniscus, and a series of escalating elbow injuries that culminated in Tommy John surgery — intervened. The torn UCL cost him all of 2019 and led into a 2020 season he would’ve been better off missing as well: 10 starts, just 27 2/3 innings pitched, and more earned runs allowed (27) than strikeouts (20).
Three years later, he’s preparing for his first season as a Chicago Cub. He turned 30 this week, and the tuft of black hair that used to stick out from under his cap is gone, as Fulmer’s opted for a Price-like shaved head-and-beard look. And rather than a potential ace, he’s now a potential closer. Read the rest of this entry »
MIAMI – You could hear the airhorns blocks away from LoanDepot Park, and the music, too: salsa, bachata, reggaeton, merengue — all blasting at artillery strike volume, echoing down the nearby residential streets lined with two-story pastel-colored houses and under the soft gray skies of a rainy Wednesday in south Florida. Small throngs of fans — women with their hair colored electric blue and cherry red, men with platinum blond dye jobs to mimic the stars of Team Rubio — became bigger clusters, all pooling around the stadium, taking over adjacent parking lots for impromptu tailgates. Everyone’s back bore the name of an icon of Caribbean baseball: CLEMENTE, GUERRERO, MARTINEZ, MACHADO, BÁEZ, SOTO, LINDOR. Tens of thousands of fans, some of whom had paid up to $400 per ticket on the secondary market just to get in the door, were here for the main event of Pool D in this World Baseball Classic: the win-or-go-home group stage finale between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
A clarification, first: It’s not accurate to call this event the World Baseball Classic — not here, at least, in Miami, where Latin American teams made up 80% of the pool’s members. (Team Israel probably picked up plenty of excellent Spanish slang in its week-long stay.) No, this was el Mundial, because all week, this hasn’t been a baseball tournament; it’s been a beisbol tournament. Every day featured a good-sized chunk of this city’s large Dominican and Puerto Rican populations setting up shop at the park and spending close to a dozen hours partying and dancing and playing panderetas and güiros and tamboras and those ubiquitous horns. Throughout the week, the west plaza of LoanDepot Park has functioned as a fanfest space, complete with a DJ on a giant stage and access to a team store stocked full of PR and DR shirts and a beer vendor seemingly every 10 feet. Long before each game every day and well past the final out each night, this is where Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Venezuelan fans (and a handful of Nicaraguans, supporting their country that had qualified for the WBC for the first time) met, laughed, crushed 20-ounce Heineken and Stella Artois cans, and celebrated together. This was their tournament, and Wednesday night’s heavyweight prize fight between Pool D’s superpowers was as close as they could get to their own Super Bowl. Read the rest of this entry »
MIAMI – The assignment facing Nicaragua’s Duque Hebbert was as nerve-wracking as he could imagine. As the 21-year-old right-hander warmed up before the top of the ninth inning of Monday’s Pool D game between Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, Juan Soto waited, watching from the on-deck circle. Up after him: 2022 AL Rookie of the Year and five-tool phenom Julio Rodríguez. Should he manage to survive both of those elite hitters, he would have to contend with six-time All-Star Manny Machado, who had homered in his last at-bat and come a combined three or four feet short of going deep twice more.
Against that terrifying trio stood Hebbert, 5-foot-9 and 170 pounds, the youngest and last man picked for a Nicaragua squad that qualified for its first-ever WBC and, as its reward, drew a spot in the tournament’s Pool of Death alongside the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. Hebbert and his teammates came into the day with two losses in two group stage games so far; down 6–1 against the DR, that would soon become three in three. Then again, no one had expected Nicaragua to win a game in this pool, much less advance. They were in Miami with the goal of growing and getting better and putting up a respectable fight against rosters full of legends and superstars. So as Hebbert finished his warm-up throws and Soto stepped in, the task in front of him was simple yet immense: end the day on a positive note for Pool D’s resident underdogs by retiring three of the best hitters in the entire world.
Nineteen pitches, four batters and three eye-opening swinging strikeouts later, Hebbert had done more than that, going from anonymous Nicaraguan reliever to baseball’s newest viral sensation. He set Soto down with three straight strikes, the last a diving changeup that he swung right over; the future Hall of Famer flashed a smile back at the mound as he walked out of the box. Rodríguez fared no better, fouling off a 90 mph fastball and that devilish changeup before eventually whiffing on a slider down and away. Machado, too, waved through a slider and was down 0–2, only to smash a double to left, bringing up Rafael Devers. No sweat for Hebbert, who fell behind one of the majors’ top sluggers 3–1, got him to foul off two pitches, then dispatched him with — what else — a changeup to finish the inning. Read the rest of this entry »
