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.

Before he’d ever thrown a major league pitch, cracked a prospect list, or reached legal adult status, Félix Hernández had a nickname: King Felix, crowned by U.S.S. Mariner blogger Jason Michael Barker on July 17, 2003, when he was overpowering much older hitters as a 17-year-old in the Low-A Northwest League. Still a teen when he reached the majors, he quickly came to represent the hopes and dreams of a franchise that had fallen short of a World Series despite four playoffs appearances from 1995–2001; parted with superstars Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., and Alex Rodriguez along the way; and capped that run with a record-setting 116 wins but a premature exit in the ALCS.

Though slow to embrace the royal moniker, Hernández grew into it. His dazzling combination of an electrifying, darting sinker, a knee-buckling curve, and a signature hard changeup propelled him to a Cy Young Award, two ERA titles, six All-Star appearances, and a perfect game. From 2009–14, he was the best pitcher in the American League by ERA, FIP, strikeouts, and WAR, parlaying that into a contract that made him the game’s highest-paid pitcher. Unfortunately, a heavy workload — more innings than any pitcher 23 or younger since Dwight Gooden two decades earlier — sapped the sizzle from his fastball, with injuries and a cavalier approach to conditioning taking their toll as well. The Mariners struggled to surround him with a quality roster while cycling through managers and pitching coaches every couple of years. The team didn’t reach the playoffs once during Hernández’s career, finishing above .500 just five times, with a pair of second-place showings in the AL West as good as it got. Read the rest of this entry »

So I had this brilliant theory. My brilliant theory was that Elly De La Cruz wasn’t as bad a defender as the numbers would have us think. De La Cruz finished the 2025 season with 11 fielding errors, the second most in baseball, and 15 throwing errors, also the second most in baseball. Put those two together and you get 26 total errors, the most in baseball. I thought those totals might be shortchanging De La Cruz a bit. My brilliant theory was wrong, but before I get to why, let me explain my thinking.

We should start with the fact the advanced numbers do not say that De La Cruz is a bad shortstop. He makes up for most of his errors with length, speed, and the Mega Man cannon where his right arm should be. Statcast’s FRV loved De La Cruz’s defense in 2024, and it pegged him as perfectly average as he battled through a quad strain in 2025. Baseball Prospectus’ DRP, which tends to skew more conservative than the other advanced metrics, had him at 0.8 runs in 2024 and -0.4 runs in 2025. Sports Info Solutions’ DRS has always liked De La Cruz’s defense the least, pegging him at -2 in 2024 and -5 in 2025. So it’s not as if De La Cruz is grading out as a catastrophe. I just thought he deserved even more credit, and with that credit, we might have started seeing him as an above-average shortstop rather than a good-enough shortstop. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox made a pre-Thanksgiving trade on Tuesday, acquiring Sonny Gray from the St. Louis Cardinals in exchange for 25-year-old right-hander Richard Fitts and hard-throwing prospect Brandon Clarke. How well the deal works out for Craig Breslow’s club is anyone’s guess — my colleague Michael Baumann wrote that he couldn’t “declare this trade to be a robbery in either direction” — but the 36-year-old righty does have a track record of reliability. Gray has graced a big-league mound 92 times over the past three seasons, gobbling up 531 innings and posting a 3.63 ERA as well as a 3.11 FIP. If he can continue to fend off Father Time a while longer, the erstwhile Vanderbilt Commodore will add value to the Red Sox starting rotation.

A Vandy product Boston brought on board as a free agent last winter came to mind when the trade was announced. That would be Walker Buehler, who despite high hopes ultimately proved to be a bust. Unable to return to old form, the veteran righty struggled to a 5.45 ERA over 112-and-a-third innings and was cut loose by the Red Sox in late August.

There are clear differences between the two pitchers — their respective health histories particularly stand out — but they nonetheless have things in common. One is a diverse repertoire. Another is a lack of high-octane heaters.

Buehler was in the 43rd percentile for fastball velocity in 2025, while Gray was in just the 16th percentile. As Baumann pointed out, the latter “has started leaking fastball velocity… [but has] compensated by leaning into a cutter and changeup, making him a legit six-pitch pitcher since 2023.” Meanwhile, the 31-year-old Buehler leaned heavily on a six-pitch mix while compensating for the velocity he lost following Tommy John surgery in 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »