This morning, Ben Clemens assessed left field. Now Craig Edwards examines the position the best player in baseball calls home.

Mike Trout is the best player in baseball. Mike Trout plays center field. Ergo, Mike Trout is the best center fielder in baseball. After Trout, we have another genuine star in Cody Bellinger, a very good player in George Springer, and then a whole lot of maybes. There’s a lot of youth and athleticism here, as one might expect from a position that requires covering a lot of ground, but there aren’t a lot of guarantees when it comes to production. Byron Buxton, Ramón Laureano, and Luis Robert are all in the top 10. So are Lorenzo Cain and Aaron Hicks, both coming off down years. While we could see some breakouts, the projections are fairly conservative, only anticipating three teams above 1.5 WAR, which would be a four-win campaign in a full season. Read the rest of this entry »

After analyzing the infield positions, our attention shifts to the outfield. First up? Left field.

Ah, left field, the last refuge of scoundrels. Last year, we wondered if teams’ evolving understanding of defensive metrics was changing the kinds of players they stashed in left field. This year, despite Christian Yelich moving over from right, the answer is a resounding “nah.”

That’s not to say there are no Alex Gordon types, plus defenders without the necessary arm to handle right. Even with a universal DH, however, left field is the domain of the Willie Calhouns, Jesse Winkers, and Eloy Jiménezes of the world. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s the shallowest position in the league; we project only four teams to accrue 1 or more WAR out of left this year, by far the least across all positions.

Is this a fluke of generations and circumstances? Will left field look different when Dylan Carlson establishes himself, or when a future outfield acquisition in Atlanta forces Ronald Acuña Jr. back to left? What if Giancarlo Stanton plays more left and less DH? There are certainly ways for left field to climb the rankings hierarchy. For now, however, it’s a big pile of middlingly athletic misfits who don’t have another clear spot on the diamond. Oh, and then Yelich and Juan Soto, both of whom are playing a completely different game than the rest of the field here. Read the rest of this entry »

This morning, we considered the catcher position. Now, we turn our attention to the shortstops.

Hello! This isn’t going to be a long intro, because you know what you’re getting into here. What has been called a golden age for the shortstop position continued apace in 2019, with shortstops batting a collective .326/.445/.772 — a 100 wRC+. This was despite several luminaries, such as Francisco Lindor and Carlos Correa, having their playing time limited by injury. There were delightful surprises from longtime players (the ascension of Marcus Semien). There were promising rookie campaigns (the arrival of Bo Bichette). And there were, of course, just plain great seasons from players who are now the usual suspects: Xander Bogaerts, Trevor Story, Javier Báez, et al. Even when plumbing the depths of this list, there are interesting progressions to follow: One can consider the strange season Willy Adames had for the Rays, or the was-it-a-breakout from the Pirates’ Kevin Newman. It’s a fascinating time for the position! Let’s get into it. Read the rest of this entry »

After Dan Szymborski and Craig Edwards surveyed the state of second and third base yesterday, our positional power rankings continue with a look at catcher.

Catcher is a hard position to project even at the best of times — though we are getting better at it — and that difficulty is compounded this year by a short season and the availability of ever-more roster spots at which to stash a backup or two. Taking those complications together, I’d encourage you to take these rankings with a dollop of salt. There’s value in taking a close look at the particular mix of players each team is bringing into this campaign, but it’s probably best understood as an effort to document the catching situation league-wide, bucket teams into tiers, and sketch out the rough outlines of teams’ depth at this position. As such, try not to dwell overly long on the ordinal rankings or the team WAR figures that fuel them; the differences are quite small in some cases.

So what is the league-wide situation at catcher? Given the continued presence of true standouts like Yasmani Grandal and J.T. Realmuto it isn’t all bad, but I think it’s fair to characterize the overall situation as a bit of an ebb tide. As recently as a few years ago, we were treated to career seasons from the likes of Yan Gomes, Rene Rivera, Russell Martin, Buster Posey, and Jonathan Lucroy, with Salvador Perez and Yadier Molina not far off their peaks as well. Now, Martin is unsigned, Posey has opted out, and the rest of the players who were so recently putting up five-win seasons are shadows of their former selves. Catchers as a group generated just 54.3 WAR last year, which, while a five-win improvement over 2018’s figure, was lower than any other season in the last 12. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve read the intro. You’ve read about first basemen and second basemen. Now, as our positional power rankings continue, it’s time to examine the state of third base.

If you scroll through the first half-dozen names on this list, you might note that there are a lot of good third basemen. Of the 10 position players projected for at least 2.0 WAR this year, four are third basemen. In fact, the hot corner accounts for six of the top 14 projected position players, while the top 10 third basemen all rank among the top 30 position players overall. There are so many good third basemen, it probably isn’t useful to quibble too much about each team’s exact placement in the rankings below. It’s a tightly bunched group with a lot more positives than negatives. It’s also a veteran-laden group, but young players like Yoán Moncada and Rafael Devers provide considerable hope for the position’s future. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, Jay Jaffe kicked off our positional power rankings series by evaluating the league’s first basemen. If you need a refresher on the series, Meg Rowley wrote a handy explainer. Today, we stay on the infield and turn our attention to second base.

Second base has become a decidedly unsexy position. Teams are more willing than ever to keep players at shortstop, leaving the keystone increasingly populated by the guys with weak arms, not enough glove for short, or not enough bat for third base. Throughout history, shortstops have generally hit worse than second basemen, which makes sense given that short is the tougher defensive position. But in 2018, after years of slowly gaining ground, shortstops outhit second basemen, with a 97 wRC+ vs. 95 at second; in 2019, they did it again (100 vs. 96).

It hasn’t helped the position that there’s been a talent drain. Chase Utley, Ben Zobrist, Ian Kinsler, and Brandon Phillips are all gone, Robinson Canó, Brian Dozier, and Jason Kipnis are nearly so, and it’s an open question whether Dustin Pedroia plays again. Only José Altuve is all that is left standing of the elite second basemen from the 2010s. Meanwhile, there are only seven second basemen with a future value of 50 or better on THE BOARD, compared to nine at third base and 14 at shortstop. Inevitably, some of the shortstops will end up as second basemen, but that’s kind of the point; the shortstops that shift will likely be the ones who didn’t make the cut at short. Players like Gavin Lux and Nick Madrigal will provide new blood, but they’re likely at least three or four years away from their peak years. 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 with first base.

First base just ain’t what it used to be. For the first time in the span covered by our strict position splits (i.e., including only the time actually spent at the position), which means as far back as 2002, not a single first baseman produced a season worth at least 5.0 WAR. Even Pete Alonso, who set a rookie record with 53 homers while posting a 143 wRC+ and playing better-than-advertised defense, topped out at 4.8, with Freddie Freeman and Anthony Rizzo the only other ones to reach 4.0, though Carlos Santana and Max Muncy surpassed that latter pair if you include their time at other positions. Alonso and Freeman were the only ones who cracked the top 10 in MVP voting, placing seventh and eighth in the NL. The highest-ranked AL first baseman in the voting, José Abreu, placed 19th.

On the offensive side, first basemen collectively hit for a 108 wRC+ for the second year in a row, matching their lowest mark of the aforementioned period. In other words, they almost perfectly kept pace with the majors’ rising tide of offense, gaining five points of on-base percentage relative to 2018 (from .333 to .338) and 24 points of slugging percentage (.from 438 to .462); the league as a whole gained five points of the former and 26 of the latter. Collectively, the 47.2 WAR produced by first basemen was just 0.3 ahead of last year for the lowest mark in that period. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, here we are. Welcome to the 2020 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 Opening Day. This is always something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly after all (thank you kindly), and are well-versed in the goings on of the offseason. You probably know that Gerrit Cole now plays in pinstripes and that Anthony Rendon calls Anaheim home and that Yasmani Grandal is a White Sox. But like so much else in 2020, COVID-19 has rendered an already odd thing stranger, harder. Sadder. In the season’s original timeline, we would have just enjoyed the Futures Game at Dodgers Stadium; I would be preparing to travel home from FanGraphs festivities in Los Angeles. Half a season’s worth of play would be in the books; in that brighter alternate reality, the All-Star game is tomorrow. Instead, the pandemic caused the season to stall out before it could get started. We witnessed a tense, nasty negotiation between the owners and the Players Association to resume play. The amateur draft was only five rounds. Most obviously and devastatingly, more than 135,000 Americans are dead.

How best to proceed with the practical vagaries and ethical quandaries of a season played against such a backdrop, I’m still unsure. I know that you still care about baseball, want to understand the who and how and what of this season. I know that I still care about the game, though I’m uncertain whether it is totally right to do so. We don’t know how much of the season we’ll get to see, just as we don’t know what the long-term consequences of COVID-19 will be for the players who contract it. It all amounts to an uneasy feeling, though it probably won’t be all bad. Strange and fraught as it is, I expect that Opening Day will feel at least a little good, that I will delight in finally seeing Cole take the mound for the Yankees, that I will thrill at remembering that Mike Moustakas plays for the Reds now, or that Mookie Betts – Mookie Freakin’ Betts! – now dons Dodger blue. And so here we are, launching the positional power rankings, hoping for good health and well-played games and for this 60-game sprint to mean something, for it to tell us something we didn’t know; to provide a welcome respite without distracting too much from the far more important task of keeping each other safe. We’ll try to find the right balance between grappling with the low lows of the pandemic and the heady highs of finally having our evenings and afternoons marked by the game’s familiar rhythms. We greatly appreciate you coming along for the ride as we do.

This post serves as an explainer for our approach to these rankings. If you’re new to the positional power rankings, 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 handy nav widget at the top to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2019.

Unlike a lot of site’s 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 allow us to cover a roster top to bottom, with stars, everyday staples, and role players alike receiving some amount of examination, while also placing those players (and the teams they play for) in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can 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-deployed 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, even a weirdo season like this one.

And while we hope you find this way of viewing things useful, don’t worry. If you’re a fan of, say, the Arizona Diamondbacks, and want to view the rankings through the lens of that team, all you have to do is select the Diamondbacks from the “View by Team” dropdown that appears above the rankings in any given post and presto! Snakes on snakes on snakes. Read the rest of this entry »

With baseball scheduled to return in a couple of weeks, I wanted to give everyone an update on how FanGraphs is doing business-wise. For those of you who are returning to the site for the first time since the season was postponed, a lot has happened since you last visited.

You can read all about what’s been going on here, here, and here, but the quick recap is this: When the season was postponed, our traffic decreased by over 70% and ad rates declined by as much as 45%, causing an 80% decrease in ad revenue, which is far and away our largest source of site revenue.

We asked you for help in sustaining the site and you’ve come through in overwhelming fashion over the past four months, giving us some breathing room to try to weather the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were also able to secure funding through the second round of the Paycheck Protection Program, which was another boon to our short-term viability. We are incredibly grateful to everyone who helped keep the site alive. We would not be here today without you.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t still need your support and assistance. We still have a long way to go. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you know who throws the fastest fastball in all of baseball? Almost certainly! Maybe you don’t know it exactly — maybe you’re not sure whether Jordan Hicks counts while he’s recovering from Tommy John surgery, so you give it to Aroldis Chapman. Maybe you differentiate between starters and relievers and want to put Noah Syndergaard, Jacob deGrom, and Gerrit Cole in the conversation. For the most part, though, you know these names.

Let’s change it up slightly. Do you know who throws the hardest cutter? Again, there’s a decent chance you know that it’s Emmanuel Clase, though he, too, will miss the 2020 season. The second name on that list, though, is Michael Lorenzen, and even if you didn’t know he threw that particular pitch, you almost certainly knew that he throws hard and is good.

Why am I asking this? Because I’m setting up for a far stupider question: who throws the hardest changeup in baseball? Frustratingly, it’s also Syndergaard (minimum 100 changeups thrown). But he’s out for the season — the fastest active changeup in baseball, then! I can tell you with near-certainty that you didn’t guess it. Maybe you got the second-fastest — Jacob deGrom. Heck, maybe you got number four, Tommy Kahnle. I’m fairly confident, however, that you didn’t get number one: Orioles reliever Miguel Castro.

Now that I’ve told you that factoid, it’s time to anticipate your next question: so what? Why do we care who throws the fastest changeup in baseball? The fastest fastball is visceral; it’s as fast as anyone can make a baseball go, which is pretty clearly awesome. You can watch the fastest fastball and be impressed without caring about context. It’s just fast!

The fastest cutter isn’t quite the same, but a near-100 mph pitch with cut looks like witchcraft. Clase isn’t even that great, and he’s still a joy to watch. The fastest changeup, on the other hand, looks like this:

Read the rest of this entry »