In just about any sport you can name, offense is king. If you’re the one who scores the goals, the points, the runs, the whatever they call it in polo – the biscuits, maybe? – you’re going to get the plaudits. Who’s the greatest defenseman in the history of hockey? It’s Bobby Orr, of course, because he was the first great offensive defenseman. This pattern very much holds when it comes to baseball.

Among other things, the sabermetric revolution helped us codify the value of hitting relative to the other facets of the game. To wit, according to weighted runs above average – and we’re using that particular stat because, like standard baserunning and defensive metrics, it’s a counting stat that compares a player to the performance of an average player – the most valuable hitter during the 2025 season was one Aaron Judge. Judge created 82.5 more runs than the average hitter. That’s 21 runs more than any other player, and an astonishing 36 more than any other player not named Shohei Ohtani. Judge was the best offensive performer in the game by a mile, which makes him the frontrunner for the American League MVP award, even though he put up negative value as a baserunner and, depending on which metric you trust, his defense graded out somewhere between pretty good (DRS, FRV) and really bad (DRP). The best defender was Patrick Bailey, who put up 30 fielding runs, and the best baserunner was Corbin Carroll, who finished with a measly 10.3 baserunning runs. Offense is just more valuable than defense and baserunning. Here’s the distribution of values for the three portions of the game:

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Dustin May is a free agent. And not because he got non-tendered; he’s passed six years of service this season, and hits the open market at the tender age of 28.

I admit this one snuck up on me. May, a highly touted Dodgers prospect, stormed into prominence when he joined the L.A. pitching staff in 2019 at the age of 21. He pitched for the Dodgers in the playoffs that October and started 2020 as the no. 14 prospect in all of baseball, and spent most of the year in the rotation, garnering a few Rookie of the Year votes and making seven appearances during the Dodgers’ run to the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »

I found this in my notes last week. I have no idea how long it’s been there. It says: “How many times this season has an infielder let the ball go right between their legs?” I had no idea whatsoever. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen it. Probably in a highlight from the 1986 World Series.

Baseball is the ultimate scorekeeping sport, and thanks to sites like ours, when you ask how many times any particular event has happened, the answer is usually easy to find. How often does a righty hit a home run off a lefty in the top of the eighth inning with the tying run in the on-deck circle? It took me twice as long to type that question out as it did to look up the answer: It has happened five times in each of the last three years. Easy. But so far as I know, nobody keeps a count of grounders that go right through the wickets.

Errors get classified in certain ways. Our leaderboard tracks fielding and throwing errors. The play-by-play notes on Baseball Savant add in missed-catch errors. Other sources differentiate between reached-on-error errors and runner-advanced errors. But that’s about it. Because they represent arguably the most embarrassing way to commit an error, between-the-legs errors are special in a human sense, but nobody splits them out into their own column because there’s nothing particularly special about them in a baseball sense. At least, you wouldn’t think so initially. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday was a big day for baseball’s old-heads. Ken Rosenthal published a piece in The Athletic in which 41-year-old Max Scherzer declared his intention to keep pitching. Justin Turner’s agent told Jon Morosi that the soon-to-be-41-year-old plans on playing in 2026. Kyle Hendricks, 35, has had enough, however. The man who started Game 7 of the 2016 World Series for the Cubs is hanging ‘em up after 12 seasons in The Show.

As a geriatric Millennial myself, these decisions got me thinking. Clayton Kershaw has retired, Kenta Maeda is going back to Japan, and Adam Ottavino was just trying to talk his way into the Rockies’ president of baseball ops job. My generation is going extinct, at least on the baseball diamond. Read the rest of this entry »

Just in time to push back the withdrawal symptoms from the lack of baseball, it’s awards week! We started, as usual, with the Rookie of the Year awards, and in the National League, Drake Baldwin earned the hardware, finishing with 21 first-place votes to Cade Horton’s total of nine. Baldwin was the only candidate to appear on all 30 ballots. Horton finished second, followed by Caleb Durbin, Isaac Collins, and Daylen Lile.

Did the BBWAA members entrusted with this task make good picks? That’s for you to decide. I’m here for my usual task of explaining/justifying/defending how I voted in my award this year, the NL Rookie of the Year award. I like to think I do a pretty good job, but I personally feel my responsibility for addressing my vote ought to go beyond the confidence I may have in my own competence. This is ostensibly an expert panel, not a federal election, so a vote here isn’t a question of my right to have one but my duty to exercise it thoroughly. People in the baseball community, from the most casual fans to the players themselves, ought to know why I voted for someone and not others. This is especially true when many disagree with me, such as my past first-place votes for Jackson Merrill last year and Trevor Rogers in 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz have been on non-disciplinary paid leave since July, as Major League Baseball investigated the two men’s involvement in a prop betting scandal. The allegation was that Ortiz had intentionally thrown at least two pitches outside the strike zone after tipping off bettors that he would do so. Armed with this advance knowledge, Ortiz’s confederates had profited in extremely specific prop bet markets.

Clase soon joined Ortiz on the sidelines, though the specifics of his supposed wrongdoing were not made public at the time. Both pitchers spent Cleveland’s terrific stretch run, and its playoff series against Detroit, in limbo.

Well, the other shoe dropped on Sunday, and what a shoe it is. The United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York indicted the two pitchers on four counts: wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to influence sporting contests by bribery, and money laundering conspiracy. The first three counts come with a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment, each. Money laundering conspiracy has a five-year maximum. Ortiz was arrested in Boston on Sunday morning, and his attorney maintained his client’s innocence in advance of a scheduled Monday court appearance. Clase is not in custody as of this writing, but his attorney says he “is innocent of all charges and looks forward to clearing his name in court.” Read the rest of this entry »

Daylen Lile was one of the top rookie performers in the senior circuit this season. The 22-year-old outfielder debuted with Washington Nationals in late May and went on to slash .299/.347/.498 with a 132 wRC+ over 351 plate appearances. Displaying a combination of speed and power, Lile legged out 11 triples and left the yard eight times. A ninth home run on his ledger was an inside-the-parker.

When I talked to him in September, I learned that Lile and Nationals teammate James Wood were doing a lot of drill work together in the batting cage. Left on the cutting room floor from our conversation— the ensuing feature can be found here — was what he told me about the work itself. Like most good hitters, Lile is diligent about his routine.

“Your preparation matters, because what happens there translates to the game,” he said. “Mechanically, I still have the same swing I had [when entering pro ball in 2021], although I have changed a few things. I started getting my foot down early to see pitches longer, and now I’m doing a toe-tap for more rhythm, getting synced with the pitcher.”

And then there is the routine itself. Lile has been doing his “movement-prep stuff,” since coming back from UCL surgery, which cost him the 2022 season. Getting his body loose and keeping it that way throughout a long season is an integral part of his process. As you might expect, the work he does in the batting cage is every bit as important. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy first Saturday of the offseason, everyone. To celebrate the occasion, you get two mailbag columns this week! The first ran on Monday and wrapped up a thrilling World Series. In today’s edition, we’ll move on from the Fall Classic and answer your questions about several teams that finished in last place this season. We’ll also cover small-market teams and some of the structures that are in place to encourage them to spend more on their rosters.

The first question we’ll answer today is about a player we’ve featured before in this column. In fact, some are calling him the Patron Saint of the Mailbag, an honor second only to his status as the worst major league player ever.

But before we continue, I’d like to remind you all 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 »

Welcome to the start of another offseason. As is customary, now that the World Series has concluded, FanGraphs is releasing our ranking of the top 50 free agents available on the market this winter. A number of writers have helmed this list over the years: first Dave Cameron, then Kiley McDaniel, Craig Edwards, and most recently me. This is now my fifth year curating these rankings, and as always, my real superpower is collaboration. The FanGraphs staff contributed mightily at every step along the way.

Below, I’ve provided contract estimates and rankings of the offseason’s top free agents, along with market-focused commentary for the top 25 players. That could be a sketch of likely suitors, a discussion of how qualifying offers might affect a player’s thinking, or even just statistical analysis dressed up as market analysis for Halloween – I’m a baseball nerd at heart, what can I say? A collection of FanGraphs writers – Davy Andrews (DA), Michael Baumann (MB), James Fegan (JF), Jay Jaffe (JJ), David Laurila (DL), Eric Longenhagen (EL), Kiri Oler (KO), Esteban Rivera (ER), and Dan Szymborski (DS) – have supplied player-focused breakdowns for the entire top 50, designed to provide some context for each player at this particular point in their career. Huge thanks go to Meg Rowley for acting as a sounding board throughout the process, Eric Longenhagen for his extensive contributions to my evaluation of the international players, Jason Martinez and Jon Becker for their market knowledge, and Sean Dolinar and David Appelman for technical assistance.

The players are ranked in the order in which I prefer them. That’s often the same as ranking them in contract order, but not always. In some cases, I prefer a player I expect will get less money over one who stands to make more. I’ll generally make note of that in the accompanying comment, but just to reiterate, this list isn’t exclusively sorted by descending average annual value or anything like that. Read the rest of this entry »

This postseason, FanGraphs is continuing its tradition of writing report cards for the on-field decisions made by playoff managers. Excluding the managers who lost in the best-of-three Wild Card Series, we cover every round of the playoffs for all eight managers. It’s detailed enough that I’ve begun enlisting some help. So far this year, I have graded the efforts of A.J. Hinch, Aaron Boone, Craig Counsell, Rob Thomson, and Dan Wilson. Dan Szymborski scrutinized Pat Murphy’s performance. Yesterday and today, I’m taking a look at John Schneider. The Blue Jays played enough games that we decided to split his report into two. Michael Baumann will follow with a review of Dave Roberts. It takes a village to get the kind of in-depth coverage we aspire to provide you.

Our goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of the outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies or unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but guys like Trey Yesavage and Addison Barger were also excellent this October. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. George Springer is important because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process.

I’m always looking for new analytical wrinkles in critiquing managerial decisions. For instance, I’ve increasingly come to view pitching decisions as a trade-off between protecting your best relievers from overexposure and minimizing your starters’ weakest matchups, which means that I’m grading managers on multiple axes in every game. I think there’s almost no pitching decision that’s a true no-brainer these days; there are just too many competing priorities to make anything totally obvious. That means I’m going to be less certain in my evaluation of pitching than of hitting, but I’ll try to make my confidence level clear in each case. I tackled the offensive portion of Schneider’s managing yesterday, so now it’s time for the pitching part of his report card. Let’s get to it, shall we? Read the rest of this entry »